Eyes that are the same as those of evil

Chapter 89 The Case of Burning the Corpse 7
The interrogation ended, and it was already pitch black outside the police station.

After working for nearly twenty hours, Zheng Yan felt a little drowsy.

He threw the notebook on the table, pressed his temples, and asked Xiao Chen, "Did you check the dashcam footage of Zhu Jun's car?"

Xiao Chen: "The car's dashcam didn't even have a battery installed; it's probably just there for show."

Many experienced drivers do this: when they encounter someone trying to stage an accident, they only need to say that they have a dashcam and don't actually need to pull up the video to make people back off. So some people simply put on a fake one.

Zheng Yan was speechless, then asked, "What about Wan Anliang?"

“I only called the Market Supervision Bureau, and they said that Wan Anliang went on a business trip yesterday morning and they can’t contact him right now. But I checked his enforcement feedback, and it’s said that many people have a bad opinion of him, which has even affected his promotion.”

This can be considered a motivation.

However, the relationship between him and the deceased Zhou Qiaoan still needs to be verified.

Tan Ming yawned to the side, looking around as if something was missing.

Oh, Tan Jia is missing.

"Where are the Gajas?"

Wu Yang, who stayed in the office the whole time, said, "She went home to sleep. She hasn't rested since midnight, and her eyes are drooping with sleep."

That's the truth; Tan Jia was indeed extremely sleepy, his eyelids drooping.

When she was staying at her aunt's house, she was worried about disturbing them if she went back in the middle of the night, so she stayed up all night with the criminal investigation team.

Now that I've moved to a new house, I live alone and can come home whenever I want, so I've simply decided to leave.

In the middle of the night, only the streetlights were on in the residential area. She stepped out of the elevator and yawned again.

Tears blurred her vision, and as she wiped them away, she sniffed. Behind the door of the room next door, which opened in response, Lin Zhiyue stared at her in a daze.

"...Are you crying?" He stared into her eyes, his brow furrowed slightly, as if he were puzzled.

Tan Jia glanced over, blinked away her tears, and looked again. His tall, broad-shouldered figure blocked the light in the room behind him, and the white pajamas he wore revealed his waistline under the light.

It's only at times like this that you can really feel that he's a grown man in his early twenties.

She said lazily, "Yawning. Why aren't you asleep yet?"

As she spoke, she walked past him and went straight to open the door.

Lin Zhiyue pursed her lips, her gaze following her, the words of greeting she had prepared beforehand stuck in her throat.

Seeing that she was about to go inside, she managed to squeeze out one sentence: "The maple leaf dough sculpture you asked me to make..."

Tan Jia turned around: "What do you mean I asked you to do it? I gave you a lump of clay as a toy, not a task assigned to you."

After saying that, seeing his face sink into shadow, she added, "Okay, are you done? Let me see."

Lin Zhiyue: "...No. It collapsed."

Tan Jia burst out laughing this time: "I knew dough sculpting was hard to learn."

No, I had already finished it, but I waited too long and found that the curve of the maple leaves had collapsed. The work was imperfect and I couldn't show it off... All these explanations were hidden in Lin Zhiyue's heart. But he, who never knew how to read people's expressions and never needed to, suddenly mastered this skill without being taught. He buried those explanations and said something else.

"Hmm, it's not easy to learn."

"You've been talking as much these past two days as you have in the last two weeks," she joked, in a good mood, before generously adding, "Next time I'll take you to make dough figurines and teach you some techniques. It's a craft that requires a lot of tools."

"Okay," he answered quickly and clearly.

But he didn't continue the conversation, and suddenly the two of them fell silent. The motion-sensor lights in the corridor went out, and the light dimmed, making it impossible to see each other's eyes.

Tan Jia suddenly chuckled, the last syllable of his voice carrying a flirtatious hook.

She went inside and clicked the door shut before the hallway lights came back on.

It was past midnight, time to sleep, but even her beautiful appearance couldn't stop her eyelids from drooping.

Perhaps it was the case she was investigating today that made her feel uneasy, because she dreamed of the crime scene again that night.

