Justice System: I Litigate for the Whole City

Chapter 92 : Someone Came Asking

Cen Hong arrived at 8:40, still in her blue cloth apron, the barcode scanner tucked in her pocket. The electric scooter was locked to the plane tree in front of the noodle shop, and the first thing she did upstairs was check her watch. "I need to be back by ten. I'm the only one at the courier hub."

He Xiufen spread the two sheets of paper across the long table and read them to her line by line. When she reached the word "opening," Cen Hong took out her phone and set it on the corner of the table. "I'm recording. Every word you say, I'm recording."

"Record away." He Xiufen flipped the witness record book to today's page. "The column you signed—I already read it to you. 'I was present on the day of opening.'"

The community's female staffer had arrived even earlier than Cen Hong. She sat on a small stool by the stairwell, her notebook spread open on her knees. The smell of scallion oil drifted up from downstairs in waves. Someone shouted for extra chili. Cen Hong signed, pressed the pen cap back on. "My mom doesn't need to come?"

"Not needed," He Xiufen said.

"She asked four times last night." Cen Hong stuffed the pen back into her pocket. "First she asked if there was anything written inside. Second, what the disc looked like. Third, she told me not to repeat what she said to anyone. Last, she said if he left words but didn't leave them for me..."

She didn't finish. He Xiufen didn't push.

"...Then it means those words weren't meant for family." Cen Hong stood up. "Let's go."

The canvas bag sat beneath the long table, untouched since last night. The iron case was still wrapped in Auntie Wang's old towel, a yellow stain on one corner that wouldn't wash out. Shen Zhixia carried it downstairs in her arms, the iron edges pressing into her forearm, switching hands only when she reached the bottom. Behind her, He Xiufen counted off today's three tasks: the bank on the 22nd to submit the originals, the archive access application delivered yesterday afternoon—the unit hadn't responded yet—and first things first, opening the lock on the case. Xiao Tan had called back last night: the case was a personal effect, so the unit wouldn't send anyone, but a video recording and a signed copy had to go to the section for their files.

The shop on Xi Street had a frontage of only a room and a half. The wooden sign advertised key cutting, lock repair, and safe opening. A string of key blanks lay on the counter, and a washed-out tea mug sat beside a pair of tweezers. The owner was in his fifties, a magnifying glass hanging around his neck. When the door chime rang, he only raised his eyes a fraction.

Shen Zhixia set the iron case on the counter, still wrapped in the towel. The owner glanced at the towel, then at the case.

"I've seen this case before."

"When?"

"Back in June." He pushed the magnifying glass up his forehead. "An old woman brought it in. Said she'd lost the key as soon as she walked through the door. I asked who it belonged to; she couldn't say. Asked if her children knew about it; she said no. I told her I wouldn't do it. She carried it away, said on her way out she'd already tried two other shops. I said one more thing to her then."

"What did you say?"

"Don't touch that thing."

Cen Hong stood off to the side, the scanner on her apron swaying.

He Xiufen pushed the papers forward: household register, inventory of personal effects, custody statement. The owner turned through them slowly, page by page, and stopped partway. He looked up at Cen Hong. "Your father?"

"Yeah."

"And these two?"

"Zhengping Firm," Cen Hong said. "My mom signed. I signed. My brother wrote a note from Shenzhen."

"What's inside?"

"Don't know."

"Don't know is fine. I'll open it." He moved the tea mug aside. "Once it's open, you look yourselves. I won't touch what's inside. You go through it—I won't look."

He picked up the small brass lock, his right hand working at it with a thin wire bent into a hook. Three attempts. On the fourth, the lock cylinder let out a small click and sprang open. He walked to the doorway, turned his back to the room, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it.

Inside the case, two cut-out pieces of foam lined the bottom. Beneath them lay a hard drive. The drive core was about the size of a palm, its aluminum shell dulled, screw marks at the four corners. A white label was stuck to the side; the printed line on it had been scraped at with a blade, not cleanly, leaving a string of letters and numbers underneath. In the upper right corner, where a unit name should have been printed, there was only a blank white mark.

