Read Novel Full Chapter 265: Burn a Disc
Chapter 265: Burn a Disc
Zhi'an pulled his phone from his pocket, set it on the table, paused half a second, then took it back into his palm.
"How long will it take?"
"Do it yourself." Lu Jibai slid a data cable toward his hand, then pulled a palm-sized external disc burner from the paper bag and set it in the middle of the table. "Plug it in. Find the recording. Drag it onto the disc."
Ten in the morning, October 1. They were the only three on the second floor of the Zhengping Firm. Downstairs, the roll-up shutter was raised only waist-high. He Xiufen had gone to the market early. Out on the street, someone was moving flower planters, plastic tub bottoms scraping against concrete, one drag after another.
The cable went in. The screen lit up. Zhi'an's thumb slid across it twice, then stopped.
"Found it."
"Where was it?"
"I renamed it." He turned the screen toward them slightly. "August 31. Before evening study hall."
The line was short, followed by a duration. Lu Jibai looked at it for two seconds. "The file properties show the minutes and seconds."
Zhi'an opened it and read: "One minute forty-seven seconds. Date created: August 31, 18:40."
"That's when you renamed it."
"The next morning." Zhi'an said. "So I wouldn't lose track of it later."
Lu Jibai opened the blue-covered notebook and copied both lines into the entry for that day. When he'd finished, he tapped the pen tip against the paper once, letting the ink dry before closing the cover.
"Is your voice in it?"
"No. Just him, ranting." Zhi'an dragged the volume slider halfway up, then pushed it back down. "She recorded it. She was standing at the stairwell. She didn't dare show her face."
"Then don't play it." Lu Jibai said. "Play it, and the voice comes from your room, your phone—it only raises questions. This recording only proves what he said."
"Drag it in."
The drive spun up. In that quiet room the sound seemed loud, like someone grinding teeth inside. Zhi'an watched the spinning circle, both hands tucked into his sleeves.
"Who's the disc for?"
"The police."
"Will they listen?"
"Whether they listen isn't up to us." Lu Jibai said. "The disc goes into the case file, and the paper gets one more page. Without that page, the other side can claim you sat on it for a month, waiting for your moment."
Zhi'an's jaw shifted. He said nothing.
Shen Zhixia sat at the other end of the table with her notebook open, writing down only what she saw and heard, not inserting a single word of her own. Right now she was the elder sister, the legal representative, seated on this side of the door. She did not speak for him.
The disc finished and came out hot. He pinched it by the edges between two fingers. "Burning."
"Wait for it to cool before you write." Lu Jibai pulled a permanent marker from the pencil case—black barrel, a small strip of tape wrapped around the cap. "Four things on the label: what it contains, the length, the date burned, and who burned it."
"Write my name."
"Whoever burns it writes their name."
Zhi'an lowered his head and wrote. The characters slanted up to the right. At the final stroke of "one minute forty-seven seconds," his hand stopped, and a small white spot appeared on the disc surface. He didn't wipe it away. He kept going, writing the date below: October 1.
[Thud. Whoever burns it signs it. From this day forward, this disc is no longer his to control.]
"Don't delete that recording from your phone." Lu Jibai placed the disc inside a square plastic case and pressed the lid shut twice.
"What if I did?"
"Then the only version of what happened would be whatever he says."
"If I'd wanted to delete it, I would have done it on August 31." Zhi'an shoved the phone back into his pocket and zipped it halfway.
Shen Zhixia pushed a cup of tea toward him without a word. Lu Jibai picked it up and took a sip, and when he set it back down he nudged it half an inch closer.
On the low table by the window sat He Xiufen's old printer, always switched off after use. Shen Zhixia pressed the power button. The machine hummed for half a minute before moving, and the first sheet jammed halfway through. Zhi'an went over, pried open the back cover, pulled out the wrinkled sheet, squinted at it, and tossed it into the wastebasket.
