The interrogation room at the municipal police headquarters. The incandescent lights were harsh and deathly pale.
Chen Lei sat behind an iron table. The bald enforcer sat handcuffed in the interrogation chair, his chains clinking.
"What happened in the five minutes before Lei Bao died?"
Chen Lei opened his interview notebook.
The bald man swallowed, his body trembling involuntarily.
"He swallowed money. Like he'd gone crazy.
He grabbed chips and cash off the table and stuffed them straight down his throat.
Even several of us couldn't stop him."
"Who entered that room during that time?" Chen Lei asked.
"No one. The door was locked tight." The bald man hurried to explain, terrified of getting himself in trouble. "Only a delivery guy went in."
Chen Lei stopped writing and looked up.
"A delivery guy? You ordered delivery at your underground casino?"
"It was a purchase-and-deliver order. Bao wanted seafood congee.
The guy brought it in, then his hand slipped and he spilled it all over Bao's pants. Bao kicked him, and he left."
Chen Lei snapped the notebook shut.
A slip of the hand. Spilled congee. Close contact.
This was no accident. It was an extreme measure the killer had taken to obtain Lei Bao's facial features and real identity in a physically isolated environment.
Chen Lei stood and pushed open the interrogation room's iron door.
"Check the Golden Sand Building's freight elevator footage from two to three last night."
Chen Lei gave the order to the technician out in the corridor.
The command center. The large screen was divided into four sections, the footage playing on fast-forward.
At 2:35 a.m., someone wearing a yellow outdoor jacket entered the freight elevator.
He wore a helmet and a black mask, carrying a plastic bag.
"Pause. Zoom in." Chen Lei pointed at the screen.
The technician tapped the keyboard. The image froze.
"About a hundred and seventy-eight centimeters tall.
Slim build. Fifty-centimeter stride, with no obvious inward or outward turn of the feet."
Chen Lei stared at the figure on the screen. "Pull up footage of delivery workers at Splendid Garden, People's Hospital, and the Grand Hyatt during the times of the incidents."
Four surveillance feeds appeared side by side.
Some showed only his back, others no more than a fleeting corner of his jacket, but the shoulder width and posture matched perfectly.
"Run a gait comparison," Chen Lei ordered.
The progress bar filled. The system displayed a notification: match, 92%.
The same person.
"Run those physical characteristics against the three hundred people we shortlisted last night." Chen Lei braced both hands on the console.
Three hundred headshots scrolled rapidly across the screen. The system cross-filtered them by height and build.
Faces vanished in swaths.
Finally, only one headshot remained in the center of the screen.
Name: Kannazuki.
Assigned station: Splendid Garden service area.
"Pull his full household registration file and his social connections." Chen Lei stared at the calm face in the ID photo.
The technician quickly retrieved the file.
"Kannazuki, male, twenty-four.
A Linhai City native. His parents died in a car accident when he was six.
Grew up at the City Welfare Institute. Dropped out of high school.
Worked as an internet café attendant and a loader. Started delivering food three years ago.
No criminal record or public-order penalties.
No property or cars in his name. Just one registered electric scooter."
Chen Lei scrolled through the extracted records of Kannazuki's contacts and social accounts.
"Fewer than twenty WeChat friends, all coworkers from his station and his landlord.
No QQ, no Weibo, no short-video accounts.
No more than ten calls a month, all delivery calls."
The technician sounded astonished as he looked at the data. "Captain Chen, this guy is too clean."
Abnormally clean.
In modern society, a twenty-four-year-old who left no trace online and had no record of spending on entertainment.
It defied basic sociological expectations.
"He's not clean." Chen Lei straightened, his gaze fixed on Kannazuki's photograph.
"He's completely shut himself away. No emotional ties, no need to socialize.
He's an island. The perfect criminal-psychology profile of an invisible man."
Chen Lei turned to the director of technical investigations.
"Contact the delivery platform's headquarters immediately. I need the highest level of backend access to Kannazuki's delivery account.
Track his phone's GPS in real time. Don't alert him. Only retrieve data, one way."
"Understood." The director of technical investigations immediately made the call.
Linhai City's East District. The sun blazed overhead.
Kannazuki had just handed a customer an order of Mala Tang. He tapped to mark it delivered.
A system notification appeared at the top of his phone screen.
[Security center notice: At 10:42, your rider account was accessed with elevated privileges from a remote server. If this was not you, please change your password immediately.]
Kannazuki stood in the shade of a tree. The screen's reflected light shone in his eyes.
He did not open the notification.
A remote server. Elevated privileges.
The delivery platform's security mechanism had triggered a low-level alert.
That meant someone had bypassed the normal login gateway and forcibly extracted his account information through the database backend.
