Futile Devices Scans

Zheng Xiangxue’s words startled Kong Bing, who was watching the interview feed. He immediately called Chen Zheng over the comms and asked what was going on, only to discover that Chen Zheng had already switched his earpiece off on his own. Kong Bing cursed under his breath and looked back at the monitor. Chen Zheng was already chatting with Zheng Xiangxue about Zeng Yan’s father, his manner bearing no resemblance to an interrogation; it looked more like two old men sitting beneath a tree, shooting the breeze. Kong Bing’s expression shifted. Whatever occurred to him, the fist he had slammed onto the table slowly loosened. One of the officers asked whether they should tell Chen Zheng to turn his earpiece back on. Kong Bing shook his head. “Forget it.”

Chen Zheng slipped the switched-off earpiece into his trouser pocket. “Zeng Qun really killed someone? How come I’ve never heard about it?”

“That’s because he covered it up well! And it happened so long ago that hardly anyone remembers anymore!” Zheng Xiangxue snorted twice. “But I’ll remember it forever. Know why?”

Chen Zheng obligingly looked curious. “Why?”

“Because my business used to be better than his! He stole someone else’s recipe!”

Zheng Xiangxue’s version of the rivalry between the cold-dish stalls differed drastically from what the neighborhood women had said. More than twenty years ago, Zheng Xiangxue and his wife were already riding through the streets and alleys selling cold dishes. Fengshu Residential Complex did not yet exist then; there were only the few old buildings that would later be incorporated into it, and the snack alley had no fixed vendor spaces. The couple rose before dawn and worked until dark, riding around the neighborhood calling out their wares.

Zheng Xiangxue was extremely conceited and believed his family’s cold dishes tasted better than those of any other vendor. Young and hot-blooded at the time, he frequently went to other stalls, bought their food on the spot, ate it right there, then loudly critiqued it. He made plenty of people angry and had even been beaten up because of it.

The only cold dishes he acknowledged as genuinely superior were sold by a woman surnamed Zhu on Miaoping Street. The first time he tasted them, he froze, immediately understanding that he could never surpass her.

There was no man in the Zhu household. The woman sold cold dishes while raising her daughter alone. Unlike Zheng Xiangxue, she could not ride around calling out her wares, so she sold from home. All her customers were regulars, and she did not sell much each day—only enough for mother and daughter to live on.

For a while, Zheng Xiangxue became obsessed with the idea of asking the woman from the Zhu family to take him on as an apprentice, but she politely refused. He was not discouraged. He often sent his wife to buy some of her cold dishes, then the two of them hid away together to study the food and improve the flavor of their own.

“I never once thought about stealing her recipe.” Zheng Xiangxue curled his lip disdainfully. “Unlike certain rotten-hearted people who tasted her cold dishes and immediately started thinking about hurting someone.”

When Chen Zheng had asked residents about the Zeng family, everyone’s stories had centered on Zeng Yan. When Zeng Qun came up, most simply said he had died young and left behind a daughter with no one to rely on. From the police’s perspective, Zeng Qun’s image had therefore been extremely vague, with only one label attached to him: the father of a hardworking daughter.

Zheng Xiangxue’s account gradually brought a clearer Zeng Qun into view.

Zeng Qun’s wife had reportedly died after giving birth. Zeng Qun had no formal job and, like many people struggling to make a living in the city at the time, had worked as a laborer and sold snacks. Later, probably after seeing Zheng Xiangxue make decent money selling cold dishes, he began selling them too. But he was a poor cook and refused to seriously improve his skills. His mind was full of underhanded schemes, and he thought that if he could destroy Zheng Xiangxue, he himself would finally get ahead.

He smashed Zheng Xiangxue’s cold-dish cart and hired local thugs to humiliate Zheng Xiangxue’s wife. The two sides got into a major fight that nearly ended at the police station.

At the time, however, they were all itinerant vendors, and the fight had not even taken place in the snack alley. Very few people still remembered it now.

After that fight, Zeng Qun probably realized Zheng Xiangxue was also too tough to provoke and stopped causing him trouble. At first, Zheng Xiangxue was simply relieved that things had finally quieted down and paid no attention to what Zeng Qun did afterward.

With his hardworking wife beside him, Zheng Xiangxue’s business steadily improved, while the snack alley gradually began taking shape and more independent vendors gathered there. Then Zheng Xiangxue discovered that Zeng Qun was somehow still selling cold dishes—and that his business was actually good.

