Chapter 359

Chapter 359

I walked Granny He to her door and offered a few more words of comfort.

To anyone else, a dog might be nothing more than a pet. To an elderly woman living alone, it was family.

When I returned home, the place was empty. Meng Yifan was still away in his hometown for the funeral.

I sat on the couch, lit a cigarette, and tried to sort through the mess in my head.

Song Xiaotian had told me not to put too much faith in every sign. Blind belief wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

Maybe that was exactly what I was doing.

Granny He’s dog had gone missing. By the time we found it, it was dead.

I couldn’t stop myself from connecting it to Liang Yi. What if this was another Stigmatized Property? What if Liang Yi was already dead?

But if she was dead, didn’t that mean I had read the hexagram wrong?

My thoughts were a complete jumble. I took a shower, crawled into bed, and buried my head beneath the covers.

First thing the next morning, I called Meng Yifan.

We had no leads at all on Liang Yi’s disappearance, but Boss Xu had hired us. Whether we found an answer was one thing. Whether we bothered investigating was another.

I definitely wasn’t going to the agency today, so I needed to let Meng Yifan know.

When he answered, I asked when he would be back.

Originally, he had said the burial would be finished early and he would return that morning. Now he abruptly changed his answer and said he didn’t know.

Something sounded wrong in his voice, so I asked what had happened.

He sighed. After escorting his relative’s coffin up the mountain that morning, everyone had returned to discover that a child from the extended family was missing.

The child was a distant relative of the deceased and had joined the funeral procession. He had still been there when everyone kowtowed, but the descent had been crowded and no one paid much attention to him. They only noticed he was gone after returning.

The boy was only seven or eight. Maybe he had gotten lost on the mountain. The entire village was searching for him.

There were plenty of streams and ditches in the area too. Everyone was terrified he had fallen into one. If he had, then even if they found him, he might already…

“Damn, what a mess. I have to go. I need to help them search.”

Meng Yifan hurriedly hung up.

I sat frozen on the bed, drenched in cold sweat first thing in the morning.

Another disappearance…

How could things be this sinister…?

I didn’t dare follow the thought any further. The more I did, the more I would connect everything.

Had studying this occult stuff driven me into obsession and madness?

But Seventh Master had studied it his entire life. Why hadn’t he gone mad?

Oh, now I understood. No wonder I always thought there was something wrong with his head.

After leaving home, I took a cab straight to Brother Liu’s precinct.

I wanted to watch the surveillance footage again.

Liang Yi’s disappearance was impossible to explain, and I was no longer sure whether she was alive or dead.

Without An Yutong, I would have leaned toward a supernatural event. But An Yutong’s presence introduced a human element.

People lied. People acted. And people always left flaws.

If I couldn’t find a flaw in An Yutong for now, I would look for one in the footage.

Brother Liu was unhappy when I explained what I wanted.

“Brother, we’re professionals. You can question my character, but you can’t question my competence.”

“I personally reviewed every camera in that building. If there was a problem with the footage, you think I wouldn’t notice?”
I told him something about this case was wrong. The footage itself might be fine, but the whole affair was riddled with contradictions. Something, somewhere, had to have gone wrong.

“Just let me watch it once. I’ll only take a look, okay?”

“Fine,” he sighed.

He took me to his office and told me to wait while he retrieved the flash drive containing the footage from the evidence room.

He returned with it soon afterward.

But when he plugged the drive into his computer, it was completely empty.

I asked if he had taken the wrong one.

“Impossible. The drive is numbered. I clearly remember storing that building’s footage on it. How could it be gone?” Brother Liu grew nervous.

So did I. If he remembered correctly, someone had removed the drive and deleted the footage.

“I’ll ask the evidence clerk if anyone checked it out.”

I followed Brother Liu to the evidence room.

Anything removed from there had to be logged. Taking evidence without registering it was a violation.

The clerk on duty was a trainee officer. Brother Liu asked him, “Xiao Zhang, did anyone check out this drive?”

“No. Weren’t you the one who submitted it? Nobody has taken it since.”

Xiao Zhang showed us the register. Sure enough, no one had checked out the drive.

Cold sweat beaded on Brother Liu’s forehead. If no one had removed it, the footage must have been deleted before it entered storage.

But before that, the drive had remained with Brother Liu. If he hadn’t erased it, who had?

I pulled him into the stairwell and demanded, “Did you delete it? Did somebody pay you off again?”

Brother Liu hurriedly covered my mouth. “Stop talking nonsense! Nobody paid me!”

I frowned. “Then explain where the footage went.”

He searched his memory. “After copying the footage onto the drive, I brought it back here and watched it in my office. I stayed late that night to finish. Then I put the drive into evidence storage and went home…”

He trailed off, confused himself.

He had been the only person to handle the footage. Nobody else had touched it from beginning to end.

“No. That’s impossible.” Brother Liu raked his fingers through his hair. “Footage can’t vanish by itself. Who deleted it? It wasn’t me. Did somebody erase it while I went to the bathroom?”

“If they erased it while you were in the bathroom, what the hell were you watching when you came back?”

I suggested checking the precinct’s security footage, especially the camera outside his office. Surely that footage couldn’t erase itself from a flash drive it wasn’t stored on.

Brother Liu took me to the surveillance room.

No one was there. He immediately pulled up the recording from that night.

It showed him carefully reviewing the footage. When he finished, he unplugged the drive and left his office.

But he didn’t go to the evidence room.

He walked out of the precinct with the drive in his hand.

By then, I was furious.

The bastard really wouldn’t admit the truth until the coffin was closing over him. The recording clearly showed him leaving the precinct with the drive first, yet he had sworn he took it straight to storage.

I glared at him. “Explain this. Why did you take evidence out of the precinct? Who did you meet that night? Was it An Yutong?”