Justice System: I Litigate for the Whole City

Chapter 124 : The Second Water Sample

When Master Qiu turned the monitor toward her, the base moved first. The screen angled over in increments, then stopped beside her hand.

"Look for yourself."

Theirs was the only door open on this floor. At the end of the corridor hung a sign listing the scope of accepted work—the first line read "Extraction, Preservation, and Recovery of Electronic Data"—and the glass over it was coated in dust. The notary had arrived at 8:40, first verifying the two perforation seals on the evidence envelope and photographing the material, then recording the names of those present on the first line of his notebook: her, Master Qiu, one inspector. She signed as an attending party, and when she set the pen down, the sweat on her palm stuck to the corner of the page.

On the screen, the upper rows were system files, gray text, long names. One layer down sat a single folder, five characters side by side: Second Water Sample.

She didn't reach for it. He Xiufen had told her three times: today, let Master Qiu do the talking, let the notary do the recording, and never ask the same question twice.

"The image was made twice," Master Qiu said. "The two matched, so I'd put my name on it. The drive's mounted read-only, in a write-protect box. Nobody's fingers are touching this thing."

He double-clicked inside with the mouse. The folder opened. The bottom bar read: 0 items.

"There was something in here originally." He tilted the desk lamp toward the screen. "Deleted. When a file's deleted, a bit of the file header remains. I ran three different tools on it; came back garbled. The name's legible. The contents aren't."

"Were the name and the contents deleted together?"

"Don't know." He said, "The name's a door plate. The house is empty, but the sign's still nailed up."

The notary wrote in his book, stroke by stroke, the pen barely audible against the paper.

She waited until the writing stopped before she spoke.

"The name was originally on this drive."

"It was."

"Can it be altered?"

"Yes." Master Qiu said. "Names can be changed, timestamps too. I'm not vouching for what the drive says. I'll vouch for two things: this drive now contains a folder with this name; and that folder is empty."

"What about the date it was deleted?"

"Not included."

"What about the scratch on the shell?" she asked. "Last time you said it was older than the day the lock was opened."

"That scratch has nothing to do with what's inside." He unsnapped the dust-free case. "Whoever opened the shell, I don't know. I only examine the material."

"What about the unit name scraped off the label?"

"Knife, sandpaper, key—they all leave the same kind of mark." He closed the lid. "That line doesn't go in my report."

She nodded and copied the five characters into her notebook. When she reached the character for "portion," the pen tip hesitated.

She'd copied the words "water sample" many times before—from her father's hardcover notebook, from the judgment, from that newspaper article nine years ago. This time, there was a "second" in front, but nowhere on the page was there a "test report."

She still copied down that last-modified timestamp, writing it along the very edge of the page and drawing a horizontal line after it. Below the line she left blank. She didn't write "looks like," nor "is."

"Who gets to see this report?" she asked.

"Whoever holds the authorization." Master Qiu pushed the pen to the edge of the paper. "I don't recognize people. I recognize paper."

"The report will have two lines," he went on. "One: no readable data recovered from the material. Two: there is an empty folder. One more word and I'd be drawing conclusions for you—I won't do that."

"That's enough."

"The original is untouched," he said. "We worked from the image. Nothing gets written to the material." He slid two pages toward her. "One's the report, one's the handling statement. The 3,600 you paid up front wasn't fully used; here's 420 back. The invoice is made out to the party on the authorization form you submitted: the family of Cen Shouye."

She signed as handler, filed the invoice and the 420 yuan into the document envelope. The notary verified the seal strips, returned the hard drive to its original evidence envelope, applied new seal strips, signed both perforations, and assigned it Number 2. She watched him press the strip flat before closing the bag.

At 9:35, there were two knocks at the door. Cen Hong came in, still in her blue cloth apron, a barcode scanner in the pocket, hair windblown on one side.

"I won't sit," she said. "Read it."

So she read the appraisal report word for word, adding nothing. When she reached "contents empty," Cen Hong's hand wiped at her apron.

Afterward, no one in the room spoke.

"That's it, then," Cen Hong said.

"That's it."

"What my dad left was an empty name."

"Yes."

"My mom's still waiting for someone to come asking." Cen Hong looked at the evidence envelope. "Last time you said, even if it's empty, you'd return it the same way."

"It's here." She pointed out the number. "Just sealed. The drive's still with me, under his personal-effects custody arrangement—you signed for it. If you want it back, I can bring it over tomorrow."

Cen Hong thought for a moment, then shook her head.

"Keep it with you."

She reached out, her fingertips stopping half an inch from the envelope, then pulled back. She signed the receipt for the copy, pressing hard.

"She wanted to come today." Cen Hong tucked the scanner deeper into her pocket. "She had her headscarf on by eight. I wouldn't let her."

"Why?"

"If she sat here and heard you read that, she'd go home and sit by the door waiting every single day." Cen Hong said, "Better I listen alone and tell her only what she can take."

"Then tell her exactly what's on this page." She handed over the copy. "Say what you heard, nothing added, nothing taken away. That last part stays unsaid today."

