Justice System: I Litigate for the Whole City

Chapter 248: The Case Is Won—Is the Video Still Up?

The elevator stopped at the seventeenth floor. The doors opened a crack, and Tang Guo passed her phone out through the gap. Two photos on the screen.

Shen Zhixia didn't take it. She looked at Tang Guo's hand first—the skin was dry, that red ring around her fingernails still there, the marks she'd dug into herself on the courthouse steps during the day.

"Nine fifty-seven PM." Tang Guo pulled the door open. "The car sat there for seven minutes. Moved slow. Even backed up a stretch."

The first photo was a wide shot of the building entrance: a black sedan parked on that white no-parking line outside the access gate, nose pointed in. The second was of the license plate; then Tang Guo zoomed the first photo down to just a hand—the right rear window rolled halfway down, a wrist reaching out, a phone held sideways, camera aimed straight at the unit number plaque.

Lu Jibai looked at both photos over her shoulder and asked, "Same one from behind the courthouse?"

"Plate ending 731." Tang Guo said. "The first few digits are blurry, but those three numbers are clear."

The apartment was spotless. Two still-tagged blankets draped over the sofa back. A livestream light stood perfectly upright on the coffee table, plugged in, green light on.

"There's something else downstairs." Tang Guo said.

The three of them went down. The entrance gate swung open, the stairwell light was sound-activated, white and faintly blue. The unit number plaque was on the right-hand side of the doorway, aluminum, stamped with the complex and building numbers. There was paper stuck to it—an A4 sheet folded once, double-sided tape on all four corners, the text default Song typeface in bold, printed to fill the page:

The case is won—is the video still up?

In the upper left corner, a pale gray streak—the kind of mark a nearly empty toner cartridge leaves. No signature on the page. No date.

Shen Zhixia's hand stopped halfway, then pulled back and slipped into her coat pocket.

"Don't touch it." she said. "What I told you this afternoon still stands—photograph it, don't put your hands on it."

"I didn't." Tang Guo raised both phones, one aimed at the paper, the other displaying a stopwatch. "Everything I shoot is timestamped. This one shows the time, that one takes the shot."

Shen Zhixia stepped back to the outer edge of the stoop and studied the placement: the paper was posted at eye level, directly across from the unit entrance—whoever opened the door saw it first. She looked up and counted two dome cameras, one at each end of the corridor, one aimed at the entrance, the other at the courtyard walkway. On the no-parking line, a section of white paint had been worn cleaner than the rest, tire tracks pressed across it.

"You asked security?"

"I did." Tang Guo said. "Footage is kept thirty days. To pull it, you go through the police, or the resident fills out a form at the property office. The property manager's in at nine tomorrow morning."

Lu Jibai stood outside the no-parking line, switched off his flashlight, and looked back at the building. "To park here, you need to get through the gate. The gate reads plates. Property management has a registration list."

"Then we get both." Shen Zhixia said. "Tomorrow, when we fill out the form, ask for two things—gate entry and exit records, and parking payment. It wasn't parked here for free. It paid. And where it paid, there'll be a trace."

Tang Guo photographed the paper again, from all four corners to the full plaque. She raised her face, eyes not red, voice not hoarse: "Just so you know—I'm not moving."

"Don't rush to say that."

"I moved in at the start of August. Today's the twenty-third day." She switched off her phone screen. "I only lived at the Minsheng Road place for a month before someone posted my unit number in the group chat. This place has a gate, security, cameras—and he still comes. I move a fourth time, he follows me to the fourth place."

Shen Zhixia didn't answer.

"I counted." Tang Guo said. "As of ten-oh-five tonight, eleven mirror accounts are still up. The judgment says delete within three days. Let's see if it deletes."

"If it doesn't, that's our luck." Shen Zhixia said. "Those eleven accounts of yours—screenshot every one, make sure the URL bar is in frame, send them to me tomorrow morning. Don't repost anything. Don't fight in the comments."

[Thud. The word "delete" is written into the judgment. Paper doesn't act on its own.]

[Thud. This entry is not yet effective and will not be counted. Delete, clarify, compensate—none have landed.]

"I'm sleeping here tonight." Shen Zhixia shifted her bag to the other shoulder. "The sofa's mine again."

Tang Guo blinked, then gestured inside. "Then... I'll make noodles? I only have dried noodles and eggs."

"Noodles and eggs are plenty." Shen Zhixia glanced back at Lu Jibai. "You can go."

