Born Criminal (Part 2)
Bringing Leo back to the precinct was easy. Getting Tina to cooperate was another matter.
Tina's father, Professor Yao, was a university professor. Her mother, Meng Huiqin, ran a women's aesthetics studio. The family wasn't wealthy per se, but they carried weight in the community.
When they learned we were there because of Leo, Professor Yao's face darkened. Meng Huiqin was wiping a family photo—just the three of them—and explained that Tina had been depressed lately, unable to sleep, and had just taken medication and was resting.
I asked Meng Huiqin to wake Tina, but Professor Yao slammed down his newspaper. "Are you asking her to assist in an investigation, or are you arresting her? If it's assistance, let her sleep. If it's an arrest, show me the warrant!"
Meng Huiqin hurried to mediate, asking us to wait half an hour for Tina to rest.
The request wasn't unreasonable. Tina was at home and, being pregnant—according to the strawberry farm owner—she couldn't go anywhere. Young Yang and I secured the exits. Nothing could go wrong.
Meng Huiqin asked the nanny to make tea, cleared the clutter from the coffee table, and invited us to sit. I glanced at the medicine box she'd pushed aside—and felt something was wrong.
It was a box of diazepam—Valium—used primarily for anxiety and functional neuroses, especially effective for anxiety-induced insomnia.
I asked instinctively, "Tina takes this?"
Meng Huiqin blinked, then nodded.
Young Yang pierced through the fog: "Miss Yao isn't pregnant?"
Meng Huiqin looked even more confused. "Tina... pregnant?"
Young Yang and I locked eyes. Alarm bells went off.
Diazepam is contraindicated during pregnancy. The strawberry farm owner had identified Tina as visibly pregnant—she must have been showing for him to notice. Meng Huiqin would absolutely never give a pregnant woman diazepam.
Upon further questioning, we learned that Tina had secretly married Leo right after graduation, nearly giving her father a heart attack. But soon after, Tina became pregnant. Meng Huiqin, unable to bear seeing her daughter suffer, convinced Professor Yao to accept the marriage, and even provided the down payment for an apartment and a car.
Then, at five months of pregnancy, the couple went on a trip and Leo drove drunk. The crash caused Tina to miscarry and left Leo with permanent nerve damage in his right leg. After a year of recovery, the limp persisted, and he'd lost his civil service job.
For the next five years, they couldn't conceive again.
I finally understood why Professor Yao was so hostile: he didn't want his daughter getting hurt by Leo again.
This realization was confirmed when Tina came downstairs.
The woman Meng Huiqin supported was thin, pale, with long hair framing a tiny, delicate face. Dark circles shadowed her eyes, and she wore a white dress that made her look like she could be blown away by a stiff breeze.
Looking at that slender figure, even a fool could tell: she was absolutely not pregnant.
---
Tina's appearance plunged the case into a deeper fog.
On March 8th, why had she pretended to be pregnant?
I sensed the answer might be connected to Mia's death.
Given Tina's fragile state, Meng Huiqin asked to accompany her to the station.
Back at the precinct, an ambulance was pulling out with its lights flashing. I stopped a colleague to ask what happened.
He sighed. "Mia's family came to claim the body for burial. When the old woman saw her daughter, she had a hypertensive crisis and fainted. The coroner sent her to the hospital—"
Before he could finish, Tina spoke from behind me.
"What?"
I turned. She was staring at my colleague, pale and trembling.
"She's... dead?"
Before we could react, she fainted.
Young Yang caught her, and we rushed her to the infirmary. Thank goodness she was young—otherwise I'd have been sprinting after the ambulance.
After settling Tina, I hurried back to the observation room. I pushed through the door to find Captain Trent standing with his arms crossed, face dark, watching the interrogation through the one-way mirror.
Inside, Leo was calmly chatting with the interrogator about which apartment layout was best for raising children.
The interrogation room was warm and lively. The observation room was an icebox.
I was stunned. "Captain, what's going on?"
Trent's face looked like he'd swallowed a fly. "Can't you tell? Our man got played."
