Overly Intense [Criminal Investigation] 134

Chapter 134: A Story on the Highway

Shen Yiyi was as fast as flying, and she even started to run halfway. When Qin Luo saw her swift steps in the office, she immediately followed her out.

The photo was slammed on the table by Shen Yiyi, and the front desk girl was startled.

She pointed to the girl in the photo who was being held by Zhan Luo. “Is this person still working at the reading group?”

Huh?!

The beautiful girl at the front desk blinked, carefully confirmed the appearance of the girl in the photo, and then shook her head. “She’s resigned.”

“When?”

Qin Luo rushed over and only heard the front desk say again, “Two weeks ago.”

Seeing that her boss had come, the front desk quickly added in detail, “Ever since the reading group was going to be moved to Logos, Sister Yan had submitted her resignation.”

Qin Luo still didn’t understand what was going on, and only heard Shen Yiyi say, “Do you have her contact information?”

The front desk hurriedly searched through her phone’s address book and read a string of phone numbers to Shen Yiyi.

Qin Luo was at a loss. “What’s going on?”

“Where’s Wang Xi?” Shen Yiyi was dialing the phone and at the same time, she was directing Qin Luo to find Wang Xi. “Have her get the car ready. We’re leaving in a bit.”

Qin Luo also entered a state of emergency. “Where are we going?”

Shen Yiyi’s finger was on the mountain behind the group photo. “Here.”

Qin Luo didn’t even understand, but she got into the car with Shen Yiyi. Qin Luo sat in the back row, the front desk girl sat on her left, and Sun Yuan sat on her right. And Shen Yiyi was sitting in the passenger seat, her face grave.

“Are you sure Liu Jia was taken into the mountains by Zhan Luo? Is there still a chance that Liu Jia is alive?”

Qin Luo’s voice was trembling. She was very afraid that the car would leave the city. The journey to the mountains was five or six hours. If there was any mistake in the decision-making, the rescue time could not be delayed.

Before they had gotten into the car, Piao Zheng had already found Zhan Luo’s license plate from the system and had put it into the think tank for a search. The car had indeed left the city in the early morning four days ago and had been driving north along the highway. Because the investigation in another province required a process, Piao Zheng could only find a part of the vehicle’s route through the shared system data of the cooperating province. It was indeed heading toward the tea mountain area.

Shen Yiyi didn’t know how to start.

She could only guarantee that Liu Jia was in the mountains, but she couldn’t guarantee whether Liu Jia was still alive.

Liu Jia had not left Shanghai. She could determine if there were any qualified victims through the identification center’s ledger. But once she left Shanghai, Liu Jia’s safety became an unknown.

Shen Yiyi chose to change the subject. She looked at the front desk in the rearview mirror. “How is the relationship between Zhan Luo and that girl?”

The girl’s face was delicate. Because of her profession, she had put on heavy makeup today. She was sitting next to her boss, nervous, and had no idea why she was in this car, and she didn’t even understand who the person in the passenger seat was asking.

Sun Yuan reacted. She said, “She’s asking you, Little Wang.”

Shen Yiyi asked again, “Are they a couple?”

The front desk said, “Ah.” “Are you talking about Yanli and Zhan Luo?”

She thought for a moment and then said, “No, Sister Yan doesn’t like boys.”

“Yes, Yanli is single. Not only does she not like men.” Wang Xi chimed in from the driver’s seat. “It can be said that she’s a bit of a misandrist. She’s mainly in charge of the group chat after the activities. Every time, she will post some very strange posts. I’ve asked their department head to stop her several times.”

“What kind of posts are they?” Shen Yiyi asked.

“Similar to the Korean radical feminists… Womad.”

Wang Xi frowned, afraid that her boss’s wife wouldn’t understand, and explained seriously, “It has a bit of a gender separatist flavor. She has already cut off ties with her father. It’s not enough for her to cut off the relationship herself. She also often encourages her colleagues around her to cut off contact with men and resolutely not to have anything to do with men. So she will share similar posts in the group.”

Wang Xi had a deep impression of one time. “Once, it was a campus activity of exchanging reading. The group was full of high school students and parents. Yanli might have sent the message to the wrong group and had sent more than a dozen posts in a row.”

“I also remember this!!”

The front desk had also worked overtime because of this. A worker would never forget. “The posts were all about the benefits of female sterilization, refusing to give birth to male babies, abortion, and so on…”

Qin Luo closed her eyes. She also remembered.

At that time, some parents had been scared by the posts in the group and had withdrawn from the group one after another, and a large number of them had unsubscribed from the reading activity. Wang Xi had explained to the organizers and the school for a long time, and in the end, their reading group had still withdrawn from the activity.

At that time, Yanli’s explanation was: there were too many WeChat groups, and the public and private were not clearly separated on WeChat, so she had accidentally sent it to the wrong group.

Afterward, Qin Luo had not investigated further and had had Wang Xi buy a batch of work phones, had rectified the reading group’s work account, and had trained them on the response rhetoric.

The front desk girl said, “Those posts look really cult-like.”

Qin Luo took the photo from Shen Yiyi’s hand and looked at the Yanli who was being held by Zhan Luo. She asked with confusion, “She hates men so much. Why is her relationship with Zhan Luo so good?”

The front desk said, “Brother Zhan seems to have gotten medicine for Sister Yan’s mother, through overseas connections, that kind of Indian medicine.”

“Hey?” Wang Xi raised her eyebrows. “How come I remember that Yanli’s mother passed away a long time ago?”

“Really?” The front desk shook her head in a daze, not sure. “Then it must have been for her father.”

Getting medicine.
A pharmaceutical salesperson.

Shen Yiyi asked in a deep voice, “How do you know?”

