Stray Birds

"Let's continue," Liang An waved his hand and raised his voice. "Lu Yao, come over here."

Not one to miss out on the excitement, Lu Yao felt a bit disappointed and secretly mouthed, "That's it?"

Immediately after, following Liang An's direction, she saw a high-end monitor on a desk in a corner that wasn't very noticeable. It was a custom-built computer, surrounded by a pile of various computer components neatly arranged within a half-meter radius on the desk, too many to count.

Lu Yao leaned in, curiously approaching. Jiang Qiu glanced in Lu Yao's direction a few times.

"Use it as you like. This is my friend, surname Jiang, he's a doctor." Liang An was very blunt, directly acting as if he owned the place.

"Jiang Qiu," Jiang Qiu added himself, nodding as a silent agreement, but his expression still seemed a bit confused.

A bit shy around strangers?

Shao Zi crossed his arms, scanning him up and down, suddenly becoming interested.

"Use this for now. Just remember to handle whichever files need processing."

"It's so good to have money." Lu Yao sat in the chair; she had a premonition. She casually checked the computer's specs and felt even more comfortable. Although searching for data didn't require such high specs, it didn't stop Lu Yao's fondness for enjoying the feeling of using a luxury item.

"It's not a secret; no need to hide it." Liang An looked at Shao Zi again, meaning there was no need to be wary of this friend of his.

Shao Zi rubbed his chin, staring at Jiang Qiu, who was momentarily stunned by Liang An's words, lost in thought.

"If I need to know when the writing in this book was written, how accurate can it be?" Liang An himself wasn't affected by his own words and took out the "Stray Birds" collection from the evidence bag that he had conveniently brought along earlier.

Shao Zi flipped through it a couple of times, his gaze landing on the page with the artistic signature. He scanned it for a moment and then slowly said, "Within three months, under normal circumstances, it can be accurate to the day. Any longer and it becomes difficult; many factors will have an impact. How accurate do you need it to be?"

"Between four and thirteen years? The environment can't be completely determined. Or I can give you a reference, but it might not be the truth."

"The environment is unclear; being able to give a rough era is already a blessing."

Liang An was a bit disappointed but still handed the book to Shao Zi, whispering a few words in his ear.

Naturally, Li Liejun's bookshelf was the most likely location. Even if it had been elsewhere, no one would likely place a book anywhere other than a bookshelf. But the question was, did another possibility exist?

"I suspect this book was originally a gift Li Liejun gave to someone." He didn't keep them in suspense and directly stated his deduction. "If this truly was a gift, this person was, at the very least, very special to him."

This was a small poetry collection, very famous, but not the kind of ordinary book that everyone has at every stage of life. Just looking at Li Liejun's bookshelf upstairs, it basically only had various textbooks from the compulsory education stage, too lazy to change to anything else.

Downstairs, let alone books, there wasn't even a scrap of paper. And those books past that stage were clearly only piled there because the homeowner was too lazy to tidy up. Li Liejun was clearly not a literature enthusiast; this kind of book on his shelf was truly out of place, not something he himself would like to read.

The signature in the corner of the page was signed very carefully, the characters exquisite yet inconspicuous. Generally speaking, it's not the author but the book owner's name written in a book, so that if someone finds a lost book, they can return it to the owner, or as a mark when lending the book to someone. Under these circumstances, even if the book owner was showing off an artistic signature, they wouldn't place the name in such an inconspicuous position. So, why was this name signed?

"Signing a gift means the recipient must have been relatively close to him. This carefully designed signature has a certain commemorative meaning. But this book is still in his house on his shelf, and compared to other things, it's very well preserved. I think if we can determine the approximate time of the signature, we should be able to narrow down the scope of the investigation."

Giving gifts was very common for ordinary people. But for Li Liejun, who didn't go out and whose only intersection with the real world was the internet and food delivery, this was a very special kind of social evidence.

What emotion drove Li Liejun to give a gift? Who did he give it to? Why was this gift still in his house? Was it because he didn't have the courage to give it, or because of something else... Questions surfaced one after another.

The crime scene left almost no clues that could help track the perpetrator; only the pollen traces provided an incredibly large search range, and it was very likely to be in vain in the end. The only thing that could be investigated was social relations, still in the ethereal world of the internet, and similarly with a massive search range.

Generally speaking, interaction between people is an important factor in identifying a killer. But for Li Liejun, who had been self-isolated for years, this was undoubtedly not as common as investigating an ordinary person. The person most familiar with his reality was probably the delivery guy who ran several large orders every day. Even so, it was merely helping someone throw away trash.

As long as the perpetrator didn't clean up at the scene and plan the route so flawlessly that they revealed their face somewhere—or simply stupidly kept the murder weapon openly in their hand to be discovered—this case had already become half a perfect murder. But if there truly was a breakthrough in the social relations investigation, it at least gave a chance for the perpetrator to momentarily slip up.

Liang An preferred to take it one step at a time. A perfect method of committing a crime was certainly terrifying, but it didn't stop him from giving himself a bit of a thrill before reaching that most difficult step of proof. He was always willing to experience the process.

He pondered silently.

"This book was clearly not originally in that position, but in a room that had been covered in dust—this is a rare thing." Liang An rubbed his chin.

