Skin - Chapter 45

Chapter 45 – Searching Wu Weihan’s House

　　At four in the morning, the lights in the office building were on. All the detectives were working all night to investigate the sanatorium captivity case.

　　Before entering the building, Meng Zhao took another deep breath, forcing himself not to think about Lu Shichen’s injuries and to focus on the case.

　　Meng Zhao pushed the door and walked into the monitoring room. Ren Bin was sitting on a chair, wearing headphones, monitoring the interrogation process next door through a two-way mirror.

　　Hearing the door open, Ren Bin turned his head and took a look, then was stunned for a moment.

　　Meng Zhao’s shirt was stained with blood, and the wound on his arm had formed a blood scab. He was full of hostility, and at first glance he didn’t look like a criminal policeman, but a desperate criminal who would fight with a knife at any time.

　　”Do you want to change?” Looking at Meng Zhao’s appearance, Ren Bin felt sorry for him even though he was not convinced that Meng Zhao was the deputy captain at such a young age. “And your arm, why didn’t you bandage it in the hospital?”

　　”I forgot.” Meng Zhao walked over and looked at the interrogation room across the two-way mirror. “Who is being interrogated?”

　　”The person in charge of the sanatorium.” Ren Bin stood up, took off his headphones, and handed them to Meng Zhao, “Please sit down.”

　　”No.” Meng Zhao didn’t move. He took the headphones and looked across the table with his hands. His eyes were sharp and he turned into criminal police officer Meng Zhao again. “The person in charge of the sanatorium? Is he the owner of the sanatorium?”

　　”No, this person said he was just a hired professional manager, and he is a foreign Chinese.”

　　Meng Zhao put on headphones and listened to the conversation in the interrogation room.

　　”I really don’t know anything about the basement,” the person in charge said. He was not young and looked to be in his fifties. He looked respectable and had the demeanor of an old British gentleman. “Although that place is also inside the sanatorium, basically no one goes there. Even the gardener who takes care of the garden usually doesn’t set foot there.”

　　”You said you are just a professional manager, then who is your employer? Who hired you to be a professional manager?”

　　”Well… this sanatorium has been functioning for almost 20 years. As soon as it was built, I became a professional manager here. As for the employer, I’m not sure if the person who first found me was the employer. I’m more inclined to believe that he was just hired, similar to the headhunters today.”

　　”You’ve never met your employer, yet you’ve worked hard for him for twenty years?” The police officer on the other side obviously didn’t believe what he said. “And in these twenty years, you’ve never thought about quitting?”

　　”I really haven’t thought about quitting,” the person in charge smiled bitterly and shook his head. “I can’t think of why I should quit. The salary here is high enough, and no one has ever interfered with my work affairs. I have enough freedom to manage this sanatorium. More importantly, this employer whom I have never met does not seem to consider the profit and loss here. Sometimes it does not make money and even makes losses. At first I thought it was a charity project. I don’t think anyone would casually quit a job like this, right?”

　　”Twenty years ago?” Meng Zhao repeated in a low voice.

　　”How old was Wu Weihan twenty years ago?” Ren Bin followed his words, “and wasn’t Xu Yulin who disappeared ten years the first person to be imprisoned? Then why was it so mysterious twenty years ago? Was there someone else imprisoned before Xu Yulin?”

　　In the interrogation room, the interrogation process is still going on.

　　”Then have you ever seen Wu Jiayi and Wu Weihan, the father and son, in the sanatorium?”

　　”I have seen him,” the person in charge nodded. “Mr. Wu Jiayi’s mother lives in the sanatorium. He is a long-term customer and comes to visit his mother occasionally.”

　　”What about Wu Weihan?”

　　”Of course he would come over to visit his grandmother occasionally.”

　　Ren Bin said at this time: “I just checked the client list of the sanatorium. Wu Jiayi’s mother has indeed been living here. She was one of the first clients to move in.”

　　Meng Zhao listened to the interrogation process for a while. He observed the person in charge and made his own judgment. From his expression, the man was calm and did not look like he was lying. Either he was really unaware of what happened in the basement of the sanatorium, or, twenty years were enough time for him and Wu Jiayi to come up with a perfect excuse to deal with the truth that should be revealed one day.

　　No matter which situation it is, it is almost impossible to get the relationship between Wu Jiayi and his son and the sanatorium from this professional manager.

