The old phone wasn’t turned off, but opening it again required a password.
Bai Lixin stared at the brightly lit yellow-green screen for a moment, pressed a few numbers on it with his index finger, and unlocked it.
S419M: [Lord Host, you…]
Bai Lixin skillfully found the call records and answered casually: [I just saw him enter the password.]
[Ha,] S419M chuckled twice, [I wasn’t going to ask that, I just wanted to say you’re really proficient with this old phone, young people nowadays don’t know how to use it.]
Bai Lixin’s hand on the keypad paused: […]
‘You better not have any other meanings.’
Bai Lixin found the call records and saw that Cao Ji’an had called Su Hong many times.
The earliest call record was half a month ago, not long after Cao Ji’an was released from prison.
The first call got through, but the call lasted only about half a minute before being hung up by the other party.
After that, every call Cao Ji’an made went unanswered.
Bai Lixin exited the call records, opened the messages, and tried to find some traces there.
But unfortunately, it was empty inside, with nothing at all.
The SIM card Cao Ji’an placed in the old phone shouldn’t have been registered with his own identity information.
He was very careful. He always kept the phone off to avoid being tracked by the police, and only contacted Su Hong with calls, not texts.
“Brother.” Cao Jiyun’s cheerful mood came through the door frame, “Happy birthday!”
“Thank you, sister. I guess you’re the only one in the world who still remembers my birthday.” Cao Ji’an replied.
Just then, the old phone in Bai Lixin’s hand made a sudden “ding” sound.
Cao Ji’an’s voice that was still coming from the other side paused for a moment, followed by the harsh sound of a chair scraping against the floor.
“Xiao’an, where are you going?” Cao Jiyun’s voice sounded puzzled.
Cao Ji’an: “Oh, sister, I’m going to my room for a moment, I’ll be right out.”
With that, the bedroom door was violently pushed open. Cao Jian locked the door, rushed to the bed, took out the mobile phone hidden underneath and opened it.
An unread text message came into view: Happy birthday, a gift for you.
The message came from Su Hong’s number, which never went through.
Cao Ji’an looked a little stunned, and at this moment there was a knock on the door.
Cao Ji’an seemed to suddenly realize something, and he opened the door and rushed out.
The living room was not that big, and Cao Jiyun had already walked to the door and opened it.
There was no one outside, only a square parcel lying quietly in front of the door.
Cao Jiyun turned back and looked at him, “What’s this, Xiao’an, did you buy something?”
Cao Ji’an stared at the tightly wrapped box, swallowed hard, and quietly watched Cao Jiyun bring the box into the house.
In Cao Jiyun’s puzzled gaze, Cao Ji’an opened the package, revealing a shrunken black object in front of them.
It looked like a dried piece of black meat. Its shape was indiscernible. It was a small, shriveled piece, sealed in a transparent airtight bag.
Above the bag was a pink bow, and a little flower with five petals and two leaves was drawn on the bow.
Cao Jiyun’s face immediately darkened.
Xiao Hua.
Ever since that incident with her brother, she couldn’t stand anything related to “flowers” anymore.
Whether it was flowers in the grass or decorative flowers, or even the word “flower”, whenever she saw these words, she would think of the evil things Cao Ji’an had done.
When Cao Ji’an saw the little flower, he was first stunned, then his expression suddenly became crazed.
Ignoring Cao Jiyun’s obstruction, he picked up the dried meat and went to the kitchen.
Cao Jiyun followed behind Cao Ji’an, watching him skillfully cut the sealed bag with a knife and cut the palm-sized dried meat into pieces and arrange them on a plate.
Seeing Cao Ji’an pick up a piece of the dried meat and about to put it in his mouth, Cao Jiyun hurriedly stopped him, “What is this?”
Cao Ji’an was a bit anxious, “It’s a gift from Xiao Hua.”
“?”, Cao Jiyun frowned, and her face became even uglier, “Isn’t Xiao Hua already missing?!”
As she spoke, she reached out and picked up a piece of dried meat, sniffing it at her nose. There was a fragrance of spices mixed with a faint fishy smell.
It was a smell she had never smelled before.
It’s Su Xiaohua again. Why does Cao Ji’an become so paranoid whenever he touches anything related to Su Xiaohua?!
As she was trying to figure out what kind of meat it was in her mind, Cao Ji’an had already changed hands, raised the dried meat and stuffed it into his mouth.
Cao Jiyun’s angry expression gradually became ferocious: “Don’t eat it, what kind of meat is this?! What if it’s rat meat? What if it upsets your stomach? First, tell me, how do you know this is from Xiao Hua? Didn’t you kill her? Isn’t she missing?!”
Cao Ji’an chewed the dried meat a few times and swallowed it into his stomach, “That little red flower is Xiao Hua’s mark. Every time Xiao Hua made me lunch or gifts, she would draw that. Sister, I guessed right, Xiao Hua didn’t die! She was indeed locked up by that trash Su Hong!”
