Overly Intense [Criminal Investigation] 52

Chapter 52: Exposing the Core

Zhan Luo parked the car on the side of the road. In the rearview mirror, Qin Luo was wiping her tears with a tissue.

But the more Director Qin wiped, the more tears flowed, with no sign of stopping.

In the small county town that had just escaped poverty, there were few cars on the street after the evening news. Groups of people sat at the village entrance, chatting, not caring at all about the business people in the car.

Her phone had reconnected to the civilized world, and messages flooded in like a torrent.

Unsettling notifications, one after another, urging her, squeezing her into this piled-up ravine.

[Remember to eat.]
[Don’t stay up late.]

Looking at the chat conversation, Qin Luo’s emotions broke down again.

The last time her mother had spoken to her like this was in college, telling her not to stay up late writing, to take care of her body, and not to ruin her health at a young age like her dad.

But ever since she had become financially independent, Jiang Yan’s concern had been stripped of its long-standing mission and had become more like a dense invasion.

It had pierced into Qin Luo’s head, becoming a bomb with a complex trigger mechanism.

So after her father’s death, Qin Luo had begun to intentionally or unintentionally avoid this kind of restraint from her mother.

She forbade her mother from controlling and monitoring everything in her life, including using concern as a way to restrain her personal time.

After living like this for a long time, besides occasionally hearing a colleague say “get off work early and rest,” almost no one would point fingers at her anymore.

She was indeed just an empty shell now.

“You go pick up the legal team.”

The space in the car was quiet, and the sound of her sobs was piercing. Qin Luo didn’t want to appear too out of control in front of her employee. “Thank you for your hard work tonight.”

Zhan Luo nodded. “Sister Qin, can you handle it by yourself?”

Qin Luo pushed open the car door and walked toward the hotel with her laptop bag.

Zhan Luo watched her back and rolled down the window. “Remember to send me the room number. I’ll bring the legal team directly.”

This mountainous area had no tourist attractions, nor was there a national highway to support transportation. Therefore, the audience for the hotels here was very singular: just for young couples who had not yet left their family’s control to open a room and sleep.

The hotel was dilapidated, with an old-fashioned sign, a watchdog tied to the glass door, and a boss sleeping on a lounge chair at the front desk.

The boss heard the dog barking and opened his eyes to get up.

The woman in front of him had an extraordinary temperament but was covered in tear stains. He couldn’t help but look at her a few more times and asked if she was staying alone.

Qin Luo said “mm” in a hoarse voice and then took out her ID card and handed it over.

The boss took the ID card and looked down at it carefully.

The girl in the photo still had a ponytail, and her face was not as tired as it was now. Her temperament was too different. For a moment, he couldn’t tell if it was the same person.

Fortunately, the woman’s nose was high and her features were delicate. The boss put the ID card into the reader. “Two hundred a night. No receipt.”

Taking out her card, paying, and taking the room key, Qin Luo climbed the narrow stairs step by step.

The lights were dim, and the old carpet was full of holes burned by cigarette butts. Qin Luo’s stamina was somewhat depleted after walking on the mountain road all day.

But she didn’t dare to touch the stair railing directly, so she had to stop at the turn of the stairs.

It was quiet all around. Qin Luo could hear the faint gasps from the corner of her mouth and the death-knell ringtone from her phone.

Qin Luo took a deep breath and picked up her phone.

It was Shen Yiyi.

Qin Luo pinched her brow, answered the phone, and walked up the stairs. “Yes, what’s wrong?”

“I asked Liu Jia. She’s not with you.”

Qin Luo held her arm up and was silent on the other end of the line.

Shen Yiyi was sitting on the sofa. Ten minutes ago, Liu Jia had replied to her message, asking if Shen Yiyi had any acquaintances at the local police station and if she could help her say hello to the police officer in charge of the case.

Shen Yiyi asked Liu Jia where she was.

Liu Jia was so anxious she was wailing, saying that her company was on fire. Where else could she be?

So Shen Yiyi had called Qin Luo. “Are you alone in the mountains now?”

Qin Luo swiped open the room. “I have colleagues with me.”

“Have you reported it to the police?” Shen Yiyi was very direct. “Have you gotten the case filing receipt?”

The smell of smoke in the room had not yet dissipated. Qin Luo looked at the moldy ceiling and the bedsheets that had been used for who knows how many years, and said “mm” tiredly.

Shen Yiyi had her laptop on her lap, her mouse moving back and forth between real and fake gossip. “I’ll send you a person’s WeChat in a bit. You can add him. He’s a relatively good economic criminal police officer in the department.”

“I just called him and told him. If the finance and audit are with you, you should have them hurry up and sort out the payment contracts and the proof of fund flow. Oh, and also give him the product quality inspection reports you’ve passed before. Maybe the case will find a breakthrough soon.”

“I’ve already told Liu Jia to send the retained product samples to the institution for testing. Once it’s confirmed that they don’t meet the requirements, the case process will go very quickly.”

Shen Yiyi said sincerely, “It will be over soon.”

Qin Luo sat on the stool. The room was stuffy, and the smell of the air conditioner and secondhand smoke was mixed. It started to drizzle outside the window.

A bad situation, when it meets with a rainy day, will make a person seem particularly unlucky.

Qin Luo felt a turbidity in her chest, and she gradually began to have trouble breathing.

