Mo Du (默读) - Silent Reading

Julien XIII

On May 24th, four days had passed since the young man He Zhongyi was killed.

Wearing gloves, Luo Wenzhou flipped through an old photo album—he had taken it from the black cab driver Chen Zhen.

Chen Zhen and his sister Chen Yuan were twins. They had grown up locally, raised by their grandparents. Afterwards, the elderly couple had passed away one after another; the sister Chen Yuan had tested into university; Chen Zhen’s grades were bad, however, so he had simply abandoned school early and gone out to earn money.

The girl in the photographs was very delicately-made, smiling broadly in every picture, revealing a pair of not very symmetrical little canine teeth.

This was the only thing she had left behind. The circumstances of her death had been obscure; due to the undignified manner of it, the police, on the grounds of suspecting the presence of hidden drugs, had searched through her personal possessions several times. Neither Chen Yuan’s second-hand computer, nor her cell phone, had been left behind.

Luo Wenzhou flipped through the photo album from beginning to end, his gaze pausing on a few photographs that seemed to be mementos of a university club event. There was a girl in them who seemed very close to Chen Yuan. On the backs of the photographs there was a date written in pencil, and the note: “At the Art of Tea Club with Xiao Cui; glad you were there.”

“Xiao Cui.” Luo Wenzhou turned to the cell phone record he’d found—about half a month before her death, Chen Yuan had made a phone call to a user named “Cui Ying.”

Just then, Lang Qiao knocked on the door of his office and beckoned to him, more dead than alive. “Chief, come and watch the moron. Tickets ten yuan each, your money back if he isn’t moronic.”

Yan City’s City Bureau’s Criminal Investigation Team’s appreciation for Young Master Zhang was extraordinary. Out of every ten sentences he said, nine were bullshit. Being detained at the City Bureau for forty-eight hours had boiled off his initially scant brains; it was anyone’s guess what had been left behind in the empty shell. The intellectual level of the words that came out was deeply affecting.

“‘Feng Niange’? Never heard of ‘em. I don’t know anyone with the surname Feng. Is it a man or a woman? Why don’t you tell me what they look like? I may have slept with them and not remembered the name.”

“Was there anyone I knew at Chengguang Mansion on the night of the twentieth? I knew all of them… What? Who was there? Ow, police uncles. Honorable police uncles! That night I got half a liter of white wine poured into me, I don’t know how many glasses of red, cut with half a dozen of champagne. The Holy Trinity! I was doing all right if I could still remember my own name. How could I tell you everyone who was there?”

“I haven’t quarreled with anyone recently. I’m very friendly. Huh? Hitting people counts? Oh, then I really can’t say… So I hit them, what are they going to do to get back at me? Don’t you know who I am!”

“How many times have I said it, that phone didn’t come from me. I only give gifts to my intimate friends. Anyway, if I were going to give someone something, it wouldn’t be a stupid phone, right? Who are you insulting?”

Aside from spending money and sleeping, Young Master Zhang’s daily life was full of chaos; matters big and small passed before his eyes like mist, making absolutely no impact on him; his psychological state could be described as “free of earthly concerns.”

Luo Wenzhou listened in for a while and issued a categorical assertion concerning Zhang Donglai. He said, “This child got dropped on his head by his dad when he was little.”

With all the patience in the world, Tao Ran tried every possible method to quiz him again and again from each and every angle, yet he was still unable to extract any useful information from Zhang Donglai’s carelessly formatted memory.