wavenovel Chapter 436 Zhang Wei's "Suicide"
Chapter 436 Zhang Wei's "Suicide"
Zhao Hu called at around 4 a.m.
When Ling Yun answered the phone, he heard a police siren on the other end, sounding intermittently before being carried away by the wind. Zhao Hu's voice was very low, as if he were speaking through a microphone.
"President Ling, something's happened."
Ling Yun sat up, his feet in slippers, but he didn't put them on. "Speak."
"Zhang Wei is dead."
"Who? Oh? How did they die?"
"They said it was suicide. He hanged himself from a heating pipe with a shoelace in his dorm room." Zhao Hu paused, then heard the crackling of a walkie-talkie on the other end of the phone, someone shouting something, but he couldn't make it out. "The police are already at the scene; I just got downstairs."
"When was it discovered?"
"About an hour ago, the neighbor next door heard a chair fall over in his room. They thought he was drunk and breaking things again, so they didn't pay attention. Later, the old lady upstairs went out to walk her dog and saw water seeping under the door. She felt something was wrong, so she knocked on the door, but no one answered, so she called the police."
Ling Yun stood up and walked to the window. It was still dark outside, and the streetlights were still on, casting light on the empty road like a piece of cling film stretched too tightly.
Have you seen anyone?
"I saw him," Zhao Hu said. "I was at the door when they put him down. His face was purple, and his tongue—" He paused, cleared his throat, "I won't say anymore."
"Where's the suicide note?"
"There was a document on the table. The police took a picture of it and wouldn't let me touch it. But I took a closer look and saw just a few lines of text, something like 'I'm sorry to the company,' 'I'm sorry to President Ling,' 'I made a mistake myself'—it was written very sloppily, and the last few words were so shaky that I couldn't recognize them."
Lingyun pulled the curtains open a little. The streetlights outside the window flickered, went out, and then came back on.
"When did he go back?"
"I left the company at 3 p.m. The HR person said they had processed part of my resignation procedures, and the rest would be done another day. I left normally and even said goodbye to the receptionist."
Where was he between 3 PM yesterday and into the night?
"The neighbors said they heard him playing TV in his house around 7 or 8 o'clock, it sounded like the news broadcast. Then there was no more noise. Around 10 o'clock someone heard him open the door to take out the trash."
Ling Yun pulled back the curtains and turned to lean against the windowsill. "Zhao Hu, do you believe he committed suicide?"
There was at least five seconds of silence on the other end of the phone.
"I don't believe it," Zhao Hu said, "but I have no evidence right now."
"Then let's find the evidence."
Ling Yun hung up the phone and sat on the edge of the bed for a while. He looked down and saw that he was only wearing one slipper; he didn't know where the other one had been kicked off. His bare foot was on the floor, and a chill crept up from the sole.
The next morning at ten o'clock, Zhao Hu came to Ling Yun's office with a copy. He spread the copy out on the table; it contained photos of Zhang Wei's dormitory and his suicide note.
The suicide note was indeed very short, written on a lined page torn from a notebook:
"I'm sorry to the company, I'm sorry to President Ling. I made a mistake, I have no face to live anymore. Mom, I'm unfilial. Don't look for me. —Zhang Wei"
Ling Yun picked up the photos and looked at them one by one. The dormitory was small, with a bed, a wardrobe, a folding table, and two chairs. On the table was a half-empty bottle of Erguotou (a type of Chinese liquor), next to a remote control with a few sheets of paper underneath it. A small piece of broken shoelace was still hanging on the heating pipe, the other end was on the floor, and next to it was an overturned chair with a few strands of hair stuck to its legs.
"Where's the lock?"
"There were no pry marks," Zhao Hu said. "The windows were also closed and locked from the inside."
"What did the police station say?"
"Suicide has been ruled a suicide. The case is ready to be closed."
Lingyun put the photo down, picked up the copy of the suicide note, held it up to the light from the window, looked at it for a while, and then turned around.
"Look at this character '孝' (filial piety)."
Zhao Hu leaned closer. The character "孝" (filial piety) was written very large, almost twice the size of the other characters. The horizontal stroke at the top was particularly long, almost extending to the next line, as if deliberately emphasizing something.
"His hand was shaking when he wrote his suicide note," Ling Yun said. "Every word was shaking. But this word wasn't shaking."
Zhao Hu stared at the words for a few seconds, then took out his phone and took a picture of the suicide note. "I asked Wang Degui for help. He has connections in the bureau; I'll have them do the handwriting analysis."
Ling Yun folded the photocopy and put it in the drawer. "There's one more thing. What did he tell you before?"
"Yesterday afternoon in the conference room, after you gave him some water, he said something like, 'There's more than just me.'" Zhao Hu put his phone back in his pocket. "I didn't have time to ask him anything before you came in. Later, you asked me to arrange for him to stay at the guesthouse, and I was planning to talk to him again this morning."
"Did he contact anyone while he was at the guesthouse?"
"I asked the front desk, and they said no one came looking for him. But—" Zhao Hu took Zhang Wei's phone out of another pocket and put it in the evidence bag, "In the call log, he made three calls last night. One was to his hometown, but no one answered. The other two were to the same number, and the calls were short, one less than a minute and the other a little over two minutes."
Have you found the owner of this number?
"We're investigating. It's an unregistered number, and the location it belongs to is Taiwan."
Ling Yun stood up and walked to the window. The sky outside was overcast, the clouds hanging low, as if it were about to snow but hadn't yet. Someone rode past on a bicycle downstairs, the bell rang twice, and then it went silent again.
"Where did he transfer the copied files from the computer room those times?" Lingyun asked.
"We tracked them down to an overseas cloud storage service, the server was in the US. But the person had deleted the files and cleared the logs. It was all done cleanly and efficiently, not like it was done by one person."
Ling Yun turned around. "It wasn't done by one person, which means there was more than one hidden agent."
Zhao Hu rested his hands on the edge of the table, remained silent for a moment, and then said, "President Ling, why do you think he suddenly wanted to tell us everything in the conference room yesterday?"
Ling Yun did not answer. He looked out the window, where his own face was reflected in the glass, overlapping with the lights in the office behind him, half bright and half dark.
"Because he was scared," Lingyun said. "He wasn't scared of us."
"What is that?"
"It was someone from outside. He only got halfway through his sentence, the words were still in his throat, and then he died."
Zhao Hu put the evidence bag back in his pocket and turned to walk towards the door. Halfway there, he turned back, his expression as if he had something on his mind that he had been holding back for a long time.
"explain."
"There was less than half an ounce of Erguotou left in the bottle on his table. There was only one cup, with no trace of anyone else. But in the kitchen sink—" Zhao Hu looked at Ling Yun's back, "there were two bowls and two pairs of chopsticks. They were all washed."
"Understood," Lingyun said. "Go check that Taiwanese number. The sooner the better."
The door closed. Ling Yun stood by the window, watching Zhao Hu's car drive out of the parking lot below. Then he picked up his phone, found a number, stared at it for a long time, and ultimately didn't dial it.
He placed his phone on the table, screen down. It had finally started snowing outside.