Chapter 18

After Dali was gone, I then went to Deng Chao’s dorm with Huang Xiaotao. As one might be familiar with, the boys’ dorms were messy and dirty the boys’ dorms as usual. Huang Xiaotao grimaced the whole way to the dorm.

As we were walking past a room, the door suddenly burst open and out came a guy wearing only underpants yelling out to his friend in another room to borrow his shampoo. The guy saw Huang Xiaotao and was so shocked he froze for a few seconds before rushing back into the room, slamming the door behind him.

“They’re living like pigs in a sty…” said Huang Xiaotao, brows deeply furrowed. “Are you just like them, Song Yang?”

“Absolutely not!” I denied firmly. “I highly value self-discipline and personal hygiene. You can ask Dali about it, and he’ll tell you that I make my bed so tidily every day that it looks like a neat block of tofu!”

“Oh, really?” asked Huang Xiaotao. “Then maybe I should pay your room a visit, and take a look for myself.”

“Y-Yeah, sure…,” I said. “But let’s just focus on the case for now.”

It would be detrimental to my image if Huang Xiaotao found out that I was no different from that group of “pigs” she just saw in this dorm.

Huang Xiaotao snickered at my reply.

We inquired about the room that Deng Chao used to stay in, and eventually we found it. We came to a room where there was a guy with long hair sitting at the desk plucking at his guitar. Perhaps it was because there had never been any girls in the dorm, or perhaps it was due to Huang Xiaotao’s cool and serious demeanor, but the second he noticed us, the guy was so startled that he almost threw his guitar onto the floor and sprang up to his feet.

“What… What are you doing here?” he asked nervously.

Huang Xiaotao pulled out her badge and showed it to the long-haired guy.

“Is this Deng Chao’s room?” she asked.

“Ah, so you’re a police officer!” said the long-haired guy. “Come in, have a seat! Would you like a drink? I heard that someone committed suicide this morning, and it turned out to be Deng Chao’s best bud Zhang Kai. Deng Chao himself hasn’t come back since last night. Did anything happen to him?”

“He’d been murdered,” said Huang Xiaotao.

Just then, a very muscular guy jumped out of the messy bed beside me, giving me the fright of my life.

“What?!” he yelled. “Who killed Chao?”

“That is still under investigation,” said Huang Xiaotao. “Do you have any idea who Deng Chao has gotten into trouble with?”

“Well…” the long-haired guy considered for a while. “There are some guys in class that aren’t in the best terms with him. You see, Chao is the kinda guy… how do I put this? He’s pretty good at rousing people’s jealousy.”

“How so?” asked Huang Xiaotao.

“He might not seem like it, but Chao has always been a genius and a top scholar!” said the long-haired guy, full of admiration.

“You mean his grades are always perfect?”

“Yeah!” And the guy continued, “He rarely ever went to class, but he’d always score above 90% on every test! And he’d always get awarded some kind of scholarship money from the college every year too! To be frank, sometimes even I felt like it was unfair. I mean, he was always hanging out with us, and he’d sleep just as much as the rest of us, but how did he manage to score so high on the tests when the rest of us didn’t even pass? It made no sense! No, wait, don’t take me wrong. I’d never kill anyone just for that, I swear!”

“Can you give me the names of the people who had been in conflict with Deng Chao?” Huang Xiaotao had a pen and a small notebook ready in her hands.

The long-haired guy contemplated for a while, then gave Huang Xiaotao a list of names, which she then jotted down onto her notebook.

“No, none of those people would kill him!” the muscular guy suddenly interrupted. “If there’s anyone who would want to see Deng Chao dead, it’s gotta be that bastard!”

“Who?” asked Huang Xiaotao.

The muscular guy sat down and pulled out a pack of cigarettes from under the pillow. He lit one up and took a huff, before proceeding to tell us Deng Chao’s history.

According to him, Deng Chao was indeed a highly intelligent individual. He scored 140 for an IQ test in high school, and had always been able to ace all the tests with minimal effort.

Recently, Deng Chao wrote an academic journal paper that received high praise from a professor, who then recommended him for a scholarship grant to the upper management of the college. Deng Chao eventually won this scholarship grant which was only awarded to four students every year.

But not long after that, there was a student from the same department as Deng Chao called Ma Baobao who reported to the upper management that the journal paper written by Deng Chao was in fact plagiarized. He even collected evidence to prove the claim. Consequently, not only was Deng Chao disqualified from the scholarship grant, but he was to return the money that he received, which was about 17,000 yuan.

After that, Ma Baobao was awarded the scholarship grant in place of Deng Chao, which raised suspicions about his real motives for reporting Deng Chao’s plagiarism.

Besides, this Ma Baobao was a loudmouth who liked to keep bringing up this incident every opportunity he got. He even went so far as to raise doubts about the validity of Deng Chao’s past exam grades, positing that those might be the result of cheating too.

No one entertained his theories, though. Even the professors couldn’t stand his smug behaviour. But when Deng Chao got wind of this, he punched through a glass window in a fit of anger, resulting in a wound that required five stitches.

Deng Chao was a typical Scorpio. He didn’t forgive easily, especially not someone who had so wounded his reputation. He was determined to have his revenge!

