Animal Detective

Chapter 130: The Timeline Doesn’t Add Up

"Then there’s a problem with this."

Ding Yuwei put down her phone. "Think about it. On the 23rd, Wang Lei was taken to the hospital. They said he’d had a fever for several days, which means he was already in the symptomatic stage."

"Let’s assume the symptoms started on the 20th. That means there was an incubation period before that. Wang Lei had a wound on his chin, which is pretty close to his head. We’ll give it a ten-day incubation period, which means he was bitten before October 10th."

"In other words, if this cat was the source of the infection, it would have already been symptomatic and contagious by October 10th. A cat’s window for transmission is only two or three days, after which it dies immediately."

"By that calculation, the cat should have been dead for about 15 days. In this weather, decomposition would be a bit slower, but it definitely wouldn’t look like this."

Judging by the state of decay, the cat in front of them had probably been dead for less than a week.

"Exactly. The timeline doesn’t add up."

Shen Xin nodded in agreement. "If this cat infected Wang Lei, it should have died a long time ago. Since it’s only been dead for a few days, there’s only one explanation: after this cat was infected, it had a longer incubation period, not 10 days."

"Today is the 27th. Assuming the cat died a week ago, then counting back another three or four days for the transmission window, the cat would have become symptomatic on the 16th. Only then would it have been contagious and able to infect Wang Lei."

"So this cat wasn’t the original source of infection. It was also infected, it just had a longer incubation period."

Zhao Shouchuan gestured for the two of them to slow down. His mind was having a little trouble keeping up.

Zhao Tianxing, however, understood perfectly. "So you’re saying there’s a third source of infection that transmitted it to both the cat and Wang Lei."

"But the problem is, there isn’t one. The dog is fine; it’s been vaccinated. Zhang Qingpeng is also fine; he even got a rabies vaccine last month. It can’t be that Wang Lei took the cat out for a walk and they were both bitten by a stray dog, right?"

"And you don’t need to walk a cat."

Shen Xin nodded. That was exactly the point.

Their eyes met. It seemed Zhao Tianxing’s intuition was right—Wang Lei’s death really was a bit strange.

Zhao Shouchuan’s head was still spinning a bit, but he understood the gist of it: there was a problem.

And he had felt something was wrong from the start.

"So what do we do now?" Zhao Shouchuan asked.

Zhao Tianxing thought for a moment. "Let’s question this Zhang Qingpeng again. We need to confirm when the cat went missing."

Shen Xin nodded, then added, "Also, what about Wang Lei’s body? The wound on his chin should still be there, right? Can we compare it to the Husky’s teeth to see if it was the one that bit him?"

"And I think we need to investigate Zhang Qingpeng. See if he had any disputes with Wang Lei."

Zhao Shouchuan immediately said, "They used to be colleagues, worked at the same media company, and then both left. Zhang Qingpeng is still working at a media company now, and I think he’s also a livestreamer, just like Wang Lei. But Wang Lei went freelance."

"As for whether they had any conflicts, that’s not clear."

Shen Xin knew about that. He only knew of Wang Lei because he made short videos and livestreamed.

He’d also blown up because of Da Mei and gained a lot of followers.

"Have you guys asked the neighbors?" Shen Xin asked.

The walls in these resettlement apartments were thin; you could hear any noise from upstairs or downstairs.

Zhao Shouchuan replied, "We did, but we only asked about the dog and Wang Lei’s schedule. We didn’t ask if the two of them had any conflicts."

They didn’t know about this situation at the time.

"I’ll go ask."

Ding Yuwei said immediately.

Zhao Tianxing said, "Then I’ll go see Zhang Qingpeng."

With that, he asked Zhao Shouchuan for Zhang Qingpeng’s phone number and hotel location.

After the two left, Shen Xin asked Zhao Shouchuan to describe Wang Lei’s daily routine while he turned on the computer in the bedroom.

The computer booted up. There was no password, and it went straight to the desktop.

It was cluttered with icons.

There were quite a few game icons, along with some common editing software used by streamers.

He didn’t see any raw footage on the desktop.

Shen Xin’s own habit was to put case files and frequently used spreadsheets all over his desktop, to the point where it was almost full.

