A real killer playing a villain; the guy surnamed Zhen in Detective, run!

The iron door to the interrogation room was pushed open, and Lu Yuan stepped out, pausing for a moment.

On both sides of the corridor, a dozen or so criminal police officers stood in two rows along the wall.

Cui Lei leaned against the wall, clutching the walkie-talkie so tightly that the vein in his thumb was taut. Forensic pathologist Lao Li took off his gloves and held them in his palm, his mouth slightly open, forgetting to close it. Lao Qi stood at the far end, a half-smoked cigarette dangling between his fingers, shreds dripping from the broken end.

No one spoke, no one moved.

All eyes were fixed on Lu Yuan, filled with fear, a pure, deep-seated fear.

They had just watched from behind the monitor screen as a highly intelligent serial killer, who had spent thirty years building a psychological fortress, was torn to pieces by a few words from this young man in a reflective vest.

Lu Yuan didn't react to these stares. He walked up to Jiang Yan and pointed to the clock at the end of the corridor.

"Captain Jiang, the man has been identified. It's 50,000 yuan in tax-free cash. Please get it done quickly."

In the interrogation room, the pens of the two recorders were practically smoking.

Lin Qinghui, curled up in a chair, spoke haltingly, detailing the second and third locations where the bodies were disposed of: the underground drainage well of the old cold storage facility and the extension of the No. 3 culvert at the cotton mill.

Jiang Yan stood at the corner of the corridor, picked up her phone, and made a call.

"Finance? My name is Jiang Yan. Special approval channel for unofficial informants, 50,000 yuan in cash, yes, tonight. Case number 202X-South Suburbs-0719... Yes, urgent."

The person on the other end of the phone asked something, and Jiang Yan gritted her teeth and said, "I guarantee it with my police badge number. If anything happens, come find me."

After hanging up the phone, she rubbed the back of her hand against the seam of her pants. Her palms were sweaty.

---

When the bureau chief arrived, his tie wasn't even straight.

Without wasting any words, Lao Qi immediately pulled up the surveillance footage from the latter half of the interrogation room.

The bureau chief sat in his chair, his hands on the armrests, and looked from beginning to end.

In the final scene, Lin Qinghui slumped down, clutched his head, and finally buried himself in the chair.

No one in the meeting room was drinking water.

After watching the video, the bureau chief pressed his palm on the table for a long time. "Archive this video."

He looked up at everyone in the task force.

"Top Secret. Internally kept by core members. Not to be circulated outside, not to be copied, and not to be accessed by ordinary files in any form."

Old Qi nodded.

The bureau chief added, "Lu Yuan's name does not appear in the official report. All leads are included in the comprehensive analysis results of the Criminal Investigation Brigade."

No one objected.

If this kind of thing gets out, public opinion will go crazy, and the system itself will go crazy.

A person who can destroy the psychological fortress of a highly intelligent antisocial personality in minutes cannot be simply described as an "informant" anywhere.

---

After the door closed, only Lao Qi and Cui Lei remained in the conference room.

Cui Lei dragged the video back to the point before Lu Yuan spoke—the chair was leaning forward, the reflective vest was crooked under the light, and the thermos was placed on the corner of the table.

The people in the picture look harmless.

However, the temperature in the interrogation room changed the moment he uttered his first words.

"This..." Cui Lei touched the back of his neck, "Which interrogation system did he use? Cognitive pressure? Emotional outburst? Or some variant of psychological warfare?"

Old Qi took off his glasses. The temples were slightly deformed from being gripped so tightly in his hand.

"Neither."

Cui Lei turned to look at him.

Old Qi stared at Lu Yuan's expressionless face on the screen.

"What's the premise of all the interrogation psychology techniques taught in police academies? It's that the interrogator is using technical means to break down the suspect's defenses. Do you understand what 'technique' means? It's a tool."

He placed his glasses on the table.

"He wasn't using tools. He went directly into Lin Qinghui's mental world and blew up the load-bearing wall from the inside."

Cui Lei's Adam's apple bobbed.

"This level of absolute dominance cannot be trained. To put it bluntly, his mental foundation, with its accumulated experiences of death and violent threshold, has reached a point where a serial killer becomes a frightened little animal in his presence."

Old Qi's voice sounded a little unsteady.

"Just think about it, what kind of environment and how many years would it take to create something like this?"

Cui Lei didn't respond.

On the whiteboard, Lu Yuan's name was circled three times in red.

---

Duty room.

Lu Yuan sat on a metal bench, a thermos beside him. Jiang Yan emerged from the stairwell, carrying a brown paper bag.

In the lobby, several veteran detectives from the task force, who were wrapping up the case, sat scattered around. Some were pretending to flip through case files, while others were drinking water from paper cups, their movements a beat slow.

Every glance from the corner of their eye was fixed on Lu Yuan.

Jiang Yan handed the paper bag over.

Lu Yuan took it, his slender fingers pinching the seal and tearing it open, his fingertips rubbing against the side of the banknotes. Five stacks, one hundred banknotes per stack, the thickness and feel were correct.

He pinched the seal back on and patted the paper bag with satisfaction.

Then I looked up. The clock on the wall—8:52.

Lu Yuan's expression changed. He ripped off his reflective vest, crumpled it into a ball, and shoved it at the junior officer on duty next to him.

He grabbed the thermos with his left hand, gripped the brown paper bag tightly with his right, and sprang up from the metal chair.

"Cat trees are on sale at 9 AM! If you're late, you won't even get the base coat!"

He had already reached the door. Before the automatic glass door in the lobby could even register him, he squeezed through the crack, the wind whipping up the sign-in sheet on the duty desk and flipping it two pages.

Jiang Yan stood in the center of the hall, watching the glass door sway back and forth even after Lu Yuan disappeared.

Her mind automatically recalled the key passage from Lao Xu's film review—

"He used the most subtle and down-to-earth sensory details from the everyday life of ordinary people to gradually pull his consciousness back from the bottomless abyss of the character."

Advanced anchor point.

In that interrogation just now, the mental resources Lu Yuan mobilized were enough to destroy the psychological structure of any normal person. He needs an extremely strong "anchor" to hold himself back.

The six-fold cat tree is made of that anchor rope.

Old Qi walked over to her with a paper cup, and the two of them stared at the glass door together.

"Did he go buy a cat tree?"

"Um."

Old Qi poured the now-cold tea from the paper cup into the trash can.

Cui Lei poked his head out from the stairwell, about to say something, but then withdrew it.

The young police officer on duty, wearing a reflective vest, looked at Lao Qi on his left, Jiang Yan on his right, and then at the empty parking lot outside the automatic door.

He decided not to write his duty log tonight. No one would believe him anyway.