Love Born of Mutual Suspicion (Part 2)
"Did you check the water system equipment room?"
The guard shook his head vigorously. "He couldn't be in there. Only the boss has the key, and the boss left at two-thirty."
I didn't care about protocol. I dragged him toward the equipment room. It sat in a forgotten corner, its door facing away from the pool—just a concrete box easy to overlook. I told the guard to open it. He said the key was with the boss. I told him to call the boss.
The boss's voice came through the phone, surprised: "Key? I gave it to the maintenance worker. I told him to leave it in the security office when he was done."
The guard's face went blank. "Old Xu never gave me any key!"
I didn't need to check the equipment room. The child had been inside it. I ordered the guard to scan the surveillance footage for the maintenance worker.
At 4:13 PM, a tall man with a cropped haircut and a messenger bag left the swimming complex.
At 5:32 PM, the same man rode a three-wheeled motorcycle through the side gate. A cardboard box sat on the cargo rack.
Half an hour later, he drove out again. The old filtration tank was loaded on the back, and the cardboard box was still there. When the motorcycle hit a speed bump, the box jolted but didn't tip over—something heavy was still inside.
Suspect locked. I split our forces three ways: Hal had the Zhangs identify the maintenance worker; a second team tracked down the water system company to verify his identity; backup from the precinct coordinated with traffic control to locate the motorcycle.
Within the hour, Hal sent word.
Aunt Chen recognized the maintenance worker. And the Zhangs had a history with him.
"His name is Wesley Xu. He used to be Victor's personal assistant. Two years ago, he was convicted of financial fraud and sent to prison. He served his time, learned a trade inside, and was released five months ago." Hal paused. "You've probably figured it out by now. The person who reported him for fraud was Elena."
The bastard was taking revenge on the Zhang family.
---
Wesley wasn't hard to identify, but catching him proved more difficult.
What I never saw coming was that while we poured everything into tracking Wesley, Victor Zhang was poisoned.
It happened two days later.
Wesley was shrewd. He had a degree of counter-surveillance awareness. After the kidnapping, he'd gone off the grid—new SIM card, no electronic trail, and he'd holed up in the western outskirts, a desolate stretch of farmland and abandoned factories where traffic cameras were sparse and rural roads crisscrossed a jurisdictional no-man's-land. Our tracking team lost him in that wasteland.
We fanned out across the area, canvassing every settlement and abandoned building, but leads dried up one after another. The case teetered on the edge of deadlock.
Then Wesley broke his silence. He called again.
By the time his phone rang Victor's device, Hal had rehearsed the talking points with him three or four times.
Victor answered on speaker. The AI-generated voice droned: "Three million in cash, 2:00 AM, Xiaochong Xianggu—"
Victor cut in, shouting: "Wait! I need to know if my son is alive. Let me hear his voice!"
A pause. Some rustling. Then a child's voice, bright and clear: "Daddy!"
Victor's whole body sagged with relief. "Xiao Xu, is that you? Are you okay?"
"Daddy! Daddy, I miss you!"
"Xiao Xu, don't be scared. Daddy's coming for you—we're going to find you!"
Hal and I shot to our feet in the same instant, and the line went dead.
Hal's face went white. "What the hell was that? We had a script!"
Victor looked ashen. "I—I was worried about my son. He must be terrified—"
Hal ran his hands through his hair, pacing. "'We're going to find you.' 'We'—do you have any idea? Wesley heard that. He knows we involved the police!"
"I was worried about my son—it just slipped out! 'We' could mean me and my wife!"
When Victor said that, Elena was staring at him with wide, disbelieving eyes.
Before we could regroup, Victor's phone buzzed with a text: 4:00 AM. Three million in non-sequential bills. Come alone. Xinzhai Lotus Ridge.
I felt the cold travel from my spine to my fingertips. Wesley had been spooked.
The new time and location were a delaying tactic. Before 4:00 AM, he'd move the child. The so-called Lotus Ridge was nothing but a decoy.
