Animal Detective

Chapter 219: Interrogation

In the interrogation room, Cao Rui was still recounting what happened next.

He described how he had worked with Bai Jifei, paying for professional online trolls to paint him as a cold-blooded murderer after Bai Jifei filed the police report.

Everyone listened in silence.

Shen Xin was filled with conflicting emotions.

He was moved by Bai Jifei’s unwavering devotion to Jiang Qi.

But he couldn’t condone his actions.

He had called the police, yes, but he’d filed a false report.

He had exploited the police and wasted their resources.

’I don’t get what he was thinking,’ Shen Xin thought. ’Why distrust the police so much?’

’If you’d just filed a normal missing person report for your wife, would the police have really not investigated it properly?’

’Forget that Jiang Qi is an ALS patient. Even if she were just an ordinary person, a living, breathing person goes missing—you think the police wouldn’t do everything they could to find her?’

’Did he really have to pull a stunt like this and frame himself as a murderer?’

’Never mind all the energy we’ve wasted these past two days. Didn’t this send the investigation in the completely wrong direction from the start, wasting precious time that could have been used to find her?’

’In fact, he should have called the police immediately on the very day he found his wife missing, letting them start the search right away.’

’Instead, he dragged it out until today. A full five days have passed.’

"Who gave you the video?"

Inside the interrogation room, Chen Chao suddenly asked.

He had carefully compared it to the video posted online. It was the footage from the property management’s security camera outside Bai Jifei’s house.

So how did Cao Rui get his hands on it? Everyone involved had been at the scene that day.

"Old Bai got it. I think he also paid a hacker to find out who deleted the property management’s video. Then that guy sent the footage to me, straight to my email. I have no idea how he did it."

Cao Rui was completely honest, holding nothing back.

After he finished, seeing that Chen Chao had no more questions, he hesitated before asking, "Officer, in a situation like mine, will I have to... face consequences?"

Chen Chao looked up. "Scared?"

An embarrassed look flashed across Cao Rui’s face.

Chen Chao considered it for a moment. "Detention, at the very least."

Spreading false information and disrupting public order had to result in at least a few days of detention.

"Oh."

Cao Rui visibly let out a sigh of relief.

Bai Jifei had told him before that the worst-case scenario for his involvement would probably be detention.

Shaking his head helplessly, Cao Rui said, "Honestly, when you have a brother like that, bawling his eyes out in front of you... what was I supposed to do?"

"When I was a kid, I fell into a river, and Old Bai was the one who pulled me out. We’re brothers for life. He was practically on his knees begging me. I had to say yes."

"By the way, Officer, what’s going to happen to Old Bai? Is it just detention for him, too?"

He was still worried about Bai Jifei.

"Him?"

Chen Chao scoffed and slammed his hand on the table. "Do you two think this is some kind of game?"

Bai Jifei had filed a false report.

And there were different degrees of severity for filing a false report.

On the lighter end, you have people who get bored and decide to harass the dispatchers. That might get you a verbal warning at your doorstep and a lecture, or you might ’win’ the grand prize of a five-day detention sentence.

On the serious end, you have fabricating a major crime.

For example, if you report a robbery, a whole squad of officers is dispatched, and after half a day of investigating, they find out you were just messing around... Well, the police aren’t going to be messing around with you.

That carries criminal liability. That means jail time.

"You’d better start worrying about yourself."

Chen Chao closed the folder, stood up, and left the interrogation room.

Back in the observation room, he tossed the folder onto the table. "What a mess."

So many people collecting evidence, investigating, pulling all-nighters, analyzing, running all over the place until our legs were about to fall off.

Not to mention the parents who were worried sick, and the countless netizens just following the drama.

All just to play along with his grand performance to force his wife to show herself?

"Alright," Lv Youwei said in a heavy tone, seeing the team’s morale was low. "What’s that old saying? ’His motives may be pitiable, but we certainly can’t condone his actions.’ We’ll deal with him as the law requires."

"But let’s not forget, we still have a seriously ill patient who is missing. Five days have passed. If Jiang Qi is bent on taking her own life, I don’t need to spell out the consequences."

"So, get Bai Jifei in for interrogation immediately. Find out exactly what happened that day. And check all the surveillance footage from the surrounding area."

"An ALS patient with limited mobility couldn’t have just vanished without help. We need to do a thorough investigation of Jiang Qi’s social circle."

Sun Zhao stood up. Seeing Shen Xin and the others still staring at him, he barked, "Didn’t you hear me? Get to work!"

With that, he turned to go interrogate Bai Jifei.

Shen Xin followed him out and volunteered to take the record, wanting to hear Bai Jifei’s side of the story.

He wondered why the man had been so certain the police wouldn’t be able to find Jiang Qi that he felt he had to resort to such a drastic plan.

「In the interrogation room.」

Bai Jifei’s eyes were bloodshot from exhaustion.

Sun Zhao didn’t waste any time. He tossed Cao Rui’s statement down in front of Bai Jifei and gestured for him to read it.

The moment he saw the name, Bai Jifei understood everything.

"I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry," he said immediately, lowering his head in apology.

Sun Zhao scoffed and sat down. "Your friend is certainly loyal. He spent a pretty penny hiring those trolls for you. It’s caused a massive uproar online. Shen Xin."

Sun Zhao turned to Shen Xin to ask how many people would have seen something that had spread this widely.

Shen Xin thought for a moment. "It’s got to be in the tens of millions, at least."

