Chapter 71: The Seed of Love (Part 1)

“Until new evidence is found, the police will not get involved again. We will investigate ourselves.” Chen Jiu said, taking out paper and pen and placing them before Chen Wu. “Now write down all the key information you know. Name, relationship to the deceased, address, contact information, and so on. I will search online to see if there is anything else to add.”

At this moment she still had a knot of anger in her heart. She could not let Chen Ning take this money again.

Half an hour later, the two of them sorted through the information. Now there were two things they needed to do.
First, find the client. Second, find a way to verify what the boyfriend had done to Xu Wei before her suicide.

“Then we will split up…” Chen Jiu flipped through the information, casually assigning tasks.

Chen Wu hurried over to hug her arm, shaking her head forcefully: “We can’t split up! We can’t split up! She will come find me. Please help me tell her this matter has nothing to do with me, don’t come find me anymore!”

“…” Chen Jiu sat up straight: “Very well, this matter is indeed difficult for you. Then from now on you must honestly follow my commands and move with me. Don’t run around on your own. Can you do that?”

Chen Wu: “Yes!”

Having not slept well for half a month, Chen Wu was already extremely haggard. Chen Jiu took a blanket and let her go to the back room to catch up on sleep, and also had Su Xiaoyu sit nearby to recite the Heart Purification Mantra for Fifth Senior Sister.

She both comforted her senior sister and exercised her junior sister’s basic skills. It was simply killing two birds with one stone.
Chen Jiu secretly thought herself a true genius.

Su Xiaoyu was quite willing as well. She obediently moved a small stool to sit beside Chen Wu. Her young, tender voice very effectively soothed Chen Wu’s little heart, and before long she fell into a beautiful sleep.

Chen Jiu returned to the counter and continued browsing news reports related to “Xu Wei, suicide.”

One news headline read “Young Woman Suspected to Have Jumped to Death Due to Depression.” It was accompanied by a blurry scene photo, pixelated, the face invisible. One could only faintly see the shocking pool of blood beneath the body. The news text was sparse. Xu, female, 26 years old, an employee of a certain company, fell to her death from the roof of her rented apartment in the early hours of a certain date. The police preliminarily ruled out homicide. The family also had no objection to the cause of death.

In the comments, someone said depression was truly terrifying. Someone said it was a pity she was so young. One comment sighed that her boyfriend cried his heart out, his love ran so deep. This comment had the highest number of likes.

Countless possibilities immediately surfaced in Chen Jiu’s mind. But before finding sufficient evidence, these possibilities should not influence her next judgment.

Hmm, now she needed more detailed information.

Thinking and thinking, Chen Jiu somewhat despairingly opened her chat window with Chen Ning. She did some mental preparation work, and finally made up her mind to send the question.

Chen Jiu: Senior Sister, on the public security side, do you have any connections?
Chen Ning: What level?

Chen Jiu’s eyes slowly widened. There were levels to choose from? Chen Ning, what kind of business have you been doing out there all these years?!

Following old rules, she honestly transferred over a consultation fee first, then said: Chen Wu encountered a tricky commission she couldn’t handle, temporarily handed it over to me. I don’t know if she revealed any information to you.

Chen Ning: This crybaby, how is she becoming more and more useless? She begged around and nobody paid her any mind, then begged to your head, simply counting on your soft heart.

Chen Jiu puzzledly touched her own chest. Am I very soft hearted?

Chen Ning continued: I know what she wants to investigate. But she hasn’t earned a single coin all these years. Was this consultation fee something you paid out of pocket for her?

Chen Jiu: Uh, you found out.
Chen Ning: Heh.

Chen Ning: Forget it, since you’re paying, I won’t waste words on useless chatter. I’ll get you the information within today.

Chen Jiu replied with an OK emoji and let out a long breath.

No good, she too must cultivate her own connections. Even if she was not skilled at socializing, but running a business with open doors, how could she not maintain her clientele?

So she listed out her connections, and was surprised to discover that the best in her first tier of connections were merely second generation rich kids. She had no proper pillars of society at all. Yu Wan, Fang Lei and the like were all second generation decorative pillows. The truly useful connections were their parents, not themselves.

Su Xiaoyu woke Chen Wu, and when she came out she saw Chen Jiu hugging her arms with a worried frown. She scooted the small stool over to Chen Jiu’s side with effort and said: “Senior Sister, are you in a bad mood? Otherwise I can recite a passage for you too.”

Chen Jiu didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She patted her head: “No need. Go play by yourself.”

That night, Chen Ning used some incredibly powerful connections to directly pull up Xu Wei’s case file from her fall.

Chen Jiu and the newly awakened Chen Wu sat together before the computer to examine it. The file was not thick, the statements brief. At 2:47 AM on a certain date, Xu Wei fell from the sixth floor rooftop and died on the spot. The forensic appraisal result was death from high fall, ruling out the possibility of homicide.
The family directly signed the confirmation document.

