CH 207

The next morning, before eight, Wang Chao came to report.

With the intention of scaring them, the teenager burst in without even knocking on the door.

But the scene inside wasn’t as bad as he had imagined.

As Wang Chao snuck in like a thief, Lin Chen was reading an uninteresting magazine with the bedside lamp on. He looked up at the quietly approaching youngster and saw him petrified in front of the sofa.

“What’s wrong?” Lin Chen asked softly.

The young man recovered from his shock and disappointedly pointed at the dismantled sofa bed.

On the sofa bed, Xing Conglian had covered himself with a thin blanket and slept with his clothes on. He was sleeping deeply and didn’t even wake up when Wang Chao pushed the door open.

Lin Chen explained, “He went back to the police station for overtime yesterday and didn’t return until five in the morning.”

Hearing this, Wang Chao snapped out of his shock.

The teenager sat down at the bedside table with a breakfast bag, feeling hesitant to speak. But the mischievous glint in his eyes gave him away. “A’Chen Gege, I didn’t mean it like that. The Boss actually slept on the sofa?”

Lin Chen put down the magazine and started to look into today’s breakfast delivery. He asked Wang Chao, “Is there a problem?”

Wang Chao whispered into his ear and looked at the sleeping gentleman on the bed, “A’Chen Gege, is there something wrong with Sister* Xing? You can quietly tell me.”

*The term he’s using is (大嫂) which is sister-in-law (Lin Chen’s wife).

Lin Chen calmly grabbed the disposable bamboo chopstick, opened the box of preserved egg and lean meat porridge from the best Xu Ji porridge shop nearby, and then replied, “I don’t think so.”

Wang Chao grinned and asked, “How do you know?”

Lin Chen didn’t know when this little comrade had become so gossipy. He took a sip of porridge and said leisurely, “Wang Chao…”

“Yeah!”

“Stop asking.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid it will shock you,” Lin Chen replied as he opened a bowl of porridge for Wang Chao and handed him a pair of chopsticks.

Wang Chao opened his mouth in surprise and looked disapproving. He had a confused expression on his face as if he was questioning life. In the end, he had no choice but to obediently start drinking the porridge.

The fragrance of breakfast porridge wafted over, and Lin Chen took a light sniff. He felt that something was off in the air. He looked at Wang Chao, only to realize that the young man was still wearing the same black punk burnout cotton T-shirt with a few patches from yesterday, and he had a faint smell of smoke all over him.

So Lin Chen asked suspiciously, “You didn’t go home last night?”

“No, I went to an internet café last night,” Wang Chao replied happily.

Lin Chen frowned. “Wasn’t anyone cleaning the house?”

“Probably, but I didn’t go back to check. The internet café serves food, has a place to sleep, and even has League of Legends. What’s not good about it?” Wang Chao said while taking out three portions of crispy beef cakes from the breakfast bag. “Besides, the internet café I went to even has a bathroom. Hehehe, it’s amazing.”

“Don’t sleep at the internet café in the future. At least get a hotel room…”

“Ah, A’chen Gege, don’t worry. I mainly went to the internet café to watch surveillance videos. I can open ten computers to watch simultaneously. It’s awesome,” he said excitedly, patting his thighs. “And A’Chen Gege, you were right. There really is such a mysterious man in a hoodie!”

Lin Chen looked up and asked, “What’s the story with the mysterious man in a hoodie?”

“During the incident, a suspicious-looking man in a hoodie lingered around the European Castle area of the Hongjing Amusement Park. Afterward, he went to the scene of the crime and quickly left!”

Wang Chao jumped out of bed, biting his chopsticks, saying one thing and doing another, and quickly connected the computer and TV again.

Lin Chen held his chopsticks and stared at the monitor.

Indeed, there appeared to be a strange figure sitting on a bench outside the European Castle of the Hongjing Amusement Park, seemingly playing with his phone. The person wore a hoodie and kept his head down, never looking up at anyone else. He seemed deeply absorbed in the content on his phone. At a certain point in time, the man suddenly stood up and left the bench without hesitation.

Lin Chen noticed the time displayed at the bottom of the screen, which was exactly 10:15, eight minutes after Tan Kang was stabbed to death.

It seemed that this was the appointed time. Lin Chen thought to himself.

But…how should he put it? Lin Chen looked at the figure of the man in the hoodie that Wang Chao had just mentioned and couldn’t explain the strange feeling in his heart.

Although the case did seem like Tan Kang had come to the park to secretly meet with someone, once they found the evidence to support the inference, the inference itself gave people a sense of inexplicable absurdity.

In modern society, there were countless ways to convey information. Why did Tan Kang choose the most primitive way of meeting?

Seeing that he had been silent for a long time, Wang Chao suddenly asked, “What’s wrong, A’chen Gege?”

Lin Chen held his bowl of porridge and said, “This is too simple.”

“Ah, where is it simple?” Wang Chao didn’t understand.

“Our process of finding this intermediary person is too simple,” Lin Chen said.

“But, but if it weren’t for your analysis of his falling motion, I might not have been able to find this ‘mysterious man in a hoodie’!”

Wang Chao was very persistent in giving the mysterious figure a nickname.

Lin Chen nodded and asked, “But have you ever thought about why they chose this mysterious spy-style means of meeting?”