Cen Hong knew what she meant and nodded.

At the door, she turned back.

"Lawyer Shen."

"Yeah."

"What if my dad got it wrong?"

"Wrong or not, he left a name." She said, "Names lead to people."

"And if the person's dead?"

"One doesn't pan out, there's the next." She wrote the firm's number on a sticky note. "If anyone comes asking, tell them to find Zhengping Firm. You remember one number, nothing else."

Cen Hong folded the note in half and slipped it into her apron pocket, next to the scanner, then headed downstairs.

[Thud. The name stayed. The thing itself didn't.]

It was past eleven when she got back to the firm. The schedule was spread across the long table, and the smell of scallion oil drifted up from downstairs. He Xiufen took the appraisal report and read it through, then read it again after a pause, her finger resting beside those five characters without touching them.

"A second one."

"The one my dad had tested was the first." She said, "That one went into the case file, and it convicted people."

"This one never even made it into a file." He Xiufen set the paper down. "But someone kept it. And whoever kept it—would they name a folder like that? You'd only call it 'second' if you'd counted a first."

"Only someone who counted would know there were two."

"Right." He Xiufen said, "Starting today, this drive gets a new designation. Strike the personal-effects line. Change it to lead physical evidence."

She turned "Separate File: Under Review" to the right page and began a new entry under "Same Origin," writing line by line: December 12, Jiangzhou Electronic Data Forensic Appraisal Institute, two findings—no readable data files detected in the material; the material contains a folder named "Second Water Sample," contents empty, original files deleted, residual file header corrupted and unreadable. No write operations performed on the original material. Envelope Number 2, double perforation seals.

After finishing the separate ledger, she added a line to her own hardcover notebook: Hard drive, one name, not a single file. After that line, as was her habit, she left a blank space, waiting to be filled in later.

When she reached the last line, He Xiufen turned the ledger back for review.

"Add one more line."

"What?"

"Material source: Qingyuan Testing Family Compound, personal-effects custody, family authorization on file, the purpose as written by the family in their own words."

She copied it down. When she finished, He Xiufen capped the pen.

"Last time I said, even nothing needs someone's signature saying it's nothing."

"Signed."

"Then the drive wasn't opened for nothing." He Xiufen glanced at the invoice again, made out to the family of Cen Shouye. "One more thing: one drive, one chain of custody, one report. Bundle them into a single file. Some day, when someone throws accusations at your desk, you can lay it all out in one go—and every item you lay out will bear someone else's signature, not yours."

"And if I lay it all out and still no one owns up?"

"Then it stays laid out." He Xiufen said, "If you can show it, you don't fear questions. If you can't, one question and you start shaking."

She closed "Separate File: Under Review," opened the drawer, and took out the Unsettled Ledger, flipping to the last page. Under Baixi Village · Shen Qian, the line still read "Attachment — one page, missing," a shade darker than last time, with a long empty space after it. Her finger drifted over the paper but didn't press down.

"Those five characters on the drive—what do they prove?"

"Someone stored something like that."

"Anything more?"

"No," she said. "A name isn't a sample."

"Remember that." He Xiufen said, "Those five characters can't go into any complaint today. If they ever do, it'll be because a case finally lets them in."

[Thud. A signpost and a letter use the same script.]

She stood the envelope upright, leaning it against the desk calendar. On today's square, "Morning, forensic appraisal institute" was written in ink that hadn't yet bled through to the next page.

"I want to find the first one."

"Where?"

"Qingyuan Testing. The person who signed the sample receipt column on that batch all those years ago."

"What do you even call that character now?"

"'Looks like.'"

"Right. A 'looks like.'" He Xiufen said, "Master Cui said the institute sent people last week to measure the doors and windows. Once measurements are done, they'll have to report the count for that building. If you go up there now and start flipping through registers, there'll be a new entry in the logbook, a new sound from the cabinet lock—and whoever wrote those characters will get word that same day."

"Then what about the third-floor cabinet?"

"The lock's in the building, the register's in the building. Neither is something you can carry out." He Xiufen said, "We can't go hunting for this name ourselves—the moment we do, someone will know we opened that drive."

[Thud. Someone else is counting this one too.]

She set her pen down. It rolled half a turn across the table and stopped at the edge of the schedule.

She took out her phone. At the top of the screen, the sent message to Lu Jibai still sat unanswered: "The testimony you owe my father—I'll wait until you're ready to give it. But the hard drive, I'm opening first." Below it, nothing.

She typed a line: Drive's open. Just one name inside. She stared at it, then deleted it character by character.

"Why not send it?" He Xiufen asked from the stove.

"He said, don't send numbers to my phone."

"What he told you not to send was that serial string." He Xiufen turned off the burner. "What you want to say—that's your business."

She set the phone face-down on the table and left it there.

From a sheet of scrap paper she cut a narrow strip and wrote out those five characters, then lifted the glass desk pad and pressed the strip beneath it. Lu Jibai's half-line of cut paper sat right beside it, its edges yellowed.

She smoothed the glass panel down. Two slips of paper lay beneath it now—one yellow, one white.