　　”Let’s go and check on Wu Weihan.”

　　Meng Zhao walked out of this monitoring room and went to the monitoring room of the interrogation room next door.

　　Wu Weihan, who was sitting at the interrogation table, yawned loudly and looked bored. It seemed that he did not take the policeman who was interrogating him seriously.

　　”Let me see the driver’s cell phone.” Meng Zhao stared at Wu Weihan and said to Ren Bin.

　　Ren Bin handed him the phone. Meng Zhao lowered his head and pulled up the call records.

　　As Ren Bin said on the phone, just twenty minutes before the car accident, the mobile phone received three calls from the same number. The one closest to the car accident had a call duration of four and a half minutes.

　　Meng Zhao dialed the number back, but was told the phone was turned off.

　　”The technical detectives can’t crack the number?”

　　”Yes, it is said that the number is similar to the one that was used to call Lu Yang to provide the content of the public account. Both are multi-layer encrypted numbers.”

　　”Have you tried to dial this number using Wu Weihan’s phone?”

　　”I tried it, but it showed an unfamiliar number. It seems that Wu Weihan’s phone didn’t communicate with this phone,” Ren Bin also looked at Wu Weihan across from him. “Although Wu Weihan is very suspicious now, we have no evidence to prove that the incident at the sanatorium is related to him.”

　　”Xu Yingying and Xu Yulin were both imprisoned there. This is enough to prove that the basement of the sanatorium is related to him.”

　　”Captain Meng, do you want to interrogate Wu Weihan?”

　　”If we try him without any evidence, he won’t admit it.” Meng Zhao stared at the screen of his mobile phone and continued to focus on those calls. “The more anonymous the calls are, the more it shows that there is something wrong with the content of the calls. The timing is so coincidental. These calls must be related to the car accident. As for whether the person who talked to the driver was Wu Weihan…”

　　Meng Zhao made a decision: “Apply for a search warrant, and then find a few people to go with me to Wu Weihan’s house and search it thoroughly. Since the call was made, the phone that made the call cannot have disappeared for no reason.”

　　”Okay.” Ren Bin responded and walked out quickly to call someone.

　　Meng Zhao stared at the other side of the two-way mirror. In the interrogation room, Wu Weihan yawned again.

　　He is so confident. Meng Zhao raised his two hands and clasped them together, cracking his knuckles and making a series of noises.

　　Then he took off his headphones, pushed the door and walked out.

　　•=•=•

　　At 4:30 in the morning, there were almost no vehicles on the road, and two police cars sped past one after the other.

　　Wu Weihan’s home is located in the CBD area of Baoyue District, where every inch of land is worth a lot of money. This mansion is luxuriously decorated, and every floor is shining with valuable luster. As soon as you enter the door, you can see a fish tank several meters wide next to the TV wall in the middle of the living room. At this moment, a shark with sharp fangs is swimming back and forth in the fish tank.

　　”This rich man has a really bad taste,” said a policeman nearby, “He even keeps a shark in his room…”

　　Meng Zhao walked in, looked at the elaborately decorated house in front of him, and asked Ren Bin behind him: “Are you sure that Wu Weihan had been staying here before and after the car accident?”

　　Ren Bin nodded and said, “Yes, we have sent people to the hotel across the street to keep an eye on Wu Weihan. He never left from here between two hours before the accident and when he was summoned.”

　　”Since Wu Weihan has never left this house, the phone must still be here.” Meng Zhao said, “Start searching. Search the boxes, cabinets, and all kinds of nooks and crannies. Also, check the toilet tank, the electricity meter box, and the water meter box outside the door.”

　　After Meng Zhao gave the order, all police officers immediately divided the area and carefully checked every corner of Wu Weihan’s mansion, not daring to be negligent in the slightest.

　　Everyone knew that if no evidence could be found, Wu Weihan would have to be released after the 24-hour summons. Allowing such a conscienceless demon to continue to go unpunished was the greatest blasphemy against justice and righteousness…

　　Half an hour, one hour, two hours… On the wall clock, the second hand went around and around, and time passed minute by minute.

　　More than two hours had passed, and three mobile phones had been turned out. Meng Zhao tried to make calls, but they were all Wu Weihan’s usual backup phones. There was still no clue about the target phone that dialed the anonymous number.