An ordinary hacker would not bother stealing a delivery worker's account.
Only an official agency would.
Chen Lei had traced it back to me.
Kannazuki calmly returned his phone to its mount.
He rapidly worked through the situation in his mind.
The police have identified me.
They're tracking my GPS in real time. They haven't moved to arrest me yet.
Why not? Because they have no hard evidence.
Zhao Gang, Wang Hu, Zhang Wei, Sun Ming, Lei Bao.
All five had died of sudden illnesses. No weapons, no traces of poison, no signs of lethal physical contact.
All the police had was one circumstantial lead: overlapping movements.
They needed to observe him, catch him in the act, and figure out exactly how he killed.
If I pull out my SIM card, ditch the scooter, and run now...
I might as well tell Chen Lei outright: I killed them.
With tens of thousands of citywide surveillance cameras, someone without transportation or communications equipment would be pinned down in a sewer by a tactical police team within twenty-four hours.
I can't run.
Not only can I not run, I have to muddy the waters.
Kannazuki climbed onto his electric scooter and opened the delivery app.
He entered the available-order screen.
He ignored the high-paying, long-distance orders.
His finger slid across the screen, searching specifically for orders in one particular area.
Jianguo Road. The location of the Linhai City Public Security Bureau.
A few seconds later, an order appeared.
[Purchase-and-deliver order: Four cups of Luckin Coffee. Deliver to: Gatehouse, Municipal Public Security Bureau, 118 Jianguo Road. Recipient: Officer Liu, Criminal Police Team.]
Kannazuki tapped the claim button.
The order was successfully claimed.
Kannazuki twisted the throttle. His electric scooter merged into traffic.
Inside the command center.
"Captain Chen! We've connected to the platform's backend. Kannazuki's live GPS signal is online!" the technician shouted.
A digital map of Linhai City appeared on the large screen.
A red dot was moving rapidly.
Chen Lei walked up to the screen.
"Where is he now?"
"Changchun Road in the East District. Heading west."
The technician watched the screen intently. "Forty kilometers an hour.
That's a normal speed for an electric scooter."
Chen Lei folded his arms.
"Send two unmarked cars to follow him, one ahead and one behind. Keep five hundred meters away.
He must not spot them." Chen Lei pressed the radio on the desk.
"Video investigation team, bring up every traffic camera along his route.
I want a live view of him."
More than a dozen surveillance windows appeared on the right side of the screen.
Each time the red dot passed an intersection, the corresponding camera feed enlarged.
In his yellow delivery uniform and helmet, Kannazuki stopped properly before the crosswalk to wait at a red light. When it turned green, he pulled away smoothly.
"Has he taken an order?" Chen Lei asked.
"Yes." The technician checked the backend data. "He claimed a purchase-and-deliver order five minutes ago."
"Where's he delivering it?" Chen Lei watched the red dot.
It was heading straight toward the city center.
The technician glanced at the order details, and his expression suddenly changed.
He looked up at Chen Lei.
"Captain Chen. The address is 118 Jianguo Road. Our gatehouse."
Chen Lei's pupils abruptly contracted.
He planted both hands on the console, staring at the steadily approaching red dot.
Provocation.
Blatant provocation.
The man not only knew the police were investigating him, but had turned his sights directly on their own headquarters.
"Notify the gatehouse. Everyone stand by. No rash moves."
Chen Lei grabbed the radio from the desk and strode toward the door. "I'll collect those coffees myself."
Jianguo Road.
The sunlight was blinding.
Riding his electric scooter, Kannazuki rounded the final street corner.
A straight, tree-lined avenue stretched ahead.
At its end, an imposing police emblem gleamed coldly in the sunlight.
The gates of the Linhai City Public Security Bureau stood open. Two armed police officers stood on either side of the guard booth, their weapons loaded.
Kannazuki slowed down.
He glanced at the phone mounted on his handlebars. Two hundred meters to his destination.
He raised his head.
His gaze passed through the windshield and his helmet's visor, settling directly on the headquarters' gates.
A man in a black jacket stood on the steps inside.
Chen Lei.
An unlit cigarette hung from Chen Lei's mouth. With both hands in his pockets and eyes sharp as knives, he stared fixedly at the far end of the avenue.
Their gazes collided in the air.
Kannazuki made no move to slow down and flee.
He held the handlebar with one hand and carried the paper bag full of coffee with the other.
The wheels rolled over the asphalt with a faint hiss.
He rode straight toward the building that represented the state's supreme apparatus of force.
The camera froze on the dashboard of Kannazuki's electric scooter.
The numbers changed.
25.
20.
15.
The front of the scooter pointed directly at the gates of the Linhai City Public Security Bureau.
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