If Wesley felt cornered, the boy's life could be in immediate danger.
We had ten hours. We moved like ants on a hot griddle—tagging the cash with tracking devices, coordinating with every level of law enforcement, and pushing every lead we had.
Elena insisted on cooking dinner herself. She needed to do something useful, she said. She wanted us well-fed so we could bring her son home safely.
The meal was lavish: seared steak, shrimp salad, cream of mushroom soup, and an eye-catching plate of lettuce-wrapped cheese—Roquefort, Elena called it. The cheese reeked. Hal nearly gagged, but out of politeness, he forced it down.
Elena urged us to try it. "It's blue cheese," she said. "Very rich. Go ahead." No one dared, so I cheerfully reached for a piece. Then she added that it was air-flown from France—twenty thousand a wheel.
Twenty thousand—more than a few months of my salary. I set the piece down and didn't touch it again.
That entire plate of lettuce-wrapped blue cheese went into Victor's stomach.
Elena had stressed the word "twenty thousand" with peculiar weight.
By 10:00 PM, Hal suggested Victor try to sleep, so he'd be sharp for the exchange. Four and a half hours later, I knocked on Victor's bedroom door. No response.
From inside the bathroom came the sound of a flush. Elena emerged and asked what was wrong. I pointed at the time and told her to find the key.
The door swung open, and a wave of sourness hit me. I lunged for the bed. Victor lay on his side, mouth full of vomit, gasping for air, his eyelids twitching.
Adrenaline spiked. I hauled him upright, scooped the vomit from his airway, and shouted at Elena to call for an ambulance.
Vomiting. Paralyzed throat muscles. Labored breathing. Flaccid limbs.
I wasn't a doctor, but the symptoms were unmistakable.
Early in my career, Chief Sharp and I had worked a case where an elderly paralyzed man had died suddenly after a large insurance payout. We'd initially suspected the caregiver of murder—chronic illness plus family stress equaled a plausible motive. But Chief Sharp soon noticed that the caregiver also exhibited dizziness, nausea, and difficulty swallowing. Tests confirmed it: botulism from homemade fermented tofu. The elderly man had been too weak to survive the toxin.
While I held Victor upright, my gaze swept the bathroom.
After the flush, I didn't hear the sound of running water. No one had washed their hands.
A thought crystallized. The cheese. That plate of pungent, pricey blue cheese. The smell had nearly knocked Hal out.
Elena had called it "the king of cheeses" and pushed everyone to try it. I was the only one who'd reached for a piece, but the astronomical price tag had scared me off.
The entire portion had gone into Victor.
When Elena said "twenty thousand a wheel," she'd bitten down on every syllable.
I waited until Hal took over watching Victor, then entered the bathroom. The toilet was spotless. I picked up the toilet brush and held it under the light. Wedged between the bristles, two tiny shards of glass caught the light.
---
Victor was rushed to the hospital. I kept Elena in the living room and asked her point-blank why she'd done it.
"I don't understand what you're implying."
She sat motionless, the red veins in her eyes like threads in stagnant water.
I exhaled. "I don't understand what you're thinking either. Your child is still missing, and you tried to kill your husband."
"We're married," she said, and smiled. "Why would I want to kill him?"
"That's exactly what I'd like to know."
Elena said nothing. She just stared at me.
"You love your child—I can see that. Your phone wallpaper is his photo. You have matching pajamas. In the bathroom, his toothbrush and toiletries are immaculately arranged. You even removed the electric toothbrush head and stored it separately so it wouldn't gather bacteria."
I leaned forward. "And yet, your son is missing, his life is in danger, and every minute you're wasting with this stunt is one less minute we have to find him."
"I didn't!" She came alive, voice cracking. "I'm not the one trying to hurt Xiao Xu—he is! That animal—"
"So you think Victor wants to hurt his own son, and that's why you tried to kill him?"