"Print three sets." she said. "If we run out of paper, I'll go downstairs."
The first thing out was the photo of the written statement. Zhi'an's handwriting sat inside the grid lines, line squeezed against line. Across the bottom ran the homeroom teacher's three characters in red pen, signed wider than the grid, cutting across the "Declarant" field. At the edge of the photo was the shadow of a finger—the sun had shifted while it was taken.
"You were standing next to her when she signed."
"Before first period. She signed, stuffed the paper into a drawer, and said, 'Noted.'" Zhi'an said. "I took the picture. She didn't stop me."
The second was the hallway. Third floor, east end, the camera mounted in the corner, lens angled down. In the lower left of the frame was a class placard, half its first character washed out by the flash—only the last one still legible. Farther up, the time sign at the end of the hall was in the frame too, the digits smeared into a blur.
"Those two things have to be in one photo, right?" Zhi'an asked.
"They just have to be in one frame." Lu Jibai said. "The frame shows where the camera is aimed, and it shows the date. If anyone later claims this camera wasn't aimed at that stairwell, they can look at the photo themselves."
The four school-uniform photos printed last, two copies of each. She squared the sheets one by one and, following the rule set on September 30, wrote in pencil on a corner of each back side: the date taken, the date printed, who printed it, how many copies. On the sixth sheet the pencil lead snapped. Lu Jibai passed her a small knife from the pencil case.
"Ten sheets total." she said, reporting the count.
"Ten." Lu Jibai answered.
Zhi'an pushed the stack into the middle of the table, then suddenly asked, "I called the police on September 1. Does that count?"
"It counts. What number did you call?"
"The local station's number. Morning. They asked my name, which school, what happened, whether anyone was hurt. They said to have the school keep an eye on it first, and to wait."
"Did they give you a receipt?"
"No. And no one ever came to the school looking for me."
"The name of the person who took the call?"
"I didn't ask."
Lu Jibai wrote a line in the blue notebook: September 1, morning—Zhi'an called the police station to report, no receipt, officer did not give a name; request that the police retrieve the September 1 report receipt record. When he'd finished, he slid the notebook in front of Shen Zhixia for her to copy into her own.
As she copied, her hand stopped on the four characters "request the police retrieve." She looked up and asked: "He reported it and no one did anything. What does that have to do with the punch he threw later?"
"The connection is all on paper." Lu Jibai stood the camera photo upright, propping it against the teacup. "On August 31 he saved that recording, submitted the written statement, photographed this camera; on September 1 he called the police. Two dates, four items. When this stack goes in, the file will say one thing: he kept going to adults."
"And the adults never picked up."
"He went looking and no one picked up—that's on them. Had he not gone looking, that would have been on him."
Zhi'an pulled his fingers back from the stack and tucked them into his sleeves.
[Thud. The missing page—let the police retrieve it themselves. A missing page goes into the file too, just in a different place.]
Shen Zhixia took a fresh kraft envelope and placed the disc and the photos inside one by one. On the cover she wrote: August 31 to September 1. Below it: one disc, one photo of the written statement, one photo of the camera, four school-uniform photos in two sets. On the next line she paused, and asked, "How do I write the missing one?"
"Write: 'September 1 report receipt record—request police retrieve.'" Lu Jibai said. "Make clear it's a request for them to pull it, not that you don't have it."
She wrote it as instructed, then folded the envelope flap once and pressed it under the table corner.
Rain fell in the evening, and the alley gleamed wet. On the first day of the holiday, the candied-chestnut seller had set up his iron wok early, and the smell of caramelized sugar rode up on the exhaust fan. The shop downstairs was full. He Xiufen stayed down there the whole time, apron still tied, sleeves rolled above her elbows.
At seven, she carried an empty basin up to the second floor, sweat plastering the hair at her forehead to one side. When she saw the kraft envelope, the plastic case, and the stack of photos laid out on the long table, she set the basin down and picked up the disc first, holding it under the light to examine the back.
