The two of them walked into the interrogation room. Chen Pei raised his head at the sound. There was little expression on his face, and his tired eyes seemed not to see them at all. His whole person seemed hollow.
Gong Yingxian sat down opposite Chen Pei and stared straight at him.
Ren Yizhuo stood against the wall to one side. He still remembered what had happened the last time Gong Yingxian faced Chen Pei. He needed to make sure Gong Yingxian did not lose control.
Soon afterward, Qiu Yan also came in carrying a stack of documents and sat down on the other side.
Gong Yingxian stared coldly into Chen Pei’s eyes. “Haven’t you always wanted to see me? Didn’t you say there were some things you could only tell me in person? You can talk now.”
Chen Pei lazily shifted his butt in the chair. “Is what I did definitely punishable by death?”
“The police are only responsible for investigating the case. The sentencing will be handed over to the court.”
“Don’t pretend. You guys wouldn’t not know, would you?” Chen Pei sneered. “My lawyer told me that there’s a huge difference between intentional arson and murder and negligent homicide. I really didn’t mean to kill anyone. Those few tens of thousands he gave me weren’t worth getting shot over. Who knew the fire would get bigger and bigger?”
“Go explain that to the judge.”
“I don’t want to die either. Who wants to die, right?” Chen Pei looked at Gong Yingxian. “I know a lot of things you want to know, but if I’m definitely going to die, why should I tell you anything?”
“You want to make a deal.” Qiu Yan gave a cold laugh. “Someone just made a deal before you. You know him too. It was Zhou Chuan. He gave you guys up in exchange for being held in a hospital instead of the detention center. And what happened in the end…” Qiu Yan leaned forward slightly, her sharp eyes boring into Chen Pei’s, while her full lips silently formed the shape of a gunshot.
Chen Pei’s expression darkened further. “Either way, I’m going to die. Getting blown up would actually be more satisfying.”
“If you were truly prepared to die, you wouldn’t have asked to see me.” Gong Yingxian tapped the table. “Besides, before you make demands, you should first weigh whether your bargaining chips are enough. Why should we believe your information is valuable?”
Chen Pei chuckled twice. “What are you pretending for, little Officer Gong? I’m relying on the way you reacted when you heard about the bird mask last time.”
Gong Yingxian narrowed his eyes.
“I can give you a little something for free. The man wearing the bird mask is known to Red Flame.”
Gong Yingxian’s Adam’s apple moved up and down. Both his hands clenched into fists beneath the table, and the look in his eyes as he stared at Chen Pei was almost murderous.
Usually, Gong Yingxian was a calm, even excessively calm person. But whenever the tragedy that had happened to him back then was involved, controlling his emotions became difficult.
Afraid that Gong Yingxian would be provoked by Chen Pei again, Ren Yizhuo immediately cut in. “You’re not an arsonist, and you don’t even go on Blazing Angel. You’ve only had contact with Red Flame. Of course Red Flame told you. So that statement is useless. We already guessed that.”
Qiu Yan nodded. “It still has no value.”
“Wrong.” Chen Pei said. “He really didn’t tell me. If I don’t say anything, you’ll never know how I found out.”
Qiu Yan said, “Chen Pei, you seem to have misunderstood the situation. This isn’t us begging you to talk. You’re the one begging us to talk. You don’t want to die, so you need to do everything you can to earn merit. The results of our investigation will have a major impact on your sentence.”
Chen Pei said nothing.
“You actually have no choice now. If you don’t talk, you’ll almost certainly be sentenced to death. If you do talk, you may have a chance to survive. Since you already know that you’re going to die either way, why aren’t you trying to save yourself? Why are you still treating us like enemies?” Qiu Yan shook her head and sighed softly. Her attitude suddenly became several degrees gentler. “Chen Pei, are we your enemies? Yes, we’re the ones who arrested you, but we’re only doing our jobs. We have no personal grudge against each other. Think about it carefully. Are we your enemies? The law won’t help you, and Red Flame only wants to kill you to silence you. Right now, we’re the only ones who can truly possibly help you.”