The community staffer held her phone up to record. Cen Hong did the same. He Xiufen read through the items one by one: time of opening, persons present, contents of case—one item: one hard drive, two foam pads, one case shell; videographers, witness, heir. After reading, she took photos: front, back, label, lock. Four people signed column by column. Shen Zhixia copied the remaining string of letters and numbers from the label into the hardcover notebook, even marking a small notation of exactly which corner the white scrape mark occupied.

[Thud. The brass lock opened. But the one inside has no keyhole.]

Cen Hong stepped outside into the shade of a tree to make a call. The voice on the other end was loud; even two steps away, half a sentence carried through: "...No writing? Then he never finished." She hung up, stood there a moment, then came back in. "My mom says take it with you. Don't leave it at our place."

Before getting in the car, He Xiufen walked over to the shop entrance and spoke to the man still standing with his back to the room: "Last time she had nothing but a lump of iron in her hands. No papers. You were right not to take it."

Leaving Xi Street, Shen Zhixia called Master Cui and asked whether anyone had come by yesterday afternoon.

"No one," Master Cui said. "Just three lines in the logbook. What day do you want to check?"

"The case is open."

Two seconds of silence on the line. "What's inside?"

"A disc."

"Disc." Master Cui seemed to roll the word around in his mouth. "Director Cen stood in front of that cabinet for half a year, saving things up, and it all went onto one disc."

"Master, keep that logbook safe."

"Locked in my drawer. Key's under the third enamel mug in the guard room. I'm the only one who knows."

Jiangzhou Electronics City, third floor: a row of glass counters. One man was repairing phones, another had a laptop disassembled into three pieces. The oily smoke of fried noodles drifted from the stairwell. One shopfront advertised "Data Recovery · Drive Opening · Forensics." Inside, a young man in his thirties stood with a motherboard still wedged between his fingers.

He took the disc and turned it over twice. "SATA. Old drive." He plugged it into a dock. A soft hum from the desk—three clicks, steady. "Drive's not damaged."

He typed a couple of command lines, clicked the mouse twice, then his hand stopped. "It's encrypted."

"What kind of encryption?"

"Full-disk." He leaned back. "Not the kind where you hang a lock on it. It's built into the drive. Without the password I can't get anything out, and if you pulled the platters and mounted them on another machine, it'd be the same story. If you want a real drive-open job, you need a cleanroom bench. That's not just popping the shell—that's a chip teardown."

"Can it be cracked?"

"Find the original machine, or the original person." He took a drink of water. "This model comes from institutional purchasing. Issued in batches. I see maybe a few a year, and they're all throwaways from office relocations."

"Has anyone brought a drive like this in to ask about it?" He Xiufen asked.

He shook his head. "An encrypted drive like this, people bring it in just to give me a look. If you want something that can stand up on paper, don't come to me. Find someone accredited—the judicial appraisal outfits. That's exactly what they do."

He Xiufen asked the price. Three hundred eighty for diagnostic testing, twelve hundred for a disk image, and after all that you'd still be staring at blank data. She still wanted a receipt, with the model number written on it. The young man hesitated, then wrote it: one line for the model, one for notes—"Full-disk encryption, unreadable."

[Thud. Three more blades tried, and still nothing cuts through.]

When they came downstairs, Cen Hong was waiting at the stairwell. She took the copy of the receipt and stuffed it into her apron pocket. She pushed her scooter forward two steps, then looked back. "That call I got at the end of June—my mom doesn't know about it. Tonight I'll tell her about all of this." She paused. "And if she can't sleep after I tell her, that's on you."

"It's on me."