"I'll pull the car into the courtyard and park under that camera." he said. "I'll leave tomorrow morning."

Tang Guo didn't follow, her eyes moving between the two of them. Lu Jibai added, "This building has two cameras. The courtyard one can see the parking spots. Better inside the complex than outside on the street."

At nine in the morning, the smell of scallion oil came upstairs before anything else.

He Xiufen had already laid an A4 sheet across the desk at the Zhengping Firm and was drawing three horizontal lines with a ruler, one line per row. She wrote without looking up: "Eat first. If you calculate dates on an empty stomach, you'll get them wrong."

The noodles arrived, and Shen Zhixia spread last night's photos, videos, and the eleven mirror accounts across the corner of the desk. He Xiufen finished reading, then tapped the three lines she'd drawn with the end of her pen.

"The judgment gives you three things." she said. "Delete, clarify, compensate. You write them as three separate items. Don't lump them into one sentence. Smear all three into 'I apologize and I'll pay' and you've got no dates—and a debt with no dates is the easiest thing in the world to dodge."

Lu Jibai took the pen and added three columns after each row: When it expires / What document proves it expired / Who enforces it once it's overdue.

First row: delete. The judgment said "within three days of the date it takes effect"—same as compensation. Not a single box had started counting.

"It's blank again." Tang Guo said.

"Write 'pending effectiveness.' The next box gets filled once the date lands." Lu Jibai touched his pen to that column.

"There's only one way to collect evidence." he said. "The dumb way. Morning, noon, and night, once each, record your computer screen with a phone, and get the system clock in the recording. If they delete it, you've got what it looked like before. If they don't, you've got proof it was still up past the deadline." He paused. "If it really is still up when the day comes, go to the notary office the next morning for a single webpage preservation. Don't go every day—twelve hundred a pop, and you know what your balance looks like better than I do."

Second row: clarify. The apology statement had to run for seven consecutive days within ten days, and the draft required court review. He Xiufen said, "We can't wait for them to write it. Whatever they draft will be 'We deeply regret any inconvenience.' We draft our own today and submit it for the court's review. If they want changes, they have to state their reasons, and the opinion goes into the case file."

"Seven consecutive days." Lu Jibai said. "Miss one day and it's incomplete. Day seven is the final box—if the first six are broken, you start over from day one."

The platform column was empty. Tang Guo turned her phone around for them to see: three identical texts—"Logged, processing, please be patient"—at three different times.

"Push." Lu Jibai said. "Keep a record every time you follow up. By the third one, this becomes 'failed to take necessary measures after notification.' It's useless now, but it'll matter in a second instance or a separate case."

Third row: compensate. Fifty-five thousand four hundred, with the platform jointly liable for ten thousand of it.

"The date in this box is blank right now." Lu Jibai stopped his pen on that cell. "The judgment says within ten days of effectiveness. So it hasn't started running."

"Leave it blank, then?"

"Write the amount, write the date, write 'pending effectiveness.'" He put the characters down stroke by stroke. "An expiration date left blank is the easiest to dodge. When it takes effect, this date gets locked in. Once locked, every day past due accrues double interest for delayed performance. Day by day, that's money."

He Xiufen added one more line at the far right of the page, the shortest of all: "Fine of one hundred thousand, payable within ten days, one administrative reconsideration allowed, reconsideration does not suspend enforcement."

"This row doesn't go into Tang Guo's books." she said. "Whether Xingyao pays that hundred thousand and whether Tang Guo ever sees her fifty-five thousand are two separate tracks. But it's a timer. If they apply for reconsideration, it means they're still stalling. If they refuse to pay even the hundred thousand, then you know they've made up their minds not to recognize anything."

Tang Guo had been recording all of it with her head down. Now she looked up. "What about the fifteen days? Can they appeal?"

"Lawyer Zhao only said one thing after court yesterday: 'I'll check with my client.'" Lu Jibai said. "A notice of appeal can be filed any time within fifteen days. If it is, all three dates on this page reset. The first-instance judgment doesn't take effect—the money can't be collected, the apology doesn't have to run, the three-day delete window hasn't even started, and the fine isn't enforceable yet."

"Even if he appeals, I'm not backing down."

"Nobody's asking you to." He Xiufen pushed the noodle bowl toward her. "The soup's no good cold."

