Chapter Seventeen: Adding to the Chaos

Early the next morning, before the sky had even turned light, Qin Ruonan was awakened by a call from An Changpu. His voice was tinged with excitement as he announced that there was news about Fang Wan.

This was no ordinary notification—after the child had been missing for over ten days, any information at all was a rare stroke of fortune, perhaps even a miracle. No wonder An Changpu sounded so exhilarated.

Qin Ruonan scrambled out of bed, hurried through her morning routine, and as she was just finishing dressing, her phone rang again. She didn't answer, but instead went to the window of the small sitting room and stuck her head out. Sure enough, An Changpu's car was parked downstairs. When he saw her, he waved from his car window.

She locked the door and rushed downstairs, flinging open the car door and climbing in. The rich aroma of coffee greeted her.

"It's so early—nothing's open except McDonald's, so I grabbed two coffees to keep us awake," An Changpu said, noticing her sniffing the air. He quickly handed her a cup from the holder.

Qin Ruonan seldom drank coffee; her palate naturally recoiled at bitterness, but she accepted the cup in silence, cradling it in her hands.

"Stayed out late on your date last night, and that's why you couldn't get up this morning?" she teased casually, turning the paper cup in her hands as if it were nothing.

An Changpu looked a little embarrassed, waving his hand as he drove. "Nothing like that! I just had dinner and went home. I'm a night owl by habit—I can stay up late, but mornings are rough. Don't get any ideas!"

"First time dating a girl, and you didn't plan anything except dinner? Won't she think you lack romance?" Qin Ruonan continued her light banter, though inside she was in turmoil. Reason warned her not to probe about An Changpu's blind date, lest she hear something she'd rather not, yet her emotions betrayed her, and the questions spilled out before she could stop herself.

Still, when she learned that An Changpu had only shared a simple meal with Tao Yinyin before heading home, Qin Ruonan felt as if a weight that had lain heavy on her chest for so long had suddenly vanished, replaced by an inexplicable sense of joy.

An Changpu, oblivious to her inner thoughts, kept chatting as usual. "I don't have 'Casanova' written on my face—romance isn't really my strong suit. Besides, when you've just met, you have nothing to talk about. After dinner, if I lingered, we'd just be staring at each other awkwardly!"

"So, how did she react? Didn’t mind your lack of finesse?"

"Not at all. She said I seemed steady and gave her a sense of security. Said there aren't many men like me these days. And actually, Tao Yinyin was quieter and more composed than I expected. Girls who are easygoing and adaptable like her are rare these days, aren’t they?"

Qin Ruonan fell silent. In her moment of smug delight, she was bitten by her own jealousy. Hearing that An Changpu’s date had been nondescript was one thing; learning that the woman not only didn’t mind but actually praised him was another matter entirely.

"By the way, how did you get news about Fang Wan so early in the morning?" She tried to steer the conversation away.

"When Fang Da put out the missing person notice, he listed my contact info as well as his own," An Changpu replied simply, not noticing her abrupt change of subject. Glancing over to see her still twirling the cup, he added, "Drink it while it’s hot. Cold coffee on a winter morning can’t be good for your stomach. Unless you’re the type to enjoy ice-cold coffee in the dead of winter?"

Qin Ruonan took a tentative sip. The coffee slid down her throat, and, to her surprise, she didn’t find it bitter as she usually did.

No wonder people say that when your heart aches, you don't feel the pain in your body; when your heart tastes bitter, even your mouth can't sense the bitterness. She sighed softly at the thought.

The roads were empty that early, so their progress was swift. Soon, they arrived near the location where the tipster claimed to have seen Fang Wan.

"Are you sure this is the place?" Qin Ruonan gazed out at the undeveloped wasteland beyond the car window, already forming a suspicion.

An Changpu was taken aback as well. The address turned out to be a barren tract on the outskirts of the city, awaiting development. All around were sand and rocks, not a blade of grass or tree in sight. How could there possibly be any clue about Fang Wan here? It was pure fantasy.