Knowing exactly who Li Liejun wanted to give the gift to might yield breakthrough results in investigating his special past origins. Li Liejun's life was full of mysteries, not because he had done anything special, but because there were too many blanks in his life. All the file data was dry summaries, all spending records were monotonous, like a robot wound up every day on time.

What exactly could cause a person to be like this, a life as hollow as a void?

Upon first learning of his fixed work and rest schedule, Liang An's first thought was that he might have been under house arrest. But this idea was completely shattered after the field investigation: the killer came from the outside, and there were no signs of forced entry on the door. Li Liejun seemed to have opened the door himself, welcoming his own death.

He wasn't unable to go out, and there were no signs of a second person living in the house: with the door locks and handles being rusty and clearly unused for a long time, the number of food orders could serve as evidence of this point. Even if just out of pure curiosity, his life was worth investigating.

"Dr. Jiang, you also live in this community. Do you know Li Liejun who lives in Sector B? Or have you heard who lives there?" Shao Zi had already packed his things and only now put down his phone, asking with a smile toward Jiang Qiu, who was standing to the side in a daze.

His attitude was amicable, his smile friendly; few people wouldn't naturally start to have a good impression of such a person upon meeting—unless they were the ones he had provoked into losing their temper.

Sitting to the side, Lu Yao peeked over, actively watching. Jiang Qiu was clearly startled by the sudden question.

Liang An, seeing this, also spoke for him: "He doesn't live here often. Shao, don't ask too much."

"Oh..." Shao Zi narrowed his eyes, unable to stop his lips from curling up, as if he had discovered some big secret.

"The next step is to see the progress on Xiao Song's side. Xiao Lu, see if there are any of Li Liejun's classmates, teachers, or anyone willing or able to talk in detail about his past." Liang An continued his arrangements. "Getting to know Li Liejun's past, I feel, won't be in vain."

Judging solely from the files, Li Liejun indeed had no recent acquaintances. Several people found earlier, including his former roommates and mentor, all said they didn't know if he had any special close friends or even relatives, and didn't even know about his parents' deaths.

Lu Yao took the task, scratching her head, looking confusedly at the constantly changing expression on Shao Zi's side, a one-sided undercurrent surging. After responding, she continued to dive into work.

Liang An said goodbye to Jiang Qiu and took him out of the lab, throwing a bunch of keys to Shao Zi before leaving. Shao Zi pulled up a chair and sat next to Lu Yao. Lu Yao worked hard to filter the list into a table. While sending messages one by one and waiting for replies, she couldn't help her curiosity and peeked at the notes Shao Zi was making in his small notebook.

"Who is Jiang Zhuo?" Lu Yao discovered the element and said in surprise, "Where did you get this gossip from?"

Shao Zi glanced at her, hesitating for a moment: "You really don't pay attention to the outside world. Don't you have any girlfriends... or guy friends to share Weibo hot searches with you?"

"And you do?"

"If you'd just follow Weibo properly and lower yourself to look at the trending topics a few more times, instead of using that web crawler software for daily news checks and spending all your spare time playing games." Shao Zi sighed.

"The Chairman of the Fengyue Group, Jiang Zhuo. Here, they had their annual meeting during the New Year, and he gave a speech on stage, which caused a stir. Everyone was saying, wow, that look, he's as handsome as some star, just a bit older. Even the fact that he's currently single was completely dug up, sandwiched between various hot searches for year-end bonuses. It's a very unique hot search, but the man has no interest in that area—otherwise, there might have been some playboy rumors."

"Look at this." Shao Zi handed him the phone.

On the phone was a photo, clearly from a public biographical data website. A man with a look too similar to Jiang Qiu stood on a stage. The photo was very clear; the man's expression and features were perfectly captured. His eyes and build were extremely similar, only a bit more mature than the Jiang Qiu they had just seen, with a few wrinkles at the corners of his eyes showing a trace of the years.

"Is it Jiang-ge's... brother?" Lu Yao asked uncertainly.

"Not a brother, but his father; the man is already in his fifties."

Jiang Zhuo's appearance was at least ten years younger than his actual age, looking only like he was in his thirties or forties. Perhaps as a middle-aged man, he maintained himself well, or perhaps his superior appearance blurred others' judgment.

"Abuse of power—I despise you." Lu Yao looked at Shao Zi with disdain, her focus a bit off. "Didn't you say this boss is single? Then Jiang-ge..."

"Who told you I'm abusing power? It's just within the scope of a reasonable investigation." Shao Zi irritably patted Lu Yao's head. "Jiang Zhuo is relatively low-key, but he's not that fussy about privacy. I heard that although he's probably the workaholic type, he has never missed a single parent-teacher meeting for his son. His usual behavior doesn't show that he's actually that wealthy. It's normal for a classmate to mention it in shock—an elementary school classmate, I heard that every year at the parent-teacher meeting, Jiang Qiu was the model student representative whose parent had to go on stage to speak. But the person participating in the parent-teacher meetings and speaking never included his mother. When others curiously asked, he only said his son was from a single-parent family—after all, when sharing teaching experience, family background still needs to be understood. This is the only piece of information with a special nature. The informant didn't say any personal information, didn't even reveal which school, just added some trivial 'character setting' to satisfy curiosity, so honestly, it's not considered excessive."