Futile Devices Scans

“Not Zeng Yan? Then who’s the person who died?” Kong Bing abruptly turned toward Chen Zheng and met his calm gaze. “You… already thought of this?”

Chen Zheng shook his head. “I just thought the change in Zeng Yan before and after her senior year was worth paying attention to. If the person had been switched, several of the questions we have now would make sense. It’s common for someone to grow up overnight because of a family crisis, but before her senior year, Zeng Yan was domineering at school and bullied others because she had people backing her, while around her home she avoided interacting with anyone and kept her presence to a minimum. After Zeng Qun became ill, she took devoted care of him, and there’s nothing strange about that. But after Zeng Qun died, she took over the cold-dish stall and suddenly became lively and outgoing. That runs contrary to her original personality. There’s one more thing.”

Chen Zheng flipped through his notebook of clues. “I didn’t find a single photograph of her with either parent in the Zeng home. I suspect she disposed of those photographs after Zeng Qun died. Would a daughter whom all her neighbors considered filial really keep not a single photograph of her parents?”

Kong Bing drew a deep breath and slowly sat down. “Right. If she wasn’t the real Zeng Yan at all, then the missing photographs and that sudden drastic change in personality both make sense.”

After a stretch of silence, Chen Zheng said, “That fight Zeng Yan got into when she was seventeen actually did us a favor. Do the original records still exist? I want to see them.”

Zeng Yan had attended Zhuquan No. 2 Middle School for both junior and senior high school. In many cities, schools with low numbers in their names were key schools, but Zhuquan No. 2 had been converted from a school originally established for factory workers’ children and had merely happened to inherit the name “No. 2.” In reality, it was one of the worst middle schools in Zhuquan City.

Eleven years earlier, on November 14, Hele Subdistrict Police Station, near No. 2 Middle School, received a report about a student brawl. Now Chen Zheng sat beside an old desk at the station, reading the statement from that year on a computer while listening to an officer complain about No. 2’s students.

No. 2 was practically a breeding ground for delinquents. Every year, among the new students there would always be a handful who refused to study properly and spent every day fantasizing about becoming “gangsters,” boys and girls alike. They attached themselves to older delinquents as their “brothers” and “sisters” and fought with students in their own year. Whoever won became the boss of the grade; whoever lost either transferred schools or stayed behind as an underling.

The officer still remembered Zeng Yan. Although there were plenty of female delinquents, most of them did not actually fight. Zeng Yan was different. She hit female students and male students alike and had been brought to the police station more than once. The November 14 fight had been particularly serious. Several boys were hospitalized, and seven students, including Zeng Yan, had DNA samples recorded at the station.

From an adult’s perspective, the reason for the fight had been absurd. Although Zeng Yan was one of the main participants, she had not started it. Feng Feng, the delinquent leader Zeng Yan had regarded as an older brother since junior high, had a buddy who took an interest in a girl who already had a boyfriend. Feng Feng gathered some delinquent friends and beat up the boyfriend. Three days later, Feng Feng himself was fine, but his buddy had been beaten badly enough to land in the hospital. Furious, Feng Feng gathered all his friends, including the exceptionally reckless Zeng Yan, and the two groups fought outside the school using weapons.

The more the officer reminisced, the more details he remembered. Zeng Yan had shown no remorse whatsoever. Zeng Qun came to pick her up and slapped her in front of everyone, and she glared at him viciously. Even now, remembering that look made the officer uncomfortable. It had not looked like the expression of a normal daughter toward her father.

Since he was already at Hele Subdistrict Police Station, Chen Zheng asked in passing, “During the years Zeng Yan attended No. 2, were there any other major violent incidents?”

The officer said, “Oh, plenty. Every year there were students dropping out, getting bones broken, suffering concussions—I couldn’t count them all for you. But the ones who got seriously hurt were always boys. Girls were involved, sure, but I don’t remember any of them getting seriously hurt. Why don’t you go ask the teachers at No. 2? Sometimes, you know how it is, schools care about saving face. Unless something got really serious, they wouldn’t bring it to us.”

Chen Zheng already intended to visit No. 2. Even if there had been no problem with Zeng Yan’s DNA, she had now been murdered, making her school relationships part of the investigation. All the more so now that someone appeared to have taken another person’s place.