On an evening right before this year’s summer vacation, Ma Baobao walked back to his dorm alone after a group study. Suddenly, a dark figure rushed out from the bushes nearby and grazed his skin with a knife. Ma Baobao was so scared he tossed away the books in his hands and ran for his life. The knife merely scratched the surface of his skin, but he soon fell ill and contracted a high fever. He had to return to his hometown early, and had to receive intensive medical treatments for three whole months, which cost him tens of thousands of yuan before the illness subsided.

When he returned to campus, he was a changed man. He became quiet and reclusive and never dared to spread unsavory news about Deng Chao ever again, although he would often post on Weibo that someone was trying to kill him!

Was Deng Chao the perpetrator? The muscular guy couldn’t say for sure, because Deng Chao would clam up the instant this subject was brought up. But he strongly suspected that it was indeed Deng Chao, and that he might have applied some kind of infectious bacteria on the knife to make Ma Baobao ill. He might’ve been infected by it himself, because Deng Chao had been wearing a pair of gloves all the time recently.

The muscular guy speculated that Ma Baobao probably suspected Deng Chao to be the perpetrator and hence murdered him for it.

“Which desk in this room was Deng Chao’s?” asked Huang Xiaotao.

“This one,” answered the muscular guy, pointing at a desk in the middle of the room.

And so, we started to go through Deng Chao’s stuff. There were some books and magazines on his desk and his small closet was crammed full of clothes. It seemed that Deng Chao had a hobby of playing basketball, because I found a picture of a basketball team. I asked the guy which one in the picture was Deng Chao, and he pointed at the thickset light-skinned guy in the middle who was wearing a jersey with the number zero on it. He was all smiles in the picture, and beside him was another guy who seemed really friendly with him. They were both putting one arm over the other’s shoulders.

“Who’s that beside Deng Chao?” I asked.

“His bae, Zhang Kai, of course.” answered the guy. “That’s the guy who committed suicide this morning.”

“Bae?” asked Huang Xiaotao asked. “You mean they’re… intimate?”

“No, no!” I said. “The word doesn’t imply a romantic relationship. It can be used for best friends who are especially close to each other as well.”

“That’s right,” said the muscular guy. “They really were best buddies. And Zhang Kai used to be such a bro too! He’d always helped me cram before a test, he even lent me his own lecture notes so I could xerox them. I passed out drunk after a party once, and he carried me back to my room on his own back…”

“So you know him too?” I asked.

“Of course!” he said. “we’re all in the same department, and we used to play basketball together all the time! I used to be the star player back then, but ever since that injury…”

The guy went on to reminisce about his past athletic career, wistfully staring at the ceiling whilst doing so. But of course Huang Xiaotao and I had no interest in any of that, so we kept on searching through Deng Chao’s possessions.

I found something that caught my eye—it was a brochure for a plastic surgery clinic, stuck between the pages of a book. The services provided by the clinic was quite diverse—liposuction, chin surgery, lip fillers, double eyelid surgery, hands cosmetic surgery, legs plastic surgery and so on.

It seems that this brochure was stuck between the pages as a bookmark.

“I still remember that match with the medical students,” said the guy, still reminiscing. “It was the finals, and it was a fierce competition, the scores were 57 versus 55 and—”

“Have Deng Chao ever had plastic surgeries before?” interrupted Huang Xiaotao bluntly.

“What? Plastic surgeries?” responded the guy. “No, never. Why would he do that? He’s not a woman! Besides, where would he get the money for it?”

I swiftly put the brochure into my pocket—this was indeed an important clue!

“Did you say that you borrowed Zhang Kai’s notes to copy them?” I asked the loud-voiced guy. “Do you have it with you now?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “what do you want to do with it?”

Before I could think of a good excuse, the guy had already climbed down of his bed.

“Whatever, I don’t care,” he said. “They’re just a pile of waste paper anyway…”

He then pulled out a stash of xeroxed paper from the drawer of his desk and even bothered to put them all in a plastic bag for me. I thanked him. He then eyed me up and down and said, “You don’t look like a police officer, bro.”

“I’m not,” I admitted. “I’m a fourth-year student here, and I’m working with the police as a special consultant.”

“Whoa, that’s awesome, bro!” he exclaimed, holding up his big thumb at me. “You’re like, the young detective! Just like Di Renjie! Cool, so our college has produced a great talent!”

“You’re too kind! You’re too kind!” I said, humbly nodding my head.

Since there was nothing left to investigate here, we both left the room after that. But once we were outside, Huang Xiaotao turned to me and sneered.

“You know,” she said, “I honestly thought that you’re one of those rare men who are modest and don’t like to boast about their talents. But it seems that you do like to bask in the limelight. I wonder if all men are like that.”

“You misunderstood me,” I said. “I just came up with a plan when I saw those lecture notes.”

“What plan?” asked Huang Xiaotao.

“Never mind that for now,” I said, then confidently added, “let’s first talk about the case itself, because I’m about 80 to 90 percent sure that I’ve got the whole sequence of events for the case right!”

1. was mentioned before in a previous chapter, but basically he’s a famed detective/official who lived during the Tang and Zhou dynasties.