　　After trying Wu Weihan’s third backup phone, Meng Zhao realized that he could not go on like this. He stood up and stopped searching.

　　It seems that although time was urgent, Wu Weihan still made preparations and arrangements in advance, and the phone was not so easy to search.

　　‘24 hours.’ Meng Zhao thought of this number again. He had to mobilize all his mental and thinking power to find enough evidence to detain Wu Weihan within the added time.

　　Meng Zhao recalled the process of leading his men to search the sanatorium a few hours ago. If Wu Weihan really hid the mobile phone in a hidden place intentionally, then this place should be impossible to find by conventional means.

　　In this room, where is the least likely and most likely place to hide evidence…

　　Meng Zhao walked around the room, putting all his energy into it, his eyes quickly scanning every part of the room – the floor tiles, the TV, the wardrobe… Every time his gaze stopped at a place, he would make corresponding assumptions and eliminations in his mind.

　　Gradually, he had looked around half of the room, and suddenly, his eyes stopped on the fish tank.

　　There is a small shark over half a meter long in the fish tank. It has sharp fangs and looks ferocious and scary. It is swimming back and forth in the fish tank.

　　An idea suddenly flashed through Meng Zhao’s mind, and he asked aloud: “Has anyone searched the fish tank?”

　　”We checked the area around the fish tank,” said a police officer nearby. “We also looked around inside, but we didn’t find any place to hide a cell phone. Besides, it’s unlikely that a cell phone would be submerged in water, right?”

　　Meng Zhao looked at the fish tank. From the very beginning, the only living thing in the room was eye-catching enough. However, it was precisely because the shark was eye-catching enough that everyone would think it was just the bad taste of the rich at first, and it was easier to ignore it.

　　Now it seems that it may not be that simple. Meng Zhao approached the fish tank and looked at the shark with bared fangs swimming in it. There were also several fish bones floating around it.

　　There were a few fresh fish that had accidentally fallen into the fish tank, which had obviously been fed not long ago.

　　At this point, Wu Weihan should have already learned that the basement of the sanatorium had been exposed. How could he still have the mind to feed the fish?

　　Moreover, he fed them so hastily that the small fish fell out of the fish tank?

　　‘There must be something wrong with this fish tank!’

　　Meng Zhao stared at the bottom of the bathtub, rolled up his sleeves, grabbed the small fish that had fallen next to the fish tank and threw them into the tank. The shark immediately swam over.

　　Seeing that the shark’s attention was drawn away, he quickly plunged his bare hands into the water and touched the viewing rock. There was still a wound on his arm, and when it suddenly touched the water, the wound, which had not yet completely healed, immediately bled.

　　Perhaps stimulated by the smell of blood, the shark suddenly turned its body, opened its mouth and pounced towards Meng Zhao’s arm, and its sharp fangs instantly pierced into Meng Zhao’s arm!

　　”Captain Meng!” The person next to him heard the noise, looked at the fish tank that had been soaked in blood, and shouted in horror.

　　Meng Zhao gritted his teeth and endured the severe pain in his arm. He pushed aside all the viewing stones and quickly groped for a gap under the bathtub. He inserted four fingers into it and pulled it aside forcefully – the cell phone in the sealed bag was revealed.

　　Meng Zhao took out his cell phone and tried to shake off the shark, but the shark held on tightly. It floated to the surface along with his arm and refused to let go.

　　The people nearby immediately rushed over to help and helped Meng Zhao get rid of the ferocious shark. The shark’s sharp fangs cut a long and deep scar on Meng Zhao’s arm. Blood gushed out, and Meng Zhao’s entire right arm was covered in blood, which looked horrifying.

　　Through the sealed bag, Meng Zhao pressed and held the power button, and the screen lit up.

　　He took out the driver’s cell phone and touched the call record on the screen that occurred before the car accident.

　　”What happened?” Ren Bin rushed over from next door and saw Meng Zhao’s injured arm. “You…”

　　Before he finished speaking, the phone in Meng Zhao’s hand began to vibrate violently.

　　Ren Bin looked at what Meng Zhao was holding: “Is this the phone that he used to talk to the truck driver?”

　　”Let’s go!” Meng Zhao hung up the phone and walked towards the door with the phone in his hand. “Let’s go back and interrogate Wu Weihan.”