Liu Yufang’s lips began to tremble uncontrollably.

Fang Yongnian was still standing, towering over her in the cramped single room.

“In that car accident, four people died. One of them was your ex-husband.” His tone remained unhurried, but every word he uttered made Liu Yufang shrink smaller and smaller.

Fang Yongnian let out a low laugh.

In these four years, he had uncovered many things—each one uglier than he had imagined.

He thought he had already seen through it all, but time and again he discovered that the evil of human nature had no bottom line.

He had never doubted Liu Yufang.

Just as Lu Boyuan had said, Liu Yufang was an ordinary woman without much education, whose only presence in the whole case lay in two statements that contradicted each other.

He had long assumed that Liu Yufang must have been paid to alter her statement. As for why she had to change it, or what would happen after the change, she probably had no idea.

After all, when he answered that phone call in the hospital years ago and heard Liu Yufang crying, he had truly believed her tears were genuine.

But in the end… she had known.

She had known in advance that the car accident would happen.

Ten thousand yuan was indeed too little for her.

Liu Yufang remained motionless, curled up on the plastic stool. Except for her trembling fingers and lips, she looked like an aged, color-faded statue.

Fang Yongnian stared fixedly at her. The prosthetic joint he still hadn’t gotten used to after four years ached sharply; he couldn’t even tell whether it was phantom pain or the mechanism catching for real.

The corners of his mouth lifted slightly, yet his eyes grew colder and colder.

“When Ge Wenyao called you, you already knew that something would happen to Wang Dagang on that trip.”

“You didn’t call the police, nor did you try to warn Wang Dagang.”

“Why?”

This was clearly a disaster that could have been prevented!

Liu Yufang moved slightly, slowly lifting her head. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.

“I…” She opened it again, this time finally producing a sound—hoarse, like someone’s throat being strangled. “I didn’t know.”

She denied it.

She shook while denying it.

Fang Yongnian ignored her.

“You knew about the car accident.” Many things finally became clear.

No wonder she only took fifty thousand yuan, because she had guilt in her heart.

She had indirectly caused the deaths of four people!

“After confirming with Lu Boyuan over the phone that there was no problem with your altered statement, you took that fifty thousand yuan and thought the matter was over. But you didn’t expect that fifty thousand wouldn’t last.”

“You called me more than a month after the accident. During that month, you found out that the deceased Wang Dagang had also taken money, yet you didn’t know where that money went—so you started asking around.”

She finally realized that five thousand yuan was nowhere near enough to settle this case, so she went around asking people to confirm whether she had been shortchanged.

That was why she called Ge Wenyao, to find out whether Ge Wenyao had also received money.

Liu Yufang’s pupils constricted tighter and tighter; even her breathing grew rapid.

Fang Yongnian laughed again.

He finally understood.

After so many years of investigation, everything had at last come into focus. His right leg throbbed with maddening pain.

“You wanted Wang Dagang to die. Why?” He kicked the plastic stool with his prosthetic leg, and a loud clang echoed in the room.

Liu Yufang was trembling so violently she could hardly be called human.

“I…” In her panic, her rural accent slipped out. “I didn’t.”

Fang Yongnian said nothing.

“It was him… it was Dagang, he wasn’t a real man…” Her wrinkle-filled eyes grew sore; she rubbed at them, but no tears came out.

Most people, when something happens, their first reaction is to blame others.

Even though she clearly had a chance to save him, even though she was one of those who had caused her ex-husband’s death, her first reaction was still to blame someone else.

“He had a woman outside! He even had a daughter!” Her lips quivered, her tearless eyes dry and red.

Fang Yongnian looked at her in silence.

“I went looking for that woman afterward, but she had moved away. She must have gotten a lot of money, that’s why she moved.” Four years had passed, yet she still resented her, hating that mistress with a venom that wished her dead.

No—she wished that woman would live, but live worse than she did.

“Who gave you the money? When Ge Wenyao called you, what exactly did he say?” Fang Yongnian’s voice was cold.

Her matter had nothing to do with him.

Liu Yufang took a deep breath.

“I didn’t know Ge Wenyao before.” Her clouded eyes no longer showed any traceable emotion.

She truly hadn’t known Ge Wenyao. At that time, she was in the middle of a divorce with Wang Dagang, because he had been sending most of his salary to that other woman while their own home was dirt poor.

No matter how she cried or made a scene, Wang Dagang let her hit and scold him without a word, refusing to tell her who that woman was.

So when she received that phone call, her tone had been nasty. Back then, she thought every strange call must be from that vixen of his.

“He asked me whether Wang Dagang had taken cold medicine before leaving the house.” Her recollection was fragmented. “I thought he was saying something unlucky, so I cursed him out.”

“But he asked me again and again to confirm, and told me that if Wang Dagang went out after taking cold medicine, he wouldn’t come back from that trip.” Liu Yufang took a deep breath.

“His tone didn’t sound like a joke, so I…”

Liu Yufang’s hands began trembling again. This time, even her deeply lined face twitched in a nervous spasm.

“Wang Dagang took cold medicine before he left.” The words came out painfully slow, but shockingly clear.

The secret she had kept buried in her heart for four years was finally spoken aloud.

“He clearly wasn’t sick that day, yet the night before, he bought two boxes of cold medicine and took several pills before leaving.”

“On the phone, Ge Wenyao told me that if Wang Dagang went out after taking cold medicine, he might not come back from that trip.”

Perhaps that line from Ge Wenyao had shocked her deeply, she repeated it twice.

