Silent Reading 默读 [BL Novel by Priest]

Chapter 161 to 170

CHAPTER 161 - Edmond Dantès XXXII

"Heng'an Orphanage's original location was on the outskirts of Yan City, though it's been too long. That place was turned into a ski run long ago." In the temporary lodgings of the resort villa, Zhou Huaijin brought out the things he'd gotten from his old home's Filipino maid for everyone to see. "This person—this girl—is called Su Hui. President Fei said that she's a very important figure. She was one of the girls being raised at Heng'an Orphanage."

The seated circle was silent, because apart from Zhou Huaijin, all of them knew about Su Hui; there was no need for him to add emphasis.

Su Hui had sold her own daughter; then her crimes had escalated, and she'd used her daughter to kidnap and sell other girls—a full range of kidnapping, selling, and murder, a range carried down through three generations.

The girl in the old photograph was naturally delicate-featured, a little dressed up, a sight that could amount to being pleasing scenery of the human world. Who could see the debt of blood on her hands? Only when she'd been dead over a decade had her crimes been revealed to the light of day.

What stuck in the throat was that in these sensational crimes spanning over twenty years, none of the three main culprits had come to a satisfactory end—Su Luozhan hadn't been fourteen yet and had been spared from criminal penalty, and Su Xiaolan and Su Hui had died natural deaths, lying in drunken dreams on top of the girls' corpses; in the end, apart from some insubstantial reputation, to the end of their lives, they hadn't paid any price.

"Privately-run orphanages always have a problem balancing income and expenditure. In the end, there are two paths. Either they find a way to be nationalized, or they find fixed long-term contributions. In the past, some overseas Chinese established donations to orphanages, and Heng'an was one of them. Afterwards, likely because of the death of its donor, the orphanage couldn't continue and wrapped up." Zhou Huaijin paused. "Its donor was Zhou Yahou.—I was just thinking that Yang Bo's mother and Su Hui were both orphans and both came from Yan City. The cities hadn't expanded at the time. How many people could there be in Yan City? How many orphanages? Could they have come from the same one?"

"The pretty ones were sold for a high price abroad, the rest were handed over to human traffickers and fell into the human trafficking market." Luo Wenzhou thought about it and nodded slightly. "That makes a certain amount of sense, but there's a small problem—given their method of raising children and then selling them, Heng'an Orphanage not only had a source of income, it must have been making considerable profits. Even without Zhou Yahou to act as donor, I don't think they would have gone bankrupt."

Xiao Haiyang said, "Maybe they were exposed and closed down?"

"Something like an orphanage being closed down for human trafficking, even if it didn't cause a sensation, would still definitely have left a record." Luo Wenzhou shook his head. "It wouldn't have vanished without a trace like this."

For a time they were all tired and without any lines of thought. They all fell quiet. No one spoke for a long time.

Then Zhou Huaijin suddenly cleared his throat, breaking the stillness. "I want... I'm planning to go back immediately to the old Zhou home."

Seeing everyone's gazes collect on him, Zhou Huaijin added, "Following my mother's lead, I found an excuse to take a vacation and leave the Zhou Clan headquarters. After I found that Filipino maid and heard about those appalling things from her, I came right back here and found President Fei. I had no time, and I didn't think of going to carefully investigate Zhou Yahou.—If all of these things really are inextricably tied to the orphanage he donated to, I think that if a person's done something, there can't be absolutely no traces of it. There must be a lead."