“Su Hong?” Cao Jiyun tried to recall this name in her mind, “Is he Xiao Hua’s uncle in R City? What does this have to do with him?”
Cao Ji’an took another piece of dried meat from the plate and put it into his mouth, chewing on the hard meat while speaking vaguely, “Sister, didn’t you ask me what happened back then? Let me tell you the truth.”
“I buried Xiao Hua back then.”
Cao Jiyun widened her eyes: “What?!”
A piece of dried meat entered his throat and Cao Ji’an choked a bit. He poured a glass of water and drank it in one gulp, then went for the third piece of dried meat.
“Back then, Xiao Hua wanted to break up with me. I didn’t agree. It happened to be summer vacation, so she planned to buy a ticket and sneak away. When I found out, I got angry and locked her up in an abandoned warehouse. Then I used her phone to send a text message to her parents saying she wouldn’t be coming home for the summer vacation.”
“I saw her laughing and chatting with a boy at that time and felt betrayed. I was crazy with anger, punching and kicking her. By the time I realized it, I had already sawed off one of her legs. She had no breath left, her body was covered in bruises and there was blood all over the floor.”
“I thought I had killed her. It was raining that day, so I stuffed her into a suitcase and buried her at the back of the mountains.”
Cao Jiyun tried hard to recall the scene at that time, “No wonder you went on a trip that summer. You were gone for a month, and when you came back, you seemed like a different person.”
Her expression was painful and somewhat hysterical, “So you really killed Su Xiaohua! This is retribution, it’s all retribution. You went to prison, but you didn’t fully redeem yourself. Mother died, the company went bankrupt, father died of depression, isn’t that retribution?”
Cao Ji’an shouted with red eyes, “But I didn’t kill Su Xiaohua! She disappeared on her own!”
“I hid for a month, and couldn’t sleep peacefully for a single day. A month later, I went back to R City, went to the back of the mountains to find her, but she was gone! She didn’t die, she didn’t die at all, otherwise how do you explain her body missing?”
Cao Jiyun looked bewildered, “But didn’t you say Su Xiaohua stopped breathing?”
Cao Ji’an: “I was confused at the time, maybe I felt wrong. She might have just passed out, but because I beat her so hard, her breath was weak, so I thought she was dead and buried her hastily. It was raining that day, I didn’t bury her deep, maybe the rain washed away the soil and woke her up. It’s also possible that someone saved her.”
Cao Jiyun took two steps back, looking at Cao Ji’an with a slightly frightened expression, “Xiao’an, how can you say such things so casually. If Su Xiaohua was really just unconscious at the time, then you buried a living person!”
Cao Ji’an bit the dried meat in his hand irritably, “How would I know if she was still alive, I thought she was dead!”
Cao Jiyun: “Then when the police arrested you, why did you first tell them that you killed Su Xiaohua?”
Cao Ji’an: “Not long after I found out she was missing, the police found the severed leg and the serrated knife in the flower bed. I thought the police had also found Su Xiaohua at the time, so I said everything. But later, my father’s legal team met with me and I learned that no body was found at all, the police only found the knife and the severed leg. They told me what to say, so I overturned my previous statement, and the police and the court couldn’t do anything to me, a severed limb couldn’t prove that the person was dead.”
Cao Jiyun sat down at the dining table in a daze, silently watching Cao Ji’an chew on the dried meat one by one.
After watching for a while, she suddenly shuddered, turned her head and looked at the birthday cake on the table. There were three candles on the cake, cheap candles burned very quickly, and they were almost burned out now. The black wax liquid produced after burning flowed down the colored candles slowly, dripping onto the pure white creamy cake, like an ugly caterpillar perched on the clear porcelain.
So her brother was not just a murderer, he was worse than a murderer.
Looking at this dilapidated and narrow house, she suddenly felt a sense of desolation and sadness..
Her gaze turned back to Cao Ji’an, and Cao Jiyun noticed for the first time the old phone on the table next to him.
“Why did you say Su Hong took Su Xiaohua away?” She stood up and walked to Cao Ji’an, wanting to pick up the old phone. Before her hand could touch the old phone, Cao Ji’an preemptively put the phone in his pocket, looking guilty.
She paused and continued, “Since Su Hong took Su Xiaohua away, why didn’t you tell the police at the time?”
“It would be disadvantageous for him to say more.” Cao Ji’an smacked his lips, licked off the meat scraps on his fingers, “The lawyer told me not to say anything else, just that there was no Su Xiaohua.”
The room fell silent, only the sound of Cao Ji’an smacking his lips remained.
After a while, Cao Ji’an finished the last piece of dried meat, belched contentedly, and strode to the cake. He closed his eyes and made a wish: “I hope to find Su Xiaohua.”
