Zhou Jin held his gaze for two or three seconds, then could not help saying: “The way you say that doesn’t sound like you want to hear my thoughts. It sounds like a high school homeroom teacher calling on me to recite a passage from the textbook.”
Jiang Hansheng blinked, then broke into a smile. “A sincere request for your guidance, Officer Zhou.”
Zhou Jin smiled back at him, her dark eyes bright and gleaming.
Jiang Hansheng asked softly, following the thread: “High school — you really hated reciting passages?”
He longed to know more about Zhou Jin: everything that had happened to her in that stretch of her life before he was part of it.
“Hated it,” Zhou Jin said. “The suffering of a poor student — how could someone with your kind of exceptional intelligence ever understand?”
In front of Jiang Hansheng, Zhou Jin never hid her feelings, and vented without the slightest inhibition.
“I even went to a cram school during the summer before my second year of high school. The teacher was a real tyrant — a friend of my mother’s — who showed me extra special attention. Get one problem wrong and she’d hit me across the palm with a television remote.”
Jiang Hansheng unsurprisingly found this experience very difficult to relate to, and could only ask: “Did it hurt?”
“Of course it hurt. But pain is what makes it stick.”
Zhou Jin laughed freely, with no particular bitterness in her voice.
She gave her umbrella an absent-minded spin and added offhandedly: “It would’ve been nice if you’d been around Gardenia Lane back then — you could’ve helped me study. You’d definitely be less harsh…”
“…”
She said it with complete nonchalance, so offhand that the very next moment she raised a hand and waved to some colleagues not far away.
Yet Jiang Hansheng’s footsteps came to a halt.
Zhou Jin walked a few steps ahead before noticing he hadn’t kept up, and looked back: “Professor Jiang?”
He was staring at Zhou Jin with a deep, penetrating gaze, utterly still, lost in thoughts she could not read.
It was rare to see Jiang Hansheng in a daze like this. Zhou Jin found him rather charming this way and smiled radiantly: “What are you staring at? Come on.”
She went back and took Jiang Hansheng’s hand.
Zhou Jin had always been direct and straightforward, and when she made an intimate gesture without thinking, it was difficult for anyone to read romance into it.
Even so, the scene layered itself over older images in his memory — and beneath the overcast sky, something of the brilliant, glorious sunlight that had once fallen across her shoulders shone through again.
Zhou Jin’s hand was just as he remembered: soft, capable, warm — the kind of hand that felt as though it could pull you all the way into her world in a single tug.
A world that had always been, from beginning to end, so full of life, energy, and warmth.
---
The two of them walked into the underground nightclub beneath Club ONE together.
There were no performances during the day, and the venue was completely empty. It was a mid-sized space — large enough for a small-scale concert.
Zhao Ping brought them inside and then went off to continue taking statements.
Jiang Hansheng and Zhou Jin stood in the center of the hall.
Zhou Jin had no idea what he wanted to consult her about, and asked directly: “What would you like me to do?”
Jiang Hansheng had killed Qi Yan with his own hands, and in his mind it was settled fact: this current killing was a copycat crime.
If it was a copycat, there had to be differences from the original Huaiguang serial murders — however subtle and difficult to spot those differences might be.
Because he had been so deeply involved with the Huaiguang serial murder case, he was inevitably prone to the pull of habitual thinking, confined within a fixed logic.
Under those circumstances, he needed to receive fresh perspectives.
Before this, Jiang Hansheng had been in touch with the students in the criminology research lab, asking them to produce a criminal profile report. Unfortunately the profile was entirely by the book, and had not given Jiang Hansheng much assistance.
He placed his hands on Zhou Jin’s shoulders, his voice lowering slightly, guiding her: “Investigative science at the police academy should have covered a module on ‘crime scene reconstruction.’ If you were the victim…”
Zhou Jin understood immediately and turned to ask: “Reconstruct the scene?”
They were looking at each other, standing very close. Jiang Hansheng smiled: “Yes.”
Zhou Jin felt a private twinge of embarrassment.
Unlike Jiang Hansheng, who was an academic to the bone, her command of theoretical knowledge had always been rather poor. When working a case, she relied mostly on the practical experience she had built on the front line.
As for the theory behind crime scene reconstruction — she had long since forgotten it entirely.
But with Jiang Hansheng right beside her to serve as her “teacher,” she had nothing to be nervous about.
Zhou Jin slowly surveyed the concert hall around her.
Time began to wind gradually back to the day Chen Xiaoyu was killed. In that same space, layers upon layers of shadowy figures surged and shifted, rising up before her one by one.
The restless beat of a drum from the stage. The roar of the crowd below. It all seemed to pour into Zhou Jin’s ears at once, moving from far away to right beside her.
Zhou Jin called to mind the statements made by Chen Xiaoyu’s friends and said: “On that night, ‘I’ came here with some friends to relax and unwind. Because ‘I’ had been single for a long time and had no family nearby, in addition to enjoying the concert, ‘I’ was hoping to meet some new people.”
“For that reason, ‘I’ had specifically chosen a red dress — my battle armor, one that looked quite sensual on me and was guaranteed to bring whoever I set my sights on right to hand.”
Chen Xiaoyu’s enthusiasm for socializing had been precisely what gave the killer an opening.
Even so, Zhou Jin’s choice of words maintained a fundamental respect for Chen Xiaoyu throughout. From where she stood, apart from having a somewhat underdeveloped sense of self-protection, Chen Xiaoyu had not really done anything wrong.
Yet a woman’s excessive sensuality and free-spiritedness often met with the condemnation and intolerance of conventional morality.
Sensual.