Zheng Xiangxue had eaten Zeng Qun’s cold dishes before. They were either so bland they tasted like nothing or so salty they could kill you. Zeng Qun himself was unpleasant, hot-tempered, and arrogant. A vendor like that could never build a loyal customer base.

Unable to make sense of it, Zheng Xiangxue thought the matter over repeatedly and finally paid a visit to Zeng Qun’s stall. Unlike when they had fought before, Zeng Qun’s stall now had a name: Xiao Yan Cold Dishes, after his daughter. Customers surrounded it. Zeng Qun wore a broad smile, amiably serving food and collecting money. Even when he saw his old rival, he greeted him warmly. “Old Zheng, you here to buy cold dishes too?”

Zheng Xiangxue was stunned by the complete change in personality. He stood there looking thoroughly displeased, awkward for a long while before finally saying, “G-give me some dressed tripe.”

Zeng Qun readily agreed, deftly cut it up, and even rounded the price down for him. “Old Zheng, we’ll both be doing business here from now on. Let’s look out for each other.”

There was a saying that you did not slap a smiling face. Zheng Xiangxue had come looking for trouble, but now he suddenly felt rather petty. He took the cold dishes home and tasted them with his wife, only to be shocked all over again.

They were genuinely good.

People changed. Zeng Qun had probably found some teacher over the past few years and finally decided to settle down and make an honest living.

But the longer Zheng Xiangxue ate, the more something felt wrong. The food was good, yes, but the flavor was far too familiar. He and his wife had studied the Zhu woman’s cold dishes so many times that the taste had been etched into their tongues. Zeng Qun’s version was not exactly the same as hers, but it was similar—and the more he ate, the more similar it seemed.

Zheng Xiangxue’s head immediately buzzed. He had begged so earnestly to become the Zhu woman’s apprentice and she had refused to teach him even a little, yet she had taught Zeng Qun? In what way was he inferior to Zeng Qun? Feeling deeply aggrieved, he asked his wife how the woman from the Zhu family had been doing recently.

People of their generation were particularly mindful of propriety between men and women, so after being rejected by the Zhu woman, Zheng Xiangxue had never personally gone back to Miaoping Street. His wife instead pretended to be an ordinary customer and occasionally bought some of her cold dishes to bring home.

His wife frowned and said the Zhu family had stopped selling food half a year earlier. Zheng Xiangxue was surprised and asked what had happened. His wife only knew fragments. When she had gone to Miaoping Street six months earlier, the Zhu house had been tightly shut. After asking around, she heard that the woman had taken her daughter and left, but no one knew where they had gone.

The Zheng family’s own business had long since become stable, and they no longer needed to study the Zhu family’s cold dishes, so his wife had not thought much of it.

Zheng Xiangxue thought that if he had learned six months earlier that the Zhu woman had disappeared, he would not have found it strange either. But now things were different. The Zhu woman’s technique had appeared at Zeng Qun’s stall. Why?

Unable to sit still, he dragged his wife to Miaoping Street. The area consisted entirely of single-story houses awaiting demolition. After the Zhu woman left, vagrants had occupied her home, though the painted words Xiao Zhu Delicacies were still clearly visible on the wall.

He questioned everyone he saw, asking where the Zhu woman had gone and exactly when she had left. After asking enough people, he really did manage to uncover something.

An elderly woman lived in a single-story house diagonally across from the Zhu family. She pitied the Zhu woman for raising a daughter alone and often brought over soup she had made. Grateful, the Zhu woman frequently gave her cold dishes in return. The elderly woman said that about a year before the Zhus disappeared, a man had begun visiting their home often. Afraid that the Zhu woman might be getting bullied, she had even gone over to check. The man did not look like a good person, but he had a sweet tongue and called her “Granny.” The Zhu woman told her he was merely a customer with no bad intentions, so the elderly woman stopped worrying.

Later, the elderly woman’s children took her to live with them in a major city for two months. She could not get used to it and eventually returned, only to find that the Zhu woman had already moved away. No one could clearly say where she and her daughter had gone. What the elderly woman found suspicious was that customers all said the Zhu woman had left very suddenly. She had still been selling cold dishes the previous day and had never told anyone she planned to stop, yet just like that, she disappeared.

