Mo Du (默读) - Silent Reading

Humbert Humbert IX

“According to this inference,” Lang Qiao, sporting dark circles about the same size as her eyes,  said faintly, “either Wu Guangchuan climbed up out of the morgue, or we got the wrong person back then and over twenty years later the real killer has resurfaced to offend again.”

“If a person succeeds in committing six crimes, with the police unable to catch a shadow and even helpfully finding someone to take the blame for him, an ordinary person would already be self-satisfied enough to go insane. If he’s a real psycho, would he have stopped for so many years?” Luo Wenzhou said. “If we really got the killer wrong back then, the last twenty years and more are long enough for him to have filled up a mass grave.”

Lang Qiao turned her head. “Captain Luo, what you’re saying is appalling.”

“What you’re saying is pretty appalling, too.” Luo Wenzhou rolled the shaft of his pen around in his hand. “However it is, I’ve already sent people to stake out Qu Tong’s house to look into the person who left the flash drive.”

“Don’t quote me on it, but they’re unlikely to turn anything up,” said Lang Qiao. “I just got through asking the parents. Qu Tong’s house is on an old estate, and the property management doesn’t do anything thirty days out of the month. It’s basically an open-door policy over there. Just last month they had some things stolen. Think about it, someone takes something from your house and they don’t get caught; forget about someone leaving something.”

Tao Ran asked, “What about other leads?”

“The flash drive is one of those ordinary cheap kinds, you can find exactly the same thing on hundreds of sites online. It’s been wiped very clean, not half a fingerprint on it. The techs are stepping up their analysis of the contents of the recording, but the suspect’s anti-reconnaissance awareness is evident.” Luo Wenzhou paused and shook his head. “The outlook isn’t optimistic.”

The possibility of leads was very small, and the possibility that the girl was still alive was also very small.

The golden seventy-two hours had passed; the recording sent to the girl’s parents seemed like some kind of preening “summing up”—I’m still here, I’m the victor again, you can’t catch me.

“There’s actually another line of thought,” Tao Ran said after quietly muttering to himself for a moment. “On the night this happened, who would have been passing by? At the time, we investigated the security camera records of some nearby scenic spots, industrial parks, and major roads. If the person who took the girl had been driving past by coincidence, it would have been very hard for him not to leave any traces. But thus far, we haven’t found any traces along that route. So is it possible that someone had been following Qu Tong all along—or perhaps his aim was another girl on that bus similar to Qu Tong, and he just happened to run into the hijacking?”

Having heard this, Lang Qiao already grasped his meaning. “You’re saying that the stalker didn’t succeed on his first try!”

On the last day of summer camp, the students had gone to the outskirts, but before that their activities had always been in the city, near the school. If this mysterious kidnapper had been tailing one of the students, then it would have been far more difficult for him to hide his tracks in the city. The traffic cameras and the surrounding residents may have noticed him!

Lang Qiao stood immediately. “I’ll go arrange it.”

“I’ve arranged it.” Luo Wenzhou waved a hand towards her. “Sit down for now. After we finished investigating the scene that day without finding any suspicious individuals, I had people investigate following the tracks of some of the girls in their class. Of the eighteen students, eleven were girls, all around the same age as Qu Tong, with six of them who resembled her in stature and appearance. Even focusing our attention on those six, investigating everywhere they went, what people they passed by, it would still involve over a hundred people. After conducting a survey of the scene, we only know that this person wears size forty-two shoes. It’s too little information; we can’t even be sure of the person’s age or sex. We have nothing to go on, unless his appearance is very suspicious, which at present it seems evident that it isn’t.”