Zhuquan City was small, and news of the murder in Fengshu Residential Complex had already spread throughout the city. Many teachers at No. 2 knew that the victim had once attended the school, so as soon as Chen Zheng arrived, the principal personally hurried over, terrified that some tactless teacher might say something damaging about the school.

“The person who died really was our former student Zeng Yan?” the principal asked anxiously. “Could there be some mistake?”

Chen Zheng did not mention the DNA mismatch. He only said he wanted to understand what Zeng Yan had been like while attending No. 2: whom she had been close to, and with whom she had had obvious conflicts.

More than ten years earlier, the principal had happened to be the head of Zeng Yan’s grade. Chen Zheng noticed that whenever he spoke about Zeng Yan, he had great difficulty concealing the distaste in his expression. Zeng Yan must have been a student who caused her teachers considerable headaches.

The principal clearly did not want to reveal what he truly thought. Instead, he praised Zeng Yan for being loyal to her friends and intelligent, saying she simply had not focused on her studies and otherwise certainly could have made it into university.

Seeing him grow more absurd by the sentence, as though becoming immersed in his own imagination, Chen Zheng interrupted him in time. “Principal Wang, this is a homicide. Judging by the clues we currently have, Zeng Yan’s death may be related to her experiences as a student, especially the fight she got into when she was sixteen. I hope you can provide us with information that’s actually useful.”

The principal looked deeply embarrassed. After a moment, he asked nervously, “Is—is this really connected to our school?”

Chen Zheng deliberately remained silent.

The principal slapped his thigh in defeat. “Our school might be a bit bad, and sure, students end up at the police station all the time, but we’ve honestly never had anyone killed!”

Chen Zheng said, “Why don’t you ask Zeng Yan’s former teachers and homeroom teacher to come speak with me?”

With no alternative, the principal called in Zeng Yan’s former English teacher, who had also been her homeroom teacher, while he himself stood outside the door eavesdropping.

The homeroom teacher was in her forties and, like the principal, had no fondness for Zeng Yan. “I thought female students would be easier to manage than boys. She’d gone down the wrong path, and I thought if I put in more effort, I could bring her back. But I was wrong. I took over her class in her first year of high school and stayed her homeroom teacher until she dropped out. The entire time, she was a little bastard.”

Zeng Yan seemed to have an extremely warped fixation on strength. Although she was a girl herself, she looked down on girls and believed they were naturally weaker than boys. She idolized older male students who had status among the delinquents and took pride in becoming their “little sister.” She had even slapped female teachers, let alone female classmates. Calling her parent did no good. Most of the time, Zeng Qun claimed he was too busy with work to come, and even when he did appear, he merely went through the motions. By Zeng Yan’s second year of high school, the teachers had almost stopped trying to control her.

Feng Feng appeared repeatedly in the homeroom teacher’s account. He had also been one of the central figures in the fight that resulted in Zeng Yan’s DNA being recorded. Zeng Yan was extremely close to him and even stayed overnight at his home. The homeroom teacher had suspected that the two were dating, but Zeng Yan denied it from beginning to end. Given Zeng Yan’s personality, she would have had no reason to hide a romantic relationship and should instead have flaunted it.

Chen Zheng noticed something strange. Around her neighborhood, Zeng Yan had always kept a very low profile, and because she habitually wore heavy makeup, it made sense that residents might fail to notice if she had been replaced. But what about her classmates, particularly Feng Feng, whose relationship with her had been anything but ordinary? Had he failed to notice as well? Zeng Yan dropped out after Zeng Qun became ill. By then, the substitution might already have occurred. Had Feng Feng noticed nothing unusual? And during the ten years afterward, had the two truly had no contact whatsoever?

No contact could explain Feng Feng’s ignorance, but the lack of contact itself became a new question. What had caused them to stop speaking?

With that thought, Chen Zheng asked, “When Zeng Yan came to withdraw from school, did anything happen? For example, did any of those ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ of hers try to stop her from dropping out, or come to see her off?”

The homeroom teacher froze, then hurriedly shook her head. “She wasn’t the one who came to withdraw at all!”

Chen Zheng frowned. “Then who was?”

“Her father.” The homeroom teacher recalled that once students entered their senior year, those who did not plan to attend university stopped coming to class regularly. Before winter break, Zeng Yan had still shown up in the classroom fairly often, harassing younger students and behaving no differently from before. But after winter break, she never came back even once.