“I came two years later than her. Because I’m at the front desk and she’s in planning, we have a lot of work contact, so our private relationship is quite good. We used to eat together and so on. Occasionally, I would hear her and Zhan Luo talk about getting medicine. She told me that her elders were not in good health and had to rely on medicine to maintain their health.”

At this, Wang Xi understood. She confirmed, “Then you must be talking about her father.”

Shen Yiyi asked, “Is her dad dead?”

“Yes, she’s just very unlucky—” Wang Xi felt that it was inappropriate to use the word “unlucky” in front of her boss’s wife, so she changed her words. “Around the time she had sent the wrong post, her father had passed away. Our human resources department told me not to put too much pressure on her. Although her relationship with her father was not good, he was still her family…”

Shen Yiyi suddenly sneered. “How bad was her relationship with her father?”

Wang Xi said, “Her dad was a gambler, and the family was in a lot of debt. The debt collectors had driven her mom to her death.”

Everyone who came to the reading group either had a story or was on a journey of self-redemption. Wang Xi had been with Qin Luo for so long and had rarely seen a child from a very happy family come to be a volunteer. Most of them had healed themselves through the reading group and had decided to give back to the reading group.

“She’s also pitiful. She worked her way through college and got plastic surgery, but she ran into an unscrupulous doctor and was disfigured. When her dad found out about this, not only did he not feel sorry for her, but he also thought that since she had money for plastic surgery, she could definitely help him pay off his debts. He would follow her around every day, asking for money. For a long time, she couldn’t get out of the gloom. Later, she went to the mountains with Director Qin for a while, and her mood gradually improved.”

“Disfigured…”

Qin Luo finally reacted. “Could it be that Yanli’s failed plastic surgery is related to Qi Yingjun?!”

“Damn it, this… this…” Wang Xi’s face was full of shock. “I’ve never heard Yanli talk about being disfigured, but I know that her failed plastic surgery was in Hangzhou, and she even won the lawsuit.”

The front desk interjected, “I know about this. I had my nose done before the New Year, and I had my eyes slightly adjusted. Ever since Sister Yan found out, she has rarely spoken to me. She’s very cold. I feel that she’s still quite concerned about being disfigured.”

Shen Yiyi asked, “When did she resign?”

“Just a month ago.”

A month ago, Qi Yingjun had just signed with Ranmei and had started his first trial live stream sale. Shen Yiyi sneered. After guessing for a long time, the clues were not as fast as chatting.

She took out her phone and sent a message to Piao Zheng on WeChat:

[You’re right. The killer is not a first-time offender.]
[He has most likely already poisoned a person to death.]

Just as Qin Luo had said at the reading group’s anniversary celebration: maintaining reading is also a sharp way, because no one can be sure if their position tomorrow will be suitable for the times, whether it will be tenable.

People will always betray their positions.
Many times, a position is inherited from others.
And reality can often pierce through all the armchair strategizing.

It is also very simple for a person to betray their own position. As long as they become a beneficiary of the system, and someone helps them to have an absolute right to speak, and they begin to taste the sweetness of control, the self will easily disintegrate.

If Yanli and Zhan Luo were not a couple, then they must have a secret alliance of interests to be able to break through the sense of distance brought on by their positions.

It is difficult for a person to change their tendency to seek profit. If you put anyone in a choice of interests, the gender antagonism will instantly disintegrate.

They were comrades-in-arms, an alliance. They had personally crushed their childhood nightmares. Perhaps Yanli had once used Zhan Luo’s hand to kill her own father, so that was why she had felt a sense of relief at that time, and had felt that she had her own right to speak, and couldn’t help but post, to spread her position and ideas.

Shen Yiyi could only explain the embrace of the two in the photo in this way.

But in this alliance game, who was the leader?

Shen Yiyi asked directly, “Then what about Zhan Luo? Do you know much about him?”

“I have the right to speak on this!” The front desk was the first to answer, and she answered like she was gossiping, “It can be said that Brother Zhan is a man of great detail. He can order suitable takeout for a person based on their mood. Ordering takeout is a great science!”

The front desk still remembered what Zhan Luo had told her:
“Director Qin might be in a bad mood these few days. Let’s order some hometown dishes. Huaiyang cuisine is fine.”

Although Director Qin had not touched the Huaiyang cuisine she had ordered, the front desk could see that at least Qin Luo had not frowned when she had heard the name of the takeout.

“He pays great attention to environmental hygiene. During the flu season a while ago, he would often stay at the reading group to do disinfection. His movements were super fast, and the whole building would be disinfected in a short while.”

Disinfection, erasing traces. Shen Yiyi, a mysophobe, had a lot to say about this.

She smiled and asked, “How is Zhan Luo with his family?”

“Very good.” Although Wang Xi was chatting, her driving speed was very fast and she did not dare to stop. “As far as I know, he should have two older sisters. He’s the only boy in the family.”

Sun Yuan finally spoke. “I think it’s quite average.”

Sun Yuan, as Liu Jia’s assistant, had been sharing an office with Zhan Luo after Wang Xi had resigned. They had spent the most time together in these past few months. “His family has been urging him to get married. I feel that he’s very impatient. And his sister seems to look down on his job. His salary used to be quite high. They would often start to argue as they were talking.”

“Really?” Wang Xi scratched her head. “Anyway, I remember that ever since he broke up with his fiancée, he has not been in a relationship again. Is he gay?”

Sun Yuan shook her head. “I feel that he’s quite straight.”

“He even shared a photo of his fiancée with me. The girl is very beautiful. I heard that it was his dad who didn’t agree at that time and had forcefully broken them up.”

Shen Yiyi pressed, “Then what about him and Li Peipei?”

Sun Yuan recalled carefully. “The two of them don’t seem to be very familiar.”