"Who wrote these characters?"
"Me." Zhi'an said.
"Slanted."
Zhi'an's shoulders tensed.
"Slanted is good." He Xiufen flipped the disc over and gave the case a little shake. "If you'd finished it and gotten someone else to write the label for you, that's what would look bad. Those papers you put your fingerprint on—every one of them is in your own handwriting."
She sat down and spread the contents out in front of her, wider than they'd had them. She touched the photo of the written statement with a finger, then the camera photo, then the four uniform photos, and finally she stopped on the disc.
"This isn't a prequel to a fight." She pressed her palm against the table. "This is the road he walked, looking for adults. School, teacher, security office, police station—level by level, and level by level no one caught him. By the night of September 19, he was the only one left standing in that alley."
Downstairs someone shouted, "Auntie He, extra noodles," and she called back toward the stairwell, "Coming," without moving.
"So this stack can't just be dropped in one bundle and left at that." She arranged the four items in a row. "One thing right after the next, the dates moving forward. Anyone who reads it can see which day he started looking."
"We don't have the September 1 report receipt record." Shen Zhixia said.
"Then let the police pull it." He Xiufen said. "What we want isn't to investigate on his behalf—it's to make sure every single one of his attempts is on paper."
She pulled one set of the school-uniform photos out and pushed it back toward Shen Zhixia. "This set goes in your envelope. The other stays at the firm. Having them to look at and having them to submit are two different things. Don't mix them."
"Xu Qing said something about that too." Shen Zhixia said. "She said it's in the file."
"It's in the file, but we can't see it and we can't flip through it." Lu Jibai said. "Her words are on somebody else's paper now."
"So what's still missing?"
Lu Jibai stood the disc upright against the cup, directly facing the lamp on the desk.
"A second pair of eyes." he said. "This stack only proves that he kept looking for adults until that night. It doesn't prove those few seconds in the alley. Until now, those few seconds are only his word."
"There was another person in the alley." Zhi'an raised his head. "The one in the blue shirt. He grabbed me from behind."
"What he says is also his own account. A witness for the victim's side—we can't approach him, and even if we did, it wouldn't hold." Lu Jibai said. "We need someone with no connection to any of it."
He Xiufen pushed her glasses up. "There's a fried skewer stall diagonally across from the school's back gate. The owner installed his own camera, aimed at the alley entrance. The person they identified on September 26 most likely came from that footage."
"That camera." Lu Jibai said. "The police probably copied from it on the 20th. Whether the owner kept a copy himself, we'll have to ask to his face."
"Then go." He Xiufen said.
"Day after tomorrow." Lu Jibai said. "Nine-thirty, when he's setting up. Director He and I will go together. We'll bring our practice certificates and a firm letter. We'll write the interview record one sheet at a time: only what he saw, not what he thinks."
"What if he won't talk?" Zhi'an asked.
"That's a finding too." Lu Jibai said. "If he won't talk, I'll write down that he refused. Put it on paper, with the date and his name. Then no one can ever say we didn't try to find him."
"Should we bring something to record audio?" Shen Zhixia asked.
"No." He Xiufen said. "The man's got a hot oil wok going. You put a recording device on the table, and he won't tell you one honest word. We want him to write. We want his own signature. We want his own fingerprint."
Shen Zhixia folded the kraft envelope's flap a second time and pressed the crease, leaving a faint print of her fingertip on the paper.
"What about me?" she asked.
"You stay at the firm and keep an eye on this envelope." He Xiufen said. "Where it goes, who touches it—you have to be able to account for it."
"Day after tomorrow." she said. "Nine-thirty."
Zhi'an pressed the phone through his pocket, and a small patch of screen glowed beneath the fabric, then went dark.
The wok downstairs clanged again, and the exhaust fan's roar rose over everything. He Xiufen stood to go down. At the stairwell she turned back.
"Don't leave the disc by the window. It'll get sun."