Chapter 4

Chapter 4

At nine in the morning, Jiang Huaixu came to see me to take a supplemental statement.

I handed him the USB drive.

He didn’t speak at first, but once he finished listening to that recording of Shen Zhiyao, his expression changed completely.

“Where did you get this?”

I didn’t tell him everything, only saying that Qin Yanxi might have hidden the evidence in the Morgue’s ventilation duct in advance.

He stared at me for a long time, looking as if he wanted to ask more, but in the end, he only said, “Don’t go taking risks on your own again.”

“My sister’s recordings are all right here. How could I just wait?”

“You wait for the police.”

“The police have been waiting for ten years.”

He fell silent.

Those words were too heavy; even I felt a sharp ache in my throat after saying them.

Jiang Huaixu rubbed the bridge of his nose, his voice dropping. “Ten years ago, I was still a trainee at the local station. I was on the scene for the Wanghe Case. That case was later taken away from us, and the conclusion was that Shen Zhiyao was missing and the leads had gone cold. It’s not that no one wanted to investigate; it’s that we couldn’t.”

“Because of Liang Yucheng?”

He didn’t answer directly, only saying, “Let’s go to the evidence room first.”

Some of the old evidence from the Wanghe Five Women Disappearance Case was still kept in the municipal bureau’s underground archives. The first victim was named Tao Yanqiu. She was nineteen when she disappeared and had spent two weeks volunteering at the Wanghe Customs Research Center. Among the evidence she left behind was a broken silver anklet.

When Jiang Huaixu handed me the evidence bag to look at, my fingertips began to itch intensely.

I knew I shouldn’t touch it.

But I wanted to know even more what she had seen at the very end.

While he turned around to flip through the case files, I reached through a small tear in the corner of the bag and lightly touched the anklet.

Images immediately rushed into my mind.

Night. A riverbank. Paper lanterns floating one after another. A young girl’s ankles were bound with Red Rope, her mouth gagged, leaving her only able to let out muffled whimpers. Someone walked ahead of her ringing a bell-the sound tolling over and over-while behind her sat an unlicensed white van. Before the doors slammed shut, she kicked out desperately, and the anklet snapped in half.

Then, she heard a man speak.

“Send her to the Customs Hall. Teacher Liang wants to see her face first.”

I jerked my hand back, my breathing becoming ragged.

“What’s wrong?” Jiang Huaixu frowned.

“I’m fine.” I stared at several words in the case file, forcing myself to stay calm. “Was the Wanghe Customs Research Center the predecessor to the Wanghe Etiquette and Customs Museum?”

“Yes.”

“All five of the missing people… they had all been there?”

He flipped through a few pages, his face growing darker by the second.

Yes. All five of them had been there.

They hadn’t disappeared at random.

Someone was using that place to screen people, to hand-pick them, and then take them away one by one.

And the person responsible for initiating that project was none other than Liang Yucheng.