Perhaps it was the slander and insults online, the betrayal of her partners, the resentment of the aid recipients, and the fact that she had been looking for a solution for two days without a break, only to find that there was still no progress.

Or perhaps it was the increased pressure. She doubted whether she could continue.

After all, she couldn’t even save Logos now. What right did she have to be a savior…

She felt that she was gradually exposing her core. The darkness was compressed in a sealed can. There was not much oxygen there, and the flame was in a precarious state.

So Qin Luo said, for the first time,

“I miss you so much.”

It was not so much that she missed Shen Yiyi, but that she hoped she could return to her body, to reinforce her falling heart, to fill her empty shell, to support the pressure she couldn’t resist. To go back to seventeen or eighteen, to have someone to lean on. She didn’t want this independence and autonomy. She wanted to lean on someone completely, not to have a life reckoning every time she opened and closed her eyes.

Shen Yiyi asked, “Have you not slept these past two days?”

Qin Luo had always thought that her floodgates had been built thick and high over the past ten years, but she had never thought that her hard shell would hit an even harder rock.

The other person was just greeting her on the phone, and her emotions were about to burst.

Qin Luo said in a panic, “I can’t sleep.”

Qin Luo didn’t care about hygiene. She leaned back in her chair, her shoulders tense and hunched, unable to relax.

“Could it be… that I was really wrong?” Qin Luo said on the other end of the line, as if mustering the courage to question herself. “I was the one who insisted on establishing this sales line despite the opposition. I was the one who stabbed Logos… I don’t know how to face those aid recipients. They believed in me, so they went back to the mountains to plant. Now that the product’s reputation is affected, what will they do in the future? Was I wrong from the beginning? Do I really have the ability to lead this project? I’ve been saying that I want to speak for them, but in the end, I’ve become an accomplice in harming them.”

Qin Luo whimpered, holding back the tears in her eyes. “I’ve tried to regain control of the situation, but this control only makes me more anxious, so I can’t sleep.”

Shen Yiyi said quietly, “Troubles will always be solved. If you don’t sleep well, your work efficiency will be halved tomorrow.”

“If you want to deal with these things quickly, you have to rest on time.”

“You also have to eat normally. If you don’t eat and end up in the hospital with a stomachache, it will delay things even more.”

Shen Yiyi said in an orderly manner, “Your two most important tasks now are to eat and sleep, and to talk to the criminal police tomorrow morning. Besides, Liu Jia is also actively working to solve the problem. You have a good team. You are not alone.”

But she had clearly always been alone.

She had applied to college alone, decided on her future career alone, rented an apartment in a strange city alone, and signed a contract with a publisher alone.

From the age of seven, she had accepted the warm-up for this competition of loneliness, and had run half the race alone.

Now, her sense of trust had been torn apart again, not only her trust in others, but also her trust in herself.

She even doubted the authenticity of this path, doubted whether her train was really overloaded. She couldn’t face the outside world and explain, and at the same time, she was afraid of admitting her mistakes.

She was alone, with nowhere to run.

So Qin Luo didn’t want to hear any comfort. Right now, she just wanted Shen Yiyi to respond to her “I miss you,” even if the other person pitied her.

But Shen Yiyi said, “Don’t worry. Things will always be solved.”

“Okay.”

Qin Luo began to wipe her tears. She swallowed the words she wanted to say.

Then the phone fell silent.

Qin Luo knew that Shen Yiyi had nothing more to say, so she took the initiative to say, “If there’s nothing else, I’ll hang up.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“Okay, I will.” With that, Qin Luo added, “Thanks.”

“You hang up,” Shen Yiyi said softly.

After the phone was hung up, the drained Qin Luo straightened her back again. Her shrunken morale quickly swelled after being recharged.

Qin Luo put her computer on the table and immediately entered a working state.

When Zhan Luo knocked on her door with the noodles, more than two hours had passed.

The round trip from the mountain village to the nearest high-speed rail station originally took three hours. To prevent the beef noodles from getting cold, he had sped on the rainy highway.

“Sister Qin, I bought you beef ramen. There’s not much meat.” Zhan Luo placed the take-out box on the table and glanced at the chat box on the computer.

Besides the endless pop-ups on WeChat, there was also the just-concluded shareholder meeting.

Zhan Luo had also bought noodles for Sister Wang and placed them on the table, taking out a pair of disposable chopsticks. “I’ll go buy you some water in a bit. Is there anything else you need?”

The legal team’s Sister Wang couldn’t be bothered to eat her noodles. Her computer was on her lap, and she was staring at the spreadsheet on the computer. She was checking the fund transactions, carefully verifying the time of each transaction. She was so busy that her keyboard was about to spark.

“Little Zhan, you’ve driven a lot in the mountains today. It’s been hard on you going back and forth between the factory and the police station. You should go back and rest first.”

Zhan Luo had his hands in his pockets. “Logos is in a crisis. I have to do my best.”

With that, he saw that Qin Luo and the legal team were both busy with their own matters and had no time to respond. He had to take out his phone, turn on the flashlight, and check the electrical facilities in the room.

The light flashed on Qin Luo, and she looked up and asked him, “What are you doing?”

Zhan Luo bent down and poked his head in. “I’m checking for cameras. These small hotels love to secretly film.”