Elena shook all over, then fell silent again. I pulled an evidence bag from my pocket. Inside it sat two minuscule shards of glass.
"Let me get this straight. You think you can fool the police? You shattered a bottle that held poison, flushed the pieces down the toilet, and called it done? Do you have any idea that it takes a hundred degrees of sustained heat to destroy this particular toxin?"
I wasn't even certain the glass could still test positive for botulinum toxin, or that Victor's symptoms definitively pointed to botulism. But I was certain she didn't know that either.
Her eyes flickered to the evidence bag. Her fists clenched against her knees, shoulders rigid as stone.
I softened my tone. "Tell me the truth. I want to help you. You know that cooperating is in your best interest. You still want your son back, don't you?"
Elena's tears broke loose. She screamed: "You don't understand! Xiao Xu isn't coming back! Victor took him!"
---
She told me that Victor was a monster.
He'd been Elena's senior in college—a campus celebrity, rumored to cycle through girlfriends faster than underwear. When Elena had a falling-out with her ex, Victor swooped in. Attentive, generous, always buying front-row tickets to concerts and shows.
At first, Elena didn't trust him. Victor insisted the rumors were fabrications by women he'd rejected. He came from a strict, traditional family, he said. He'd only ever love one woman.
Captivated by his wealth and charm, Elena fell hard. What she didn't see coming was that Victor was a sexual sadist.
Marriage unlocked his darker impulses. He praised her dancer's flexibility, suggested spicing things up. Then came the restraints, the humiliation, the whips, the punishments. Each new game stripped Elena of another layer of dignity.
"I didn't just take it," she said, pulling up her sleeves to show me the faded rope burns. "But he told me that if I loved him, I should accept all of him. He's an animal. And I—I loved him so much then."
Victor's control over Elena evolved from the physical to the psychological. Abused and desperate to please, she sacrificed her self-respect to keep him.
Then Victor convinced himself she was cheating.
At a class reunion, Victor happened to be out of town. Elena had too much to drink, and her ex-boyfriend walked her home. Victor hit the roof. He interrogated her endlessly, accusing her of rekindling the affair. Elena wept and begged forgiveness, swearing she'd never speak to another man.
Victor didn't believe her.
And now I learned: Elena's ex-boyfriend was Wesley.
To torture her, Victor had hired Wesley as his assistant, claiming he wanted to "help an old classmate out."
"He was lying!" Elena's voice shook. "He's not normal. He has paranoid delusions!"
After their son Xiao Yang fell ill and died, Victor forged a paternity test claiming both boys weren't his. He torched every family photo, and he forced himself on Elena in the aftermath of his rage.
As if that weren't enough, he'd used intimate recordings to blackmail Elena into framing Wesley for embezzlement, landing the man in prison.
"He's insane. He wanted to make me miserable for the rest of my life. I knew from the start that Xiao Xu's kidnapping was his doing. He didn't call the police to save our son—he hit me, he smashed things, all so he could manufacture a reason to involve the authorities and have Xiao Xu killed indirectly. He used Wesley as a scapegoat, just like he made me do to Wesley. He's too clever. He knows how to manipulate people..."
Elena said that once Wesley went to prison, his fiancée left him, and his ailing mother lost her mind. Victor must have secretly paid Wesley to come after her and the child. His refusal to follow the script on the phone call, his deliberate use of "we"—it was all theater. He was positioning himself as a tragic father while ensuring both she and Xiao Xu suffered.
"He's not human. He's a demon." Elena's body trembled. "He wants to destroy me, and he wants to destroy our child. I couldn't let him win. The only way to stop him was to kill him—and make him pay for what he did to Xiao Xu."
A year ago, Elena had acquired several vials of botulinum toxin from a friend, for cosmetic use. When she realized Victor was willing to let their child die rather than pay the ransom, she had injected the remaining toxin into the sharp-smelling blue cheese—a "last supper" for her husband. Terrified of discovery, she'd flushed the empty vials in stages, never imagining that her haste would draw my suspicion.