Chapter 2
Edward Quan ·
I gave a soft laugh.
“Then are you here to tell me stories, Officer Wei?”
He stared at me.
“Miss Jing, it would be very difficult for you to do all this on your own in a wheelchair. You’d need someone to help you cover your tracks, wouldn’t you?”
I said nothing, merely motioning with my eyes for him to continue.
He glanced toward the kitchen.
“Aunt Wu was the perfect person.”
“She used to be your neighbor. You were close to both her and Jiang Ting. After the assault, Jiang Ting couldn’t endure the gossip and scrutiny and drowned herself. You and Aunt Wu hated Weng Chengwen. To you, five years in prison wasn’t nearly enough to pay for Jiang Ting’s life. You wanted him dead.”
“You could call it a mutually beneficial arrangement, but given your relationship, I’d say you were helping each other.”
“You wanted your father dead so he could never abuse you again. Aunt Wu helped you. Then you began living together. You told everyone she was a caregiver you’d hired because of your legs, but in reality, you were waiting for Weng Chengwen to get out of prison so you could take your revenge.”
“I checked. You bought the apartment next door too. You let Weng Chengwen rent it very cheaply. You used the low rent to lure him here and give yourselves the chance to act. Am I right?”
He watched me intently as he spoke.
When he finished, I couldn’t help giving a bitter laugh.
“Even if everything you say is true, Officer Wei, how exactly did I kill him?”
“I’m disabled.”
I sighed and looked at him.
He could see the challenge in my eyes. I knew he could.
Sure enough, he sprang to his feet, his voice hardening.
“I haven’t worked that out yet. But I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a perfect crime.”
I chuckled.
“Incidentally, Aunt Wu has a heart condition. Between the two of us, we’re old, frail, or ill. However weak Weng Chengwen might have been, we couldn’t have killed him.”
“And if this is a murder investigation, have you found the weapon?”
I asked the question quietly.
4
The moment the front door closed, I burst out laughing.
Wei Dong hadn’t received any forensic results at all. He hadn’t even established whether Weng Chengwen had been murdered or killed himself.
He had come here to trick me into giving something away.
But of course I knew that.
I had all of this well in hand.
5
On the third day after Weng Chengwen’s body was found, Wei Dong came again.
Aunt Wu was out buying groceries.
When I opened the door, he smiled.
“Sorry to trouble you again, Miss Jing.”
I returned a faint smile.
“Have you found a new lead?”
He nodded, then shook his head.
“We haven’t made any progress. I thought I’d take your statement again and see if anything new comes up.”
I wheeled myself over to pour him a glass of water, then held it out.
“Of course. Every citizen has a duty to help the police solve a case.”
I watched him reach for the glass. The next instant, somehow, it slipped straight through his hand and fell to the floor.
Hot water splashed everywhere, spilling over my legs.
I felt nothing.
My only concern was for him.
“Did you burn yourself, Officer Wei? I have some burn ointment. Let me get it.”
I pulled open a drawer in the cabinet beside me, found the ointment, and handed it to him.
Wei Dong said nothing. He just kept staring at me.
His stare made my skin crawl. I forced an awkward smile.
“What is it?”
He looked at my legs.
“Can’t you feel anything?”
I glanced down, then laughed.
“I lost all feeling in them a long time ago. How could I?”
“Besides, if I could feel them, I’d have got up and walked by now.”
As I spoke, I quietly wiped the water off my legs.
“Miss Jing, I went to the hospital where you were treated,” he said. “Your legs weren’t actually broken. In fact, there’s a very good chance you could recover and walk like anyone else.”
“The reason you can’t stand is that, psychologically, you resist it.”
I laughed.
“So you didn’t drop the glass by accident. You deliberately used it to test me?”
He nodded.
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s actually nothing wrong with your legs. But without realizing it, you still believe there is. That’s why you’ve never been able to stand.”
I gave him a helpless smile.
“You’re still determined to treat me as a suspect, aren’t you?”
Instead of answering, he countered, “We have every reason to question whether you’re only pretending you can’t stand.”
I smiled.
“And now? You saw it for yourself. Was my performance convincing?”
For a moment, he had no answer.
The hot water had spilled straight onto my legs in front of him, and I really hadn’t reacted at all.
Just as the silence grew awkward, his phone rang.
“Excuse me. I need to take this.”
I nodded.
I wheeled myself into the bathroom to wipe the water off my legs.
He spent five or six minutes on the phone. Then, looking displeased, he hung up and said goodbye.
I asked no questions. Once he had gone, I went to my computer and put on my headphones.
I had installed a listening device in my apartment. Whenever Wei Dong came to question me, I listened to the recording several times afterward.
Today was no exception.
I heard his entire phone conversation. It went roughly like this:
Wei Dong: I’m out. This isn’t a good time to talk. Whatever it is, we can discuss it when I get back.
Caller: I’ve told you over and over. There’s no need to keep investigating this case.
Wei Dong: There are still too many things that don’t add up. Don’t worry about me, Dad. I know what I’m doing.
Caller: I’ve spoken to the forensic team. Weng Chengwen clearly killed himself. He wasn’t murdered. What more is there to investigate?
Wei Dong: [Audibly impatient] I don’t believe he would have killed himself. The night before he died, he uploaded his résumé to look for work. He was planning a fresh start after prison. Why would he kill himself?