The file also included an interrogation record. The person being interrogated was precisely Xu Wei’s boyfriend, Zheng Kai.

Even though Chen Jiu told herself to view this so-called boyfriend who was deeply in love with Xu Wei as objectively as possible, when she saw this name, she still felt that Zheng Kai was more or less a performative personality, at least in front of the public.

In the record, Zheng Kai said that night he and Xu Wei had an argument over the phone. He hung up first. After both sides cooled down for a while, he called Xu Wei back, but could not get through.

Zheng Kai knew well his girlfriend’s condition. After an argument she was very likely to be in poor spirits. He immediately regretted it and rushed to his girlfriend’s rented place, only to find the room empty and deserted. Xu Wei was not there. At this point the fear in his heart had already reached its peak. Almost guided by intuition, he ran madly to the rooftop. At this time Xu Wei had already jumped.

His words seemed full of regret, carrying intense grief over his girlfriend’s death.

“Intuition.” Chen Jiu carefully chewed over the meaning of this word, asking: “Why intuition to go to the rooftop? If she wanted to die, wouldn’t it be more convenient to jump directly from her own room?”

Chen Wu said woodenly: “Maybe that height wouldn’t kill her. Maybe she didn’t want to cause trouble for the landlord…”

Chen Jiu felt her perspective was very humane. She nodded and said: “That is possible.”

Subsequently, Chen Jiu noticed a time detail in the record: Zheng Kai’s call to 110 was at 2:51 AM.

From Xu Wei’s fall to her body being discovered by Zheng Kai, only a few minutes passed in between. Wasn’t that a bit too efficient.

Chen Jiu had only two deductions regarding this. One, Zheng Kai was the murderer who killed his girlfriend, and he disguised it as suicide. Two, Zheng Kai truly loved his girlfriend deeply, and after the argument he was constantly paying attention to her emotional fluctuations, which allowed him to discover her fall at the first moment.

Chen Wu somewhat dared not look at the scene photos attached to the file. She would look for a while then cover her eyes for a while, saying sadly: “She must have been in so much pain… She was already mentally ill, and her boyfriend still stimulated her like this. Too much.”

Hearing this, Chen Jiu slowly raised an eyebrow.

If, knowing his girlfriend suffered from severe depression, he deliberately used words to provoke her, causing her to commit suicide, was this homicide or suicide?

However, guesses were merely guesses. She wrote down the doubts she thought of in brief notes on paper, and continued flipping through the file.

The last few pages of the file included screenshots of Xu Wei’s WeChat chat records from before her death on her phone. The time was from the evening before the incident to the early morning hours. The chat partners were her mother, her friend, and her boyfriend respectively.

In the conversations with her mother and friend, Xu Wei’s tone was relatively calm. The chat content was merely some daily trivialities and private gossip. Nothing indicated any sign of her wanting to die.

But in the conversation with her boyfriend Zheng Kai, Xu Wei’s message sending frequency was extremely high. There were many messages, her tone ranging from anxiety to breakdown, from breakdown to screaming, from screaming to despair. The last few messages were only ellipses.

Zheng Kai’s replies were roughly things like “Baby, calm down” and “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.” Such things could be interpreted as impatience, or analyzed as the saying that there are no filial children before a long sickbed. Xu Wei’s long-term depression tormented herself while also exhausting her boyfriend’s patience.

After all, Zheng Kai was also a normal person with flaws. It was impossible to maintain emotional stability every single moment and comfort his girlfriend’s emotions. Everyone had times when they were in a bad mood. He was the same.

Chen Wu looked for a while and sighed: “Looking at it this way, I think both sides are quite pitiful.”

But Chen Jiu frowned, scrolling back and forth through these few screenshots of chat records, saying: “Don’t you feel that these chat records have been edited?”

Chen Wu: “Huh? But if they were edited, wouldn’t the police check?”

“If someone deliberately helped Zheng Kai cover it up?” Chen Jiu said.

“…” Chen Wu couldn’t help but hug her own arms, feeling the temperature had suddenly dropped a lot. She trembled for a while and muttered: “I told you people are scarier than ghosts.”

After sending the case file images, Chen Ning instructed them to keep them safe and destroy them promptly after use. Then she gave another suggestion: You can also check Zheng Kai’s social media. You might find something new.

This suggestion probably counted as a freebie.

Chen Jiu smiled. She had been planning to do exactly that.

Zheng Kai’s Weibo updates stopped the day after his girlfriend’s death. The attached image was a photo of an IV drip. The caption read: These past two days have been very hard. Thank you everyone for your concern. I will slowly get through this.

Several hundred comments. All saying condolences, take care of your health, she is gone and you must live well. Most people praised him as a good man. In this era, devoted men like him were few. They hoped he would see things clearly soon.

There were even female commenters saying they were willing to wait for him to recover, and if needed, they could come over right now to take care of his health. They sincerely admired his deep affection.

Zheng Kai seemed to be inspired by something. Dragging his weak body, he liked every single comment.