Chapter 3

Later, he married and had a son.

But the good years did not last. His wife fell ill and died, leaving him alone with their boy, Wang Zhifeng.

Misfortune still seemed unwilling to leave the man in peace.

Eighteen years earlier, when Wang Zhifeng was nine, he had suddenly disappeared.

Child trafficking was at its worst in those days. Wang Guohao was convinced his son had been abducted and sold.

Ignoring the villagers' advice, he set out on the long, grueling search for his child.

He never came back.

No one heard from him again.

But Kong Meilian had come to see the three men because…

Wang Guohao had found her!

After traveling far and wide in search of his son for more than a decade, he had suddenly turned up looking for Kong Meilian.

It had given her a terrible fright.

Fortunately for her, she really had never trafficked his son, Wang Zhifeng. She had managed to fend him off with evasions.

Still, the encounter had left her uneasy.

She had come to ask the three men whether Wang Zhifeng's disappearance had anything to do with them.

Naturally, they denied it. They insisted that Kong Meilian had always been their only contact. They would never have abducted a child from their own village and handed him to someone else to sell.

Even a rabbit knows not to eat the grass around its own burrow. Surely they were not that stupid.

Kong believed them and thought no more of it.

Then, half a month later, she was killed.

Something was certainly wrong.

Lin Zhijian had not mentioned any of this earlier because he had thought the killer was targeting only the three men.

Once he heard that something had happened to Kong too, he immediately remembered.

“That makes Wang Guohao a very strong suspect.”

Kong Meilian had been the first to die. That was crucial.

We could surmise that, after more than a decade of searching, Wang Guohao had finally found a lead that took him to her.

But Kong had flatly denied everything.

So he had killed her and staged it as a suicide.

He still had other people to take revenge on: Lin Zhijian and the other two men.

He had probably forced Kong to give him their names.

Perhaps learning that had made Wang Guohao's anger explode.

He had searched for his son for years without finding him. All that time, the three bastards who had taken the boy had been living comfortably in his own village!

I would not have been able to bear it either.

I would have wanted to kill them with my own hands, however much they denied being the actual culprits.

There were traffickers in the village, and his son had disappeared from that same village. Anyone would have suspected them.

It was only natural.

But perhaps…

He really had killed the wrong people.

Whether Lin Zhijian and the other two deserved to die was a separate question. He might have chosen the wrong targets for his revenge.

We agreed that our first priority was to find Wang Guohao.

But the man had been missing for more than a decade.

Easier said than done.

Eventually, we thought of a way.

Lin Zhijian.

“Relax. You'll be fine. We'll watch you and protect you around the clock. Someone will bring all your food and drink. As long as you don't wander off on your own, nothing will happen to you.”

Zhao Jun gave Lin Zhijian his solemn assurance.

Lin could only stare at him, openmouthed.

Yes.

We were going to send him home.

And then wait to see…

Whether Wang Guohao would appear.

To be honest, under ordinary circumstances we would never deliberately expose a member of the public to danger.

But we had explained the situation very clearly to Lin.

The police were involved. He had spent several days at our unit. We had reason to believe that the danger to him had passed.

No killer would be stupid enough to commit a crime right under the police's noses.

So there was no reason for him to remain there.

Entirely lawful. Entirely within the rules.

Leaving the legal argument aside, our real reason for taking this approach was our assessment of the man we were looking for.

Someone who had searched for his son for more than a decade without ever giving up had to possess extraordinary determination.

And he had to carry a great deal of resentment.

If it really was Wang Guohao, he would not abandon his revenge.

Not even with the police involved.

All the same, whatever crimes Lin had committed in the past, we genuinely had a duty to protect him.

We kept a very close watch on him without making it obvious.

Honestly, if he had simply accepted our protection, nothing strange would have happened.

But he did not.

His first day back home passed normally. Nothing unusual at all.

The second day was normal enough too.

That night, however, the light in his room stayed on until morning.

On the third morning, the colleague delivering fresh supplies of food discovered…

Lin Zhijian was gone!

His light was still burning from the night before.

We immediately went inside to check. Only then did we discover that the security grille over his window had been cut open.

There was no sign of a struggle in the room.

And the grille had clearly been broken from the inside.

That meant…

Lin had cut through it himself and climbed out.

Why?

We could not understand it.

He knew he was in danger. Wandering off was the last thing he should have done.

Even if he had left by the front door, we would at least have seen him and been able to follow him.

Instead, he had forced his way through the window and slipped out.

We had never anticipated that.

The unexpected development made our investigation even harder.

Fortunately, the ground below the window was damp. Lin had left footprints in it.

But we also found…

Another set.

Size 42. Athletic shoes.

The prints overlapped in a confused pattern. From our analysis, it appeared that someone had approached the window, stood there for a while, then turned and walked away.

In other words…

Someone had stood outside Lin's bedroom window that night.

That certainly had something to do with his decision to leave.

Could it have been Wang Guohao?

Unlikely.

Lin would never have followed him.

Besides, Lin had made a point of avoiding us, cutting the grille and leaving through the back.

Then who was it?

Whoever it was must have had a reason compelling enough to make Lin evade the police.

A threat, perhaps?

We had nothing to go on.

All we could do was follow the footprints.

They vanished once they left the damp patch of ground and reached the hillside behind Lin's house.

We suspected that both Lin and the person who had come to his window had gone around the back of the hill to stay out of our sight.

We did not have enough personnel to search the entire area for him.

Just as we were running out of options…

There was another extraordinary turn.

The day after Lin Zhijian disappeared of his own accord…

Wang Guohao turned up!

And in a way we had never expected.

He surrendered.

The man's face was weathered, with deep layers of wrinkles across his forehead.

But his eyes were bright and piercing.

He was only in his forties, yet his face looked almost sixty.

You could see what those years of hardship had done to him.

In the interview room, he wasted no time. He confessed at once.

“I've come to turn myself in. I killed Zhang Delin, Chen Jianzhong, and Lin Zhijian. I did it to avenge my son.”

Zhao Jun had always been blunt. He immediately challenged him.

“But Wang Guohao, do you realize you may have killed the wrong people? They were traffickers. They deserved to die, yes. But what if they really weren't the ones who took your son? What if your son is still alive somewhere, living a good life?”

Wang Guohao gave a cold laugh and answered with questions of his own.

“Are all you police like this? Talking bullshit when you don't know a thing? What do you know? Do you know where my son is? Did you find him when he disappeared?”

We had no answer.

It had not been our case. But we knew the police had not paid enough attention to preventing child abductions in those days. As for finding and rescuing the children afterward, the less said the better.

That was one reason child trafficking had been so widespread back then.