"Never mind the short-video platforms. It was trending on social media, with hundreds of thousands of retweets and comments. The reach is terrifying."

"And then?"

Sun Zhao looked at Bai Jifei. "It’s past six in the evening now. A full day has gone by. Has your wife contacted us? No."

"Did you ever stop to consider whether your wife would even appreciate this? If she was hell-bent on dying, don’t you think that by wasting all these days, you might have missed the best window of opportunity to find her?"

Tens of millions of people were watching.

After it had been brewing online for a full day, Sun Zhao figured that if Jiang Qi was in hiding somewhere, she had probably already seen the news.

But she hadn’t contacted the police, which could mean she was determined to die and truly never wanted to see Bai Jifei again.

Or, it was possible that she had already ended her life at some point in the past five days.

Bai Jifei bit his lip so hard it turned white. "Of course I thought about that. But I was out of options. I’d already made up my mind: the best-case scenario is that she comes forward on her own and proves I didn’t kill her."

"If she doesn’t come out, if she chooses to die, then I don’t want to live either. You can just treat me as the murderer and execute me for all I care."

Whoa!

Shen Xin winced.

’What did the precinct ever do to you? You’re just determined to screw us over, aren’t you?’

’Execute you and be done with it, he says.’

’If you died, it would become a massive miscarriage of justice. From the top brass all the way down, who knows how many people would lose their jobs?’

Sun Zhao’s head was throbbing. He felt Cao Rui had been right about one thing: Jiang Qi’s departure had made Bai Jifei come unhinged, completely fixated on this one single, irrational idea.

"Let me ask you, where is the letter Jiang Qi left behind?"

They had searched the villa multiple times but hadn’t found any suicide note.

Bai Jifei said, "I was afraid you’d find it, so I burned it."

Sun Zhao rolled his eyes.

’The suicide note was a critical piece of evidence! It might have contained clues, and you just burned it?’

’On the one hand, the guy was brilliant—the crime scene he faked was masterfully done.’

’On the other hand, he was an absolute idiot—burning his wife’s suicide note and stubbornly insisting on this plan to force her out.’

Then Bai Jifei added, "But I took a picture of it. I uploaded it to my cloud drive."

Only then did Sun Zhao manage to rein in his anger. He had Bai Jifei write down the account and password for the drive and immediately sent someone to check the contents of the note.

Only then did he have Bai Jifei recount, in detail, everything that had happened since the day his wife disappeared.

"That morning, everything was normal. I was thinking that even though Songpu isn’t far, the round trip would still take over three hours. I asked her if I should call Ningning to come over and help look after her."

"She told me it was fine, so I..."

Sun Zhao held up a hand, interrupting Bai Jifei.

"This Ningning you mentioned, is that Wang Xin’ning?"

She was listed in his social network background check—a childhood friend of Bai Jifei’s from the same village.

Zhou Zhongyi had paid her a visit and reported that they had been in contact before the New Year and she had visited the villa, but there had been no contact since the new year began.

Bai Jifei nodded and continued, "Jiang Qi said there was no need, that she’d be fine. And if she really needed something, there was always Pudding."

"Who?"

Sun Zhao interjected again.

Bai Jifei said, "A dog we had before we opened the kennel. A Golden Retriever. He’s very smart. Sometimes if Jiang Qi needed to grab something, he could even help her get it."

Shen Xin also chimed in, noting that he hadn’t seen a Golden Retriever at the scene.

There were traces of blood at the scene, and plenty of Maltese dogs, but no Golden Retriever.

Bai Jifei didn’t say anything, his brow deeply furrowed.

A thought suddenly struck Shen Xin. With dawning realization, he asked in a low voice, "You killed him, didn’t you?"

The bloodstains in the first-floor guest bathroom had been confirmed as dog blood. A small dog like a Maltese couldn’t have produced that much.

Bai Jifei nodded.

Shen Xin shook his head slightly. ’Why take your anger out on an innocent dog?’ he thought.

Bai Jifei continued his story.

When he got home, all he found was the suicide note.

The letter was resolute. She wrote that she saw how hard he worked to take care of her and didn’t want to be a burden to him any longer.

Living was too painful for her, and she had accepted her fate.

She knew that if she stayed home, Bai Jifei would never allow her to take her own life.

So she chose to leave, to find a deserted place and wait for death to come.

She hoped Bai Jifei wouldn’t come looking for her.

"I wanted to call the police right then, but I know her," Bai Jifei said, looking up. "She’s incredibly methodical. Once she decides to do something, she thinks through every single detail until her plan is flawless."

"She must have been planning to leave for a long time. Once, before the New Year, she even asked me what I would do after she died."

"We got into a fight over it. I think that’s when she understood where I stood on the matter."

"That’s why she left in secret. I’m almost certain that even the buyer from Songpu was just someone she had hired to play a part."

"Someone helped her, but I don’t know who. Knowing how her mind works, if she wanted to disappear, I knew I would never be able to find her."

"And sure enough, when I went to property management to check the surveillance footage, both the camera recordings and the access-control logs had been completely deleted. That’s when I knew for sure that she must have been planning this for a long time."

"I had no other choice. I wracked my brain, and this was the only method I could think of to force her to come out."

At this, Bai Jifei suddenly buried his head in his hands and began to wail.

Perhaps he was anguished that even after he had gone to such lengths, his wife still hadn’t come forward to contact the police.