Yan Yi and Qi Xiao went out for a meal first, then watched a movie. It was not until nightfall that they each called a few friends over and went to the bar they often frequented to hang out.
Actually, Yan Yi quite liked drinking. He just wasn’t an alcoholic. It was simply that when they were on duty, drinking was strictly prohibited. Since he finally had a day off, naturally he had to relax and enjoy himself properly.
They played until midnight before the group gradually dispersed. Yan Yi had drunk quite a bit, but he could still walk steadily. Qi Xiao, on the other hand, was staggering and practically hanging off him.
When they reached the car, Yan Yi freed one hand and pulled out his phone. “Wait a second. I’ll call a designated driver.”
Qi Xiao wrapped his arms around Yan Yi’s neck. He raised his head, his warm lips coming close as he gently kissed Yan Yi.
Yan Yi put an arm around his waist and mumbled, “All right, all right. Let’s get home first.”
Qi Xiao stared at Yan Yi with hazy eyes and said softly, “Bro, you’re really nice. Really, really nice.”
“Mm, I know.” Yan Yi laughed. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Actually… I really want to seriously date you.” Qi Xiao spoke drunkenly. “But I feel like right now… I’m nothing. I’m not famous, I don’t have money, so-so I don’t have the right to be in a relationship.”
Yan Yi comforted him. “You’re only twenty-three. What’s the rush? You’ll definitely become famous.” He placed an order through the app and waited for the designated driver to arrive.
“Nowadays, those kids are getting into the entertainment industry when they’re only teenagers. Cough, cough…” Qi Xiao rubbed his cheek against Yan Yi’s. “That one who just hit on you was eighteen or nineteen. You… you wouldn’t get stolen away by someone younger, would you?”
“You’re talking nonsense.” Yan Yi laughed helplessly. “I’ll take you home and let you get a good night’s sleep.”
“You… why don’t you date either?”
“I don’t have time.”
Qi Xiao looked at Yan Yi with a silly grin. “How about… we give it a try?”
Yan Yi rubbed Qi Xiao’s hair and said softly, “We’ll talk about it after you’re sober.” It wasn’t that he didn’t want a relationship, but he knew that he and Qi Xiao were too different, from their backgrounds to what they pursued to their values. They probably wouldn’t be able to make a relationship work.
Qi Xiao wrapped his arms around Yan Yi’s waist, his entire body hanging off him. He buried his face in Yan Yi’s chest and slowly rubbed against him, like a well-behaved cat.
Not long afterward, the designated driver arrived. Yan Yi got Qi Xiao into the car, only to discover that he was already asleep.
He had the driver take them to Qi Xiao’s home.
When the sky was just beginning to brighten, Yan Yi was awakened by the sound of his phone ringing. Groggily, he grabbed the phone from the bedside table and held it to his ear, answering hoarsely, “Hello?”
There was a pause on the other end.
“Why are you still sleeping at this hour?”
Gong Yingxian’s cool, distant voice was like a bottle of cold water being poured over Yan Yi’s face, instantly waking him up somewhat. He struggled to open his eyes. “W-what time is it?” After asking, he checked the phone screen himself. It was almost nine.
“You drank.”
Gong Yingxian’s voice was clearly displeased.
“Ah, I was drinking with some friends last night and stayed out pretty late.” Yan Yi sat up. “I really haven’t woken up this late in a long time… What’s wrong?”
“Forget it.”
Gong Yingxian simply hung up.
Yan Yi listened to the busy tone on the other end and sat there in a daze for quite a while. When he finally came back to his senses, he remembered that the two of them had agreed yesterday to go back to Wanyuan Residential Complex again. The crime scene couldn’t remain sealed off for too long because it would affect the residents’ normal lives. It wasn’t like a bar, so they had limited time.
He had really drunk too much last night and forgotten.
Yan Yi pounded his head and climbed off the sofa, then went to the bathroom to wash up.
He had spent the night at Qi Xiao’s place. After getting Qi Xiao onto the bed, he had been too sleepy to move and had simply collapsed onto the bed himself. After sleeping through the night, he woke up with an aching back and waist, dizziness, and nausea—the typical aftermath of a hangover.
After taking a shower, he came out to find Qi Xiao still fast asleep. He rummaged through the wardrobe and picked out a relatively plain T-shirt and jeans from among a pile of trendy clothes. He wasn’t much taller than Qi Xiao, so the size would do.
After changing, Yan Yi left a note for Qi Xiao saying that he had something to do and had to leave first. Then he grabbed his keys and headed out.
This was rush hour, and Yan Yi got stuck on the Third Ring Road. Irritably, he stared at the endless line of cars ahead of him, picked up his phone, and sent Gong Yingxian a message:
It’s a little congested. I’ll be there soon.
On the way, Yan Yi received a call from Zhang Wen. The results from the samples they had sent back to the laboratory had come out. It was indeed gasoline. Yan Yi asked Zhang Wen to come over again. They needed to search the scene for clues that could help them find the culprit.
The journey was only ten kilometers, yet it took Yan Yi more than forty minutes to drive. When he saw Gong Yingxian’s car outside Wanyuan Residential Complex, he breathed a sigh of relief.
Fortunately, he was still there.
Yan Yi hurried upstairs and saw Gong Yingxian and several civilian police officers at the scene.
When Gong Yingxian saw him, he merely glanced at him casually before turning away. With his mask covering his face, only his beautiful eyes were visible, concealing a great many emotions.