Ren Yizhuo silently cheered in his heart.
He had listened to several interrogations and discovered that Qiu Yan’s interrogation skills were much better than Gong Yingxian’s. Gong Yingxian was very intelligent and good at finding logical loopholes. He was skilled at using his extraordinary judgment and solid evidence to crush suspects. But he was not good at social interaction. If he couldn’t even interact well with ordinary people, criminals were even more difficult. There was always a confrontational atmosphere between him and suspects. Sometimes, that atmosphere of confrontation made suspects afraid to speak, or at the very least increased the difficulty of obtaining useful information.
Qiu Yan, however, knew how to use both softness and force. She could apply pressure, but she could also show compassion. When necessary, she could even use her identity as a woman to lower the other person’s guard. She clearly knew better how to obtain the greatest value at the smallest cost.
Sure enough, something shifted in Chen Pei’s eyes.
Qiu Yan said, “If you tell us everything you know, truthfully and completely, it will greatly help with reducing your sentence.”
“How do I know you aren’t just blowing smoke up my ass?” Chen Pei looked Qiu Yan up and down flirtatiously. “With a look like yours, you must be pretty good at fooling men.”
Gong Yingxian’s face darkened with anger. He was just about to speak when Qiu Yan raised a hand to stop him. She curled her lips into a smile. “Right now, you can only choose to trust us. If you trust us, there’s still hope. Otherwise, you’ll have nothing.”
The muscles on Chen Pei’s face tightened slightly, and his eyes wandered uncertainly.
“Come on. Tell us the whole thing from beginning to end, exactly as it happened. Try to earn yourself some merit.”
Chen Pei was silent for a moment before saying, “I want a cigarette.”
Qiu Yan took a pack of cigarettes from her pocket, pinched out one, put it into Chen Pei’s mouth, and lit it for him.
Chen Pei took a blissful drag, then relaxed and slumped back into the chair.
The three of them quietly watched him.
“When I was in prison back then, I met a cellmate.” Chen Pei said, “You don’t need to waste time investigating him. He had a stroke in prison and died.”
Gong Yingxian held his pen and said firmly, “Name.”
“Liu Dayong. He was an oil thief. He got sent inside for slashing a truck driver.” Chen Pei blew out a ring of smoke. “We were in the same cell and got along pretty well. Once, when he was bragging, he told me something. Back in the day, he and his brother specialized in stealing fuel from the gas tanks of long-haul trucks at highway gas stations.”
“What area did he usually operate in?”
“The surrounding cities, I guess. They picked those remote gas stations where there weren’t many people.” Chen Pei continued. “One day, they were hiding at a gas station, waiting for drivers traveling at night to come there to rest. At around three or four in the morning, a car came in to get gas. It was a black sedan, the kind of car that looked pretty expensive for that era.”
“Do you remember what kind of car it was, or its license plate?”
“He didn’t know anything about cars, and he didn’t pay attention to the license plate. Anyway, it was extremely rare for a luxury sedan to go to a remote place like that to get gas in the middle of the night. The person finished refueling and drove away. That was normal too.”
Everyone listened intently. They could feel that the important part was coming.
“But after a while, that car actually came back. Then it filled up with gas again.”
“How long was the interval?”
“About half an hour. In half an hour, there’s no way the fuel could have run out, right? But that person came back to refuel anyway. After filling up, he drove the car to the side, went to the bathroom, then threw a large box into the trash can before driving away.”
At this point, the others were still completely confused.