“I just…”

“So you told Ge Wenyao that Wang Dagang hadn’t taken any cold medicine.” Fang Yongnian suddenly felt an overwhelming fatigue.

They had all been wrong.

In her first statement, Liu Yufang had indeed lied.

Because of that phone call from Ge Wenyao—because she had lied to him during that call—she instinctively lied again in her first police statement after the accident.

“Wang Dagang… wasn’t human.” Exposed, Liu Yufang lost control of her emotions again.

“He clearly knew that he wouldn’t come back from that trip. He knew he was going to die, yet he didn’t say a single word to me before he left.”

Perhaps that was the knot Liu Yufang had carried in her heart all these years. At last, tears began to well up in her eyes.

“He didn’t say a single word to me!” she cried hoarsely, repeating herself.

“Who gave you the money?” Fang Yongnian cut her off directly.

He didn’t want to hear her rambling or see her crocodile tears. Every excuse she made only made the pain in his right leg grow more unbearable.

Liu Yufang choked.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I found that fifty thousand yuan while packing up Wang Dagang’s clothes at home.”

So no one had actually given her the money and the empty pill boxes.

When she found the money, she instinctively assumed it was Wang Dagang’s payment for selling his life.

“Then I got a call. It came from a private number. He said he was a police officer. He told me he thought there was something wrong with my statement today and that I should go to the Public Security Bureau tomorrow to make a new one, to tell the truth.”

She emphasized the words ‘tell the truth’.

“After that… you already know the rest.” Liu Yufang’s voice grew fainter. “What I did… doesn’t count as breaking the law.”

She had lied the first time, but the second time, she told the truth.

“A police officer called you on a private phone?” Fang Yongnian frowned.

Liu Yufang nodded. Perhaps realizing Fang Yongnian didn’t fully believe her, she stood up, rummaged for a long while in the wooden chest behind the bed, and finally took out a tattered notebook.

“I’m not stupid. A few days after it all happened, I started to think something was off.” She squinted and handed the notebook to Fang Yongnian. “I wrote his number in here.”

“At first, it could still be reached. But later, when I asked him for money a few times, the number turned out to be invalid.” She paused, thinking.

“Oh, right. Before I got married again, I even asked someone to look him up.”

“I could never find that mistress, so in the end, I asked a fellow villager. He knew how to trace phone numbers. I gave him a few hundred yuan and told him to find out who the number was registered under.”

A few hundred yuan, and he really did find something.

“But this is all I have.” She handed over a string of numbers. “This is the ID number registered to that phone.”

She only knew that much, and from then on, she could no longer find out anything else. She got married, and one troublesome matter after another left her with no strength to care about her ex-husband or that clearly suspicious car accident.

That time, Fang Yongnian obtained a phone number that had been disconnected for three years—and an identification number.

He didn’t even need to look it up, because it belonged to Ge Wenyao.

He had already become intimately familiar with that number during the past few years while investigating bank accounts.

He wrote down Liu Yufang’s address and told the investigator Yu Hanfeng had found for him to keep tracking them.

Liu Yufang had debts of her own to pay, but right now, he only wanted to know who had given her that money in the first place—and what kind of benefit that person had given Wang Dagang, that he would willingly exchange his own life for it.

He had finally proven that the car accident had not been an accident at all, and that the driver’s sudden turn of the steering wheel in that critical moment had not been his imagination.

Liu Yufang knew Lu Boyuan. After revising her statement, she had even called Lu Boyuan to confirm, so the person who had impersonated a police officer to call her was clearly not Lu Boyuan.

Although Liu Yufang had spoken vaguely, she had indeed used that phone number to extort money several times back then. That explained why her current man had later been trapped and cheated out of money through gambling setups—because at that time, Fang Yongnian had already begun investigating Lu Boyuan. He knew that during that period, Lu Boyuan had not been blackmailed, nor had he been involved in any gambling schemes.

But it also couldn’t possibly have been Ge Wenyao, who was already dead.

Ge Wenyao had known the truth, which was why, before getting into the car, he had repeatedly confirmed whether Wang Dagang had taken cold medicine that day. Because of Liu Yufang’s assurance, he had lost his life as well.

By a twist of fate, a car accident that could have been avoided turned into a tragedy.

After that, the trail became easier to follow.

Since Ge Wenyao had been an insider, tracing him along with the list of accounts now in hand, within a few days of returning to Hecheng, Fang Yongnian quickly narrowed down several people who had financial dealings with Ge Wenyao during that period.

Coincidentally, apart from the two who had already been arrested in the Musheng Pharmaceuticals case, there were four others. Among those four, one was in prison, three were on probation—all of them connected to data falsification.

Just like the two from the Musheng case, they were repeat offenders.

When they had first filed that project, the initial data had already been problematic.

୨୧ ⏔⏔⏔⏔♡⏔⏔⏔⏔ ୨୧ 

The taste of the mint candy in Fang Yongnian’s mouth grew more and more bitter.

That project had been initiated by the old professor himself. The preliminary data had been his responsibility.

That same old professor who, for the sake of his paper, hadn’t gone home even when his only son had a fever all night.

That same person whom Fang Yongnian had once taken as his life’s ideal, who had quietly cried in the hospital after the incident because he still believed in him.

Someone he had once respected—deeply respected.

—

Author’s Note:

This matter won’t drag on too long—this is a romance novel (serious face). The main focus is still love and pharmaceuticals.

Ge Wenyao was one of the people who died in the car crash. In the beginning, Fang Yongnian had once obtained a recording related to him (see Chapter 2).