After one night, Sang Hai was brought back to the interrogation room, slumped in his chair, looking even more haggard than the day before. Hua Chong pushed the photo of the fruit knife in front of him. He glanced at it, immediately pressed his knees together, and shook his head rapidly.
“What do you mean by showing this to me? It’s not mine!”
“This really isn’t yours, but it’s exactly the same as the knife you used to injure someone,” Hua Chong said.
Sang Hai stretched his neck, eyes full of shock and anger.
“Where’s your knife?” Hua Chong’s face darkened. “Where did you put it?”
Sang Hai began biting his thumbnail, his legs jerking like they were cramping. Qu Zhi slammed the table and shouted: “On the night of the 13th, did you use the straight-handled fruit knife you just bought to injure someone?”
Hua Chong cleared his throat and pushed the freshly brewed chrysanthemum tea to Qu Zhi, then looked at Sang Hai. “I told you yesterday, now that you’re here, don’t lie, don’t hide anything. Confess honestly. Don’t think you can get lucky. Do you think that by saying half and hiding half, you can deceive everyone under heaven,[footnote]瞒天过海 = to deceive everyone including those in power[/footnote] hmm?”
Sang Hai exhaled, pounding his fists on his knees again and again. After a moment, he stammered, “I…I was scared. I didn’t mean to cut him, he asked me for money!”
“Why didn’t you mention the fruit knife yesterday?” Hua Chong folded his arms and looked at him coldly.
“If I mentioned it, you’d definitely treat me as the murderer!” Sang Hai suddenly went hysterical. “Now that you know I brought a knife on the 13th, aren’t you just treating me as the murderer! I didn’t kill Yujiao! When I saw her there, she was already dead!”
Qu Zhi roared: “What are you yelling for! Where is that knife now?”
Sang Hai glared at him like a frightened beast, but this beast was small and thin, lacking any real threat—even with eyes bulging, he had no power to scare anyone.
“Did you buy the knife for self-defense ba?” Hua Chong softened his tone, even the corner of his mouth even curling into a slight smile.
Sang Hai froze, as if grabbing at a lifeline, and nodded frantically. “Yes! I never thought about hurting anyone!”
“Then tell me again what happened that night.” Hua Chong’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “If you want to prove you’re innocent, don’t let me hear another lie.”
Sang Hai stared at his smile that had no warmth, and opened his mouth numbly. His scalp felt cold, and his back was soon soaked with cold sweat and became sticky.
“Yujiao suddenly said she wanted to go to Daoqiao Road alone. I…I wasn’t prepared at all…”
Sang Hai stuttered from the beginning. Most of the details matched what he said the previous day, except that after leaving the subway station, he got more and more scared. When passing a hardware store, he suddenly thought about buying a knife for self-defense, so he spent 20 yuan on a straight-handled fruit knife.
That fruit knife came in handy when the thug Li Jing blocked him and asked for money. Li Jing was tall and strong, fierce and rude. He blocked Sang Hai’s way and wouldn’t let him go and even used his hands and feet. In a panic, he pulled out the fruit knife and stabbed forward. Li Jing reacted quickly, dodging aside, so only his forearm got a cut.
Seeing that, Sang Hai was so scared he nearly lost his soul. He stumbled and fled down a pitch-dark alley. He was afraid that Li Jing would catch up with him, so he had no choice but to keep running blindly. When he stopped, he had completely lost his direction and could not find his way out.
The whole Daoqiao Road area had terrible signals—sometimes none at all, sometimes only 2G. He couldn’t use navigation and grew more and more anxious that he finally broke into the wasteland where Xu Yujiao’s corpse was.
“I’m really not lying to you. I didn’t kill Yujiao.” Sang Hai’s face was drenched in sweat. “I didn’t dare tell you I bought a knife, even less that I cut someone that night. Otherwise you’d think I have violent tendencies and treat me as the scapegoat for the real murderer!”
