Chapter Eighty-One: Direction

When Lin Heng stepped out of the Shengyi Building, it was already close to eleven o’clock. Realizing that his questioning in the Shengyi Building had taken so much time, Lin Heng quickly put away his notebook and law enforcement recorder, hurried his pace, and headed to the café in the building across the street.

On the eighth floor, a woman sat by the window holding her coffee with one hand, her gaze fixed outside. Even when Lin Heng sat across from her, Shen Yunxi did not turn her head.

“Yunxi…”

Lin Heng fumbled for words in his mind, looking at Shen Yunxi expectantly.

She merely responded with a gentle “hmm,” her tone indifferent. “Officer Lin, are you finished with your work?”

“Yunxi, I’m sorry, I was delayed a bit. If you mind—”

“It’s fine, I understand. Officer Lin, you exhaust yourself and devote yourself to public service. Ordinary citizens like us are lucky to have a great protector like you; how could I possibly mind?”

Lin Heng’s reply stumbled and faltered; he could only force a smile at Shen Yunxi, looking much like a child who’d broken a vase and was waiting to be scolded by his mother.

At last, Shen Yunxi turned her head. Seeing Lin Heng’s pitiful expression, she shook her head.

“All right, all right. I’ve been looking at the scenery from upstairs for several hours, but the view from this window is actually quite nice… It’s just that there’s so little time left for us to spend together today.

“To say I’m angry isn’t quite right—after all, I have a day off tomorrow. That means we can still go out together then, don’t you think?”

Her words only made Lin Heng’s smile even more awkward and conflicted.

“Well… Yunxi, during my questioning in Shengyi earlier, I found some promising leads. So tomorrow I plan to…”

He trailed off, but his meaning was perfectly clear.

Shen Yunxi’s gaze locked onto him, her face stripped of all expression.

Lin Heng’s head drooped lower and lower, like a child who, after breaking a vase, had come home with several failed report cards requiring a parent’s signature.

After a long silence, Shen Yunxi let out a faint sigh.

“Lin Heng, there will always be more work. Don’t you think you’re being a bit too self-important?”

With that, she stood up, took her handbag, and left the café without looking back.

Lin Heng wanted to call her back, but felt he had no right to do so. He could only sit there, staring blankly at her departing figure, at the coffee she’d left on the table, unable to utter a word.

It wasn’t until a café employee politely asked if he wanted to order anything else, tactfully reminding him they were about to close, that Lin Heng finally stumbled to his feet, apologized in embarrassment, and left the café for the street.

In the chill of the night breeze, Lin Heng looked at the sparse passersby on the street, feeling weary and speechless.

But as he trudged step by step toward home, his phone rang in his pocket.

He took it out and unlocked the screen—it was a message from Shen Yunxi.

“When you’re done with this case, reserve the entire next weekend for me. Hmph. (╯－＿－）╯╧╧”

Clutching his phone, Lin Heng gazed at the message and suddenly felt the night wasn’t so cold after all.

He quickly typed his reply.

“All right.”

…

After bringing the interview notes and law enforcement recordings from Shengyi to the provincial department and saving them in the database, Lin Heng searched the police’s internal case files for the names of the victims mentioned by Zong Yuan.

Soon, he found what he was looking for.

—On July 22, siblings Wang Ruo and Wang Lu were killed about three hundred meters from the Shengyi company, near a sanatorium. Cause of death: blunt force trauma; both suffered severe fractures to the rear skull and died on the spot. Since nothing was stolen from the victims, the case was preliminarily classified as a crime of passion, revenge, or thrill killing. The crime scene was in a security camera blind spot, so there was no footage of the perpetrator.

—On July 24, Shengyi’s HR manager Huang Cheng died at home, also from blunt force trauma, but with a fractured frontal bone, indicating he was killed while facing the assailant. Some valuables were missing, so police classified it as a home invasion robbery. Huang Cheng lived in an old neighborhood with only the main entrance under surveillance, and the hallway cameras were long out of order, so again, there was no footage of the suspect.

These two cases had initially been treated as separate, but after July 27 were merged for joint investigation.