An Changpu quickly called Fang Da for confirmation. Apparently, Fang Da had also received the same notification early that morning. When An Changpu told him the location was a desolate wasteland, Fang Da was just as surprised. They double-checked the address multiple times, but it was correct. Helpless, An Changpu hung up and called the station, asking a colleague on duty to trace the call’s origin. As they drove back toward the city, the results came in: the phone number was nothing more than a public payphone by the roadside.

What had seemed a hopeful lead turned out to be a cruel prank. An Changpu was deeply frustrated.

"Normally, I’d have verified the source before acting! But this time—damn it! Some heartless jerk played us for fools!" He slammed his fist on the steering wheel, accidentally hitting the horn, which startled the driver in front, who glared back at them during the red light.

"You were just desperate to find the child, it's understandable. Fang Wan’s been missing so long, everyone’s worried. If it were me, I’d have done the same," Qin Ruonan said, not merely to comfort him but from the heart. Though young and not a mother herself, she couldn’t help but worry for a child missing so long.

Fang Da, too, had rushed out of his house, hoping against hope that his son would be found. Even after realizing it was a wild-goose chase, he was already waiting at the station when An Changpu and Qin Ruonan returned. He apologized for causing them to run out so early, then fumed over the false tip.

After soothing the furious Fang Da, they refocused on tracing Fang Wan’s phone using its serial number. They discovered that, days after Fang Wan disappeared, the phone had been used again. By tracking the location and checking the owner’s information, they quickly found the current holder before noon.

The person using the phone was a young white-collar worker in his early twenties, less than half a year out of college. He’d bought the phone from a secondhand shop and produced the receipt from his desk drawer to prove it.

An Changpu and Qin Ruonan visited the secondhand shop. The clerk was startled to see the police and said the phone had been sold by a child. But when pressed for details about the seller’s age and appearance, her account bore no resemblance to Fang Wan.

According to the clerk, the seller was a boy of about sixteen or seventeen, dark-skinned, not very tall but stocky, with the distinctive raspy voice of a boy whose voice was changing, and a cigarette burn scar on his right hand.

Beyond that, she couldn’t recall any other features. In her frustration, Qin Ruonan noticed that across the street from the shop was a telecom business hall, with a surveillance camera at its entrance.

Qin Ruonan asked the clerk to accompany them across to the telecom hall. After explaining the situation to the security supervisor, they pulled up the footage for the day in question. Though the street was across from the shop and the footage wasn’t clear, they could still make out some details.

After watching the footage for a long time, the nervous clerk finally pointed at a figure emerging from the shop after a bus moved out of the camera’s view. "That’s him! That’s him!"

On screen, the person matched the earlier description: medium build, stocky, his skin color unclear due to the poor image quality. He wore a short, close-cropped haircut, a loose sports jacket, jeans, and walked with both hands in his pockets, swaying slightly as he moved.

"We’ve found him, but how do we identify him?" Qin Ruonan asked An Changpu softly, at a loss.

The security supervisor, overhearing, grinned. "I can help with that! I’d bet anything this kid is a student at No. 8 Middle School in our city!"

"No. 8 Middle School?" An Changpu’s eyes lit up. "Are you sure?"

"Ninety percent. My own son graduated from there," said the supervisor, a man nearing fifty, after another look at the footage. "Their uniforms are all the same. Whether this jacket belongs to the boy or is borrowed, I can’t say, but it’s definitely from that school."

As the supervisor pointed out, if the jacket wasn’t the boy’s own, tracking him down might be harder—but at least they now had a direction: they could start looking for leads at No. 8 Middle School.

[Wuwuwu, another late update today. I’m so sorry—no idea what’s going on, but I’ve had a fever for three days straight, and it still hasn’t broken. The medicine makes me woozy and my writing is slower, so the update is late. Please forgive me! I’ll do my best to keep updates coming and get back to the regular schedule soon!]