In the darkness, amidst the heavy shadows of the trees, "she" looked down at the burning corpse at the bottom of the slope. Having seen enough, she turned and left with a sense of satisfaction. This is the only scene in the sequence; with careful observation, it's even impossible to determine whether the two people in the scene are the murderer and the victim.

Tan Jia had several eerie dreams and didn't sleep well. She originally planned to sleep for two more hours to catch up on her sleep, but she was woken up by Zheng Yan's phone call at 8:30 the next morning.

"Little Green Wolf, come quick, I saved some steamed buns for you."

"..." Is she someone who's short of steamed buns?

After washing up in silence, Tan Jia slowly walked across the street, counting down in her mind. Before she reached ten, she unsurprisingly saw Lin Zhiyue, who had gotten up early.

"Good morning, what a coincidence," she greeted meaningfully.

Lin Zhiyue looked at her and said her first words of the day: "Is there another case?"

Leaving early and returning late, rushing out in the middle of the night, is very similar to the work schedule of someone investigating a child murder case.

"Don't ask questions you shouldn't. Do you have anything else to say? You only have one sentence left."

Lin Zhiyue's lips moved slightly, and he took out a small bag from behind him, which contained breakfast that had been packed in a box.

"Have you eaten?" he asked softly, his eyes clear and bright.

Tan Jia took it and opened it. The breakfast inside was perfectly presented and smelled delicious. It was something she, who had been eating white food for many years, could not resist.

"I haven't eaten yet, thank you," she said, knowing he didn't like physical contact, so she replaced her habitual pat on the shoulder with a gesture of holding something up. "I'll take you out next time."

Lin Zhiyue watched her leave, saw her open the box, take a bite of a tattered pastry, saw her tear open the yogurt straw with her mouth, saw her chewing motions causing her cheeks to puff up and touch her hair... In the end, the scene was blocked by the elevator door.

Her magical day has begun again.

His dull and ordinary day began again.

……

Tan Jia had already eaten by the time he arrived at the police station.

The steamed buns that Zheng Yan had saved for her were given to Tan Ming free of charge out of consideration for family ties.

"So, any new developments?"

Tan Ming, munching on a steamed bun and drinking coffee, mumbled, "There are two. One is that we found someone who traveled with Zhou Qiaoan for a while that night in the surveillance footage, and they are summoning them. The other is that Wan Anliang didn't actually go on a business trip on the morning of the incident. He changed his ticket information midway and changed to take a train the next morning. We are still investigating his whereabouts."

Just as he finished speaking, Xiao Chen outside announced that the person summoned had arrived.

After leaving Sanlin Town on the night of the incident, the deceased Zhou Qiaoan met Zhou Lian, a fellow villager, and hitched a ride with him until they parted ways at the fork in the road below Guilingpo.

Therefore, Zhou Lian must know something.

"When you dropped Zhou Qiaoan off at the fork in the road, did you see anyone else following him?"

Zhou Lian was a slightly younger middle-aged man, around forty years old, big and burly, who spoke without any restraint and had a loud voice.

"No! It was very late, there were hardly any cars around, let alone people."

"Do you know why Zhou Qiaoan left home so late?"

"I don't know. I just saw him running over in a panic, asking me to take him to the city. But I don't go into the city, so I dropped him off at the crossroads."

Panicked? Trying to get into the city?

"Do you know why he came to the city? He usually does odd jobs on construction sites. Is something wrong at the construction site?"

Zhou Lian gave a strange smirk.

"You've got it wrong. He's not a good worker. He hasn't worked on construction sites for a long time. He's probably better off going out to play cards."

Zheng Yan sensed something was wrong: "Isn't Zhou Qiaoan supposed to be out there making money to pay for her grandson's medical treatment?"

Zhou Lian: "What? He would never suffer for the sake of his descendants. Otherwise, my nephew wouldn't have gone mentally ill. Half the people in town know what kind of person he is. His death is actually a good thing for my sister-in-law and the others. Wasn't he hit by a car? It's good that they can get some compensation to pay for their children's medical treatment."

(End of this chapter)