CH 240

“What can I do, Consultant Lin?”

Just before Lin Chen left, he specifically asked him to come down the mountain together. Li Nuo was both excited and at a loss for what to do.

He stood at the foot of the small hill, breathing rapidly to take in the fresh air around him, but the nauseating smell of blood and gore from earlier still lingered. He didn’t even dare to close his eyes because once he quieted down, the overwhelming fear of death would come rushing back. So he could only desperately follow closely behind the person in front of him, fearing he would be left behind.

“Help me find a place to stay.” Lin Chen reached the car at the foot of the mountain and turned around, saying so.

Li Nuo was stunned for a moment. The consultant before him seemed completely unaffected by the brutal and inhumane scene from earlier, except for his pale complexion. But there were moments when Li Nuo felt that grief was engraved in his bones, that it could easily find outlets for emotional expression, and it couldn’t be considered nothing.

He quickly sniffed and hurriedly asked, “What kind of place are you looking for?”

At the same time, an elderly officer in the car at the foot of the hill hurriedly opened the door and nervously asked Lin Chen, “Did you catch the person?”

Lin Chen shook his head at the old officer first, then turned to him and said, “Anything will do.”

Upon hearing this, the old man seemed to have guessed something, and a look of terror quickly appeared on his face, accompanied by deep guilt that seemed to weigh him down. Li Nuo didn’t know what had happened between them, but it definitely wasn’t something good.

Just as Li Nuo thought Lin Chen would coldly nod to the old man and pass by him, he was very surprised to see Lin Chen deliberately stop in his tracks.

The young police consultant stood in front of the old man, appearing tall and imposing. He slightly bowed his body, one hand holding the old man’s weathered hand, while using the other hand to pat his back forcefully. His tone was gentle but carried a comforting power. “Do you remember what I said earlier? I was serious. It’s not your fault. There are many people who should bear responsibility for this, but it’s not your turn for now.”

The old man trembled at his words, looking up towards the direction of the mountaintop with a distant and teary gaze.

Lin Chen didn’t say anything more. He opened the rear door of the car and took out a stack of files enclosed in a leather document bag from inside.

Li Nuo noticed that the name “Shen Lian” was written on the paper bag. He shivered once again, only to see Lin Chen quickly turn his gaze back. That look instantly brought him back to his senses. It turned out that when the consultant said to find a place, he meant immediately and without delay.

He hurriedly turned back up the mountain. Though the mountain breeze was gentle around him, he became nervous. The images of the elderly people with brown bloodstains on their necks resurfaced in his mind one after another. But now wasn’t the time. He suppressed the urge to vomit once again, looked around, and realized that the elderly lady who had been sitting under the tree enjoying the breeze had disappeared. Perhaps she had gone up the mountain to see what was happening.

In his memory, there was a small shack where villagers stored thatched grass and miscellaneous items. So he ran up the path on the right side and indeed saw that shack. However, unlike his memory, this makeshift brick house was extremely dilapidated and didn’t even have a door.

He turned back to Lin Chen once again and asked, “Should I go find a resident’s house instead?”

Lin Chen shook his head. “This place will do.”

Li Nuo didn’t know what Lin Chen intended to do, but he rushed into the house ahead of him. However, the foul smell of the thatched grass inside made him take a step back.

With a snap, a dim yellow light bulb lit up, but the light only illuminated a small area of the broken brick floor, leaving the rest of the space in a gloomy haze.

At some point, Lin Chen was standing in the doorway with a calm expression. He let go of the switch on the wall, and, for a moment, Li Nuo felt that this rundown and drafty house was a true reflection of this psychology consultant.

But Lin Chen’s actions quickly pushed that thought out of his mind. The consultant entered the shack and swiftly took out the papers from the document bag, placing them casually on the pile of grass, the broken cabinet, and the floor.

Those were all the materials related to Shen Lian saved in her personal file, from birth records to medical reports, from report cards to teacher evaluations. There were even a few crayon drawings and handcrafts that were probably submitted for the school’s comprehensive education assessment.

Each item represented a clear trace of important events in a person’s life. With each bend of Lin Chen’s body, they were slowly presented in this stuffy and damp old house.

