The 80s Female Detective's Guide to Self-Preservation [Criminal Investigation] - Chapter 30

Chapter 30

Kuang Yun sat in the interrogation chair, his hands cuffed, squirming and wincing in pain. He had clearly been given a severe thrashing. When he saw Xia Qiuyuan and Liang Guangqi walk in, tears nearly welled up in his eyes. He looked ready to lung forward and hail them as his long-lost saviors.

A low, questioning “Hmm?” came from Kuang Dan, who was standing nearby. Kuang Yun immediately froze, sitting as straight and obedient as a soldier.

Xia Qiuyuan: “…” Truly, the suppression of a bloodline is absolute.

When parents say they’ll hit you, it’s often an empty threat; but when siblings say they’ll hit you, they are usually mid-swing before the sentence is finished.

“If you had been this honest a few days ago, you wouldn’t have taken that beating,” Xia Qiuyuan said, opening her notebook. “State your reasons. We just negotiated with your school last week to let you back in. Why did you jump the fence, skip class, and run away? Where have you been hiding?”

“…” Kuang Yun bit his lip, his fingers picking at the surface of the desk. He hesitated, though it was unclear exactly what he was afraid of.

Xia Qiuyuan and Liang Guangqi had interrogated countless minors. Usually, these kids were just neglected at home or hated school—immature minds that ended up in the station for “ideological work.” Since they were children, hard tactics were off the table. If they kept their mouths shut, it was normal to get nothing out of them for a whole day. Letting them cool off in the interrogation room was often safer than letting them wander the streets and get into real trouble.

The officers waited patiently.

Kuang Dan, however, had no such patience. She sat to the side with her arms crossed, her eyelids flickering as she clicked her tongue twice. When she shifted her weight to change her sitting position, Kuang Yun flinched instinctively, trying to put as much distance between himself and his cousin as possible.

Kuang Dan snapped, “What are you dawdling for? Speak up. This is my day off, and I don’t have time to play. If you don’t answer in three seconds, I’m going to slap you!”

Kuang Yun looked miserable. “I’m a minor! You can’t just hit me whenever you want!”

“You’re just begging for it. If you don’t want to study, pack your bags and go build the borderlands. They need manual labor. You haven’t finished high school, but your literacy is enough for that.”

Kuang Dan was done with him. In her view, the family had spoiled him rotten. If they had lied about his age and sent him to the army a few years ago before the restructuring, he’d be disciplined by now.

Kuang Yun pouted, still dragging his feet. But as he saw Kuang Dan’s lips move to count to three and her hand start to rise, he blurted out, “The school is weird! I’m scared! I didn’t dare go back!”

Everyone in the room: “?”

Kuang Dan: “Is this your new excuse? Just to get out of school?”

“No… really, it’s not!” Kuang Yun scratched his head in frustration. “See? I tell the truth and you don’t believe me! If you don’t believe me, why force me to talk?”

“Then give us a legitimate reason. How ‘scary’ can a school be? Is it scarier than your combined science scores being under 150?” Kuang Dan’s blood pressure rose just thinking about the report card she found at home.

“No, not that kind of scary. It’s different!” Kuang Yun struggled to organize his thoughts, looking at Xia Qiuyuan. “I told the police at the school’s local precinct about this, but they said I was just making up excuses to skip class. But it’s true! At night, there’s a sound of chains! Like the big iron chains they use on the gates. Clang, clang, clang… coming from the first floor of the Science Building!”

Liang Guangqi tilted his chin. “Stop reading horror stories. You’re a coward who doesn’t pay attention in class. If I recall, you’re in Class 16 on the third floor. How would you know about chain sounds in the first-floor bathroom?”

“I was catching up on homework!” Kuang Yun said righteously. “I might be a bad student, but I still put effort into faking my assignments! But that’s not the point!”

“At first, I did skip because I didn’t want to be there. But since that night last semester, I’ve been trying to find the source of the noise!” Kuang Yun counted on his fingers. “Me, Leizi, and Xiaoxi stayed late for self-study. Xiaoxi had biology competition prep in the lab building. She’s the only girl from our class going, so Leizi and I told her we’d walk her home if she let us copy her homework.”

“We dropped her off around 6:00 PM. The building was empty and quiet then. But at 9:00 PM, after we finished copying, we went to pick her up. Leizi said he had to pee, so we went to the first-floor bathroom. While he was in there, the chain sound started—rustling, very quiet at first.”

Kuang Yun lowered his voice. “Quiet, but clear. Like it was right next to us. Then it sounded like someone was dragging those chains toward us. I screamed. I thought Leizi was messing with me, so I yelled at him to stop or I’d beat him when he came out.”

“Then Leizi came flying out of the stall, face white as a sheet, screaming, ‘Why the hell are you scaring me?!’ I told him I didn’t do it! I asked him why he brought chains to school! He said he didn’t. He said he felt a chill behind him and heard ghost chains in his ear. He was too scared to even finish peeing.”

