Animal Detective

In the observation room.

Liu Baoqing crossed his arms, his face wrinkled in thought. He asked in a low voice, "Zhang Zhi, I remember a case back in ’01, I think. Someone at the funeral home called the police, said they’d seen a ghost, that the dead had come back to life. Do you remember that one?"

Zhang Hancheng said nothing. Beside him, He Jinxiang shook his head, speechless. "I know the one," he said. "I handled that case."

Back then, He Jinxiang was still at the Lishan Branch. It was a case he personally managed.

Someone from the city funeral home reported a haunting at night.

At first, no one paid him any mind, but after he kept calling, they finally went to the scene and actually found a problem.

They staked it out for a few days. The story was that the bodies in the cold storage would be in one position before the end of the day, but after a night passed, some of them would have switched places.

It was as if the bodies got up and moved around in the middle of the night, then lay back down in the wrong spots.

Because of the "haunting," no one dared to work the night shift, so the cold storage was always locked at night.

This only seemed to confirm that the place was haunted.

The local police station suspected someone was defiling the corpses, so they contacted the branch office. He Jinxiang was the one who led the stakeout and figured out what was going on.

It was the nephew of one of the funeral home’s cold storage workers. He had secretly made a copy of the key, snuck into the cold storage at night, and was messing with the bodies.

He Jinxiang shuddered, some memory surfacing. "I can still picture the scene," he said.

They caught him in the act. When they burst in, the guy was right in the middle of it.

"He had the bodies arranged all over the place, had even assigned roles to each one. He was putting on a play."

"Don’t even get me started on that scene. It was horrifying. Qian Hao had just joined the force back then. He was so scared he had nightmares for days."

"No idea what was wrong with that kid. Probably had some psychological issues. He’d developed a strange interest in corpses. During his interrogation, he said something that I’ve never forgotten."

"He said that whenever he went into the cold storage, he’d look at the faces of the dead and feel like they were talking to him."

"As for whether it actually happened... he said no, but I’m guessing it did."

He Jinxiang grimaced and didn’t continue. He pointed to the trembling Zhang Zhanhui in the interrogation room. "So, is this guy a psycho too?"

Zhang Hancheng stared intently at Zhang Zhanhui and said in a low voice, "We’ll know if he’s a psycho after we question him."

He still planned to conduct the interrogation personally.

But just as he was about to leave, he stopped and called over Qian Zidan. "You take notes."

"You got it, sir."

Qian Zidan hurried to follow.

Inside the interrogation room.

After taking his seat, Zhang Hancheng quietly sized up Zhang Zhanhui.

He had just turned thirty this year.

His looks were unremarkable, maybe even below average. His puffy eyes, in particular, really brought him down.

On top of that, he didn’t seem to put much effort into his appearance. His medium-length hair was messy and stuck to his scalp.

His skin was also pockmarked with acne scars.

Just sitting there, he gave off an impression of someone lacking confidence, almost pathetic.

In reality, his education and job were quite good.

A top university, with a degree in the ever-popular field of computer science.

He even worked at Institute 57, a key national research institute. The pay wasn’t low; including bonuses and benefits, his annual salary couldn’t compare to the big tech companies, but it was still around 200,000.

Plus, it was a stable, official government position—a pretty prime gig.

After going through the basic procedures, Zhang Hancheng chose to start with the topic of money.

He asked Zhang Zhanhui why he had only given Li Siyu a little over two thousand yuan in virtual gifts.

At Wang Liang’s company, you had to spend over five thousand to even be considered a "whale."

Logically, spending that little money shouldn’t have led to a real-life, offline relationship with Li Siyu. So how did the two of them get together?

They had pulled the communication records.

Zhang Zhanhui’s own phone, registered under his real name, had never been used to contact Li Siyu.

The unregistered burner phone, however, showed a lot of contact.

They also obtained the WeChat records from both phones. The chats were very flirtatious, and they video-called often.

But on holidays like 520 or the Qixi Festival, he never sent her any red envelopes with money.

Combined with his bank records, there was nothing to be found in terms of financial transactions between them.

Zhang Zhanhui didn’t even dare to look up as he spoke, mumbling subserviently, "I may not have spent much in the livestream, but I gave her cash."

"Think about it. If I give her gifts on the stream, the platform takes a cut, the company takes a cut, and then she gets her commission. How much does she actually end up with?"

"Isn’t it better if I just give her the money directly?"

His tone carried a hint of self-righteous criticism, as if to say that his stacks of red bills were the only true sign of sincerity.

The reasoning was acceptable.

Zhang Hancheng asked him how much money he had given Li Siyu in total.

Zhang Zhanhui thought for a moment, then shook his head. "I didn’t keep a close count. Anyway, a lot of the money Mao Ruiqiang gave me was spent on Siyu. Things I bought for her, plus cash... I’d estimate around three or four hundred thousand."

"That’s what I told her. Well, it’s what Mao Ruiqiang taught me to say—that I work for a classified organization and my income sources could be investigated, so bank transfers are a hassle. Giving cash is best."

Qian Zidan suddenly interjected, asking how much money Mao Ruiqiang had given Zhang Zhanhui.

Zhang Hancheng shot Qian Zidan a glare and pushed the keyboard toward him, signaling for him to just stick to taking notes.

Unlike Wang Liang, Zhang Zhanhui hadn’t been on the receiving end of Qian Zidan’s methods before. He glanced at Qian Zidan and said, "Not much. All in all, maybe seven or eight hundred thousand. He’s a cheapskate."

"Just take the car, for example. I asked him to get me a car. Fine, I get that it couldn’t be in my name, I understand that. But I asked for a Panamera, and he insisted it was ’inappropriate.’"

"Said something about how it wouldn’t be good if someone saw it, and that there was nowhere to park it. That parking it over at Yuanqiao would be too conspicuous. In the end, he got me a C260."

"It’s because he’s so cheap that I’m not willing to do his dirty work. Does he really think I’m an idiot? Thinking he can buy my life for a few hundred thousand."