Finally, a large expanse of white paper formed a sea of documents before Li Nuo’s eyes. When the wind blew, ripples seemed to appear under the dim yellow light.

Lin Chen took a step back, leaned on a low brick, and sat down.

Li Nuo tried his best not to associate the low brick wall with a fence of a livestock pen, nor did he recall the previous purpose of this dilapidated house. He followed Lin Chen’s gaze and looked back at the uneven sea of paper materials, contemplating whether he should go out and return this space to Lin Chen.

He silently took two steps back, accidentally stepping on a piece of broken brick that produced a clanging sound, breaking the silence.

Lin Chen’s gaze followed the sound, and Li Nuo quickly said, “I’m sorry, Consultant Lin. I’ll leave immediately.”

“Just a moment…”

Li Nuo suddenly looked up, but when he looked towards Lin Chen, Lin Chen wasn’t looking at him.

The consultant sitting on the pile of bricks lowered his head slightly, subconsciously holding his phone in his hand. His black hair hung down, revealing a fair nape above his collar. His pale fingers lightly brushed over the call records, as if he was about to dial someone’s number. A trace of vulnerability or longing appeared on his face, and then he paused for a few seconds. Unexpectedly, Lin Chen put away his phone and looked at him again.

With his dark and calm gaze, Lin Chen said to him, “Stay, and let’s talk.”

……

The command center at the Municipal Bureau.

Xing Conglian still maintained the same position as when he entered the room, holding his phone. The content of the previous call was that the traffic police in Yulin District had already found the abandoned van left by Shen Lian, and forensic officers were now on their way there. In the brief moment he took the phone away from his ear, he inadvertently glanced at the call records. Lin Chen’s name was the last entry on the phone’s screen, with the bottom half obscured by the number keys, only revealing half of the name.

An inexplicable emotion welled up in Xing Conglian’s heart; an emotion that he didn’t even have time to carefully ponder at that moment. His fingertip gently touched the half name of Lin Chen, but in the end, he didn’t dial the number.

……

“What… do you want to talk about?” Li Nuo carefully avoided the papers on the floor and didn’t dare to get too close to Lin Chen.

“Ask me questions. Anything will do.”

Lin Chen sat on the fence like this, with his toes touching the ground. There was a bit of distance between his heels and the floor, looking like an ordinary student.

“Why do you want me to ask questions? Won’t it disturb you like this?” Li Nuo gathered his courage and asked.

“No, because asking questions is the best heuristic strategy for problem-solving,” Lin Chen replied.

Li Nuo squatted down, finding it difficult to understand what a heuristic* strategy was; it was probably something related to psychology. But since Lin Chen asked him to ask questions, and he had a lot of questions in his mind, why not ask?

*Any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a tactical method that’s not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation. Such techniques include trial and error, a rule of thumb, or an educated guess.

“Why did you lay out Shen Lian’s files? What are you trying to do?” In the quiet and dilapidated shack, Li Nuo pointed to the vast sea of paper materials and asked.

“It’s Shen Lian’s past in front of you. I want to deduce her future.”

“How can you deduce that? Can you really know what she’s going to do next just based on Shen Lian’s personal files?” Li Nuo was astonished, but he suddenly remembered how Lin Chen was able to pinpoint the exact location of the nursing home on the mountaintop. He immediately wanted to swallow back the question he had just asked. However, to his surprise, Lin Chen patiently answered him, “By understanding her past to speculate on her personality traits, and by using her personality traits to judge her thinking logic and behavioral characteristics in a given environment. Human choices seem random and irrational, as if each of us has free will, but in reality, it’s just an illusion created by the one above.”

As Lin Chen spoke, he raised his index finger and pointed at the ceiling. Li Nuo knew that the one above referred to a higher power. He shivered, feeling dizzy from the flickering of the light, and couldn’t help but say, “I’m a materialist. This sounds too mystical.”

“Who said it wasn’t?” Lin Chen replied calmly.

