After some preparation, Gong Yingxian had not only restored all the video evidence from that year, but had even constructed a perspective model of the house based on the blueprints, photographs, and his memories.
Ren Yi also brought along all the materials he had obtained from the fire department.
Qiu Yan walked around the model on the table once. “It’s about the same as I remember. The reconstruction is very good.”
Gong Yingxian lowered his head, silently staring at the model of the three-story villa without saying anything.
Across the table, Ren Yi looked at Gong Yingxian, the conversation they had not long ago still echoing in his mind.
He was somewhat calmer now than he had been earlier, but the calmer he became, the more heartbroken he felt. Every time he allowed himself to kindle even a little hope, thinking that the two of them could at least rebuild their friendship, Gong Yingxian would always use his words and actions to tell him: Stop dreaming.
He couldn’t imagine what kind of person he had become in Gong Yingxian’s eyes after that night.
At this moment, Gong Yingxian really did look like a naive boy of barely ten or so, beginning to develop an interest in adult secrets under the influence of hormones. He wanted to explore them but was hesitant and awkward, and Ren Yi just happened to be a suitable person to experiment with—someone who wouldn’t resist, wouldn’t reveal anything, and wouldn’t hold him responsible.
Yes, he had fantasized about it. He had fantasized countless times about intimate contact with Gong Yingxian, but none of those fantasies had ever been under circumstances like these. And that made him…
“Captain Ren? Captain Ren?”
Ren Yi suddenly snapped back to reality and looked blankly at Qiu Yan, who was calling him. “Sorry, I might have…”
“Are you tired?”
Gong Yingxian looked thoughtfully at Ren Yi, but Ren Yi avoided his gaze.
Qiu Yan looked at the two of them and couldn’t help feeling helpless.
“I’m fine.” Ren Yi walked to the side and picked up his coffee in an attempt to disguise his unease, taking a sip. “It’s nothing. Let’s get started.”
Qiu Yan began with the timeline. “Yingxian saw the masked man at around two o’clock. When he got up during the night to use the bathroom, he saw someone wearing a bird mask moving around in the yard. He became frightened and hid under the covers. Yingxian’s mother called the fire department at 2:36. You’ve both heard the emergency call. She never mentioned that an outsider had set the fire, nor did she say anything that pointed to her husband having started it. The first fire brigade arrived at 2:44, and entered the building for the rescue at 2:48. Three minutes later, at 3:00, Yingxian was rescued. At 3:38, the fire was extinguished.”
That brief description of the timeline summarized the final moments of a family of four—their last moments struggling in fear and pain.
Gong Yingxian stood motionless to one side, his face frozen into an expressionless mask. In his pursuit of the truth, he had already gone over these details tens of millions of times, including his mother’s desperate cries for help. He had become numb. Beneath that numbness were pain nerves rendered useless after being battered beyond recognition.
Qiu Yan looked at Ren Yi and continued. “The first fire brigade to arrive at the scene that day was the Fifth Brigade of Hongwu District. Yingxian told me that the firefighter who first entered the fire and rescued him was the captain of the Fifth Brigade—that is, your father.”
Ren Yi nodded. “The Fifth Brigade was the predecessor of the Phoenix Brigade. Later, after the organizational structure was adjusted, several new brigades were added and the jurisdictions were reorganized. The original site of the Gong family’s home is no longer within the Phoenix Brigade’s jurisdiction.”
“Such a coincidence…” Qiu Yan paused, a difficult-to-read emotion appearing on her face.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just too much of a coincidence.” Qiu Yan said, “You really are destined to be connected to each other.”
In the past, Ren Yi would have joked about it, but now he merely gave a perfunctory smile.
Gong Yingxian picked up the thread. “This model is a proportional reconstruction. The villa has four levels in total—three above ground and one underground. The basement is the garage and storage area. The first floor has no bedrooms; it’s entirely functional space. This room on the south side of the second floor was my parents’ master bedroom. These two are the guest room and study.”