When Young Yang and I had gone to the Yao household, all physical evidence related to Leo had already been submitted for analysis. A colleague was using old-school rapport-building tactics—chatting, making small talk—to try to extract new leads from Leo.
No one expected the time-tested method to fail so spectacularly on a property consultant.
Leo had quickly seized control of the conversation, steering clear of the case entirely and redirecting toward an entirely new topic. Trent hadn't intervened, wanting to see how far Leo would go.
"He's enjoying this," Young Yang murmured, stepping closer to the glass, watching Leo talk circles around the interrogator. "Enjoying the sensation of being in control. It makes him feel like the only winner."
Trent nodded. "Young and slippery. Hard to crack."
The colleague was called out, and Trent started "cooling" Leo—leaving him alone in the room. Leo lounged in his chair, looked at the one-way mirror, and flashed a strange smile.
I couldn't quite describe what was in that smile. Just a sense of cold calculation beyond what was normal.
If the interrogation room incident merely made Leo seem "difficult," the preliminary forensic results pushed things from "difficult" to "troublesome."
The fibers found in the potted plant were from a cotton-linen blend, commonly used for large shawls. But they were too badly burned to extract useful information. The missing boning knife was recovered from the residential complex's trash station—its blade was chipped, and it bore three sets of fingerprints: Leo's, Professor Yao's, and Meng Huiqin's. But the knife had been scrubbed clean—no trace of Mia's DNA.
As for Leo's white Toyota Vios, it had undergone a thorough cleaning. All interiors replaced. We found a single strand of Mia's hair under the backseat floor mat, but the car tested negative for luminol.
None of the evidence qualified as evidence.
However, on the night of March 8th, Leo had a gap of several unaccounted hours!
Leo's project was still under development. The site had only a sales center—no security personnel, no cameras. We couldn't verify when he'd driven in. A few days earlier, Leo's computer hard drive had crashed, making data recovery impossible. We couldn't confirm when he'd used the computer.
The only concrete sighting was a neighbor who saw Leo driving into the residential complex at around 10 AM on March 9th.
Between 6:30 PM and 10:30 PM on the night of the murder, no one knew where Leo was.
Facing a table of physical evidence that proved nothing, Trent's temples throbbed.
"It's impossible," I said, flipping through reports, unable to banish the image of Mia's husband's tear-streaked face. "With such obvious gaps—the scarf, the weapon, the timeline—how can we not nail him?"
I closed my eyes and tried to reconstruct the night of the murder.
That day, Leo had dropped Tina off first, then gone back for Mia. Whether they'd arranged to meet or Leo contacted her at the last minute, they'd rendezvoused in the northern suburbs.
Mia and Leo had no financial disputes, but emotional entanglements couldn't be ruled out.
Mia's husband was always away. Leo was charming, a self-proclaimed nice guy who'd clearly won Mia's trust—and his married status made her lower her guard.
The car crash five years ago likely left Leo or Tina infertile. Either way, it affected Leo's attitude toward pregnant women.
Tina had defied her father to marry Leo. Faking a pregnancy to spice up their marriage wasn't outside the realm of possibility.
But a fake pregnancy could never compare to a real one.
Mia got into Leo's car, drank the drugged beverage, and fell asleep.
Leo might have only intended to take advantage of her. If he was infertile, his semen wouldn't show up in a DNA test—as long as he was careful, he could leave no evidence. But perhaps due to dosage or constitution, Mia woke early. They struggled, and in a moment of panic, Leo strangled her with the silk scarf.
The shock of death reminded Leo of the near-fatal crash and the helplessness of being controlled by fate.
He found a secluded dumping spot, hoisted Mia's body into the low trees, took out the boning knife he'd brought as a contingency, and a cruel, thrilling vision surfaced in his mind.
As Young Yang observed, Leo enjoyed the sensation of being in control.
Five years ago, the crash had taken his and Tina's child and the future of a "family of three." Five years later, on that out-of-control evening, he had a chance to regain control.