Qu Zhi didn’t buy it. “Funny how clear your story is now?”
Sang Hai shook his head desperately. “I swear. If I’ve lied to you even one word, I’ll be hit by a car the moment I walk out of the city bureau!”
“Yeah, and then who has to do all the work?” Hua Chong said. “The knife? Where did you hide it?”
“I…” Sang Hai lowered his head and couldn’t squeeze out a word for a long time.
“Speak!” Qu Zhi slammed the table again.
“Easy,” Hua Chong said. “Don’t shatter my teacup.”
“The knife had…had blood on it. I…I heard that today’s forensic technology is very amazing. Even if you wipe the blood clean, it still can be tested. I didn’t dare keep it, didn’t dare to just throw it away either.” Sang Hai took a deep breath. “I cleaned it, then…got rid of it.”
“Got rid of it?” Hua Chong asked. “How did you get rid of it? Where did you put it?”
“I didn’t dare take it out of Daoqiao Road. That night, my mind was a complete mess and I couldn’t think straight. I just wanted to leave quickly, so I…I wedged it into the brick seam of a house and sealed it with mud.” Sang Hai spoke haltingly. “I originally planned to wait until things died down, then…then figure out how to take it away and throw it somewhere else, but…but…”
Hua Chong’s expression didn’t change. “Which house? You remember now?”
“Remem…remember. It’s the second house from the entrance on the east alley of Daoqiao Road!”
In the east alley of Daoqiao Road, a middle-aged woman with a big waist and round arms rushed out of the house yelling, “Demolishing my house, huh? What right do you have to tear down my house!”
The place where Sang Hai hid the knife was at the foot of the wall behind the street, extremely well hidden, even covered with a lump of dirt. Even in broad daylight, you couldn’t see it at a glance.
The trace examiners were carefully collecting evidence when suddenly a big crowd of nosy neighbors gathered, and the house’s owner went crazy screaming as if digging a bit of dirt from her wall was the same as tearing her house down.
Qu Zhi and Hua Chong were different. After graduating from the police academy, Hua Chong was directly selected into the city bureau’s special police department without ever going down to the grassroots level. Qu Zhi, however, climbed up step by step from the local station, dealing with ordinary folks every day. In his early years, he dealt with ordinary people every day. He’d been so angry at the unreasonable ones he thought he’d explode. So when he saw a resident throwing a tantrum, he got physically uncomfortable, like he was allergic.
Hua Chong pushed him and asked him to comfort the woman. Qu Zhi immediately retreated and crouched by the trace team. He would rather be a handyman than reason with the crying and shouting woman.
Hua Chong sighed and had to do it himself. Unexpectedly, the woman didn’t listen to a single word and even called over people from the opposite alley.
“The police are tearing down our house! Can the police just tear down a house as they please? We’ve lived here for decades. You’re handling a case, and you can just tear it down?”
Hua Chong figured it out; this woman’s thinking was rather quirky, clearly trying to score some ‘demolition compensation’.
Within a few minutes, a balding middle-aged man also came out of the house, followed by a young man around twenty with dyed yellow hair.
The family’s shouting rang out one after another: “Demolishing the house and not paying us?”, “Don’t you police have any law in your eyes?”, “We’re going to petition, petition!”
Hua Chong: “…”
He’d seen brutal murderers and inhuman terrorists, but he’d rarely encountered common folks so unreasonable and stupid.
“Now you see why I’m allergic?” Qu Zhi rolled up his sleeve to show goosebumps all over his arm. “It’s all because of these people. I’m not discriminating against low-income commoners. I’m from a rural township myself. Plenty of ordinary folks live hard lives, don’t have much education or knowledge, but at least they’re kind and want to get ahead, never done anything bad. But these people… sigh, how to say it, you can’t say they’ve done anything evil, but every word and deed just makes you uncomfortable. They’re stupid and toxic, and you can’t even get angry with them; you just have to let them make a scene.”