Just then, Li Nuo noticed several drawings that Shen Lian had made as a child in the corner. He suddenly remembered the scene from the live stream when Lin Chen and Li Jingtian faced each other across the wooden table. He had watched the entire live stream, and the summary was that Lin Chen asked Li Jingtian to draw a picture, and then miraculously guessed the exact location where Li Jingtian had hidden the incriminating evidence.

Thinking about this, he asked, “What about those drawings? Can you tell where Shen Lian might go now based on those drawings?”

Lin Chen also looked over. “Those are works from Shen Lian’s childhood. Art can indeed reflect a child’s inner world, but unfortunately, I can’t.” Stepping down from the pile of bricks, Lin Chen walked through the narrow path between papers and picked up the drawings from the floor, as if he could see through people’s hearts. He looked back at Li Nuo and said, “The success of the drawing test I gave to Li Jingtian relied heavily on modern scientific methods that you didn’t see, such as pressure sensors, and so on. Now that Shen Lian is not in front of me, I can’t stimulate her to react by asking various questions.”

“Are you saying it’s more difficult now than it was back then?” Li Nuo scratched his head.

“Yes, and Shen Lian is far more dangerous than Li Jingtian. That’s the difference between a terrorist and an ordinary psychological deviant,” Lin Chen answered decisively. Then he looked at Li Nuo as if waiting for the next question.

Li Nuo took a deep breath, and the scene of the frenzied massacre in the nursing home once again surfaced in his mind. Those images kept looping in his head, like a nightmare that he couldn’t escape for a lifetime. He shook his head desperately, trying to calm himself with a question. He pointed to the image in Lin Chen’s hand and asked, “What was Shen Lian’s inner world like when she was a child?”

It was a sketch, depicting a group of children sitting inside a house. It seemed like Shen Lian had drawn a birthday party, with a messy cake on the table. The picture appeared dark and made people feel very uncomfortable.

“She was very talented. She drew this when she was eight years old.” Lin Chen casually placed the drawing on a stack of grass and stared at the paper. “Her drawings of houses were not two-dimensional, and she used overlapping strategies, omitting invisible lines. She even used perspective when depicting the structure of the house, showing that the objects she drew extended in three-dimensional space. She is a genius, or rather, her spatial thinking ability surpasses that of children her age.” Lin Chen continued, absorbed in his own thoughts. “This reflects her high intelligence quotient. That’s why I doubted her low academic performance before the second year of middle school. After eighth grade, her grades improved significantly. I deduced from this abnormal period that Shen Lian might have experienced something that caused a major transformation.”

“Is her bad experience related to the nursing home then?” Li Nuo asked.

“No, it’s more complicated than that,” Lin Chen replied.

Li Nuo felt a bit stuck, but then the profound and penetrating gaze of Lin Chen hit him again. He could only continue asking questions. “The picture she drew seems very isolated and terrifying. Could her poor academic performance be due to being ostracized at school? Would she seek revenge on teachers and classmates?”

After Li Nuo blurted out all his questions, he realized his presumption. How could Lin Chen not have thought of things that even he could guess? Lin Chen must have already ruled out this possibility! As he thought this, he saw Lin Chen turning around and saying seriously, “Is that what you think?”

Li Nuo nodded, not knowing how he became the one answering questions.

Lin Chen asked, “If I told you that the person Shen Lian despises the most is her former neighbor Chen Jianguo, would you speculate that she wants to seek revenge on Chen Jianguo?”

“That’s definitely her seeking revenge on the neighbor. Where does her neighbor work? Should we notify the parties involved to be cautious?”

“Why couldn’t Shen Lian possibly seek revenge on Zhourui Pharmaceutical? After all, they ruined her plans, didn’t they?”

Li Nuo was once again caught off guard. “That’s also a possibility—a very likely one!”

As he finished speaking, Lin Chen suddenly turned around and stared at him intently.

Li Nuo was startled and quickly apologized, “I… I’m sorry. I really don’t understand this.”

“No, you understand the psychology of the masses very well. Thank you.” Lin Chen lowered his head, took out his phone from his pocket, and made a call.

“Do you know where Shen Lian might go?” Li Nuo asked.

“To a place that she thinks, and I think, she wouldn’t go.”