Suspicious or not, everyone had their own lives. They talked about it over tea and meals and then moved on. No one thought to search for her or report her missing. In the end, she was merely a woman as rootless as duckweed; once she disappeared, she disappeared.

After hearing the elderly woman’s story, Zheng Xiangxue’s blood rushed to his head. He immediately helped her onto his three-wheeled cart and took her to the snack alley. “Look. Is that the man who used to visit the Zhu family?”

The elderly woman stared at Zeng Qun from a distance for a long time. “Looks like him! Very much like him!”

Zheng Xiangxue’s mind raced. The Zhu woman never shared her secret recipe. Zeng Qun’s cold dishes tasted like hers. Zeng Qun’s business had suddenly improved. The Zhu woman had inexplicably disappeared… Everything seemed to point toward one conclusion: Zeng Qun had killed the Zhu mother and daughter for their secret recipe.

They had never moved away at all. They had been murdered.

Zheng Xiangxue wanted to confront Zeng Qun, but his wife stopped him, clutching him with tears in her eyes. “If things aren’t what you think, then all you’ll do is make an enemy. We all work around here and see one another every day. Why turn it into something this serious? And if he really killed someone, then he’s a murderer! Are people like us capable of provoking someone like that? Have you forgotten how he beat you? Even if you don’t think about yourself, you have to think about me and the children! Old Zheng, can we please stay out of this?”

Once his initial impulse subsided, Zheng Xiangxue calmed down and decided his wife was right. The more he looked at Zeng Qun, the more frightening the man seemed. If Zeng Qun had already killed two people, would he be afraid to kill a few more?

From then on, Zheng Xiangxue avoided Zeng Qun whenever possible. Zeng Qun, on the other hand, would still greet him cheerfully whenever they happened to meet. Zheng Xiangxue wondered whether, because he had killed people, he deliberately wore the face of a good man.

Zeng Qun had not mastered the essence of the Zhu woman’s technique. His food was good, but not exceptionally so. Over the years, both stalls developed their own loyal customers. Then Zeng Qun died of cancer ten years ago. Zheng Xiangxue suddenly thought he could seize all the business for himself, only to lose to Zeng Yan instead. That part matched the neighborhood women’s account.

Chen Zheng lowered his eyes to the interview record. There were now even more uncertainties. The identities of the Zhu mother and daughter could not presently be verified, and the single-story houses on Miaoping Street had all been demolished. Zheng Xiangxue’s theory had some logic to it. If Zeng Qun truly had murdered the Zhu mother and daughter, could Zeng Yan’s death be connected to what had happened back then? Was someone avenging the Zhu mother and daughter? Or had one of them survived?

Zheng Xiangxue said indignantly, “I swear Zeng Yan’s death really has nothing to do with me! I did find people to bother her. I thought she was a woman and easy to bully, so I figured if I scared her, she’d learn her lesson. Look at someone like me. Do I look like I have the guts to kill anybody?”

Chen Zheng laughed. “At least you know yourself.”

Zheng Xiangxue looked annoyed. “That father and daughter were both strange. Zeng Qun’s personality suddenly changed for no reason, and Zeng Yan’s did too.”

Chen Zheng had already felt the day before that there were contradictions surrounding Zeng Yan. Hearing Zheng Xiangxue say this, he immediately asked, “Zeng Yan wasn’t always warm and outgoing?”

“Bullshit!” Zheng Xiangxue said. “Outgoing, my ass. Go ask around properly. She used to be a delinquent girl!”

“Yanzi changed a lot as she grew up. After her father got sick, she suddenly became sensible!” At the same time that Chen Zheng was hearing another side of the Zeng father and daughter from Zheng Xiangxue, the Beiye Sub-bureau officers conducting the canvass also discovered a version of Zeng Yan very different from the one described the day before.

Fengshu Residential Complex had been around for years, but because its location was convenient, it had always housed a large population. Many young people rented nearby, coming and going constantly. People who had lived there for more than ten years vaguely remembered that Zeng Yan had been almost a completely different person while she was in school.

“All kids go through a rebellious phase. Besides, Yanzi grew up without a mother, so it was normal for her personality to be a little strange,” one woman said. Her own daughter was about the same age as Zeng Yan and had also attended No. 2 Middle School. During secondary school, Zeng Yan had gone astray, spending all her time with a group of male delinquents. She barely studied and had terrible grades, liked bullying classmates at school, and never greeted the adults in her neighborhood, keeping an extremely low profile there.