He pointed his laser pen at each area he mentioned in turn.
“My sister and I lived on the third floor, in these two rooms side by side on the south side. The murderer poured an accelerant on the first and second floors. The fire started on the first floor and quickly spread upward. Because the fire completely blocked the route downstairs, and my sister and I were upstairs, my parents would inevitably have to go upstairs. Once they went up and found us, our entire family was trapped on the third floor. Every window had security bars.”
Ren Yi let out a sigh.
Back then, every household had security bars installed on its windows. It was only in the past ten years or so, as more and more tragedies occurred because security bars obstructed escape, that people gradually began installing escape doors in them.
“In the end, we hid in the bathroom of my room.” Gong Yingxian’s voice grew increasingly heavy. “My memories of this part are very vague. When the psychologist guided me through the memories, my consciousness resisted very strongly. The masked man, on the other hand, is relatively clear in my memory.”
Ren Yi asked, “What did you tell the police at the time? Did you mention the masked man?”
Gong Yingxian shook his head. “After the incident, I refused to speak for nearly half a year. My treatment in China wasn’t going well, so my grandfather sent me to the United States. By the time I was able to remember some things, the case had already been closed for several years.”
“So you never gave the police any testimony.”
“Even if he had, the testimony of a six-year-old child would have been invalid in court,” Qiu Yan said. “In the end, it was determined to be a suicide motivated by guilt because there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that someone else had started the fire.”
Ren Yi walked around the model once, then picked up the documents and carefully compared them. He inserted a marker beside the sofa in the living room.
“According to the report, this was the point of origin. But the gas canister in the kitchen exploded, and there were also very obvious traces of a flash fire and deep burning.”
Qiu Yan pointed at a charred object nearby. “This is a fragment of the sofa from back then. There are traces of alcohol on it.”
“Was the sofa definitely positioned here at the time? By the window?”
“Yes.”
“If the sofa was the point of origin, and the accelerant was poured all the way from the sofa to the door, the kitchen, the entrance to the staircase, and the stairs, then the fire would spread across the first floor and up the stairs…” Ren Yi thought about it. “It’s possible, but I still feel like there’s something wrong.”
He continued searching through the photographs.
“Look at this one.” Gong Yingxian handed him a photograph from the scene. “With a fire this large, the curtains weren’t damaged very much. Is that normal?”
“Curtains are highly combustible, but compared with an accelerant, the latter would obviously attract the fire more.” Ren Yi frowned. “However, even if the fire spread along the trail of accelerant, the curtains were so close to the sofa that, logically, they should have burned away completely. But only half of them burned…”
A thought flashed through his mind.
“Wind.”
“Wind?” Qiu Yan asked. “You mean the wind direction?”
“Yes. Wind direction is extremely important in a fire. It can completely control the direction in which the fire spreads. Suppose there was wind drawing the flames away from the curtains. That could explain why half the curtains survived. In that case, the direction of the wind would be…” Ren Yi examined the villa model. “East. Toward the kitchen window?”
Qiu Yan exclaimed, “The murderer opened the kitchen window? It was late autumn. Nobody would have forgotten to close the window.”
Gong Yingxian found the photographs of the kitchen. After the explosion, the kitchen had been severely damaged. The window, which had been reduced to little more than its wooden frame, was indeed open, but it was impossible to determine whether it had been opened by someone or blown open by the force of the explosion.
“There’s a problem.” Ren Yi frowned deeply. “I can understand why the murderer would want to draw the fire toward the kitchen, because there were a lot of electrical appliances and gas there. But according to the traces of the accelerant—in other words, the path where he poured the gasoline—the fire would spread eastward. If he started the fire in the living room, then look at the structure of this first floor. Wouldn’t he be trapping himself inside the fire by doing that?”
The two of them studied the model.
“That’s right. The front door is on the route between the living room and the kitchen. How would he escape?”
