Fifteen minutes later, in the interrogation room.
“I’ve already said it wasn’t me! What more do you want?!” Li Cunhou broke down. “I just stole some money from my sister—no, it was taking. I took some money from my sister. What’s wrong with that?”
“We know you didn’t kill her.” Fang Si Ting said regretfully. “But the murderer who killed Li Cuicai identified you as the one who instigated him, and your fingerprints were on the murder weapon he brought. With both witness and physical evidence, even if you claim you accidentally touched the weapon afterward while taking the money, you have no way to prove it. The judge won’t accept your testimony. The situation is very unfavorable for you right now.”
Li Cunhou still stubbornly denied it. “I don’t know.”
“Still not telling the truth? No choice then.” He stood up and formally announced, “Mr. Li, we are arresting you on charges of murdering Li Cuicai.”
“I-I-I…” Fang Si Ting’s expression was too frightening. He instinctively glanced at Tang Shen beside him.
Tang Shen stood up as well. “You left too much evidence at the crime scene. There’s no escaping it. Instigating someone else to commit murder starts with the death penalty.”
Li Cunhou said anxiously, “When my sister died, I was still at the Sovereign… villa…”
He suddenly realized what he had said and quickly stopped.
Both of them looked at him.
Tang Shen said, “While we still have some doubts about the Lu Jin case, if you confess everything honestly now, it can count as turning yourself in. You still have a chance for leniency. Once we uncover everything, you won’t have any chance left.”
“How much leniency?”
“At least not the death penalty. If you behave well in prison, you might even get out someday.”
“Fine, I’ll talk.” Li Cunhou closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. “That night, I didn’t go to my sister’s place. I listened to my sister and went to Sovereign Cloud Realm to kill someone.”
“I was playing cards on the street. Around 3 PM that afternoon, my sister told me there was a big deal. She showed me a photo on her phone and said someone wanted this person’s life. They’d already figured out where he lived, so I just had to go there.
“Doing the job would net me hundreds of thousands. No reason not to. So around 8 PM that night, I drove the maintenance car into the neighborhood. I found the house according to the map, went inside, and jabbed a tube of injectant into his neck.
“After that, I don’t know what happened. My vision blurred, and it felt like someone told me to cut off that person’s fingers.” Li Cunhou shuddered. “I don’t know if I did it. When I woke up again, I was sitting in the car, already out of the neighborhood.”
At the same time, after the last sentence, a prompt from the program crew came through the earpiece. That was their cleanup work and could be interpreted as Li Cunhou killing the man, then immediately using pruning shears to cut off all ten of his fingers before driving straight out of the neighborhood.
“Who provided the maintenance car?”
“I don’t know. Someone messaged me and said there was a car parked over there. Around 8 PM, he messaged again to tell me to drive into the neighborhood, so I did.”
“After killing him, you just left? Didn’t do anything else?” Xu Nuo looked at him doubtfully.
“What else was there to do? I’d already killed someone.” Li Cunhou broke down crying. “Ever since killing him, I’ve had nightmares every night at the station. My sister clearly said she’d handle everything and provide false testimony that I was with her that night, so it wouldn’t trace back to me. Now she’s dead too, and you’re suspecting me!”
“Why did your sister suddenly want to kill Lu Jin? Did you know him before? Or at least know of his existence?” Fang Si Ting asked.
“You ask me? Who am I supposed to ask, a dead person?” Li Cunhou rubbed the goosebumps on his skin. “Really fucking possessed. When I went there, the house was perfectly fine—clean and bright. But the photos you showed me? Pitch black all around, moldy. How did it decay like that in just a few hours?”
He suddenly caught on. “Wait, was the body moved by someone?”
Fang Si Ting picked up the photo again.
The Abandoned Villa was not the first crime scene.
So how did Li Cunhou leave his saliva there?
That saliva must have been deliberately planted by the real culprit behind the scenes to mislead them.
Even Tang Shen had never questioned the saliva issue, but Xu Nuo had noticed it and tested it thousands of times.
A trace of guilt welled up in his heart for never believing Xu Nuo.
If he had believed him, the investigation would have progressed faster with fewer detours.
“Was the villa you entered this one?” He pulled out interior photos of Jiang Xu’s Villa, home of Lu Jin’s friend.
“Yeah.”
After Li Cunhou finished the killing, the person behind the scenes had gone in to clean up. They moved the body from Jiang Xu’s Villa to the Abandoned Villa and cleaned up the bloodstains inside the villa.
Bai Zhu escorted Li Cunhou away. Xu Nuo packed up the case files and followed Fang Si Ting out. A loose scrap fell from the folder. He opened it and tucked the crumbling piece of paper back in.
Xu An was rampaging around in the boss chair. As Xu Nuo closed the folder, he wasn’t paying attention and nearly collided. His mind focused on dodging, his arm suddenly hurt. An external force yanked him, and his cheek pressed against someone’s collarbone.
A strong hand timely wrapped around his waist, pinning him in place.
The tightly buttoned shirt buttons gleamed with a silver-gray sheen. Scorching body heat seeped through the stiff suit fabric bit by bit. Beneath the heavy layers of the suit, Fang Si Ting’s shoulders were straight and full, his muscles taut and brimming with power.
Steady and reliable. Neat and abstinent.
He lifted his gaze. The Adam’s apple above the black shirt was particularly striking.
Veins faintly bulged on his neck. His eardrums throbbed with the surging blood in the vessels. Xu Nuo couldn’t tell if it was Fang Si Ting’s or his own.
His body temperature rose unbalanced by two degrees.
Fang Si Ting steadied him and immediately let go. His attention was now entirely on Xu An, completely ignoring him.
Xu Nuo pressed a hand to the collar of his T-shirt, turned his face away, and trembled twice in a futile attempt to play it off.
“Expert Xu, go check all the surveillance footage from Sovereign Cloud Realm Neighborhood again, especially before the incident. Look for any strangers or guests entering the neighborhood.”
“We already checked. Nothing. What’s the issue?” Xu An asked, puzzled.
“Wrong angle. I’ve reviewed all the program crew guests’ backgrounds. None of them have any connection to Sovereign Cloud Realm Neighborhood. So how did the murderer know about that Abandoned Villa inside the neighborhood?”
Xu Nuo’s brows twitched.
“You mean he scouted the place beforehand?” he blurted out.
Fang Si Ting nodded. “We always assumed the first crime scene was the Abandoned Villa because of all the blood. But Li Cunhou’s testimony proves Jiang Xu’s Villa was the actual first scene. So the murderer must have scouted ahead of time and known there was a suitable spot in the neighborhood to stage the crime scene.”
In the end, the program crew’s setup had a flaw. If Li Cunhou had killed and severed the fingers in Jiang Xu’s Villa, then the blood in the Abandoned Villa couldn’t have been Lu Jin’s. A DNA test would have revealed right away that it wasn’t the first crime scene.
But the program crew couldn’t actually kill anyone, so they used chicken blood. The autopsy report stated that Lu Jin’s fingers had been severed after death, so the Pursuit Team naturally assumed it was substitute blood standing in for Lu Jin rather than fake blood staged by the murderer.
Xu An tossed his half-eaten popsicle into the trash can, wiped his mouth, and said excitedly, “I’ll go check it out right now!”
This was a major clue!
Fang Si Ting showed no smile, but the tension in his brows eased considerably. Evidently, his mood had improved.
Xu Nuo watched as the two men walked off in separate directions. His expression was indifferent, and he didn’t know what he was thinking.