“People were poor back then. Liu Dayong thought that person was rich, so he wanted to see what he had thrown away and went through the trash can. He found a pastry box. When he opened it, there were food packaging bags, beverage cans, receipts, maps, scraps of paper, and other miscellaneous things inside. They were all garbage, actually, but all of that garbage had been arranged neatly inside the box, like presents.” Chen Pei said, “There were drawings made with a red paint marker on several pieces of scrap paper. The drawings were strange too. They were almost all regular shapes—circles, squares, triangles. Even the slightly more complicated patterns were regularly symmetrical. There were also some lines, and those lines were regular too. Straight lines were perfectly straight, while every rise and fall of the waves in the wavy lines had almost exactly the same curve and spacing. And on one of the pieces of paper, there was a completely symmetrical bird mask.”
Gong Yingxian’s breathing began to grow heavy.
Chen Pei simply flicked his cigarette ash onto the floor. “Liu Dayong thought none of it was useful, so he threw it away right then. That person was pretty strange, but he didn’t pay much attention to it. Then the next day, your family was all over the news.”
Gong Yingxian’s lips trembled slightly. “How did you know about me?”
“Don’t rush. Let me finish. Your house wasn’t far from where Liu Dayong was living at the time. After people heard about it, a lot of them went over to watch the commotion. The scene had already been sealed off, but things were still being gradually cleared out. There was a plastic bucket among them. You know, the most common kind of white plastic bucket. They came in all sorts of sizes. Liu Dayong used one when he stole fuel too. The plastic bucket had been burned until only about half of it remained. On the bucket was a wavy measuring line drawn with a red paint marker, exactly the same as the wavy line on that piece of scrap paper.”
Qiu Yan frowned. “Then why didn’t he report it to the police?”
Chen Pei laughed. “Report it? How was he supposed to report it? ‘Officer, when I was stealing fuel in the middle of the night, I happened to discover that someone was acting strange?’ Liu Dayong told me about it while he was bragging. Even if he thought there was something wrong, why would he go looking for trouble? What did it have to do with him?”
“…And then?” Gong Yingxian asked in a deep voice.
“There were people in prison who bragged about all kinds of outrageous things. There were stories much more unbelievable than this. I just listened to it as a story and forgot about it afterward.” Chen Pei said. “Later, I got out and looked for work everywhere. Somehow, Red Flame got in touch with me. You know what happened after that.”
“You still haven’t said how you knew about me, or why you mentioned the bird mask.”
Chen Pei took his final drag of the cigarette. “After I set fire to 2209, I knew something major had happened. I felt that Red Flame had ripped me off by only giving me those few tens of thousands. He had said that afterward he would buy the recording from me, so I waited for him to contact me. He did, just as expected. I asked him for two hundred thousand. He said that was fine, but I had to do one more thing for him. He would give me four hundred thousand.”
Ren Yizhuo’s heart tightened. “Was the target us?”
Chen Pei nodded and looked at Gong Yingxian. “He also said that if I could livestream it, the income would be even higher. He gave me some information about you guys. That’s when I learned your surname was Gong. You were the child from that family back then. I immediately remembered what Zhao Dayong had told me.”
Ren Yizhuo felt his scalp go numb. So Red Flame had already wanted to target them back then. They just hadn’t found a suitable person.
He gritted his teeth. “Then how did you know that person was part of their organization?”
“I asked. After I finished reading the information, I directly asked him, ‘Your people were the ones who set fire to this family’s house back then too?’”
Qiu Yan’s voice had also lost its composure as she asked sharply, “What did he say?!”
Chen Pei said, “He said, ‘You don’t need to know the answer to that question.’ Isn’t that even more suspicious?”
Gong Yingxian lowered his head, desperately suppressing the fury in his chest.
“Later, your manhunt got tighter and tighter. I only wanted to run. I asked Red Flame for money and threatened him. I told him I knew who had committed the case back then. I pretended to casually mention a few things, like the black sedan, the paint bucket with the measuring line, and the bird mask. When I mentioned the bird mask, he reacted. He said he wanted to meet me and discuss it in person.”
“So in reality, all you knew was what Zhao Dayong told you.”
A vicious look appeared in Chen Pei’s eyes. “Yes. Looks like the bird mask is pretty important. So when you arrested me, I used that to blow you up too.”