Cutting the baby from the womb and holding its life in his hands gave Leo back his misplaced confidence.
He wrapped the still-breathing infant in the shawl, left the northern suburbs, changed out of his blood-soaked clothes, brought the materials he'd already prepared to the nightclub, and created a clever alibi.
From Tina's reaction, she hadn't known Mia was dead. But seeing Leo bring home a blood-soaked baby, she realized something had gone terribly wrong.
They argued bitterly, and Tina fled to her parents' home. She didn't know whether to turn him in, tormented day and night by fear and anxiety, relying on medication to sleep.
Leo, left alone, had plenty of time to dispose of evidence.
I snapped my eyes open and grabbed the photos of Mia and the infant. "No matter what we missed, the breakthrough must be Tina. I'm going to the infirmary!"
Young Yang said, "I want to talk to Leo."
I was frantic. "Your experience is too shallow. You know that bastard is a predator—why walk into his jaws? If he realizes we have no evidence, interrogating him further will only make things harder!"
Young Yang wasn't annoyed. He simply said, "I want to understand why he did it."
"Because he's a psychopath. Captain, stop him from making things worse for us."
Leaving those words behind, I didn't wait for Trent's response and headed straight for the infirmary.
Tina was awake, answering a female officer's questions with Meng Huiqin by her side.
I switched places with my colleague, pulled up a chair beside Tina, and cut to the chase. "Tell me what really happened on March 8th."
Tina's eyes were red. She looked down and said nothing.
Meng Huiqin started to speak, but I raised my hand to silence her and slapped two photos in front of Tina. The lifeless faces appeared before her eyes, and Tina screamed, burying herself in Meng Huiqin's arms. Meng Huiqin fumed, demanding to know how I could do such a thing, but I only looked at Tina.
"Mia's due date was today. She should have been with her husband and mother-in-law, nervously and happily waiting for her baby. She'd even picked a nickname—Duo Duo, meaning abundance and joy. But now Mia and her child are lying in a cold storage drawer. Minus fifteen degrees—colder than the coldest day of winter here."
Meng Huiqin tried to comfort Tina and argued that her daughter was not involved, asking me not to harass a patient.
I ignored her, pointing at the photos and raising my voice. "Mia was the same age as you. She liked children just like you. She liked strawberries just like you. You have countless chances to eat strawberries again. Her life ended at twenty-eight. I just want to know what happened on the day she died!"
Tina shuddered, looked up at me, her eyes red as if scrubbed with a brush. "We... we went to the strawberry farm, and we played until sunset before leaving."
"And then?"
"We were going to eat at a farm restaurant, but Leo suddenly got an overtime call—a client needed contract materials, and he had to rush to the project site. Mia didn't want to delay his work, so she said she could get a cab herself. That's when we separated."
Tina answered every question, but something felt off. I asked what happened next.
She claimed that after dropping Mia off, Leo took her into the city. She went home, and Leo drove to the project site, not returning until the next morning. When he came back, he smelled of alcohol and women's perfume. She'd been convinced he'd been carousing all night, and they'd had a terrible fight. In a rage, she'd packed her bags and moved back to her parents'.
Identical to Leo's account.
I pressed harder, appealing to her emotions, and asked again.
Still identical.
But it shouldn't have been identical.
Under normal circumstances, people describing the same event would emphasize different details based on their perspectives and personalities. Even if the broad strokes matched, the specifics should differ. Yet Tina and Leo's accounts matched almost word for word!
A chill ran through me: Leo and Tina had coordinated their stories.
When? Under what circumstances had they aligned?
Just as I was about to push on the fake pregnancy and probe Leo's twisted fixation on pregnant women, the female officer returned with two colleagues and handcuffed Tina.
Not just Meng Huiqin and Tina—even I was stunned. I pulled the officer aside and asked what was going on.
She looked at Tina meaningfully. "She's the killer. Leo's been protecting her all along."
Thunderstruck, I strode back to the observation room. Only Trent was there. He tilted his chin toward the one-way mirror.
"Young Yang got it out of him."