Caller: And what have you found? If it was murder, why were there no other fingerprints or footprints at the scene? What about the weapon? You haven’t found one. How can you prove it was murder?
Wei Dong: Can you stop meddling? How old do you think I am? Do I still need you supervising my cases? Besides, you work in education. I work in criminal investigation. They’re completely different fields. Why do you insist on telling me what to do?
Caller: It’s for your own good. I’ve looked into Weng Chengwen. He was scum who used his job as a teacher to harass schoolgirls. Society’s better off without him. Yet here you are, wasting police resources on a man like that. Have you thought about how it makes you look? Do you care about your career at all?
Wei Dong: I can manage my own career. I don’t need your advice! The moment you abandoned your wife and son to marry a woman my age, you lost any right to lecture me!
The call ended there.
I took off my headphones, a smile curling my lips.
Aunt Wu was setting the table. She called me to dinner, and I wheeled myself toward the living room.
“The fish has taken the bait,” I told her with a smile.
6
The case soon became the subject of intense public debate.
Partly, it was because Wei Dong insisted on continuing the investigation. Partly, it was because a post suddenly appeared online.
The author said she was a former student of Weng Chengwen’s. She didn’t say what she did for a living now.
She described her background. Born in the countryside, she had grown up in a family that valued boys far more than girls.
She loved studying and did extremely well at school. But when she won a place at a top high school, no one in her family would let her go.
Their reasons were always the same.
What good was an education to a girl? She ought to get married early and help support the family.
Besides, she had a younger brother. He was already in seventh grade and could barely write his own name, yet the family still believed that, being a boy, he was bound to have better prospects than she did.
She had been planning to run away and find work to pay her own tuition when Weng Chengwen came to her home to speak to her parents.
In the end, he offered to pay for all three years of high school himself.
Only then did they reluctantly agree.
Her grades remained excellent throughout high school.
Weng Chengwen didn’t just cover her tuition. He helped her apply for financial aid from the school and even put money on her meal card.
Most importantly, he did all of it discreetly.
He truly cared about an eighteen-year-old’s pride and self-respect. He quietly considered her feelings in everything he did.
Now she had graduated from a prestigious university and found a job paying two hundred thousand yuan a year. She had escaped her unhappy family for good.
She also had a loving, well-off boyfriend. They were preparing for their wedding.
She had just graduated when Weng Chengwen went to prison.
For years, she had searched for evidence, without success.
She couldn’t believe that the man who had changed her life could be capable of such things. She had never stopped investigating.
This year, when she learned he would soon be released, she decided to find him and talk.
But he kept refusing to see her. She was getting married, he said. She shouldn’t let the people around her find out she associated with an ex-convict.
She had worked so hard to escape her family and build a good life. He thought it would only hurt her if people knew she was still in touch with him.
After he turned her down, she thought about it for a long time.
Finally, she decided to tell her fiancé everything.
She couldn’t keep treating the man she owed so much to as a stranger.
More than that, she had decided to invite him to her wedding.
Then, without warning, Weng Chengwen died.
She didn’t believe he had killed himself. He had told her he was going to start over.
7
The post caused an immediate uproar.
Before it appeared, many people had believed a scumbag like Weng Chengwen deserved to die. Some had even said the police shouldn’t waste time investigating.
Now people began to waver. If the writer was telling the truth, perhaps he had been wrongly convicted five years ago.
I sat at my computer, looking at the post. When I refreshed the page, the comments saying he had been wrongly convicted suddenly vanished.
Soon, the original post disappeared too.
I began typing a new one.
Of course, the forum administrator had been paid off. Every time I posted, he deleted it.
But the more he deleted, the happier I became.
I knew the other side had swallowed the hook.
I kept working on my post.
Soon, a thread titled “You Can Delete the Posts, but Not the Truth—People Know What’s Right!” was pinned to the top of the forum.
This time, the administrator discovered he couldn’t delete it. He began to panic.
I had stolen his account long ago and taken control of the entire forum.
I took screenshots of his deletion history and block list, added them to my post, and put it up again.
Views soared. Shares and comments raced past ten thousand, then a hundred thousand, then a million…
The short-video platforms erupted too.
On Weibo, the case shot onto the trending list.
For a while, the whole of little City A seemed to be talking about it.
More and more people who had known Weng Chengwen came forward.
Their accounts gradually revealed a fuller, more vivid picture of the man.
He had been an orphan, frail and quiet from childhood.
But he was very bright. Once he became a teacher, his students had nothing but praise for him.
He had won outstanding-teacher awards year after year.
He had helped many students who couldn’t afford an education, never wanting anyone to know.
All of it had ended that night.
The police had taken him away, and he had confessed to sexually harassing a female student.
8
On the thirtieth day after Weng Chengwen’s death, Wei Dong knocked on my door again.
This time, he was completely different.
He looked worn out, as though all the fight had gone out of him.
I poured him a glass of water.
He thanked me, then suddenly gave a bitter smile.
“It looks as if I really was wrong.”
I watched him without a word.
“The forensic team has maintained all along that Weng Chengwen killed himself. Every piece of evidence at the scene points to suicide. But after looking into his background and what he’d been through, I was certain he’d been murdered.”