Read Novel Full Chapter 116 : The Same Hand
Chapter 116 : The Same Hand
"March nineteenth."
Zhou Yu laid a stack of printouts sideways against the desk edge and tapped the date line at the top. "Hongyi's account. That's the day the seal card was changed."
The District Procuratorate's office faced north. An enamel mug sat baking on the radiator, a thin ring of seepage pooled on the windowsill beneath it. She didn't sit. She checked the account name first—Jiangzhou Hongyi Translation Service Co., Ltd., opened at that small bank in Chengdong, a different establishment from the Jiangzhou Bank Chengdong Branch. He'd scheduled the duplicate records for Wednesday; the pages were still warm, carrying that printer-ink smell from the edges.
"The landlord's account. Also cut off on March nineteenth."
"Xinhe took over that same day," Zhou Yu said. "Three parties changing hands in a single day—you can still call that a coincidence. One more day and you'd have to call it something else."
The pages covered the better part of a year's transactions. Before March, Hongyi's account was clean: a few deposits a month, the same amounts moving out, who paid and who received all matching up, like a translation company actually doing business. From March nineteenth onward, the amounts barely changed—the shape did. A sum coming in got scattered across the following ten days going out; a payment going out got split into seven or eight pieces. Every single one kept just under three hundred sixty thousand.
She pulled a middle page free to study it: a deposit of two hundred ninety thousand, in on March twenty-fourth, dispersed over the next eight days in nine transfers, the smallest just eight thousand.
"Money that comes in on the same day—you still recognize it when it leaves," Zhou Yu said. "Wait two more days, and you don't."
"Three hundred sixty thousand."
"Exactly fifty thousand US dollars." Zhou Yu said, "This line—Min'an Li walked it, Anyu walked it, and Hongyi walks it too. More steadily than either of them. It only moves one or two transactions a day. Never hurries."
[Thud. One sum split into ten, and ten sums are still one.]
She flipped further back. On the outgoing side, the payees were three offshore companies, registered in two jurisdictions, their names changed once a year. The purpose column read the same from top to bottom: translation service fee. She counted: seventy-one transactions in all, the arrival dates spaced out neat and even, no two crammed into the same two-day window.
"Which portion got frozen?"
"The portion tied to the case. Frozen back in September." Zhou Yu said, "At the time of the freeze, the account held six million three hundred thousand. The frozen four million two hundred thousand hasn't moved. The remaining two million one hundred thousand wasn't ringed in—as of last night, sixty percent of it has walked."
[Thud. Freeze one portion, and the rest walks itself out.]
Her hand, mid page-turn, went still.
"Of that two million one hundred thousand—how much belonged to the 1,042 households?"
"Impossible to tell." Zhou Yu said, "This account doesn't recognize people, only transactions. Once money enters Hongyi, the purpose line holds exactly four words: translation service fee. Whose twenty-four thousand, whose nineteen thousand—it all dissolves under those four words."
She didn't answer. Tang Guo's grid sheet had 105 rows, each tailed by a name and a unit number; the purpose column sat blank, unfillable.
"How long can the freeze on this account hold?"
"Six months." Zhou Yu said, "Until next March. It has to be renewed when it lapses, and if the renewal doesn't go through, it gets released—by then, that floor up on fifteen will have been cleared out long ago."
"We didn't move slow," he poured himself half a mug of water but didn't drink it. "It doesn't rush, either. It queues."
"Queues for what?"
"That's exactly what I wanted to ask you." He pointed at a spot on the page. "After last night, the account went still. Inbound stopped, outbound stopped, and the balance sits at a round number. While it moved, I understood: it was moving. Now that it's stopped, I can't figure it out."
She thought of Shi Lei's call: 9:40, every light on the fifteenth floor burning, the stairwell piled with boxes plastered in white labels, exactly like the Wanshun building that time. The man downstairs who bought scrap cardboard said the floor would be emptied by month's end.
"Waiting for the paperwork to line up," she said. "They'll clear the floor at month's end. Before moving anything, they have to square the purpose codes, the amounts, and the documents. If they can't line them up, they'd rather leave the account frozen in place."
"Two things colliding." She went on. "The floor gets cleared by month's end; the freeze runs until March. Calculated that way, they need to finish moving everything out of that floor before March. If they can't finish, they'll simply do nothing and wait for the freeze to lift."
"I've been thinking the same." He studied her for a moment, then set the mug down.
"I can pull Hongyi into the case," he said. "The paper trail's enough: sole domestic payee, running through trade in services, every transfer pressed just under the threshold, connecting cleanly to Min'an Li and Xinhe. It's not the paper trail I'm missing."
"Missing the signatory."
"Missing one piece of paper with a living person's handwritten name." He said, "The outbound remittance applications carry a stamp. A company seal. The legal representative is some twenty-eight-year-old installed in June—a figurehead, nothing to get out of him. I need that piece of paper, to pry this off the company and onto a real person. Just one."
"Someone's warned you about this account," Zhou Yu added.
"Mentioned it once."
"How?"
"Told me not to touch it with my own hands."
Zhou Yu finally lifted the mug and took a drink. "Then he was right. Don't reach for it yourself. Wait for the paperwork."
She tucked the transaction records into her bag without further questions. At the door, she looked back: "That fifteenth floor—are you watching it?"
"Watching. Not going in." Zhou Yu said, "Go in, and those boxes won't be in the building tomorrow."
