Eyes that are the same as those of evil

Chapter 221 Unexplained Motives 11
Unfortunately, there was no body or clues to the crime in the house Wang Yaohua rented.

There wasn't even any furniture; it was a bare room with a messy blanket on the single bed, and a faint stench emanated from it.

When asked, the neighbors across the hall all said they had never seen Wang Yaohua bring anyone back; he usually went out alone.

However, when asking people around Liao Wenxiang, some said they had seen Wang Yaohua in their area.

But it was impossible to tell whether he was delivering a package or knocking on Liao Wenxiang's door.

Fortunately, Tan Ming was able to find his information.

"Wang Yaohua and Liao Wenxiang are from the same place."

They're from the same hometown.

Other fellow villagers are very united when they are away from home, but he kills his fellow villagers when he is away from home.

"Wang Yaohua's life story is quite dramatic. His family owns a pharmacy, which is very close to Liao Wenxiang's family. In the village, they are considered very close neighbors, and it is said that the two families have a good relationship."

“He was 28 years old. He was two grades ahead of Liao Wenxiang in elementary school. He passed the entrance exam for the best junior high school there with outstanding scores. Back then, he was the one people called the ‘literary star’.”

“But when he was in junior high school, he got into a fight with a classmate who didn’t do well in school and hit his head. He was fine at the time, but six months later, he suddenly started to become stupid. Not only did his grades plummet, but he also started to act strangely.”

"He was taken to the hospital for a checkup, and the doctor said he had a blood clot in his brain that couldn't be surgically removed and could only be expelled slowly on its own. After that, he remained mentally impaired, and two years later, his parents had their second child."

The rest of the story is easy to guess: he gradually disappeared from the eyes of his parents and the villagers, like a discarded defective product.

Liao Wenxiang became known as the "God of Literature" and continued to excel in his studies, achieving excellent results from middle school to university.

“Normally, Wang Yaohua and Liao Wenxiang would not have any further contact,” Tan Ming analyzed. “But unexpectedly, Liao Wenxiang changed companies several times and finally came to Baima Lane, while Wang Yaohua did not inherit the family pharmacy and had no other means of making a living, so he could only work as a stock clerk and also came to the vicinity of Baima Lane. They met again.”

Tan Jia didn't quite like this seemingly fatalistic way of telling the story and asked, "So why did he kill Liao Wenxiang? After they met in Baima Lane, what happened that made him so determined to kill his childhood neighbor?"

"Is it because he resents that everyone's praise for him was transferred to Liao Wenxiang? When you can't hate everyone, most people will choose to hate the one who is easiest to bully," Xiao Chen guessed.

Tan Jia has a different view.

“Yesterday’s investigation revealed that someone had knocked on Liao Wenxiang’s door, and Liao Wenxiang pretended not to be home and did not open the door. If the murderer really is Wang Yaohua, they are clearly good neighbors, so why does Liao Wenxiang treat him this way? Something must have happened between them.”

What could it be?
“Wang Yaohua liked Liao Wenxiang, but Liao Wenxiang didn’t reciprocate?” Tan Ming said, “Although it’s a stereotype to think that a crime of passion is a crime when the murderer and the victim are a man and a woman, the frequency of crimes of passion is indeed the highest between a man and a woman.”

“If you don’t like it, you can refuse,” Tan Jia said subconsciously. “There’s no need for Liao Wenxiang to solve such a small problem by avoiding me, is there?”

Zheng Yan hummed softly.

Xiao Chen shrugged: "Team Leader Zheng is about to give you one-on-one guidance."

Zheng Yan glared at him, but the correction still had to be made, and she said in a gentle voice, "If Liao Wenxiang had your personality, she wouldn't be the one who was killed."

Tan Jiadun paused for a moment, then slowed down the kneading of the dough.

In fact, during her time receiving psychological treatment, she has been consciously avoiding thinking about problems from the perspective of the murderer.

Having nightmares about killing someone was not the only reason for her worsening psychological problems; repeatedly thinking from the perspective of the murderer and speculating on the psychology of the crime was also an important factor.

However, once she detaches herself from the case, she inevitably becomes influenced by subjective thinking when analyzing it.