The homeroom teacher had long since stopped wanting to manage Zeng Yan and knew she could not control her anyway, but the school needed to count which students would participate in a diagnostic exam, so she had no choice but to call Zeng Yan’s home. Zeng Yan herself answered and explained that her father was seriously ill and that she spent every day caring for him at the hospital, leaving her far too busy.

The homeroom teacher paused, looking puzzled. “Actually, I thought she was a little strange. Now that you’ve asked, I remember it. She had never spoken to me that politely before. She sounded like a normal student.”

Chen Zheng thought, Maybe Zeng Yan hadn’t suddenly become normal. Maybe by then, the person had already changed. “If Zeng Qun was seriously ill, why did he still come to process Zeng Yan’s withdrawal himself? Why didn’t Zeng Yan come?”

The homeroom teacher thought for a moment and shook her head. “I don’t know. I only remember that he looked exhausted when he came. You could tell at a glance that he was seriously ill. He’d lost a lot of weight compared with the times he came to parent meetings before. He said Zeng Yan couldn’t get away, so he came to handle the paperwork for her. In that situation, I really couldn’t bring myself to ask questions.”

Once the withdrawal procedures were completed, Zeng Yan disappeared entirely from No. 2 Middle School. A student like her had always been regarded by the school as a festering sore, so no one spoke of her again.

Chen Zheng asked where Feng Feng had gone after graduation and who else Zeng Yan had been close to apart from him. The principal had been eavesdropping for quite some time. Hoping to provide useful clues and win back a little good publicity for No. 2, he brought in several other teachers to supply information.

Chen Zheng wrote down several names, then ate lunch at a noodle shop outside No. 2 Middle School.

Zeng Qun had been the one who withdrew Zeng Yan from school, which was somewhat unexpected. The substitution had definitely occurred during Zeng Yan’s senior year. Once the fake Zeng Yan appeared, where had the real Zeng Yan gone? The replacement could not personally come to the school to withdraw, because the moment she appeared, teachers who had seen Zeng Yan every day would discover the difference. Zeng Qun had helped her.

Why would Zeng Qun help someone who had taken his daughter’s place? He was terminally ill—had the fake Zeng Yan threatened him? But at the time, he was still capable of moving around. That did not make sense. Did the fake Zeng Yan have some leverage over him? For example… the missing Zhu mother and daughter? But that was also far-fetched. Zeng Qun was already a dying man. Even if the Zhu mother and daughter’s disappearance truly had something to do with him, would he still fear his past crimes being exposed?

There was another possible explanation—the “real Zeng Yan” from before might actually have been the fake one, and the woman who appeared later was the real Zeng Yan, Zeng Qun’s actual daughter.

The noodles arrived. Chen Zheng casually picked up the handwoven mat on the table. It was beautifully and intricately made, and he could not help looking at it twice before setting his bowl on top. He lifted a tangle of noodles with his chopsticks. The noodles were silky and smooth, yet the clues kept knotting themselves together in his mind. Zeng Qun had left no DNA information in the system, making it difficult to verify whether the current Zeng Yan was truly his daughter. Either way, one fact remained: the earlier Zeng Yan might already be dead.

Chen Zheng looked at the names written on the paper. They had all been Zeng Yan’s “big brothers” and close buddies. What had they been doing when Zeng Yan dropped out of school? When she reopened Xiao Yan Cold Dishes, the business had not gone smoothly at first. Under normal circumstances, they should have gone to help her. Yet they had not. Zeng Yan’s withdrawal from school seemed to mark the point at which she had cut herself completely off from her past.

After paying, Chen Zheng stood outside the noodle shop, his gaze shifting from the clear autumn sky to the mottled school gate of No. 2 Middle School. There were still secrets hidden behind those gates that the police knew nothing about. Zeng Yan—the former Zeng Yan—and Feng Feng and the others were all keepers of the same secret.

To keep that secret from ever coming to light, they could only choose to stay away from one another.

Chen Zheng had originally planned to find Feng Feng next, but after returning to the driver’s seat and briefly sorting through the case, he felt that the investigation would only become more difficult the deeper it went. He closed his eyes and remembered the years when he had been captain of Luocheng’s Criminal Investigation Detachment.