Zhongshan West Road turned into a narrow lane, clotheslines strung between the walls on either side. At the end of the lane, the shopfront was even smaller, its glass bearing eight faded characters: Data Recovery, Hard Drive Opening. On the counter sat a half-disassembled cardboard box, the recipient line addressed to "Master Tong." Inside, the old shopkeeper was in his fifties, a microscope set up on his desk, tweezers lined in a row, and dust-free boxes arranged in cubbies in the cabinet.

Shen Zhixia explained why they'd come and set the papers on the corner of the counter. The old man first put on his reading glasses and examined the interface, then the screws, tapping the aluminum shell twice with a fingernail. When he flipped it over to look at the side label, his hand stopped.

He pushed the drive back and removed his glasses. "I won't take this job."

"Why not?"

"Don't want to earn that money."

"Master," He Xiufen said, stepping half a pace forward. "He passed away in June. The family has signed. What we want is something we can see."

The old man glanced at the papers in her hand but didn't take them. His fingertip hovered above the white scrape mark on the label, not quite touching it. "There was a name here. Someone scraped it off. Whoever scraped it didn't want anyone knowing whose drive this was. And you want what's inside. I took one job like this before. Didn't sleep well for six months after."

"When was that job?"

He didn't answer.

"The owner of this drive was Cen Shouye, retired from Qingyuan Testing. He's been gone for over two months." Shen Zhixia said. "For six months before he died, he went through old files every day. No one knows what he was looking for. His family still doesn't know if what he left behind was a message or not."

The old man looked up at her, then lowered his eyes and pushed the drive back toward her hand. The tea on the counter had gone cold. He tapped the desk twice with his fingers and stopped.

"This kind of thing," he said, "someone came asking about."

"When?"

"Last month." He slid the tweezers back into the rack. "Came in with a phone, showed a photo of exactly this kind of label. Asked if anyone had brought a drive like that in for recovery. I said no. Wasn't here two minutes."

"What kind of person?"

"Can't remember."

She pulled the canvas bag a little tighter against her. "Did he ask whether 'anyone had come for recovery,' or 'whether anyone had brought this particular one in for recovery'?"

The old man's hand hovered over the tweezer rack for two or three seconds.

"The photo he had," he said, "showed the scraped spot."

He Xiufen didn't ask his surname, didn't ask the shop's name. She only said, "Those five words today—we'll remember them."

At the mouth of the lane, the wind picked up, and the clothes hanging from the bamboo poles swayed. He Xiufen told her to turn the hardcover notebook to a fresh page and write line by line: 10:20 a.m., Zhongshan West Road, one data recovery shop, declined the job after inspecting the hard drive; shop stated that last month, a person came with a cellphone photo asking about a similar drive, and the photo showed the label's scraped area. Here, Shen Zhixia's pen stopped.

"Writing 'shop owner' isn't good here," He Xiufen said. "Write 'one data recovery shop.' Don't ask names."

She made the change, then closed the notebook.

She crouched by the roadside and put the hard drive back in the iron case, pressing the two foam pads back exactly as before, snapping the brass lock shut, wrapping the case back in the towel, and tucking it at the very bottom of the canvas bag. Through two layers of cloth, the iron edge pressed against her hip; it didn't shift the whole way.

The draft on her phone was still there, half a line written: The case is open today. Nothing written inside. She read it over, then deleted it character by character. He was probably at the bank right now, pushing the ten-day deadline back section by section. Today's discovery about the drive wasn't yet something she needed to ask him about.

He Xiufen walked slowly and only spoke after a stretch: "Back at the office, lock it in the old safe. Two keys—one for you, one for me."

"What about Cen Hong?"

"Tonight. She signed that column herself."

Shen Zhixia glanced back at the shop. The roll-up shutter was halfway down and frozen there, just enough to block the row of dust-free boxes in the cabinet from view.

The wind came through the lane again. Two white shirts on the clothesline pressed together, then drifted apart. He Xiufen repeated those five words without missing a syllable before walking on:

"Someone came asking."