When Shen Zhixia wrote the third row, her pen ran dry. She shook it twice—nothing. Lu Jibai pulled the cap off his own pen, swapped out the one in her hand, and set the fresh one under her fingers, tip aimed at her right hand.

"How many pages did you write last night?" he asked.

"Four."

"Did you date them?"

"I did."

"Good."

Two in the afternoon, the police station.

The officer laid out the items one by one: three photographs of the same car on three different dates—July 30 in the afternoon, parked in the alley below the Zhengping Firm; August 12 at 12:09 PM, along the wall behind the courthouse; August 26 at 9:57 PM, on the no-parking line below Tang Guo's building. Plus the photo of the paper on the unit plaque, the ID numbers of both cameras, and the property office's hours.

"You can't make out the person inside in these photos." the officer said.

"Can't make out the person. Can make out the car." Shen Zhixia said. "Same plate ending, three dates, three locations. All three times, outside a place where we were conducting business."

The officer looked at the last photo the longest, then raised his head. "There's not a single vulgar word on this paper. And no signature."

"Correct."

"You know better than I do who that sentence is aimed at." He finished the receipt, tore it off, and slid it over. "Materials received. Keep the receipt. For the property office footage, fill out the form yourselves, and send me a copy when you get it."

On the way out, she called Zhou Yu. He listened fast and cut straight to the point. "Three photos and one sheet of paper—none of it stands alone. Together, it's a pattern. What you need to add is two things: the gate records for the car entering the complex, and the parking payment. Those two will pin down who was driving and who paid."

"I'm filling out the form at the property office this afternoon."

"Fill it out." Zhou Yu said. "And I'll say this now—a witness or a witness's family being followed is exactly the kind of thing we watch closely. If you come across anything like this again, photograph it first, then call 110. Don't go downstairs by yourself."

Three-thirty, the courthouse.

At the enforcement window in the litigation services hall on the first floor, a young clerk sat behind the glass. Shen Zhixia handed over the original judgment and the proof of service, then asked three questions: when could she apply for enforcement, what materials were needed, and did she have to provide the defendant's asset leads herself?

"You can't apply now." the clerk said. "Fifteen-day appeal period, through September 10. Once it expires with no appeal, we issue the certificate of effectiveness. You need that certificate to file for enforcement."

"What if they appeal?"

"Then it waits for the second instance. Enforcement only comes after the second-instance judgment."

She memorized the list of materials in silence, then took back a one-page notice: application for enforcement, original judgment, proof of service, certificate of effectiveness, proof of identity, and asset leads for the judgment debtor. The paper was freshly printed, still faintly warm.

"The asset leads field." she asked. "Does the court recognize what I provide?"

"We'll investigate what we can." the clerk said. "The more specific you are, the faster it goes. Leave it blank and we run it through the online asset search system—it just takes longer."

She went to the writing counter at the far end of the hall. When she reached the "asset leads" field, she pulled from her folder the photocopy of the relationship diagram submitted in court on August 12—the page listed only fields and dates: Taiying, Sheng'an, and Dingchang's annual reports with the same phone number and the same bank branch office; Dingchang's corporate account receiving seven transfers in three months from Taiying and Sheng'an; Sheng'an's shareholder column listing Hengyue Capital, and Hengyue Capital's legal representative column listing Chen Maolin, change date June 20.

Below the diagram she wrote one line: The above lists only public registry fields and dates, for reference in asset tracing; it is not a statement of fact.

Lu Jibai stood slightly behind her, read the line, and said only, "Make two more copies. One to file, one to keep, one for Tang Guo."

The evening wind blew through the hall entrance, rattling the notice in her hand.

She was halfway down the steps when her phone rang. The screen showed "Zhi'an."

"Out of school?" she answered.

No immediate answer from the other end. Footsteps first, then a sniff.

"Jie." Shen Zhi'an's voice was muffled, like he'd been running and was forcing his breath even. "Two people followed me to the school gate today."

Shen Zhixia stood motionless on the steps.

"Where did they start following you?" she asked.

"At the bus stop. They were behind me when I got off." he said. "One in a gray T-shirt, one wearing a cap."

"Did they talk to you?"

"No."

"Did you take photos?"

"Yeah. I turned around at the school gate. The one with the cap had his phone up, aimed right at me."

"Were they walking fast or slow?"

Shen Zhi'an paused on the other end. His voice dropped. "When I sped up, they sped up. When I slowed down, they slowed down too."