Suspicious Location

Eight hundred yuan was actually neither a lot nor a little. It could help fill up a small car's gas tank twice, or cover the utility bills for a family of three for a month or two, but it wasn't enough for a wealthy heir like Yuan Yao to spend on a single meal at a nightclub.

However, Shao Zi could guess that, just like Du Yingjian, for someone in poor economic straits like Ding Wei, this kind of unstable yet relatively abundant income was indeed very tempting. But in terms of degree, Ding Wei only wanted to support his struggling family and was not desperately short of money; this income alone was not enough to make him contemplate doing anything "illegal."

Therefore, Shao Zi looked up at Du Yingjian, truly wanting to know how this guy had arrived at such a speculative conclusion, or if he was just being sensationalist.

"Ding Wei going out in the early hours of the morning to earn extra income is a clear conclusion. It's just that aside from that, there are parts that aren't very clear..." Du Yingjian also shared his investigation results. "As you can see, the account transferring money to Ding Wei is anonymous. Specifically, the funds come from an overseas account, and we cannot investigate who the sender actually is."

Shao Zi frowned. "A very old trick. But this alone is not enough to prove there is anything special about Ding Wei."

Du Yingjian nodded. "Getting paid to do a job. From Ding Wei's perspective, this naturally couldn't be called suspicious—never mind not knowing the sender's account, even if a stack of cash fell from the sky after the job was done, as long as it reached his account on time, it was good money."

It was just that there was clearly a "but" next.

"Since the employer can't be traced and Ding Wei is dead, I could only start from his house to see if there were any clues." Du Yingjian shrugged. "I only know this matter required a car, lasting about three to four hours, roughly starting from when Ding Wei made a call from his home landline, which was also confirmed by the surveillance cameras in the residential area."

"And lasting until Ding Wei received the transfer," Shao Zi chimed in. "I understand all of this. However, earning eight hundred yuan in four hours... while not overly extravagant, can still be considered a lucrative job. I'm wondering if it included reimbursement for upfront expenses? For example, purchasing large items and having Ding Wei pay first. Although there are no other suspicious transfer records, you should also consider this point: if it was a cash transaction, electronic invoices wouldn't show it."

As a man with a model housekeeper's mindset, Shao Zi's ideas were always practical and reasonable.

Du Yingjian waved his hand. "Actually, I thought of that possibility too. But there's a problem—not just this time, you can look back at every suspicious transfer. Each time, the amount is a multiple of one hundred, never an odd number. Furthermore, there's a key point: the actual transfers all occurred in the early hours of the morning, just at different specific times."

Without waiting for Shao Zi to reply, he continued, "Thus, I have a hypothesis starting from Ding Wei's side. He happened to know a generous employer who didn't haggle over prices, hiring him to drive out for work. Perhaps due to the unusual hours, or some other reason, the other party offered a very high price, and Ding Wei accepted the job out of necessity."

"In the early hours of the day of the incident, at midnight, Ding Wei took the job as usual. First, he made a phone call to an unidentified person in his house—perhaps his wife who knew about it but didn't report it, or maybe a fourth person we don't know about—and then drove off. As for what exactly he did... I will conservatively assume for now that I don't have a direction. But what actually happened was: after finishing the job, he received the money, and on his way home, he collided with Yuan Yao's car and died in an accident."

Shao Zi keenly caught Du Yingjian's implication. "Are you saying you found the specific job details when searching Ding Wei's room?"

Du Yingjian raised his eyebrows. "You could say that."

His sense of morality and excessive empathy ultimately prevailed, causing Shao Zi to inadvertently ignore the premise of Du Yingjian's explanation—the reason he was suspicious and hesitant lay in the fact that the person acting abnormally was actually Ding Wei. Realizing this, Du Yingjian couldn't help but sigh.

"The situation is like this. Although there are no specific job records like a diary, or GPS navigation logs that showcase the utility of modern technology, the old driver Mr. Ding still left behind a few scattered notes—some isolated place names."

Du Yingjian opened his phone again, went to his photo album, split the screen, and opened a map application.

"This is..." Shao Zi didn't understand his intention for the moment, but seeing Du Yingjian operate so smoothly, he knew the man must have investigated something special to be this confident.

"Locations."

Just as he said, the photo in the album showed a sticky note with a few scribbled Chinese characters divided into several lines. Each line happened to contain two fixed place names within Yuzhou City. The spacing between the lines indicated they were written at different times.

Du Yingjian was also an experienced driver who knew Yuzhou's traffic by heart. He didn't need navigation when going out, making him one of those rare young people who didn't rely much on electronic products.

Though operating on the screen was a bit difficult, he still used those place names to mark the map. To make it clearer for Shao Zi, he used the map's navigation function to connect the two locations on the same line.

"Excluding traffic congestion which doesn't happen in the early hours, the travel time between the two locations on the first line takes three hours and twenty minutes, the next line takes one hour and fifteen minutes, and the last line... the round trip takes two and a half hours. There are certain differences, but in the early morning when there's no traffic, only affected by vehicle speed and traffic lights, if driven by the same driver, the margin of error is no more than ten minutes."

Shao Zi frowned. "These are Ding Wei's travel logs? But he shouldn't have needed to..."

"Exactly," Du Yingjian nodded. "If it were just to remember locations, he wouldn't have needed to take a sticky note printed with his daughter's cute cartoon characters to write them down. In the digital age, there are plenty of tools to remember addresses. The reason this happened is because Ding Wei suddenly discovered something: every time he drove for work, he would stop at the same time, at the same conspicuously unforgettable location along the way... Perhaps he even spotted the same car."

The leap in conclusion left Shao Zi stunned. He followed the point Du Yingjian was indicating, combined with the timing clue from earlier, and a cold shiver ran down his spine as he instantly understood the source.

"The Black Swan Nightclub?"