After saying that, he blew out the candles that had burned to the surface of the cake, then gleefully used his fingers to scoop up a piece of cream cake and stuffed it into his mouth, “It’s sweet, sister, you should try it too, the cake is delicious.”
There were still some meat scraps at the corner of Cao Ji’an’s lips. The black-red meat pieces were stained with saliva, turning into a dark red color. At first glance, they looked somewhat like blood clots.
The inexplicable and unkind conjecture instantly made Cao Jiyun’s hair stand on end. She looked at Cao Ji’an, then at the plate of almost finished meat, and a terrible thought suddenly came to her mind.
Just the thought of it made the blood drain from her face. She didn’t even know how she walked into the kitchen, but when she came to her senses, she had already put the dried meat in a plastic bag, holding it weakly in her hand.
She stared at the dried meat for a moment, suddenly hesitating.
Should she give them to the police?
Obviously, Cao Ji’an was still hiding many things from her. The fact that he didn’t confess about Su Hong at the beginning wasn’t so simple. If the dried meat was really what she thought, would Cao Ji’an have a new charge this time? Then wouldn’t she be sending her own dear brother back to prison herself?
But if she didn’t give it to the police…
What if what her brother ate was really…
“Sister.” Cao Ji’an’s voice brought Cao Jiyun back from her internal conflict, “What are you doing?”
Cao Jiyun came to her senses, “Oh, I’m putting the meat in the fridge for you.”
Cao Ji’an stretched lazily and walked to the bedroom, “I’m tired, I’m going to bed.”
Seeing Cao Ji’an’s back, Cao Jiyun was in a daze for a moment, but finally put the dried meat in the refrigerator and went into the kitchen.
A few minutes later, she pursed her lips and walked out of the kitchen, striding to the refrigerator.
She opened the refrigerator door but was surprised when she looked inside.
The dried meat that she had just put safely in the refrigerator was now missing.
Did Cao Ji’an secretly come out again and eat the remaining jerky?
With anxiety and suspicion, Cao Jiyun closed the refrigerator.
———
Wang Tou was at the police station sorting out Xiao Hua’s case files.
He applied to his superiors for the case to be reopened because there were many doubts about the case back then. After review, he quickly obtained the right to retrial.
Although there were new clues now, the case happened too long ago, and many details were almost forgotten. Wang Tou and the middle-aged policeman were reviewing the case information detail by detail.
They were participants in the “Xiao Hua Missing Case” back then, and now they were participants in the reopened “Xiao Hua Missing Case.”
Just as the two of them were reviewing the case intensively, there was a knock on the door outside.
The middle-aged policeman went out and found the uncle from the delivery room.
The uncle held a delivery bag in his hand: “Is Wang Tou inside?”
The middle-aged policeman: “Yes, uncle, is there something for him?”
The uncle handed over the delivery bag, “This was left in the delivery room by someone else, saying it’s evidence for Wang Tou. Please give it to Wang Tou quickly, don’t delay the official business.”
Wang Tou stood up when he heard it. Only his name was written on the delivery bag.
He opened the bag with puzzlement. Inside was a transparent bag with a little flower drawn on it and several neatly cut dried meat pieces.
Wang Tou and the middle-aged policeman exchanged a glance, then Wang Tou suddenly grabbed the bag and rushed to the forensic identification department.
The security guard looked at the backs of the two leaving figures and couldn’t help but shake his head with emotion, “Ah, it’s great to be young.”
The forensic identification department includes four sections: trace examination laboratory, which can detect alcohol, drugs, and poisons, etc., the physical and chemical laboratory, which can detect footprints, fingerprints, etc., the DNA laboratory for identifying human identities, and the forensic laboratory specially responsible for autopsies.
Half a day later, the forensic identification department told them the results.
The tissues they sent were tested and identified.
The similarity between the structure and human tissues was close to 99.99%, basically confirming that it came from a human.
The tissue came from the lungs. After being air-dried in a special way, the lungs shrank more than twenty times and became the dense dried meat they saw.
As for the source of this organ, they quickly locked onto the target.
They didn’t even need to look for this person, he was lying in the morgue right now.
The owner of this organ was the deceased from R University they found a few days ago—Shen Shukuang.
As for the plastic bag, they also detected five intact fingerprints.
After fingerprint comparison, they finally identified the owner of the fingerprints.
Cao Ji’an and Cao Jiyun.
Seeing Cao Ji’an’s name appearing in front of him again, Wang Tou and the young policeman suddenly became excited.
Wang Tou slammed the table, “Let’s go and apply for a search warrant!”
Ten years ago, he let him escape, but this time he wouldn’t let him slip away from his hands again!
Su Xiaohua, where are you? What exactly happened back then? We will definitely force Cao Ji’an to tell the truth and give you justice!
