[Cloud City · Major Crimes Unit Office]
He Jinsong's closure report was two pages long.
Yin Wuwang looked at the document on the desk. Every piece of verified evidence was listed in neat order—convenience store surveillance, external traffic camera route comparisons, purchase receipts, walking trajectory toward the residential district. Every single line pointed to the same conclusion: after leaving the back alley at 10:35 PM, He Jinsong never went back.
Two pages. One suspect, from emergence to elimination, ultimately condensed into two pages of paper.
Xie Qingyan stood before the whiteboard, using a red marker to move "He Jinsong" from the suspect column to the cleared column. His stroke was clean and decisive, like closing a surgical suture.
But Yin Wuwang's attention wasn't on the whiteboard.
He was looking at the appendix Little Lu had attached to the final page—He Jinsong's financial records over the years. The auto repair shop's revenue wasn't particularly high, with monthly turnover fluctuating between eighty and one hundred twenty thousand yuan. After deducting rent, labor, and parts costs, his take-home profit was roughly twenty to thirty thousand a month.
Five hundred thousand. The amount He Jinsong had lost because of Chen Wan was equivalent to nearly two full years of his total profit.
From a purely financial standpoint, this was not a number anyone could simply turn the page on. Enough to make an ordinary man carry a grudge for a very long time.
But not enough to make a man kill.
Yin Wuwang had zero hesitation on this judgment. Five hundred thousand was painful, but He Jinsong had his repair shop, had a source of income, had the ability to keep living. He wasn't a man driven to the edge. And people who actually killed for money were usually the ones who had already lost everything—nowhere left to retreat, nothing left to protect.
He Jinsong wasn't that. He was just an ordinary man who'd been swindled out of a sum, hated it, cursed it, and then accepted the loss.
"I've signed off on the closure report." Xie Qingyan finished marking the last timestamp on the whiteboard and turned around. "He Jinsong is officially eliminated."
Yin Wuwang closed the folder.
"Eliminated from the suspect list, sure. But there's still something worth mining from him."
Xie Qingyan glanced at him.
"Last time we went to his place, anything within the script—the five hundred thousand, Chen Wan, the night of the incident—he answered without missing a beat." Yin Wuwang pushed the folder aside. "But the moment we asked about his repair shop, he went completely blank."
"You want to go again."
"Not want." Yin Wuwang picked up the car keys. "He knows things about Chen Wan that go beyond what we could dig up from business registration records. They co-founded a bar together. He saw what Chen Wan looked like before the debt consumed him."
Xie Qingyan picked up his jacket.
"Together, then," he said.
[He Jinsong's Apartment]
He Jinsong's expression when he opened the door was marginally better than last time.
Not friendlier—he'd never been the type to give strangers attitude in the first place. Rather, that "just been woken up" irritability had mostly faded, replaced by a quiet, faintly weary calm.
The cardboard boxes were still in the living room. The takeout container on the coffee table had been swapped for a new one. The TV was on, playing some car modification show at low volume.
Yin Wuwang's gaze swept the room. Last time, the TV had been on but muted—existing solely to fill the silence. This time there was actual sound. Not much, but at least there were traces of a living person in this apartment.
He Jinsong pulled three cans of beer from the fridge, cracked one open for himself, and set the other two on the coffee table.
"Don't drink," Yin Wuwang said.
"Then let them sit." He Jinsong dropped into the chair opposite, took a long swig, and asked, "What brings you back?"
"The case—you've been cleared." Yin Wuwang cut straight to it. "We're here to learn more about Chen Wan."
He Jinsong's hand paused mid-motion.
"Learn about Chen Wan?"
"You two ran a bar together." Xie Qingyan picked up the thread, his tone even, seated at the far end of the sofa at an observer's angle. "Before the equity dispute, how long did you work with him?"
He Jinsong's fingers wrapped around the beer can, rubbing absently against the metal.
"A year and change," he said. "Six years ago now."
"How did the bar get started?"
He Jinsong drew a breath, his gaze drifting to the TV screen, though he clearly wasn't watching the modification footage.
"Chen Wan wasn't like what he became later." His pace slowed, layered with something that had settled a long time ago. "I met him on an entrepreneurship forum. Sharp guy, full of ideas, real drive. He said he wanted to open a bar—not the loud clubbing kind, the quiet sort where people come to have a drink and unwind. He had the concept, the taste, the connections. Just no money."
"You put up the capital," Yin Wuwang said.
"Five hundred thousand." He Jinsong nodded, the corner of his mouth twitching—not a smile, but the kind of self-deprecation that only comes in hindsight. "Scraped together everything I'd saved in three years of running the shop. Thought he was solid. Worth the bet."
"And then?"
"Then the bar opened. First year, business was good. Chen Wan genuinely had talent—knew how to make customers feel comfortable, how to set the right atmosphere. We broke even on half the investment in under six months." A trace of distant warmth colored He Jinsong's voice—the unmistakable tone of back then, things were really good. "I handled the back end—liquor procurement, equipment maintenance, dealing with suppliers. He handled the front—welcoming guests, mixing drinks, running events. Clean division of labor."
Yin Wuwang listened from the side. He noticed that as He Jinsong described this period, his pacing was steady, his expressions animated. None of the blank-screen freezes from last time—no "asked something off-script and crashed" moments.
He filed this change away quietly.
[End of V2_Chapter 45]
Next: "His Mom Got Into Trouble"—Five Words That Rewrite Everything