I Am Truly Innocent
Bang! Bang!
“Who is it? Keep it down!”
The violent pounding jolted Wen Yiqian awake. He didn’t even have the strength to open his eyes. He rolled over and pulled the pillow over his head.
After getting home last night, he had discovered he didn’t have his keys.
There had been no other option: he’d had to ask the night-shift security guard to call the landlord on his behalf.
It was already past two in the morning by then. If not for his history of paying rent on time and, not insignificantly, his looks, he would probably have gotten an earful.
In the end, Wen Yiqian made it home, took the hot shower he had been dreaming about, ate a bowl of instant noodles, and fell asleep without a second thought.
It felt like he had barely closed his eyes when the noise dragged him back out. Even someone without a short fuse would have been irritated.
“Get up.”
A deep, commanding voice cut through the room.
Has someone broken in?
The fog cleared from Wen Yiqian’s head all at once. He snapped upright and immediately took in the scene before him.
More than a dozen fully armed police officers surrounded his bed, gun barrels trained on him from every angle.
“Let’s talk this through…” He felt slightly faint. He swallowed and raised his hands without argument.
“We meet again,” Li Weiguo said, his tone flat and cold.
Only then did the bewildered Wen Yiqian register the familiar face. “Captain Li, what’s going on?”
“Sure you don’t know anything about this?” Li Weiguo’s eyes were like two blades, trying to cut through whatever he might be hiding.
Wen Yiqian shook his head repeatedly, looking as harmless as he could manage.
“An Zhi is missing.” The anger behind Li Weiguo’s eyes was barely held in check.
“When?” Wen Yiqian’s stomach dropped.
“Last night. After she drove you home, she vanished.” Li Weiguo’s chest rose and fell with the effort of keeping himself steady. “And before that, she sent emails to several colleagues at the station. In those emails, she said she suspected you were a concealed high-IQ criminal and intended to test you by putting herself at risk.”
He grabbed Wen Yiqian by the collar. “She also said that if anything happened to her, the person responsible would definitely be you.”
Wen Yiqian felt the floor drop out from under him. He pressed both hands to his forehead. “Why am I so unlucky?”
“Start explaining,” Li Weiguo said.
Wen Yiqian took a slow breath, patted his own cheeks, and tried to get his thoughts in order.
“This genuinely has nothing to do with me. There should be surveillance footage at the entrance of the complex. Check it and you’ll see,” he said after a moment.
Li Weiguo didn’t respond. He gestured, and an officer stepped forward with a laptop.
The screen showed the surveillance footage from the complex entrance the night before.
“At 1:52 a.m., An Zhi parked her car at the entrance. But you didn’t get out immediately. The two of you stayed in the car and talked.” Li Weiguo pointed at the screen. “Explain that.”
“She locked the doors and wouldn’t let me leave,” Wen Yiqian said plainly. Seeing the skepticism in the other man’s eyes, he added, “It’s in the footage. You can see me unbuckle my seatbelt and try the door. It wouldn’t open.”
“Why would she do that?”
“She said she suspected me of being a high-IQ criminal and kept pushing me to show my true colors.”
There was no reason to lie about any of this, and Wen Yiqian laid it out without embellishment.
“Fine.” Li Weiguo nodded and skipped the footage forward by two minutes. “Then explain this.”
On screen, Wen Yiqian, already out of the car, could be seen walking around to the driver’s side window to speak with An Zhi.
That alone wouldn’t have been a problem. What came next made his face burn.
The camera angle was close enough to show everything clearly: Wen Yiqian leaning in toward An Zhi’s ear, taking her hand, stroking her hair, while An Zhi sat rigid and unmoving, as if too frightened to react.
“As far as I’m aware, the two of you aren’t on those kinds of terms.” Li Weiguo’s voice dropped to something low and dangerous. “Do I have reason to suspect you said something threatening to keep her from resisting?”
In his eyes, An Zhi had always been like a younger sister. Watching this footage, with the knowledge that she was now missing, made it nearly impossible to keep his composure.
Worse, he was the one who had told her to drive Wen Yiqian home. That sat heavily on him.
“I didn’t actually do anything.” What had happened the night before did look exactly like the behavior of a predatory creep, but Wen Yiqian pressed on and pointed at the screen. “Look: I went straight back inside after that.”
On screen, after Wen Yiqian disappeared into the complex, An Zhi remained in the car for a short while before driving away.
The timestamp in the corner read exactly 2:00 a.m.
“After that, she went missing.”
Li Weiguo continued to study Wen Yiqian, searching for any crack in his composure.
“How long does it take to drive from this complex to her home?” Wen Yiqian asked, growing uneasy under the scrutiny.
“About an hour. Less traffic at that hour, so probably forty to fifty minutes.”
“She never made it home?”
“Her family says she never arrived, and the surveillance at her building confirms it.”
“It was the middle of the night: she wouldn’t have stopped anywhere on the way.” Wen Yiqian’s thoughts moved quickly. “That means she most likely went missing somewhere between here and home.”
He paused. “The drive takes under an hour. After I came back inside, I didn’t have my keys, so I had to get the security guard to reach the landlord. I didn’t get back into my apartment until 3:30 a.m. There was no window of time for me to go after her.”
He met Li Weiguo’s gaze. “The landlord, the security guard, and the complex’s own surveillance footage should all confirm that.”
“I know.” Li Weiguo’s expression didn’t soften. “And that is precisely why I’m more suspicious of you.”
“How so?” Wen Yiqian frowned.
“Why did you just happen to forget your keys?”
“Why did your phone just happen to be dead, forcing you to go through the security guard?”
“Why is there conveniently surveillance footage inside the complex placing you there the entire time?”
“And why did An Zhi just happen to disappear within exactly that window?”
“Don’t you think that’s an awful lot of coincidences stacked on top of each other?”
Li Weiguo’s rapid-fire questions sent Wen Yiqian’s heart sinking straight through the floor.
He could account for every single point. But taken together, it was undeniably too neat.
Viewed from the outside, all of it looked like the kind of airtight alibi a high-intelligence criminal would construct in advance.
But he was completely innocent.
(End of Chapter)