Chapter 3: Muddy Footprints Can Lie

At six in the morning, the back room of the library was like the inside of an old clock, the second hand pounding against Song Zhao’s temple with relentless persistence.

He curled up on a faded, worn-out sofa, the springs digging painfully into the back of his neck, his phone buzzing hot in his pocket, the vibrations crawling from his thigh into his very bones.

“Awake?”

The warmth of tea drifted over first, and Su Wan’s voice, wrapped in the scent of jasmine, was lighter than the morning light itself.

When he opened his eyes, he collided with a stray lock of her falling hair, the tips brushing across the back of his hand like a feather that could breathe.

On the back of her hand, holding the celadon cup, faint blue veins were visible—traces left by countless nights spent hunched over ancient texts.

“I checked the message you sent me.” She pushed the tablet across, the blue light from the screen etching the fine lines at the corner of her eyes in sharp relief.

Song Zhao accepted the tea, only realizing how cold his hand had become—like a slab of iron—when his fingertips met the warmth of the cup.

In the surveillance screenshot, the city’s southern highway entrance at 11:47 pm, June 17, 2020, was smeared into a blurred ink wash by the rain.

A black SUV sped against the flow of traffic. The passenger’s face, sliced by water streaks from the wipers, was nearly unrecognizable, but Song Zhao knew that brow ridge—Zhao Zhenbang always slicked his eyebrows into sharp peaks with gel, a habit unchanged even on the night of the crash.

“The checkpoint system log shows this video was flagged as redundant within forty-eight hours and overwritten a week later.” Su Wan traced the edge of the tablet. “But I asked a friend at the Provincial Library to dig into the base data—the IP address that flagged it belonged to the city bureau’s information division.”

Ripples quivered in the teacup cradled in Song Zhao’s palm.

He remembered what the attending physician had told him three years ago in the ICU: “The crash caused a gap in your memory.” He remembered returning to the force after his recovery, finding the entry for June 17, 2020, replaced by a blank page in every dispatch record. He remembered Zhao Zhenbang, clapping him on the shoulder, the scent of cedar drifting from his cuff as he said, “Song, this was an act of God. The organization will look after you.”

“I was dispatched that night to handle a violent protest over forced demolitions in the development zone.” His voice, when it came, was rough as sandpaper scraping steel. “Someone was threatening to set themselves on fire. I took the evidence team to secure the scene.”

Su Wan’s hand stilled on the tablet.

She recalled eavesdropping in the hospital corridor three years ago—a nurse saying, “That cop’s lucky, got thrown ten meters by the SUV, the dashcam shattered to bits,” and a cleaner replying, “Isn’t that right? I heard the car was transferred to some foundation the very next day.”

“It wasn’t an accident.” Song Zhao pressed his knuckles to his temple, where his pulse throbbed violently. “It was a purge.”

He rose abruptly, the blanket sliding to the floor with a sharp slap.

As Su Wan bent to retrieve it, she glimpsed a flash of a USB drive poking from his pocket—the one he’d sent to the inspection team last night, its edge deformed from his tight grip.

When the metal door of the evidence center creaked shut behind him, Song Zhao’s heel caught the step.

The hem of Dr. Chen’s white coat brushed the back of his hand like a flake of drifting snow.

The old medical examiner didn’t look at him, only pressed a ring of keys into his palm, the little brass bell on the ring chiming softly—it was a gift Song Zhao had given when he joined the team, a token of apprenticeship.

“The file for your father’s case was emptied out three years ago,” Dr. Chen’s voice was muffled behind his mask as he used forceps to pick up a blood-flecked bone fragment. “But the dashcam from your crash….” He abruptly turned, pulling a silver USB drive from the bottom of a drawer. “Traffic said the hard drive was broken, but I checked the port—there were scratches from a Phillips screwdriver.”

Song Zhao gripped the USB so tightly his nails nearly drew blood.

He knew what the old examiner was gambling on: the evidence center’s cameras would log his time in the archives, and Zhao Zhenbang’s informants might be smoking at the end of the corridor right now. He knew, too, that once he stepped through this door, he would no longer be a “suspended officer under investigation,” but a “person of interest in unauthorized evidence tampering.”

“Thank you,” he murmured, voice barely more than a sigh.

The old doctor didn’t respond, only bent over the bone fragments again, the forceps glinting coldly under the lamp.

As Song Zhao backed out of the room, Dr. Chen called out, “When your father investigated the Lin family’s first forced demolition case, he also had a hard drive with those same scratches.”

The static-free worktable in the rare books restoration room was shrouded under a waterproof cloth. When Song Zhao lifted it, a scrap of Republican-era stationery still clung to the surface.

Su Wan dimmed the overhead lights, leaving only a gooseneck lamp shining on the USB. The beam cast a fan-shaped shadow across her lashes.

“Microcurrent tech can reactivate damaged memory chips,” she said, connecting the drive to her custom repair rig, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “I used this when restoring the Annals of River City, but…” She looked up at him. “It might miss key frames.”

Song Zhao said nothing.

