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.

At the sound of that word, Jiang Hansheng’s brow furrowed faintly.

His interpretation of red was different from Zhou Jin’s.

The “red dress” was a symbol associated with Qi Yan’s mother. Qi Yan had suffered a profound betrayal by his mother during adolescence, leaving him with indelible psychological wounds. Whenever he saw the color red, he was overtaken by an uncontrollable anxiety, irritability, and recklessness.

This was also the reason Jiang Hansheng had deliberately chosen to wear red during his published profile interview with Qi Yan all those years ago.

For Qi Yan, red represented “hatred.”

But viewed from the perspective of the victim, red could represent “sensuality.”

If the female victims of the Huaiguang serial murders were “symbolic stand-ins” for Qi Yan’s mother, then why had a mother left her son with his deepest impression of her most “sensual” side?

A question formed in Jiang Hansheng’s mind. He set it aside for now without voicing it.

Zhou Jin climbed the stairs and went out through the door into the alley behind the club.

On the night in question, the alley had had club staff working there, moving things about. The police had already questioned the relevant personnel — several of them remembered Chen Xiaoyu clearly.

She had been strikingly beautiful, and the red dress stood out like a beacon in the dark night. She had been alone on the street, sobering up in the fresh air, and passersby had inevitably glanced at her more than once.

According to the staff, it had not been long before Chen Xiaoyu’s “boyfriend” followed her outside as well.

An investigator produced photos captured from a dashcam and showed them to the staff for identification.

The response had been: “It was too dark. I can’t say for certain.”

Zhou Jin twirled her umbrella and looked up and down the street from one end to the other, saying: “This street connects through at both ends to busy districts, and there were staff coming and going. The killer was truly audacious — bold as anything, taking Chen Xiaoyu away right out in the open.”

What had he used to lure Chen Xiaoyu away?

Zhou Jin thought of the killer’s appearance in the photograph: by contemporary standards of attractiveness, his features were clean and well-proportioned, his build tall and strong.

For Chen Xiaoyu, he would have been, at minimum, a perfectly acceptable prospect for a one-night encounter.

Zhou Jin remembered Wang Pengzhe mentioning that this man bore a striking resemblance to Qi Yan.

That had sparked her curiosity.

Zhou Jin asked: “Qi Yan — the actual perpetrator in the Huaiguang serial murder case — did the task force ever investigate his family background and personal relationships?”

Jiang Hansheng said: “They did, but turned up nothing. Even the name Qi Yan — he told me that himself.”

Zhou Jin: “…”

She thought of how Jiang Hansheng had been abducted, pressed her lips together, and tightened her grip slightly on her umbrella handle.

Jiang Hansheng’s tone was entirely matter-of-fact.

After he had been rescued by Yao Weihai, and once his condition had improved slightly, an officer came to his hospital room to take a statement.

Jiang Hansheng lay in his hospital room and carefully recalled everything that had happened during his captivity. Hampered by the physical and mental exhaustion his condition had put him through, in the end he had only been able to give the police a single name — Qi Yan.

The task force had drawn on the criminal profile report Jiang Hansheng had submitted, along with that one name, and over time had poured substantial numbers of grassroots police personnel into canvassing and investigating in an effort to further verify Qi Yan’s identity. It had all come to nothing.

The criminology research lab had originally planned to study Qi Yan as a landmark case, but the absence of any background information on the killer’s family or personal history made it very difficult for the project to move forward.

Zhou Jin thought: Like a ghost, truly. No wonder Professor Wang cursed Qi Yan for haunting them even from beyond the grave.

Rain pattered against the umbrella, producing a rustling roar, white droplets splashing in all directions.

In the quiet between them, Jiang Hansheng went over the process by which the copycat had killed Chen Xiaoyu once more in his mind, and still could not find any point of difference.

Zhou Jin noticed that his brow was slightly furrowed, and assumed she must not have been much help. She said: “My mentor always says, finding nothing is itself a finding — at least it lets you set aside that line of investigation.”

Jiang Hansheng: “…”

Finding nothing is a finding?

Perhaps the fact that there were no differences between the two cases was itself the key.

All at once, Jiang Hansheng’s gaze sharpened, and an overturning thought flashed through his mind —

What if — just, what if — Qi Yan had never died?