The woman knew Zeng Yan was a delinquent mainly because her own daughter had talked about it at home. She had also seen teachers speak to Zeng Qun about Zeng Yan during parent meetings, but her own daughter had never been bullied, so she did not particularly dislike Zeng Yan.

After entering high school, Zeng Yan seemed to stop bullying people, but whenever the neighbors saw her, she wore heavy makeup. As the woman put it, she “didn’t look like a student at all.”

Some nosy neighbors told Zeng Qun to discipline his daughter before she went further down the wrong path, but Zeng Qun merely laughed it off, saying what his daughter did with her future was her own freedom. The people offering advice felt they had only embarrassed themselves, and afterward hardly anyone commented on Zeng Yan anymore.

The change occurred during Zeng Yan’s senior year of high school. Zeng Qun was diagnosed with brain cancer and rapidly deteriorated. Zeng Yan dropped out of school to care for him and practically lived at the hospital. The Zeng family’s cold-dish stall could no longer operate, so Zeng Yan found temporary work at the hospital to help cover the enormous treatment costs.

Zhuquan City still had the custom of erecting temporary funeral tents in residential neighborhoods. After Zeng Qun died, Zeng Yan brought his body home and laid him out for three days. With no makeup on, looking grief-stricken and alone, she moved many of the older residents to pity.

They all said that this was simply how children were: after losing the person closest to them, they grew up overnight.

Half a month later, Xiao Yan Cold Dishes reopened. Zeng Yan no longer wore heavy makeup. She became the woman Chen Zheng later knew—warm, hardworking, and seemingly possessed of endless energy.

When the various witness accounts were put together, the atmosphere in the sub-bureau meeting room grew solemn. Zeng Yan’s change before and after Zeng Qun’s illness could be explained, but Zeng Qun’s own transformation and the uncertain existence of the Zhu mother and daughter directly affected where the investigation would go next.

Chen Zheng had uncovered the lead about the Zhu mother and daughter. Kong Bing asked heavily, “How likely do you think revenge is?”

Chen Zheng leaned against the back of his chair. His posture was relaxed, but his tone was extremely cautious. “According to the information Zheng Xiangxue gave us, the Zhu daughter was around Zeng Yan’s age, at most two or three years older. And Zeng Yan’s behavior before and afterward makes her seem like two different people. She’s twenty-eight now, and that change happened ten years ago. It’s perfectly normal that people’s memories of her former self have faded.”

Kong Bing froze. “What do you mean? Are you saying the current Zeng Yan is actually…”

Chen Zheng spread his hands. “I only think Zeng Yan’s transformation may not be something that can be explained by ‘growing up overnight.’” After a pause, he added, “Zheng Xiangxue also had another, much less reliable theory.”

“What?”

“He thinks Zeng Qun may not only have murdered the Zhu mother and daughter, but raped them as well.” Chen Zheng’s voice gradually cooled. “The Zhu daughter was still a minor at the time.”

Kong Bing drew a sharp breath and clenched his fist. “If that’s true, the man was an animal!”

Chen Zheng asked, “Any progress on the photograph and DNA?”

Kong Bing shook his head. “No match on the DNA, and we’re still canvassing everywhere with the photograph. You know how it is—looking for one person like this is a needle in a haystack.” After saying it, Kong Bing awkwardly turned his face away, as though the words “you know how it is” should never have escaped his mouth.

Chen Zheng pretended not to notice. To ease the awkwardness, Kong Bing quickly began assigning the next tasks. Although Chen Zheng was participating in the meeting, he tactfully avoided overstepping and simply listened to Kong Bing’s arrangements—verify the identities of the Zhu mother and daughter, visit Zeng Yan’s old school to investigate what she had been like as a student, continue searching for the woman in the photograph…

Chen Zheng pressed his fingers to the space between his brows. A voice in his mind said, It’s still not enough.

Just as the meeting was about to end, the forensic pathologist suddenly pushed open the door, breathing hard. “The DNA doesn’t match!”

Chen Zheng instinctively stood. “Whose doesn’t match?”

The forensic pathologist placed the report on the table, disbelief in his eyes. “When Zeng Yan was seventeen, she injured someone in a fight and the police station collected her DNA. That DNA doesn’t match the murder victim’s!”