He stared at the scrolling hexadecimal code on the screen, Dr. Chen’s words echoing in his ears: “Your father was after the Lin family’s first blood debt.”

Suddenly, the headaches from three years ago surged back. He pressed a hand to his temple, fragments flickering before his eyes: charred banners, shattered cameras, someone in the crowd raising a sign that read, “Give me back my old home.”

“Got it!” Su Wan’s voice made his head snap up.

A seventeen-second video flickered onto the screen: a mountain road on a rainy night, his patrol car just coming to a stop, the headlights of a black SUV in the rearview mirror burning like two crimson eyes.

A second before impact, the passenger window rolled down. A hand in a black leather glove reached out, the fingertips tracing a semicircle in the air—as if adjusting some device.

“Wait.” Song Zhao’s pupils contracted sharply.

As golden patterns unfurled from the depths of his eyes, he heard his own ragged breathing.

This time, the “eye of truth” revisited more than just the image: the scent of cedar cologne flooded his nostrils, mingling with rain and the tang of rust; on the dashboard, a book with a gilded cover was swept by the wipers, the words “Gifted by River City Lin Foundation” on the back stabbing at his vision.

“Lin Haoyu,” he blurted out.

Su Wan’s fingers froze above the keyboard; in the blue glow of the screen, her face turned as pale as paper.

The next morning, at ten, the sandalwood door of the rare books division thundered under heavy knocks.

Song Zhao was examining the hard drive interface with a magnifying glass. When Su Wan went to open the door, he glimpsed a navy suit in the corridor—Zhao Zhenbang’s trouser creases could slice paper, his shoes polished to a mirror finish.

“Captain Song, I hear your health’s still shaky?” Zhao Zhenbang’s smile was as stiff as frozen cream. He glanced past Su Wan into the room, his gaze lingering on the static powder left on the worktable. “Unauthorized evidence tampering, restoring deleted data…” he drawled, “Word gets out, and it won’t look good for your reinstatement.”

Song Zhao set the magnifying glass down lightly.

He noticed the pale ring around Zhao Zhenbang’s left ring finger—a mark left by years of wearing a ring. It matched exactly the witness description from three years ago: “A black glove with a sapphire-studded ring.”

“Is Deputy Chief Zhao so concerned about me?” He stood, towering half a head above Zhao Zhenbang. “Perhaps you can explain why the file for the sanitation worker’s homicide ended up in your office safe?”

Zhao Zhenbang’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

He drew a file from his suit’s inner pocket and slapped it on the table. The cover was stamped: “Preliminary Report on Unauthorized Case Access During Suspension.” A slip of paper slid out—Dr. Chen’s forceful handwriting, etched through the page: “Original dashcam drive, Evidence Center B7 cold storage, code-name ‘Cicada in Winter’.”

“There are some doors,” Zhao Zhenbang said as he turned, the cedar cologne now tinged with threat, “that open onto an abyss. You’d best think carefully.”

The evidence center at midnight was like a graveyard.

Song Zhao hugged the wall as he walked, keeping his shoes clear of the motion-sensor lights.

The lock on cold storage B7 was an old-fashioned padlock. When he took out Dr. Chen’s key, the metallic clink echoed sharply in the empty corridor.

Click.

Inside the cold storage cabinet, there were no biological samples—only a silver hard drive. Its label had been torn away, leaving just the corners; a shaky hand had scrawled “Cicada in Winter” with a marker.

He reached for it, but from outside came the sound of leather heels striking the floor—tap, tap, tap—like blows against his heart.

He killed the power and slipped into the air duct, scraping the back of his neck on rusted metal.

Through the mesh of the vent, he saw Zhao Zhenbang enter with two plainclothes officers, one of whom sported a bulge at his waist—a sidearm.

“Starting tomorrow, this locker gets cleared and sealed,” Zhao Zhenbang’s voice was cold as ice. “Erase every trace tied to ‘Cicada in Winter’.”

“Are we really going after him?” one of the others asked, voice trembling.

“He shouldn’t have touched President Lin’s car.” Zhao Zhenbang tapped the cold cabinet with his shoe. “Old Song got himself killed meddling with Lin’s land deed, and that’s why…”

The rest of his words were drowned out by the roar of blood in Song Zhao’s ears.

His fingers dug deep into his palm as the dossier on his father’s case exploded in his mind—March 12, 2000, construction worker Song Yuanchao’s fatal fall at the worksite, the last page of the file bearing an approval signature blotted out by black ink, the remaining strokes identical to the handwriting on Zhao Zhenbang’s “demolition permit.”

Dust from the vent drifted into his eyes. He blinked, golden patterns swirling in his pupils.

This time, he didn’t run.

At three a.m., the desk lamp in the back room of the library was still burning.

Song Zhao wrote the final line in his notebook, the pen’s tip piercing the page: “If you’re so afraid of the Cicada’s song, I’ll make sure it echoes through all of River City.”

Outside, the rain began to fall, fine as if someone were scattering salt from the heavens.

When Su Wan brought in a bowl of hot porridge, she saw him staring at the hard drive with an expression as sharp as a knife honed twenty years—finally ready to be drawn.