“Because all of Tan Kang’s electronic communications were being monitored, whether it was his phone or computer, he had to meet this person in person?”

“But in any case, since they agreed to meet here, they must have had first contact with each other. How did he contact this person for the first time?” Lin Chen asked.

“Huh?” Wang Chao was speechless for a moment. “Makes sense.”

“Two possibilities: First, the intermediary person is an acquaintance of Tan Kang, and they had face-to-face conversations and agreed to meet here; second, he knew a middleman who conveyed the message and got in touch with this intermediary person through him; third…”

“What’s the third possibility?”

“The third possibility is that he called this person directly without going through anyone else and agreed to meet here.”

At this moment, Xing Conglian’s voice rang out. “The first possibility hardly exists. Hongjing Amusement Park has surveillance cameras and requires tickets. If acquaintances want to meet up, it’s not good to choose places without surveillance cameras, and it’s not as if they’re dating.”

Lin Chen turned around and saw Xing Conglian getting up from the sofa bed, rubbing his face in a daze.

Xing Conglian looked at the screen and beckoned to Wang Chao while speaking. Perhaps he had just spoken ill of Xing Conglian, so this time, Wang Chao very flatteringly served up the food.

“Why don’t you sleep a little longer?” Lin Chen asked.

“I have an appointment with Zhourui Pharmaceutical at 9:30,” Xing Conglian said.

Lin Chen was about to speak, but Xing Conglian added, “You have a full-body examination at 11 today, so behave and stay at the hospital.”

“It’s okay. I can do the full-body examination alone, so don’t rush back,” Lin Chen said.

Wang Chao interrupted them. “It might necessarily be about dating… After all, times are changing. Maybe the mysterious hoodie man is Dr. Tan Kang’s secret lover!”

Lin Chen helplessly glanced at the young man. “Didn’t you say that this mysterious hoodie man had been to the Tan Kang murder scene?”

“Yes!”

“Retrieve the crime scene video.”

Wang Chao nodded. When the person arrived at the scene, the police and amusement park security were already there, and the cordon had been raised, with most of the crowd on the periphery.

The mysterious hoodie man mentioned by Wang Chao had indeed been to the cordon, but he only stayed at the scene for a short period of time, confirmed the situation, and then left.

“What’s your feeling?” Lin Chen asked Wang Chao.

“Uh…I can’t say for sure,” Wang Chao replied.

“If it’s a lover, when one party dies, the other only pauses and is shocked for less than 10 seconds without the usual grieving gesture like covering their mouth with their hand. Is this reasonable?” Lin Chen counted the seconds the hoodie man had looked at Tan Kang’s body and continued, “And, moreover, the body language is not that of someone grieving.”

“Uh…” Wang Chao was confused again. “Is the person I found really the one Tan Kang wanted to meet? Why did Dr. Tan Kang have such an obsession until his death, while this person left so casually?”

“Congratulations, Comrade Xiao Wang. You have finally discovered the problem!” Xing Conglian laughed, “And the video you found not only shows that the person who made contact isn’t very concerned about Tan Kang’s life and death, but also that this contact person is not very professional.”

“Boss, what do you mean by not being professional?”

“It means that spying activities that can be captured by surveillance cameras are not professional.” Xing Conglian took a bite of beef pancake and asked, “Did you capture his face?”

“He kept his head down and his hoodie covered him, so we didn’t capture it. Isn’t that professional enough?”

Xing Conglian did not comment on this. “It’s probably because the amusement park’s surveillance is poor. Haven’t you encountered someone who can avoid surveillance cameras all the way?”

Wang Chao was speechless with the rebuttal. “Then why did Tan Kang come to the amusement park to meet this unprofessional person secretly and even die in the process?”

“Then we need to investigate based on the two or three possibilities suggested by your A’Chen Gege. First, filter through Tan Kang’s recent communication records and see if he made any calls that he had never made before. If there are no results, then expand the search area a bit and see if he has used any public phones or the like…”

“I understand!” Wang Chao’s blood was boiling as he shouted, then fell back down again. “But if he used a public phone, isn’t that like looking for a needle in a haystack? We would have to analyze Tan Kang’s daily activities to come to any conclusion.”

“So my point is that if there is no significant progress in this project, we can end it, because if Tan Kang was murdered, then which of the three possibilities do you think is the most likely?”

“The second one. There may be a middleman who leaked information, leading to Tan Kang being stabbed to death,” Wang Chao replied.

“What does Consultant Lin think?” Xing Conglian turned to him and asked.

“It’s not entirely accurate.”

“Oh?”

“Rather than there being a leaker, it’s possible that this was a loyalty test in and of itself,” Lin Chen said as he looked at the dim TV screen. “The killer was able to calculate Tan Kang’s movements yesterday, intercept him accurately, and be prepared enough to kill him with one blow and then escape smoothly. This couldn’t have been done without sufficient preparation. And that so-called middleman is likely just a lure. Someone dug a pit, put in some tempting bait, and Tan Kang jumped in without suspecting anything, only to be stabbed by the blade in the pit.”

Lin Chen’s voice grew colder and colder.

Wang Chao took a sharp breath.

Xing Conglian lightly ran his index finger across his throat, revealing a very cautious and vigilant expression.