Seeing her silence, Zheng Yan thought he had been too blunt and demanding. Just as he was about to say something comforting, Tan Jia looked up and said:

"But I still think that Liao Wenxiang's avoidance of meeting him was not just because she was embarrassed to refuse Wang Yaohua."

“Even though you’re home, you pretend you’re not. This has happened twice in a row. It could be because you’re annoyed and don’t want to talk to anyone, or it could be because you’re afraid.” She flattened a dough ball and stood it up as a door, giving an example: “If you’re someone who lives alone, and you hear someone knocking silently on the door without any prior arrangement, what’s your first reaction?”

Xiao Chen cooperated perfectly: "He turned around warily and looked at the doorway, wondering who it could be."

“Yes, usually they would ask who the person outside is and what they want. But Liao Wenxiang didn’t say anything until the person knocking left. This happened twice.”

"She knew who was knocking on the door, which might mean she knew very well that Wang Yaohua was capable of such a thing. Could it be that something similar had happened before?"

Zheng Yan: "You mean, Wang Yaohua also harassed Liao Wenxiang in the past."

"Yes. Perhaps out of sympathy and a bit of neighborly affection, plus not wanting to expose her job setbacks and move to Baima Lane, she couldn't tell her parents or Wang Yaohua's parents about it, and didn't want to go to the police, so she chose to pretend to be deaf and dumb and ignore the past."

"But Wang Yaohua might not be able to accept being ignored by someone again, so he deliberately waited for Liao Wenxiang to return home in the middle of the night. The two had an argument, and Wang Yaohua brutally murdered her."

"Yang Jia may just be an innocent bystander who was implicated."

Her analysis was logical and well-founded. Zheng Yan pondered for a while, then looked at her with an admiring gaze.

“I have already asked the local police station to keep an eye on the area around Wang Yaohua’s house. Once they find him, we will go to Wenqu Township to interrogate him on the spot.”

"However, we still need to continue reviewing the surveillance footage. We need to figure out exactly how he avoided the cameras to throw the bag by the river, and where he took the body. Only with a complete chain of evidence can we convict him."

Xiao Chen stood up: "I'll go ask the technicians how the investigation into locating Liao Wenxiang's phone number is going."

Tan Jia also stood up, kneading the dough figurine and said in a serious tone, "My 'bus' is waiting outside, I'm going to eat."

Tan Ming had just uttered "I..." when Zheng Yan pressed his shoulder down heavily.

"You can watch the surveillance footage with the technicians. I'll go and invite Lin Zhiyue over to help out again."

Lin Zhiyue didn't like watching surveillance footage, but in order to have enough time to enjoy some fruit after dinner with Tan Jia, he still sat in front of the computer with a blank expression.

Then a photo of Wang Yaohua was placed in front of him.

“Look, this person is very likely the murderer. He took the body away, and I don’t know where he put it. He also went to the river to throw the bag away, then went home. The next day, he went to work at the post station outside the alley as usual, and then went back to his hometown today.”

With such frequent outings, he's bound to appear in more surveillance footage, but so far the technical team has only found surveillance videos of him going to work and traveling to his hometown.

“He was likely disguised on the day of the crime,” Zheng Yan added.

Lin Zhiyue seemed oblivious to whether he was listening or not, his gaze fixed on the computer screen. The reflected light made him look even more like a cold-blooded killer than Wang Yaohua.

Zheng Yan thought it would take some time and planned to go to the trace evidence office. Unexpectedly, as soon as he walked out of the office, Lin Zhiyue said that he had found it.

He turned to Tan Jia to report: "It's him."

He was meek and mild-mannered, with a gentle voice.

Zheng Yan didn't bother to argue with his attitude and went over to take a look with Tan Jia.

It turned out to be the same person I had seen on surveillance footage before, the owner of an electric scooter that had passed by the river in the early hours of the morning.

Because there were two people sitting on it, they immediately ruled out those two as suspects.

"Two people, two murderers?" This was Tan Ming's first thought when he ran back after hearing the news.

But Tan Jia hesitated and said, "The person sitting on the back of the electric scooter looks like Liao Wenxiang's corpse."