“You don’t recognize her?” Shi Ting suddenly spoke up. “Do you know what the consequences of lying are?”

Wang Feng kept his head lowered, his mouth clamped shut, clearly prepared to resist to the end.

“If you lie, you’re potentially committing perjury. We have the right to prosecute you.”

“I really don’t recognize her.” Wang Feng repeated once more, his tone growing more resolute each time.

Shi Ting took a phone from Old Fan and, after opening it, dialed a number. A few seconds later, a ringtone sounded from Wang Feng’s person.

Wang Feng was so startled he nearly leaped to his feet. As he fumbled to silence his phone, he heard Shi Ting say: “You claim you don’t know Fan Mingming, yet her phone has your number saved in it.”

Just as Shi Ting had suspected, Fan Mingming had locked her phone inside the ground-floor mailbox of the residential complex. The mailbox belonged to the Fan family, but Fan Wenzhi and Lin Yuqin had never used it.

Fan Mingming had secretly obtained the key and was using the mailbox as her own private storage cabinet.

“I — I remember now.” Wang Feng’s eyes lit up. “I ran into a woman at a bar one day, and we got along pretty well, so I saved her number. If you hadn’t mentioned it, I’d have almost forgotten her entirely.”

“Keep making things up,” said Old Fan, slamming a folder down in front of Wang Feng. “Fan Mingming may have deleted her call records, but we still obtained all her call history from the phone company. The records show that on the 11th, 22nd, and 28th of last month, as well as the 1st and 2nd of this month, she was in contact with you — the longest call lasting over thirty minutes. Saying you’d nearly forgotten her is complete nonsense.”

Wang Feng pressed his lips together and said nothing.

“On the 1st, Fan Mingming called you most frequently — at noon, 3 PM, 8 PM, 11 PM, and then again at 1 AM on the 2nd. Can you tell us why the two of you were suddenly in such frequent contact on the 1st and 2nd?”

Wang Feng’s eyes darted sideways. “Well, the truth is — the truth is, I was pursuing Fan Mingming. But as you know, she’s a student, a good student at that. Her parents kept an extremely tight watch over her, so I could only pursue her secretly. I didn’t dare let anyone know about our relationship.”

“Have you ever been to her home?”

“How could I?” Wang Feng assumed an expression of surprise. “She lives in a wealthy residential complex. How would someone like me ever get in there?”

“You say you were pursuing her?” Old Fan slammed the table. “Then how do you explain the money on this card?”

Wang Feng watched as Old Fan held up an evidence bag containing a bank card. The calm composure on his face began to crack ever so slightly.

“We’ve already had the bank check it. On the 1st, your bank card received a deposit of fifty thousand yuan. Then, at noon on the 3rd, another fifty thousand yuan arrived. The transfers came from a mobile payment account — the owner of that account is Fan Mingming.”

“That was money I borrowed from her.”

“Wang Feng, you’re still trying to wriggle out of this.” Old Fan’s voice rose sharply. “You said you’ve never been to Fan Mingming’s home — yet we found your DNA on a glass there.”

Old Fan placed a glass in front of Wang Feng. When Wang Feng saw it, his pupils contracted sharply; the disbelief on his face was nearly impossible to conceal.

“How — how is that possible…”

“Impossible, you say? Because after you drank from it, you took it away from the scene and threw it in a rubbish bin. Did you think discarding it there would destroy the evidence? Unfortunately for you, the net of justice is wide — nothing slips through.”

“I — I really never went to Fan Mingming’s home. That complex is full of cameras. If I had gone, wouldn’t I have been captured on footage?”

“How do you know you weren’t?” Shi Ting asked coldly.

Wang Feng fell silent again.

Shi Ting said: “We reviewed all the surveillance footage from the day of the incident. We did not, in fact, find you on any of it.”

Upon hearing this, Wang Feng felt an immediate surge of relief.

“However, the fact that the cameras didn’t capture you doesn’t mean you weren’t there. The method by which you entered the premises was actually quite simple. You knew that the garbage collection truck enters the complex at around three o’clock every afternoon, so you and Zhang Zefeng hid underneath the truck in advance and rode it inside, then slipped off when the property management staff were loading the rubbish.”

“That’s nothing but speculation on your part. What evidence do you have?” Wang Feng, emboldened by the fact that the cameras had not caught him, pushed back with an air of righteous indignation.

“Who said we have no evidence?” Old Fan added from the side. “How do you think we figured out you were hiding under the garbage truck? The property management company in that complex is a publicly listed firm with strict standards for its staff — employees are not permitted to smoke during working hours. Yet when our investigators were searching for the glass, they discovered several cigarette butts in a corner near the waste collection point. The residents wouldn’t go there to smoke, and neither would the property staff. Those cigarette butts were therefore highly suspicious. Following that lead, we examined the garbage truck and found numerous fingerprints, palm prints, and signs of someone having climbed underneath it. The forensic results from the cigarette butts are currently being compared against the DNA from the glass. It won’t be long before the truth comes to light.”

Hearing this, the hands resting on Wang Feng’s knees instinctively tightened, and his composure was no longer what it had been when he first arrived.

Shi Ting continued: “At 3 PM on the 1st, your call with Fan Mingming was her confirming whether you had successfully entered the complex. The calls between 8 PM and 11 PM were her updating you on the movements of her parents. You waited until just past 1 AM on the following morning, when Fan Mingming called to let you know that her parents had returned home. You then used the door code Fan Mingming had provided to enter the premises without difficulty. Her parents had no idea that anyone would intrude so brazenly, and without any preparation whatsoever, they were killed — one after the other.”

Wang Feng’s head sank lower and lower as the final vestiges of his inner resistance began to crumble.

“After killing her parents, you felt thirsty, so you took a glass from the drinks cabinet and drank from it. Fearing you might leave behind physical evidence, you took the glass with you. While waiting at the waste collection point for the garbage truck, you tossed it into the rubbish heap. The following day, the truck arrived on schedule to collect the refuse. You and Zhang Zhetian crawled back underneath and made your escape. As for the murder weapons and the blood-soaked clothing — you didn’t dare discard those at the rubbish collection site. Judging by your travel route, those items were most likely thrown into the Pu River. Did you think destroying the weapons would let you walk free? What you didn’t count on was this: although your plan appeared meticulous, it is riddled with holes at every turn. The DNA from the glass and the cigarette butts, along with the call records between you and Fan Mingming, are more than sufficient to establish the facts of the murders committed by you and Zhang Zhetian.”

—