But it was also possible that Wang Lei had a habit of storing everything in one place.

The Recycle Bin was empty.

He opened My Computer. There were three drives.

He checked the D drive and found a lot of raw footage related to his streaming and video creation.

There was also a folder named "Study Materials."

After opening it, he found it was completely empty.

Shen Xin backed out and started checking other files.

There was a lot of footage, all sorted into folders by year.

The earliest was from 2015, meaning he started this line of work back then.

Shen Xin gave it a quick look.

In 2015, he seemed to be a gaming streamer who played League of Legends.

Then, in 2016, his content became more diverse. He started doing game reviews, lifestyle vlogs, and even mukbangs. He had an account on Bilibili.

Starting this year, it looked like he had begun to focus on short-form videos. He ran several accounts at the same time, including ones for local restaurant reviews, food vlogs, gaming, and funny video compilations.

"Lao Zhao, what about his phone?" Shen Xin asked.

Zhao Shouchuan said, "He had several phones. They’ve all been given to his parents."

Shen Xin nodded. ’Looks like I’ll have to meet with his parents later.’

As he thought this, Shen Xin took out his phone and searched for the account "Wang Pao Fu."

The account was still there.

It still had 430,000 followers.

The pinned post was that viral video of Da Mei training Black Panther.

The screen-recorded apology video had been deleted by him.

Then, Shen Xin made a surprising discovery. After the incident was handled before, on September 8th, he had started uploading videos again.

The content was about "accidentally" finding a beautiful calico cat in his residential complex.

This must be the cat that died on the balcony.

Watching the video, Shen Xin realized that this cat didn’t just look like Da Mei—it was a striking resemblance.

’So Wang Lei probably couldn’t bear to let go of the traffic and popularity from Da Mei, so he managed to get a cat that looked almost identical to her.’

And you had to admit, the script he fabricated really worked. His videos were getting thousands of likes, some even tens of thousands.

The last video was posted on October 18th, which lined up with him getting sick around the 20th.

On his computer, Shen Xin also found the raw footage of this calico cat.

However, the hard drive was a bit full.

The D and E drives were both one terabyte, and the D drive was now almost completely full.

Shen Xin checked the folder sizes.

He found that something about the D drive didn’t add up.

His video footage was only over 700 GB, and the games and software also took up a lot of space, but there was still a discrepancy of nearly 100 GB.

’The "Study Materials" folder?’

Shen Xin frowned slightly. He checked the properties of the "Study Materials" folder and, sure enough, it was 87 GB.

But there was nothing inside.

It was obvious the files were hidden.

He enabled the "Show hidden files" option and took a look. Well, it really was "study materials."

Meanwhile, Zhao Shouchuan finished explaining Wang Lei’s daily schedule.

In a big city, neighbors tend to be more indifferent, so his neighbors hadn’t paid much attention to Wang Lei.

They had, however, seen him walk his dog frequently in the mornings, and sometimes at night as well.

As a streamer managing his own accounts, his work hours were very flexible, so they weren’t sure when he would go out to film videos.

But recently, he had been frequently filming in the green belt downstairs.

When he walked the dog, he usually stuck to the perimeter of the residential complex, though sometimes he would go further, to a sports park a few hundred meters away.

A lot of people from the neighborhood also walked their dogs there.

But the people from the CDC had searched the area and hadn’t found any stray dogs infected with rabies.

Just as he said that, Ding Yuwei returned.

"I found something. The resident downstairs reported that around the middle of last month—he doesn’t remember the exact date—he heard a loud argument upstairs. It was probably Wang Lei and Zhang Qingpeng who were fighting."

Zhao Shouchuan immediately said, "Then Zhang Qingpeng is looking more and more suspicious."

Shen Xin nodded.

Zhao Shouchuan continued, "The key issue is that Wang Lei died of rabies. That has nothing to do with Zhang Qingpeng."

It’s not like he was stabbed or poisoned.

The rabies virus... you can’t just get your hands on that stuff. And even if you could, it would be nearly impossible to infect a stranger with it.

You can’t just lead a rabid dog over and have it deliberately bite Wang Lei, can you?

Most importantly, after coming into contact with a rabid dog, why didn’t Wang Lei go to the hospital to get vaccinated immediately?