Hua Chong patted Qu Zhi on the shoulder to show understanding.
Amid countless staring eyes and their piercing wails and howls, the trace examiner finally expressionlessly retrieved the fruit knife Sang Hai had hidden.
That knife actually had a large amount of dried blood on it.
“That doesn’t make sense!” Qu Zhi’s eyebrows nearly knitted together. “Could that little wound on Li Jing have bled this much?”
“Whether it could bleed that much is secondary,” Hua Chong’s expression was grave. “Remember, Sang Hai said he’d wiped the blood clean before wedging the knife into the brick seam.”
A few seconds later, Qu Zhi abruptly stood up. “He’s lying!”
“Check first,” Hua Chong said. “Find out whose blood it actually is.”
“You’re just leaving like this?” The woman grabbed her own hair a few times, screaming hysterically as she rushed forward. “You tore down our house and now you just want to…”
“First, we didn’t tear down your house. It’s standing just fine without a single brick or tile missing.” Hua Chong shot her a cold look. “Second, we are conducting normal case evidence collection. If your whole family wants to obstruct us in carrying out our duties, I’ll have no choice but to invite you, your son, and your husband to come to our bureau for a bit.”
The woman had only been bluffing, hoping to wring a few bucks out of them; that would be good enough. But at this moment, Hua Chong blocked her with a stern voice. She immediately lost her nerve, didn’t dare say another word, and grabbed her son’s arm to pull him back.
But the son was even more ignorant. He raised his chin and shouted: “You fuckin’ dare scare my mom?”
“Let’s go, let’s go!” the woman whispered. “For these cops, crushing us common folks is even easier than crushing ants!”
Hua Chong: “…”
The leader of the Serious Crime Unit, who rarely used strong words, also wanted to curse.
Just then, a woman dressed completely unlike anyone from this street hurriedly ran over from the alley entrance. She seemed to be under thirty. She was wearing black stiletto heels, a slim-fitting gray professional skirt, and a rectangular patent leather bag hanging on her shoulder. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she was neat and had presence—a clear career woman.
“Mom!” She ran up to the house, slightly out of breath. Probably because she was running too fast, there was sweat on her face and neck, “What’s going on?”
The woman, who’d just backed down, instantly perked up. “Why are you only just back! It’s useless to raise a daughter! I’ve been calling you for half a day, and you only now come back? Good thing your brother was home today, otherwise who knows how these police would have bullied us!”
The young woman looked worried. “What exactly happened?”
“These police nearly tore down our house!”
The woman looked over in panic, and her eyes met Hua Chong’s.
Hua Chong immediately concluded in his mind that this girl was the eldest daughter of the family, rushing back after receiving her family’s call.
“Jie, as soon as they came they started knocking and hitting around behind our house, saying they needed to collect evidence. What kind of evidence were they collecting? That body was found behind Qiu Dakui’s house! Why are they coming to us for evidence? What the hell?”
The woman’s face turned awkward. She quietly persuaded her parents and brother back into the house, then walked up to Hua Chong and the others and gave them an apologetic smile: “Sorry, my parents don’t know anything, neither does my brother. Sigh… I don’t even know how to explain it to you. They’ve always been like this, they don’t understand reason or law. Sorry for making you laugh. Let me apologize on their behalf.”
As she spoke, she gave a half-bow.
Hua Chong stepped aside slightly. “It’s fine. We understand.”
The woman added, “Something happened on Daoqiao Road, everyone who lives here knows about it and is worried. The victim was around my age, and also a woman. I often work overtime and come home late, so I’m scared too. Officer, please do your best to solve this case and catch the murderer.”
Before Hua Chong could reply, Qu Zhi grinned and jumped in: “Absolutely! Protecting the safety of residents and their property is our duty!”
•
That evening, Xu Kan handed Hua Chong the lab report. “The blood left on the fruit knife is Xu Yujiao’s.”
