The Brain Science Case 117

Chapter 117: Hibernating in the Dim Sunlight – 11

Riding in the small white car, Yingli quickly noticed that Jinglin was much quieter than usual.

“I heard you two did a great job today.”

“How so?”

“You successfully followed him and brought Pan Yuhuan back to the station for conviction.”

Jinglin snorted. “If you’re talking about preventing casualties, then I guess so.”

“You don’t seem very satisfied.”

“Should I be? I spent so much effort… but I still couldn’t get in.” Pounding the steering wheel, Jinglin was so frustrated that she told Yingli what had happened. “Dingdang said she knew my mom had passed away, and she even looked sad for a moment, but she denied talking to Qian Hanliang… and in the end, she just said, ‘Don’t just believe what you see.’ I’m sure she knows some facts, but what does that sentence mean?”

Jinglin was right… Dingdang did know that Li Yuejiao was not dead, and it was very likely that, at Li Yuejiao’s instruction, she was acting as a cover.

But even if Yingli understood, she couldn’t give any more hints.

“After this, you’ve had contact with her twice. What do you think of her?”

“She’s very smart, and she has her own set of principles. If you just look at her in terms of running a club, she’s not a disappointment. I can probably understand why my mom handed the shop over to her…” Jinglin remembered another thing. “By the way, before the team packed up today, I ran into a woman.”

“A woman?”

“Yes, a strange woman… I’m sure I’ve never seen that face before, but her eyes gave me a very familiar feeling.”

This description set off alarm bells in Yingli’s head. “What did she look like?”

Jinglin briefly described the person’s appearance. “…She was wearing a form-fitting white suit. I only saw her in profile, but when she turned, she smiled at me. I immediately raised my gun and pointed it at her, but she was completely unfazed and got into a car. I pulled the trigger, but the car window was actually bulletproof. I immediately thought of the surveillance footage from the cosmetic surgery clinic that the director had shown.”

“You think she’s the mastermind?”

“That’s right. But her eyes…” Jinglin let out a “tsk,” “I still have a strange sense of familiarity, as if… I’ve seen her before.”

“I see. This feeling of not having seen something before, but feeling very familiar with it…” Yingli rested her chin on her hand, “is what’s commonly called ‘déjà vu,’ right?”

“Déjà vu?”

“Yes, it’s like this event that’s happening in front of you, you feel like you’ve already seen it at some point, that feeling of having seen it before.”

Jinglin pouted and asked, “I have a feeling you’re going to bring up the brain again.”

“Yes, but unfortunately, this phenomenon, in the field of cognitive neuroscience, still cannot be perfectly explained, so it’s mostly explained as a memory image that happens to overlap in the brain, or a similar experience, which leads you to feel that you’ve already seen or experienced what’s happening when you encounter it.”

“So… you mean, I confused the image of the person in the surveillance footage with the woman in the white suit, which caused my sense of familiarity with her?”

Yingli took a deep breath. “It’s very possible.”

Is that so? Although Yingli was usually right when it came to her professional field, Jinglin still felt that something was not right.

“Although you say that, Teacher… but that woman wasn’t afraid of a gun at all. What’s with that?”

“If you were pointing a gun at her back, of course she wouldn’t be afraid.”

Well, that’s true. “But her car is bulletproof. An ordinary person’s car wouldn’t have specially customized bulletproof glass, would it?” Does that mean that person’s identity is unusual?

“I’m just glad her car window was bulletproof.” Yingli’s expression was serious. “Otherwise, if there had been any innocent casualties, your detective license would have probably been revoked.”

Jinglin covered her mouth. “I didn’t even think of that.”

“You, you’ve forgotten Officer Lu’s warning?” Yingli shot her a look. “In any case, your insistent following was a success from your superior’s point of view, and there were no other casualties, which is a blessing in disguise. As for the identity of the woman in white… let’s just not worry about it for now.”

“Since you’ve said so… alright, I understand.”

Jinglin was focused on driving, and thus did not notice the almost guilty look in Yingli’s eyes, which were reflected in the car window.

**

In the afternoon of late March, after a rain, it was as cold as winter again.

“Thank you. Take care, Miss Lai.”

After seeing off a regular customer, Huang Yunjia returned to the shop to clean up the scattered hair. On a weekday afternoon, the hair salon was usually not very busy.

The two stylists in the shop were chatting, and she, as an assistant, was in charge of cleaning the work area to prepare for the next customer. A moment later, the doorbell rang.

“Welcome.” She looked up to greet them, and her heart skipped a beat when her eyes met the tall, dark figure.

“Hello, miss. Do you have an appointment?” one of the stylists immediately came forward.

The woman shook her head and pushed up her glasses. “I’m here to find someone.”

“Find someone?”

“That’s right.” Her gaze shot toward Huang Yunjia like two sharp arrows. “Miss Huang, may I have a few minutes of your time?”

Since there was no one in the shop, after a basic cleaning, Huang Yunjia followed Tang Yingli outside.

“I’ve already said everything I can in my statement.”

“Ah, I’ve seen it, that statement.” Yingli nodded noncommittally. “But regarding Mr. Lin’s case, I still have a few questions for you… this is also related to whether we can successfully find the person who killed him. Miss Huang must be very eager to know who killed your boyfriend, right?” she walked closer to Huang Yunjia and said in a particularly gentle voice, “you, who loved him so deeply.”

