“…”
Jiang Hansheng’s face remained cold throughout, his voice soft and unhurried as he laid it out plainly: “That woman was a sex worker. So the question is — were you the one procuring clients for her? Or were you simply providing the premises?”
The manager’s breath caught. A fear he couldn’t name suddenly filled his chest to capacity.
……
Before entering the hotel, Jiang Hansheng had offered Zhou Jin a preliminary analysis: “Missing for over seven days, with no missing persons report filed — that tells us the victim had no close family or friends in Haizhou City. Even when she disappeared, no one thought to look for her.”
“No steady employment. No family to speak of. Yet here is a polished, well-presented young woman — what was her source of income?”
He smoothed his sleeves and fastened his cuffs, his gaze settling on the Shangyue Hotel across the street. “Given that she was staying at a hotel of this tier, it’s unlikely she had any inherited wealth to spend freely.”
Zhou Jin turned it over. Drawing on her experience in the Vice Suppression Unit, it was all too easy to arrive at one particular conclusion.
“Also…”
Jiang Hansheng looked toward her — and then, without any particular warning, thought of her short hair tucked behind her ear back in the Major Crimes Unit.
He reached out and lifted the strand of hair at her cheek, gently tucking it behind her ear.
Zhou Jin flinched back in surprise. The ear his fingers had brushed against went slightly numb. She rubbed at it, confused. “What was that for?”
Jiang Hansheng explained: “When the victim was waiting for the taxi, each time a stranger walked past her, she would unconsciously tuck her hair back — exactly as I just demonstrated. To a certain extent, that is a gesture of sexual signalling.”
His gaze was entirely composed, his expression as cool as ever, which lent the whole thing a certain detached, disciplined quality — so much so that his unannounced gesture a moment ago had felt less like anything personal and more like a research demonstration.
Zhou Jin, taking it at face value, simply pushed back: “It could also just be because it was hot.”
“Agreed.” Jiang Hansheng accepted the counter without any resistance. “Behavioural analysis only suggests a possibility. It would still need to be verified.”
But Zhou Jin had understood the implication well enough. “…You’re saying there’s a strong chance she was a sex worker?”
If that was the case, checking the check-in records would likely yield very little.
……
Now, in the face of Jiang Hansheng’s pointed questioning, the hotel manager had clearly lost his composure.
When extracting a statement, breaking through a person’s psychological defences was the most critical step.
Jiang Hansheng glanced at Zhou Jin in silence — a look that said everything. She understood immediately and prepared to play the final card.
“Actually,” Zhou Jin said, “we’re not especially concerned right now with who was soliciting or who was being solicited. What I’m here to tell you is this — the girl in that photograph…”
She held her phone screen up in front of the manager’s face.
“She’s dead.” Zhou Jin let the words fall slowly, heavily. “This is a matter of a human life. I’m going to ask you one more time. Do you, or do you not, recognise her?”
“She’s dead?!” The manager looked up with a jolt of genuine horror. “Guan Ling — she’s — she’s really dead? How could this have happened…”
Guan Ling.
August 3rd. The victim’s name confirmed: Guan Ling.
They might have had the nerve to be involved in solicitation, but the moment a death entered the picture, everyone panicked. Zhou Jin brought the manager back to the Major Crimes Unit for formal questioning, and the answers came quickly.
Guan Ling was from the countryside. She had dropped out of high school and come to Haizhou City alone to find work.
At first she had only worked front-desk service jobs. Later, because of her striking looks, she caught the eye of a procurer known as “Lai San’er,” who brought her into sex work.
“That day, Guan Ling wasn’t taking any clients — she’d been drinking and slept the whole afternoon. Before she left the hotel that evening, she told me she wasn’t coming back anymore. Said she was going home to her village…
I thought, that can’t possibly happen — Lai San’er treated her like a cash cow. He wasn’t going to let her go that easily. So I told her to be sensible, make good money, stop thinking about all this. But she wouldn’t listen. Said if she walked up to Lai San’er right now, he’d treat her like royalty…”
“I thought Guan Ling was still drunk, so I didn’t pay too much attention…” The manager wiped at the sweat on his brow. “We — we only provided the rooms. That’s all we were involved in. Officer, I only found out about Guan Ling’s death from you just now. I assumed she’d really gone back to her hometown…”
Zhou Jin and Xiao Yang came out of the interrogation room together. Zhou Jin had her laptop tucked under her arm. She raised an eyebrow at Tan Shiming. “He talked.”
Every pair of eyes in the Major Crimes Unit turned toward Zhou Jin.
“According to the Shangyue Hotel manager, Guan Ling was going to meet someone called Lai San’er that night. It’s very likely she had something on him — was using it as leverage to threaten him. That’s almost certainly what got her killed.”
Tan Shiming: “Lai San’er? Did you get a real name?”
Zhou Jin shook her head. “He only knows the alias. But Lai San’er had mentioned at some point that his cousin had just opened a new bar, and that he was going to be working there as a floor manager. Lai San’er is likely to turn up at the bar.”
She glanced at the calendar on the desk and confirmed the time: “Tonight at 8 o’clock. Phoenix Fire.”