—On July 27, in Jinhui, a neighboring city, police arrested a criminal gang active in Qingjiang Province and several surrounding regions. The group had eight members and was involved in theft, robbery, rape, extortion, murder, and homemade firearms. Several members had long been wanted, but they were careful to avoid cameras and witnesses, so the police had not caught them.

On July 27, thanks to a tip-off, the Jinhui police arrested the gang in an unfinished building on the city’s outskirts. During the raid, five members were killed in a shootout resisting arrest, including the gang leader; three survived. Later interrogations revealed their involvement in numerous violent crimes, with a death toll in the double digits, but the main planners and actors died during the raid.

Police found a blunt weapon stained with the blood of Wang Ruo, Wang Lu, and Huang Cheng in a corner of the derelict building. The surviving members claimed to know nothing about it, but since the main perpetrators were dead, it was suspected those men were responsible for those murders.

Further investigation at the scenes of Wang Ruo, Wang Lu, and Huang Cheng’s deaths uncovered the gang leader’s fingerprints near Huang Cheng’s doors and windows, confirming these cases were part of the gang’s crimes and merging them into a single case file as evidence against the group.

Reading these records, Lin Heng fell silent.

If he were just an ordinary officer, without the information he’d gained at Shengyi that day, he might have found nothing amiss.

But now, reviewing these files, he couldn’t help but feel a vague sense of unease.

The first detail that caught his attention was a phrase in the documentation of the gang’s capture: “A tip-off provided clues… But who was this informant?”

Lin Heng tapped at the keyboard, and with a press of the enter key, more information appeared on his screen.

—The tip-off was made from a public phone booth in the outskirts of Jinhui. The caller’s voice sounded odd, likely altered with voice software. He claimed to be a local villager who saw several people enter the derelict building, and one matched the photo on the wanted posters exactly. Frightened, he called the police and then hung up. The Jinhui police had tried to verify the informant’s identity, but there were no cameras in the area, no businesses or pedestrians, thus no witnesses. Since the tip was genuine, the police hadn’t pursued the caller further.

“No surveillance again?”

Lin Heng frowned, a thought taking shape in his mind.

No cameras in the Wang Ruo case, no cameras in the Huang Cheng case, no cameras for this informant either.

In the 8/12 major case, the police’s greatest suspicion was the criminal organization’s uncanny skill at evading surveillance, leading to speculation that only an insider or local security staff could have pulled it off without leaving a trace.

While the Wang Ruo, Huang Cheng, and July 27 cases were far less severe than the 8/12 case, that sense of “leaving no trace” seemed to linger here as well.

Lin Heng’s mind sharpened, his focus intensifying despite the late hour.

He continued reviewing other materials related to the July 27 raid from the Jinhui Public Security Bureau.

Most of it merely elaborated on previously known facts, but Lin Heng noticed multiple reports describing how, during the raid, the gang’s leader and main perpetrators died remarkably easily in the confrontation—struck by stray bullets while attempting to resist—so much so that none of the SWAT officers were injured.

One officer even wrote that while searching the building, he vaguely sensed someone else was present. However, after coordinating with colleagues to seal off the entire floor and sweeping from the first floor to the roof, nothing was found.

There were no secret passages or exits in the building; colleagues guarded the ground floor, and dozens of officers were in action throughout. Unless someone could teleport or fly dozens of meters off the rooftop, escape was impossible. The officer chalked it up to his imagination.

The SWAT officer believed it was a trick of the mind, but Lin Heng felt otherwise.

He opened a notebook and wrote down his suspicions:

“Surveillance… Informant… Phone booth… Fingerprints… Bloodstains… Murder weapon… The suspiciously easy death of the gang leader… ‘One more person’ in the building…”

He recalled his conversation with Shen Yunxi that evening, the video on his phone, and the mention of “supernatural abilities…”

“…No.”

Lin Heng shook his head; such conjecture was far too absurd. As a police officer, he needed to stay grounded.

Still, the clues he’d gathered suggested a faint link—both in method and atmosphere—between the deaths of Wang Ruo, Wang Lu, and Huang Cheng, and the 8/12 case.

Of course, there were still too many missing pieces for these cases to be connected by hard evidence.

Thinking of the information he’d gotten from Zong Yuan today, Lin Heng turned back to the case files, searching for the next name.

It was:

“Yang Luo.”

(To be continued)