Huang Yunjia couldn’t help but shiver. “O-Of course.”

“Then I’ll ask. You said you didn’t know he had a drug habit, right?”

“Yes, I didn’t know.”

“Do you often go to his place?”

“About once a week.”

“You’ve been dating for almost a year, and you’re already close to getting married?” Huang Yunjia nodded. “Did your parents say anything?”

“My parents are very against it. Because we’re sixteen years apart, and with his job, he doesn’t really make much money… as for him, I’ve never met his parents. He seems to have been out of touch with his family for a long time.” Huang Yunjia frowned, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone else walk into the shop. “It seems a customer has come. That’s enough, right? I’m still at work. If there’s anything else… what are you doing?”

Yingli suddenly grabbed her left hand. “This ring looks low-key… but it should be a real platinum ring, right? There are no scratches.”

She pulled her hand back forcefully. “He specially… bought it for me.”

“If you’re using the price of his death to exchange for this wedding ring, then it can be considered that he bought it.” Yingli smiled faintly, and Huang Yunjia’s face instantly turned pale. “The autopsy results show that Lin Pinyi was poisoned with a strong neurotoxin, which would have taken effect in about two to four hours after being inhaled. That night, after his interview, he went back to his room. He knew you wouldn’t be visiting today, so he confidently took out his smoking paraphernalia as usual, ready to try the new batch he had just gotten.

“But after using the drug, around ten at night, he inexplicably felt difficulty breathing and couldn’t stop coughing. As he was about to pass out from the pain, someone entered his room.”

Huang Yunjia was trembling, holding her left hand, and Yingli approached her. “You, who had a key to his room… and the drug dealer who had been supplying him for a long time.”

Although after the special task force was formed, Yingli had spent most of her time investigating the connection and purpose between Wu Jianxiong and “Mountain Wind,” the other detectives had not been idle. They had followed the trail and had finally, this morning, caught a drug dealer they had been tracking for a long time. He had confessed to the police that he had sold drugs to Lin Pinyi multiple times, and had also pointed out that Huang Yunjia had come to see him.

“As a freelance journalist, Lin Pinyi was not well-off and often borrowed money from you to buy drugs. You had long been disgusted, but you were afraid of his special forces background, so you could only silently endure it. Until someone offered you a perfect method, which was to switch the drugs he was using with another, truly deadly toxin. You quietly waited for the poison to take effect, and finally, while he was in a coma, you and the drug dealer worked together to move him to the bathroom, turn on the faucet, and create the illusion that he had been electrocuted in the bath.”

“No… no.”

“But after you had set the scene, you didn’t leave right away.” Her index finger on her glasses, Yingli said coldly, “because that was a request from the person who had given you the wedding ring, right?”

A needle in his tongue. Huang Yunjia gripped her left hand tightly, and it was almost with gritted teeth that she could resist the urge to take off the ring.

“You said you went to Lin Pinyi’s place almost every week, but in reality, you hadn’t been there for a while, so you didn’t even know he had changed the faucet. You turned it in the direction of the hot water, but what came out was cold water, so he was in a cold bath on a cold day. Finally, I’ll ask you one more time…”

Huang Yunjia trembled, meeting Yingli’s cold gaze behind her lenses. “Did you really not step into the bathroom at all?”

“I…”

“I found a strand of your hair at the bottom of the bathtub, and it wasn’t wrapped around the drain. If you really didn’t go in, then how could your hair have been left in his bathtub?”

Huang Yunjia collapsed to her knees, sobbing and muttering incomprehensible words. The two police officers who had been waiting on the side immediately came forward to help her up.

“He clearly said… as long as I did this,” she said, as if in a daze, the moment she was handcuffed, “I would be free from him… and I would definitely not be found out.”

“As long as there is a crime, with the police’s persistent investigation, the truth will eventually come out.” Pushing up her glasses, Yingli lowered her eyes and said, “The brain doesn’t lie.”

Huang Yunjia’s smile was more painful than a cry. Lu Tingfeng, seeing this, directed the two police officers to take her to the service vehicle.

“Did you suspect she was the culprit a long time ago, Teacher?”

“Yes, I just thought that it was impossible for her not to know that her other half was using drugs. Of course, the hair in the bathtub was indeed very suspicious.”

“But who gave her the ricin?”

“We’ll find out in the detailed interrogation later.” She put her hands in her pockets. “By the way, the autopsy report of Lin Pinyi… I remember it was Officer Lu who gave it to me, right?”

“Yes.” Lu Tingfeng nodded. “I printed out the report not long after Dr. Tao had uploaded it… what’s wrong?”

‘About the pulmonary edema… I remember I specified it in the autopsy report.’—Tao Qianya had said that to her very clearly.

“It’s nothing. I just wanted to confirm…” while they were talking, Yingli’s phone suddenly rang. It was Jian Minggui calling her. “Officer Jian?”

‘Are you coming to the station, Teacher?’ his tone was urgent.

“Yes, I just caught the culprit. Is there an emergency?”

‘I’ve already analyzed the detailed identity of every shareholder, but just now the chief received an even more important piece of news… you should come back to the team room right away, Teacher.’

More important news? she pursed her lips, “I’ll be right back with Officer Lu.”