Walking down, she pulled out her phone and found that name. Her thumb hovered; she deleted the half-typed message and slipped the phone back into her pocket. He'd told her not to touch this account with her own hands. She'd touched it today—through a layer of paper. What that layer of paper actually was, she hadn't figured out yet.
Downstairs at the noodle shop, scallion oil was sizzling, the aroma climbing through the cracks in the stairwell. Someone called through the door curtain—"Lao He, add an egg"—and He Xiufen answered from the stove. In the rider group chat, Ma Jianjun sent a voice message asking whether the year-end roster needed rechecking. She replied with one word: Yes.
She spread the route map she'd been drawing for over two weeks across the long table: Tang Guo's twenty-four thousand leaving the bank, weaving through Youzhu, Youjia, and Xinhe, landing in the landlord's account, cut off March nineteenth; one row up, the two shells of Min'an Li and Anyu; above that, the three photocopiers on the sixth floor of the Wanshun building, always running—Shi Lei had counted them during deliveries: nonstop from dawn to dark.
She laid the Hongyi page next to the rest, used a pencil to draw a line from Min'an Li, skirting past Hongkun, landing in Hongyi's box. Beside it, she wrote four characters: Domestic Outflow.
When she finished, she stepped back half a pace. Across the whole sheet, money set out from the hands of 1,042 households, wound through half the city, and finally crossed the border from this one box. That box had been a dead end. Now it had a name.
She remembered He Xiufen's words from before: "This is just the remainder." The 175,400 distributed to tenants' hands—on this sheet, it didn't even qualify as a remainder.
He Xiufen came in carrying noodles. She glanced at the table but didn't sit.
"How much is left in the account?"
"The frozen portion hasn't moved. Sixty percent beneath it has walked."
"The amount left hardly matters." He Xiufen set the bowl down on a corner of the table; two poached eggs nestled on top of the noodles. "What matters is whether what you saw today was money moving, or people waiting."
"People waiting."
"If they're waiting, you still have time." He Xiufen wiped her hands. "But don't forget what I told you before—this account, don't touch it with your own hands."
"I didn't touch it," she said. "It was Zhou Yu's hand."
"Your hand reaching in feels accounts. The case reaching in feels people." He Xiufen rapped the table edge. "Look at the accounts all you want. But don't go hunting the people yourself. Even if you find them, you won't know how to hold on."
She didn't answer. He Xiufen picked up the empty tray, stopped at the stairs.
"That bank column—how far have you gotten?"
"The three companies' account has hit bottom. The two shells too. The bank column has to be calculated out of the loans it handled, and once calculated, someone still has to acknowledge it."
"Then calculate." He Xiufen said, "Hongyi is the exit. The bank is the entrance. Both ends need firm numbers before the stack of paper in the middle can hold anything down." The wooden stairs creaked downward, step by step.
Listening to those footsteps, she suddenly remembered the half-sentence from the steps at 412 Wenchang Road. She pulled her hand back from the paper. What she'd touched really was paper—three pages. The accounts were over on Zhou Yu's side.
She opened the deepest drawer and drew out the transparency sheet. Faint traces were marked on the plastic—left from the last handwriting comparison. Back then, He Xiufen would only go as far as "resembles," never "is."
Two items lay spread on the windowsill. On the left: the photocopy of the Baixi Village sampling record from nine years ago, a "Shi" in the sample receipt column, the final stroke flicking upward. On the right: the bank's August 22 approval page, the top line half-eaten by a stamp, only visible through the red filter—the same character, the same flick.
She set the transparency in the middle, then took out the page she'd brought back today and turned to the last item: Hongyi's cross-border remittance application, photocopy, bottom-right "Review" field—a handwritten "Shi." Smaller than the other two, steadier, but the final stroke still flicked upward.
The three characters differed in size: the one from nine years ago was the largest, drawn inside its grid box, strokes spread wide; the approval page's was smallest, half-obscured; Hongyi's was written along the form's edge, compressed tight. But all three final strokes flicked up and right, the height of the rise off by less than half a fraction.
She moved the plastic sheet over Hongyi's field and compared it against the other two. The same character on three sheets—beneath the film, they touched at one point.
He Xiufen was standing at the doorway again, silent.
"The same hand," Shen Zhixia said.
"The same hand." He Xiufen didn't nod; she returned the four words exactly as received. "Last time, I only dared say 'resembles.' Today, you can only say 'resembles.'"
"What I'm saying is—" She stopped. She understood what He Xiufen was blocking: three sheets of paper. One was a photocopy, one only half-visible through a color filter, and one was a tracing she'd made herself. Laid before any official window, these three items amounted to nothing more than one person's word.
"What's missing?"
"The difference isn't in what your eye can see." He Xiufen nudged the bowl toward her and turned to leave. "What's missing is an original pulled from that small bank in Chengdong—account number, seal card, signature field. None of it can be a transcript. Someone needs to go in with proper authorization to retrieve it. You can't go, and this old face of mine won't carry enough weight. Let Zhou Yu's hand do it."
Upstairs fell quiet. Downstairs, He Xiufen turned the stove low; the pot lid clinked against the burner rim with a crisp sound. Shen Zhixia sat alone under the lamp, stacking the three sheets back in their original order, returning the transparency to her notebook. Finally, in the lower-right corner of the route map, she added a small line of characters:
The last missing step: the original in that small bank in Chengdong.
[Thud. The writing matches. The man doesn't yet.]