“He could only go upstairs.” The red dot of Gong Yingxian’s laser pointer stopped on the staircase.
“That doesn’t make sense. There was accelerant on the stairs too. He starts the accelerant in the living room and then runs upstairs? Impossible. He absolutely couldn’t outrun the speed at which the fire spread. And if he poured the accelerant after igniting the living room, he’d be pouring fuel onto the fire and could easily set himself on fire. No arsonist with even a little common sense would do that. Even if he somehow managed not to get burned, what happens after he gets upstairs? All the windows were sealed off. He would be trapping himself inside the fire.”
“Isn’t that a paradox? Could it be that the point of origin wasn’t the living room?”
“Even if the point of origin was the kitchen, he still couldn’t get out.”
The three of them fell into thought. It seemed as though something was just about to emerge, yet they simply couldn’t figure out what it was.
After a long while, Gong Yingxian finally spoke.
“We made an assumption from the beginning. What if the murderer didn’t start the fire inside the house?”
Ren Yi’s eyes lit up.
“Right. He could pour the gasoline, leave the villa, and then start the fire by throwing the flame through the kitchen window!”
Qiu Yan flipped through the photographs of the kitchen and living room. “But then how do we explain these V-shaped burn marks in the living room, the burned depression in the floor, and all these other things? Aren’t those evidence that the point of origin was here?”
Ren Yi’s heart sank. After hesitating, he said, “I have a theory, but…”
Gong Yingxian said decisively, “No ‘but.’ Just say it.”
“Imagine I’m the murderer. I know fire extremely well, and I also understand the methods used in fire investigations. If I wanted to fake a suicide by arson committed by the male homeowner, what would I have to do first? I’d have to erase all traces that I had ever been inside this house and make everything look as though it had been done by someone inside. Simply put, I’d have to create a sealed-room fire scene. So how would I do it?”
The two of them looked at him solemnly.
“First, I pour gasoline in the kitchen, the hallway, and the stairs, all the way up to the second floor. I open the kitchen window, then leave the house and throw the fire in through the kitchen window. The flames would instantly spread from the kitchen toward the second floor.”
Ren Yi narrowed his eyes, his gaze cold.
“Then I return to the house and pour gasoline on the living-room sofa and set the sofa on fire.”
Qiu Yan’s eyes widened.
“Two points of origin!”
“That’s the most reasonable explanation I can think of. First, the explosion of the kitchen gas canister destroyed a lot of evidence, including whether the window had been open and the traces indicating the point of origin. Although the kitchen would also look like a point of origin, if there were a more obvious and definite point of origin in the living room, investigators would naturally favor the living room. They wouldn’t think that there were two points of origin.”
“You’re right.” Gong Yingxian’s voice was deep. “Although the kitchen window was destroyed, the living-room door was basically intact. According to the report, its lock was forcibly broken by the firefighters during the rescue. There was no way to determine the condition of the lock before the firefighters broke it, so there was also no way to prove that someone had illegally entered the house.”
Qiu Yan slowly sank into her chair, looking somewhat drained. She murmured, “Apart from the curtains being somewhat suspicious, everything else makes sense. The kitchen explosion means there’s no way to prove that the window had been opened. The front door was damaged by the rescuers, so there’s no way to prove there was an illegal entry. Whether the fire was started in the living room or the kitchen, once it started, the arsonist had no way out except going upstairs. That points directly to the arsonist being someone inside the house—in other words, the male homeowner, who was under immense pressure from the production accident, legal problems, debts, and public opinion, and therefore had ample motive to commit suicide!”
The more they analyzed it, the more chilled they became.
If Ren Yi’s theory was correct, then the murderer had constructed a trap without any obvious flaws, disguising a murder as a suicide. And if there had also been someone on the inside helping destroy evidence and mislead the investigation, combined with the male homeowner having a motive for suicide, the whole thing would have been practically flawless.