Yan Yi walked over. “The fire investigation laboratory confirmed that there was gasoline used as an accelerant outside 2209. It was arson.”
“Mm. I already know,” Gong Yingxian said.
“The person who set the fire was probably a neighbor on this floor.” Yan Yi looked around. “There are twelve households in total. Someone in 2211 also died, and the other households had some minor and serious injuries. I don’t know whether the person who started the fire ended up suffering from his own actions.”
Gong Yingxian didn’t respond. He simply continued examining 2209 intently.
Yan Yi followed behind him and continued, “Maybe the arsonist only wanted to take revenge on 2209, but didn’t expect it to cause such a huge fire.”
Gong Yingxian still said nothing.
Yan Yi had no choice. He stepped directly in front of Gong Yingxian, forcing him to look at him.
“What is it, Dr. Gong? Are you angry with me?” Yan Yi looked at him in confusion.
Gong Yingxian said coldly, “I don’t have time for that.”
“I was only a little late. I finally got a day off, so having a few drinks and letting loose a little is only natural.” Yan Yi teased him. “You don’t have to be like this.”
Gong Yingxian walked around him and headed toward the kitchen of 2209, rummaging around for something.
“You… What are you looking for?”
“A coffee machine.”
“What?”
Gong Yingxian carefully searched through the kitchen, which had been burned beyond recognition. He frowned and thought for a moment before walking toward the bathroom and continuing to search for something.
“What are you looking for now?”
“An electric toothbrush.”
Yan Yi was even more confused. “What exactly are you trying to do?”
“Instead of wasting time talking, help me look.”
Yan Yi had no choice but to search together with Gong Yingxian. However, all they found beneath the collapsed bathroom cabinet was half of a plastic toothbrush handle.
Gong Yingxian placed the toothbrush handle into the evidence bag as well.
Yan Yi was getting a little annoyed. “What exactly are you doing? At least tell me. When I assist you, I tell you everything I know.”
Gong Yingxian finally looked directly at Yan Yi and said expressionlessly, “I found some household garbage in that pile of burned trash outside the door that may not have belonged to this family.”
“Such as?”
“I observed that this family’s standard of living isn’t high. There aren’t any noteworthy modern appliances in the house. Even their washing machine is an old model.” Gong Yingxian lifted the bag in his hand. “But in that pile of garbage, there were things like coffee grounds and replacement heads for an electric toothbrush.”
Yan Yi’s eyes lit up. “Wow, you observed things that closely. So that pile of garbage outside the door didn’t belong to this family?”
“Some of it did. My colleagues have already visited some of the neighbors and confirmed what Xue Fei said. This family really did frequently pile garbage outside their door. Later, they may have deliberately done it to antagonize their neighbors, often accumulating several days’ worth, or even a week or two’s worth, before throwing it away.”
“Then why was there garbage outside their door that didn’t belong to them?”
“That can only be asked of the murderer.”
Yan Yi thought for a moment. “There are surveillance cameras downstairs, right? Any clues?”
“We just brought the footage back to the district station. My colleague is looking through it.” Gong Yingxian said, “Can you draw me a fire-spread diagram based on the scene? Not inside the apartment, but for the entire floor. The direction in which the fire spread might tell us something.”
“Sure.”
Gong Yingxian took out his iPad, pulled up the floor plan of the building, and handed it to Yan Yi.
Yan Yi took it and returned to the hallway. Based on all kinds of traces left by the fire—the burn marks and pits on the floor, the shape and locations of soot on the walls, fallen ceiling panels, and all the other silent evidence left behind at the scene after the fire—he drew the direction and sequence in which the fire had spread.
Just then, Zhang Wen arrived as well and joined them in examining the scene.
After he finished drawing, the three of them stared at the diagram and fell silent.
“Strange…” Yan Yi looked toward the window at the end of the hallway. “2209 is on the west side. Once the fire started, it should have spread toward the ventilation window on the west side first. So how did it spread east instead? The fire on the west side burned through from inside the suspended ceiling.”
“How can you be sure the fire on the west side burned through from inside the ceiling?”
Yan Yi picked up a piece of gypsum board. “It’s simple. If the floor on the west side had caught fire first, then after the flames reached the walls, they would have blackened the ceiling first. When the ceiling eventually collapsed, the side that hit the ground would be black, and it would have fallen onto other burning materials. But this piece of gypsum board…” He turned over the charred board, revealing a surface that was completely white. “Not only are there no soot marks on the side that hit the ground, there aren’t any burning materials underneath it either. That proves the fire was burning inside the ceiling and only fell to the floor afterward, causing the floor to catch fire.”
“How could that happen?”
Yan Yi shook his head. “Yesterday, we were only focused on 2209 and didn’t examine the hallway carefully. I overlooked it. One possibility I can think of is that the window on the west side was closed at the time, so the fire spread toward the windows in the east-side hallway.”
“Let’s go take a look.”
The three of them walked to the west-side window. It had already been burned down to nothing but its frame, with broken glass scattered all over the floor. Judging only from the window frame’s current condition, the window had been closed, but they couldn’t rule out the possibility that the pressure from the heat had forced it open.
“This window is for ventilation. Normally, unless it’s winter, it wouldn’t be closed in the hallway,” Gong Yingxian said thoughtfully. “If there was constantly foul-smelling garbage in the hallway, even less reason would there be for anyone to close it.”
Yan Yi took a deep breath.
“Someone closed it. They wanted to keep the fire from spreading west?”
The two of them simultaneously turned their heads toward the deep hallway.
Of the six households on the west side, which one had the arsonist been?