On the other side of the glass, Tan Shiming saw what was happening, called for backup, and burst through the door.
Zhou Jin seized his right hand, forced through the pain, grabbed his entire right arm and drove her knee up hard, then threw every ounce of strength she had into rolling and pushing herself to her feet — bringing Lai Zhengtian cleanly under her control.
The two officers who had charged in dragged Lai Zhengtian away from Zhou Jin.
In the chaos, Lai Zhengtian remained murderous, thrashing his limbs wildly as he tried to lunge at her again. “I swear I’ll kill you!”
Tan Shiming saw he was still raging, bellowed a curse, reached out and grabbed Lai Zhengtian by the collar, and — iron cuffs still on his hand — drove a punch hard into Lai Zhengtian’s face.
Lai Zhengtian’s head snapped to one side and his consciousness vanished in that instant. His ears rang, his vision swam, and the body that had been coiled with violent force slumped and went limp, letting them drag him back into his seat.
Fresh air flooded back into her windpipe all at once. Zhou Jin pressed her hand over her throat and broke into a coughing fit, her face flushed deep red, a throbbing ache radiating around her eye sockets, her eardrums humming and ringing.
Tan Shiming crouched down beside her, his hand moving to the back of her neck, and found it damp with cold sweat.
He asked urgently, “Zhou Jin? Zhou Jin — talk to me. Where does it hurt? …What are you all standing around for? Someone go get medical attention!”
It was a long while before Zhou Jin gradually brought the coughing under control. She gripped Tan Shiming’s arm and shook her head. “I’m fine.”
Tan Shiming steadied her and helped her to her feet.
Where Tan Shiming’s punch had landed, the left side of Lai Zhengtian’s face had already swollen dramatically, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.
He was completely spent, but still managed to drag his head up, eyes carrying a cold, murderous fury as they fixed on Zhou Jin.
Zhou Jin touched her aching throat, her voice reduced to a raw rasp. “You’re nothing but a wreck now. You can’t win against a man, and it turns out you can’t win against a woman either.”
Lai Zhengtian spat — a mouthful of blood and saliva — but said nothing.
“I believe you didn’t kill Guan Ling. You don’t have what it takes anymore.”
After hearing those words, every feature on Lai Zhengtian’s face twisted with savage fury. Every muscle seemed to twitch with barely-contained rage. He ground his back teeth together and stared at her as though he wanted to tear her apart with his bare hands.
Say it, Zhou Jin urged him silently. You have to say it.
The tension in the room stretched taut. The prolonged standoff seemed to freeze the small interrogation room solid.
No one could have said how much time passed. Then, at last, the ice cracked — in a laugh from Lai Zhengtian so quiet it was barely audible.
He opened his mouth in a wide grin, revealing teeth stained with blood.
“Trying to provoke me into talking?”
The tension drained from his body all at once. He sagged back into the chair, utterly relaxed — an immovable, untouchable lump of a man. “Officer, you all just saw it yourselves. I’m a wreck. I’ve got no way to kill anyone.”
“…………”
The breath Zhou Jin had been holding in her chest quietly sank back down. In the rigid silence of the room, the ease and indifference on Lai Zhengtian’s face made her deflation and defeat nearly impossible to conceal.
Zhou Jin walked quickly out of the interrogation room.
Out in the corridor, she pressed her palm against her damp forehead, closed her eyes, and bit down with barely-contained frustration.
Tan Shiming came out of the interrogation room shortly after.
He found Zhou Jin with her right arm braced against the wall, her face buried in the crook of her elbow, not saying a word — looking as though she were crushed with defeat.
Tan Shiming kept his voice low but firm. “You were too reckless.”
Zhou Jin turned her head to look at him, showing a pair of dark, bright eyes — with a faint redness around the rims, a glimmer of tears barely held back.
Faced with Tan Shiming’s reprimand, Zhou Jin had no defense. She admitted her mistake. “I thought I could force him to talk.”