Kuang Yun saw the skeptical looks on the officers’ faces and clutched his head. “Look! That same look! I told the teachers, they didn’t believe me. Leizi and I went to the police, they didn’t believe me. What else do you want from me?”

Xia Qiuyuan frowned slightly, toying with her pen. “Actually… it’s not that we don’t believe you. But have you heard of the ghost trains on the London Victorian tracks? Often, buildings create specific acoustic phenomena due to structural combinations. Could the ‘chains’ be wind or pipes?”

Kuang Yun paused. “What? What’s that? But… I took a teacher there later, and we didn’t hear anything.”

“If it’s physics, there’s a pattern,” Xia Qiuyuan said.

Kuang Yun added, “Leizi and I have been to that bathroom thirteen times since last semester. The thermometer shows that at night, the temperature there is 2 to 3 degrees lower than outside. We heard the chains twice, about a month apart. That’s not right!”

“The temperature is lower? Only there?”

“Only there.” Kuang Yun saw Xia Qiuyuan was interested and struck while the iron was hot. “At first we thought it was ghosts, but Xiaoxi thinks someone is playing tricks. We looked for info but found nothing about ‘special phenomena’ there. However, we did hear something else.”

Liang Guangqi sat up straight. His sixth sense told him something was off. “What did you hear?”

“The grandmas practicing Tai Chi in the park told us to go home early. They told Xiaoxi specifically not to go near Mount Qingmang. Four or five people have gone missing there recently, mostly girls.”

Kuang Yun whispered, “Our school is right next to the right peak of Mount Qingmang. We usually stay at the base, and the main path is guarded by security… but what if someone is climbing into the school from the other side of the mountain? It’s too dangerous! That’s why I don’t want to go!”

Kuang Dan, hearing that her brother had been wandering around looking for “phenomena” instead of studying, lost her cool and kicked him. “Have some backbone! Xiaoxi still goes! Leizi still goes! Only you have all these problems. Are you some precious young master? School is 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM—no one is making you stay until night. Your grades are so bad even a ghost would cry for you. What are you afraid of?!”

Kuang Dan figured if there were ghosts, she hoped the ancestors would just take Kuang Yun away before he lowered the family’s average IQ any further.

Xia Qiuyuan interrupted. “Have there ever been reports of hikers from Mount Qingmang getting into the school?”

“Never,” Kuang Dan answered. “I graduated from No. 7 High School too. They built it there because there was no land left in the city. It’s a protected forest. The school was built around the terrain. The main reason it’s safe is that the main peak and the side peaks are separated by a natural ravine—a valley about fifteen meters long and ten meters deep. Without a bridge, you’d be killed or crippled if you tried to cross. Most hikers see the drop and turn back.”

“So, the missing people couldn’t have come to your school,” Xia Qiuyuan mused. She asked Kuang Yun, “Besides chains and the cold, what else did you hear?”

“The sound of wheels turning!” Kuang Yun said. “Only once, during one of the two times. It was pouring rain, and the school was flooded up to our calves. Leizi and I both heard wheels splashing through water along with the chains!”

“Alright. I will investigate this,” Xia Qiuyuan said, looking at Kuang Yun. “But you have to promise me: once I clear this up, you go to class and stop skipping!”

“I promise!” Kuang Yun raised his hand. “Also… I didn’t mean to steal that bracelet yesterday…”

“Oh?”

“I had no money and I was starving. I was afraid to go home and get killed, so I thought I’d come in and taste the police station food. I was worried old people couldn’t catch me, and I was afraid young people would beat me up for no reason, so I just robbed someone near your apartment. Convenient, fast, and easy to get caught.”

Kuang Yun continued righteously, “Even though I got hit anyway, can I get one last meal before I go? I want the honey-glazed chicken wings and the sweet and sour pork with pineapple.”

Liang Guangqi: “…This is a police station, not a daycare!”

He’s actually ordering off a menu?

Xia Qiuyuan rubbed her temples. “Don’t let it happen again.” Then, she paused. “Wait, how do you know the cafeteria is serving honey chicken and sweet and sour pork today?”

Kuang Dan had already stepped out of the room to retrieve her thick tree branch, ready to serve her cousin a dish of “bamboo shoots fried with meat” (a beating).

Kuang Yun winked, unaware of the approaching doom. “Heh, last time I got caught skipping, I caught a glimpse of the meal calendar on your desk. Your station’s braised eggplant is good too, though it’s a bit too salty…”

Kuang Dan reappeared at the door, pointing the branch at him. “Kuang Yun, you calculated the menu, but did you calculate which part of the ancestral mountain you want to be buried in? Actually, don’t bother. I’ve decided for you. You’re going in the unmarked graves. You’re an embarrassment!”

Before Xia Qiuyuan or Liang Guangqi could stop them, the two were chasing each other around the room. Xia Qiuyuan, fearing collateral damage, grabbed her notebook and bolted for the door.

Let them fight, she thought. He’ll have more of an appetite for that chicken once he’s done crying.