Hearing this, Lin Dongxue couldn't help feeling sad. Chen Shi said, "It seems that he likes to stay here."

"Yeah, he’s just like a child!" The old lady smiled proudly. "He can't speak but when I hear him whine, I know what he’s doing. Whether it’s someone coming or it's raining outside, I’d know. At night, when he can't sleep, I would tell him stories about Meng Jiangnu crying on the Great Wall[1], about the pony crossing the river, and the like. He’d kneel in front of me and listen very seriously... Sometimes, he reminded me of my dead son who was also loyal and honest. He went to work on a construction site and worked for a whole year, but the company didn’t pay him. The workers told him to stand atop a crane and call the reporters to expose it so that the boss would pay them. My son really went up. He climbed to the top of a crane more than 100 meters high. It was very windy that day. He climbed up but didn't climb down again...”

The old lady's tone was very calm. She seemed to have told this story many times and her soft sigh felt very helpless.

"Officers, I don't know what trouble Puppy has caused, but please be magnanimous. He’s a good boy. If he causes trouble outside, he must have his own reasons. He would never provoke others for no reason."

Chen Shi lied to her. "We just want to find him and get some information. When did he leave?"

"Last week. He hasn’t come back since."

"Aren’t you worried?"

"Worried? Of course I’m worried. When you find him, no matter what trouble he’s caused, please let me see him, okay?"

"Okay, we’ll notify you."

After leaving, the two asked the neighbors again, but the neighbors said that Puppy had returned the day before yesterday. That is, before the second case happened. It could be seen that the old lady was lying. She was deliberately protecting this "godson", but Chen Shi and Lin Dongxue didn’t go back to expose her.

Walking out of the village, Chen Shi sighed sentimentally. "Everyone has misfortunes."

"I'll contact my brother. Let's deploy an ambush around here!"

"Okay!"

Xu Xiaodong called and said that there was an important discovery, but he couldn't make it clear on the phone and asked them to come back quickly.

It turned out that Xu Xiaodong found a person near the scene of the second crime. It was Zhou Xiao’s girlfriend, Wang Ying. She didn’t appear at the time of the crime but appeared twice on the night of the 12th and 13th.

Chen Shi praised Xu Xiaodong a lot for being able to find this clue in a bunch of surveillance footage. A person who seemed to have nothing to do with the case appeared at the scene of the crime twice. This alone was worth visiting her again.

Lin Dongxue said, "Wang Ying should still be at work, right? Shall we go to the company to find her?"

Chen Shi said, "Send her a message!"

Lin Dongxue sent a message to her saying that she wanted to meet, but she didn’t reply. By the time she replied, it was already evening. Wang Ying said in a text message, "Excuse me, I’ve been working without looking at my mobile phone the whole time. I’m walking home right now."

"We’ll come and find you!"

Two hours later, the three of them went to Wang Ying’s residence. Chen Shi printed out the screens that Wang Ying appeared in on the surveillance footage in advance and straightforwardly showed it to her. "Miss Wang, how do you explain this?"

"Do I have to explain everywhere I go?" Wang Ying was a little flustered. She didn't expect the three people to visit her for this.

"Of course there’s no need to explain that, but the murder occurred where you appeared on the night of the 14th. You appeared at the scene of the murder in advance. There must be a reason for it, right?"

"What?! Who was killed...? Still failed to stop him?" Wang Ying bit her lip.

"Stop who? The Silent Man?" Chen Shi asked.

Wang Ying lowered her head in silence and only spoke after a while. "Actually, I’ve also stayed at the Rehabilitation Mental Hospital before."

This surprised the three of them. It turned out that she, Zhou Xiao, and The Silent Man all knew each other. Wang Ying continued, "In fact, Zhou Xiao came to me that night to tell me that he saw The Silent Man. He even told The Silent Man about the hospital director’s address that he had found. I was very scared. If the director was really killed, would Zhou Xiao commit the crime of instigating murder? I don’t want him to go to jail, so I wanted to stop this. I needed to tell The Silent Man that killing couldn't solve the problem. That person has already received retribution... I went there to stop him, but I didn't see him for two days. I thought he stopped. Who knew..."

"Why didn't you tell us this directly that day?" Chen Shi asked.

Wang Ying cried, covering her face. "I don’t want you to catch The Silent Man. The real bad guy is the hospital director! It’s the nurses! Every one of us suffered deeply... Two male police officers, can you excuse yourselves first? I have something to show Officer Lin."

Chen Shi and Xu Xiaodong went to another room and heard Lin Dongxue's surprised low cry through the door. "This is what the hospital director did?!"

"Yes! Now you understand why we hate him to his core."

"Old Chen and Xiaodong, you can come in now."

The two returned to the living room. Wang Ying sat sullenly holding the teacup. Recalling the past made her look sad. Lin Dongxue said, "There’s a long scar on her waist. The mental hospital took the patient’s kidneys and sold them for money."

Wang Ying said calmly, “In their admission contract, there is a line of inconspicuous fine prints. ‘If Party B is unable to provide treatment costs, they will allow Party A to collect treatment fees through labor dispatch or medical trials.’ This was a huge trap. As long as the family of us patients no longer care about us or if we have no family, the director’s subordinates would take us to the basement where they’d draw our blood and archive it. We were pigs and sheep waiting to be slaughtered. Once someone needed a kidney with a certain blood type, that person would be taken away and there would be an ugly scar on their body after they returned!"

Wang Ying’s lips trembled and tears fell into her cup. “There is no so-called professional treatment in that place. Their treatment method was to administer large doses of drugs. We ate food that seemed like sewerage water and slept on cold sheets. The cries of patients reverberated in the corridors at night. I knew a patient who had a fever after he had his kidney taken. He cried all night in the next room. The two nurses in the duty room were playing cards and laughed constantly. They heard him, but they didn’t care. The patient stopped crying in the middle of the night, and then there was no sound at all. When the day was about to dawn, I saw the two nurses carrying a single frame outside, and then the director told us that they had recovered and were discharged!" Wang Ying smiled bitterly and shook her head. "This is the only missing person I have witnessed. Many patients disappeared overnight. Because our bodies were weak to begin with, taking a kidney away would really kill us. The night I was brought back from the surgery room, I kept crying. I was so afraid that I wouldn’t survive the night. I was afraid that I’d also go ‘missing’!”

She raised her head and looked at the three with tears in her eyes. "That was hell, and the director was Satan. He held the final say there and weird things were happening there every day, but the world had already forgotten us. We just died prematurely, leaving behind a numb shell of a body that lived its days out. Until someone stood up and resisted..."

1. Chinese tale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Meng_Jiang