“Someone who could get hold of a police-issue firearm — did you think he was a pushover? That’s enough. Cases never go smoothly. It’s not the first time. Don’t you dare stand here sniffling in front of me!”
Tan Shiming made her stand up straight.
Zhou Jin did. The skin on her neck was pale, and the bruising from the strangling grip was dark and livid — ugly and alarming.
Tan Shiming exhaled a long breath and said, “Zhou Jin, think carefully. If this case had nothing to do with the ‘8·17’ incident, would you be in this much of a rush?”
Zhou Jin pressed her lips together. The scale within her had been slowly tipping for some time now. She already knew the answer.
“I’m sorry, Mentor.”
“This is only human. There’s nothing to apologize for — but you need to clear your head.” He pointed at Zhou Jin’s throat. “Go to the medical room yourself.”
“Yes.”
The injury on Zhou Jin’s neck looked alarming, but it was nothing serious. After a quick treatment, she left the medical room.
Lai Zhengtian had gone completely silent now — a wall of iron and copper; there was no finding a crack in him. Nothing more could be gotten from him.
Not long after, a police car, its red and blue lights dancing off each other, rolled into the courtyard, and Zhao Ping returned to the Major Crimes Unit with a man in tow.
The moment Zhao Ping walked in, the thick, rich smell of instant noodles hit him, and his stomach let out an immediate and loud protest.
He said, “Who’s going to let me eat first? We chased that old driver all the way onto the Haiji Expressway — more action than a go-kart race. I’m so hungry I’m about ready to pass out.”
Yu Dan laughed, handed him a cup of instant noodles, and said with mock exasperation, “You’d talk yourself into an early grave if you could!”
They had originally only planned to track down the driver to find out more about Guan Ling’s situation that night. They hadn’t expected the driver to have been running passengers without a license — guilty conscience and all — and had assumed the police were coming after him for that. He’d jumped straight into his car and made a run for it.
He ran, and Zhao Ping and his people ran after him — putting out a call to set up a checkpoint block at the expressway exit, and finally forcing his vehicle to a stop just as he was about to come off the highway.
On the way back to the station with the driver, they had already asked him a few basic questions about what had happened that night.
According to the driver’s account, on the evening of July 23rd, he had indeed driven to the Tonghe riverbank at the agreed time to collect a female passenger.
The person who had made the booking, however, was not the passenger herself.
Zhao Ping showed the driver a photograph of Lai Zhengtian and asked, “Was it him who contacted you?”
The driver shook his head. “Not this person. It was a young kid.”
“You saw him?”
“I did,” the driver said. “That night I waited and waited and the passenger never showed. So I called the person who’d booked the car. He was nearby at the time — he came over, took the luggage off the car, and told me his sister wasn’t leaving after all. He was young, looked about high school age.”
“If you saw him again, could you identify him?”
“Definitely. Kid had a head of yellow hair — hard to miss.”
Earlier that day, investigators had gone to the Phoenix Blaze bar and brought back a number of people with close ties to Lai Zhengtian.
The moment Tan Shiming heard this news, he immediately arranged an identification lineup.
Zhou Jin made her way to the identification room.
The driver was going through the lineup. One row after another of people filed in and out.
Finally, on the fourth group, the driver raised his hand and said, “Hold on. First one on the left.”
“Take a good look. Are you certain?”
It was an extremely slight, thin young man, with a head of messy, coarse yellow hair, the fringe nearly hanging over his eyes. He looked as though he’d just been in a fight — his face was marked with bruising — and his lips were pressed into a faint line, giving him an air of defiance.
The driver held his gaze on the young man for a moment, then nodded again. “No mistake. That’s him.”
Zhou Jin looked past the crowd toward the young man the driver had identified.
Yellow hair. A young, unformed face. One eyelid still swollen.
Zhou Jin recognized him.
In the Phoenix Blaze bar, dragging himself through the pain, limping out of the bathroom toward her, saying: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry — but you were sticking your nose in where it didn’t belong. Who asked you to stick your nose in…”
The boy who, that day in front of Jiang Cheng, had nearly lost his hand.