A prosperous provincial capital saw more bizarre murder cases. An apparently insignificant homicide could often drag an enormous mass of wrongdoing behind it like mud and sand. At times like that, stopping was more important than running without pause. Zhuquan City’s criminal investigators had little experience handling complicated cases and might already have been “hijacked” by the tangled mass of clues.

Kong Bing would report upward, and even the municipal bureau would probably request support. Chen Zheng checked the time and decided to return to the Beiye Sub-bureau first, then determine his next step based on the situation.

The Beiye Sub-bureau was especially lively that day. Just as Chen Zheng had expected, leaders from the municipal bureau had arrived. He had no desire to exchange pleasantries with them, so he stayed on an empty balcony and smoked. The commotion behind him drew nearer and farther by turns, while before him lay the peaceful residential neighborhood behind the sub-bureau. His thoughts suddenly drifted far away.

Anyone who rose to the position of captain of a municipal bureau’s Criminal Investigation Detachment inevitably had to deal with all kinds of social obligations, especially in a city as large as Luocheng. Chen Zheng had grown up accustomed to such situations, but when he himself became the person expected to maneuver gracefully through them, he still resisted for quite some time.

Yet the responsibility on his shoulders left him no choice but to adapt. He gradually moved away from the frontline work he knew so well and was constantly summoned to meetings by the bureau director or leaders above him. He wanted to doze off too. It had been a long time since he had personally examined a body, but he had to stand in a higher position because he needed to hold open a relatively free space for the subordinates beneath him, so they would not have to worry about anything else and could devote themselves entirely to their cases. Over the years, he had seemed increasingly idle on the surface. Whatever cases the Major Crimes Unit solved, the credit was attributed to him as the Criminal Investigation Detachment captain, yet the pressure on him increased every moment. Until, in the end, everything fell apart.

He had never expected that the next time he personally became involved in a case would be in Zhuquan City. Chasing down leads and conducting canvasses—these tedious little tasks stirred a secret excitement inside him. The position of Criminal Investigation Detachment captain had been like a set of shackles. It had been a very long time since he had felt this kind of excitement.

Footsteps suddenly sounded behind him. In truth, people frequently passed near the balcony, and footsteps were almost constant. But perhaps because his train of thought had only just come to a stop, he instinctively turned when this particular set drew closer. The moment he saw who was approaching, he could not help feeling startled.

Ming Han—the man who had practically forced iced porridge on him, then turned up as a dog trainer at the police dog center… a Mobile Unit member from the Provincial Public Security Department.

“Bro.” Ming Han initially had both hands in his pockets, but now he pulled out his right hand and waved. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Why are you hiding out here smoking? Give me one.”

The balcony was not large, merely a small extension of the corridor. It was comfortable enough for one person, but once another man nearly 1.9 meters tall squeezed in, it became rather cramped. Chen Zheng moved back toward the railing. “Looking for me?”

Ming Han remained fixated on getting a cigarette from him. “As soon as I got here today, I heard people saying you were working this case too.”

Chen Zheng handed him a cigarette, assuming Ming Han had a lighter. Ming Han merely pursed his lips innocently around the filter.

Chen Zheng: “…”

What kind of place was the Mobile Unit? If you gave someone a cigarette, were you also responsible for lighting it?

Chen Zheng smiled. Shielding the flame from the wind with one hand, he flicked the lighter; with a click, a slender flame sprang up. Ming Han immediately leaned closer and lowered his head. Looking down at the crown of his head from such close range, Chen Zheng had the sudden, completely unprompted thought that this might be the first time he had seen Ming Han’s hair whorl. His hair was short, sure, but it actually looked surprisingly smooth.

Ming Han lit the cigarette and straightened, only to meet Chen Zheng’s gaze. “Bro, what are you looking at?”

Chen Zheng calmly put away the lighter and refused to follow him down that line of conversation. “I am investigating this case because it happens to have some connection to me. But what about you? Aren’t you supposed to be at the police dog center right now?”

Ming Han smiled and was just about to explain when a criminal investigator came running over. “Teacher Ming, there you are. We’re about to start the meeting.”

Chen Zheng raised an eyebrow at Ming Han. “Teacher… Ming?”

Ming Han smiled. “Zhuquan City reported that the Zeng Yan case wasn’t simple and asked the Mobile Unit to send someone over. Pretty convenient, isn’t it? I happen to be right here.”