When Qin Shen questioned Lu Meiqin before, his attitude was relatively polite. This time, it was not so good. The questions, which had a tone of interrogating a prisoner, made Xu Man, who was taking notes, tremble with fear, not to mention the ballet teacher who had to face the pressure. Soon, Lu Meiqin confessed the whole story.
It turned out that Lu Meiqin had a boyfriend whom she had been dating for five years. Their relationship was stable and they were at the stage of discussing marriage. However, last month, she discovered that her boyfriend's chat records were full of flirtatious conversations with strange women, and the bill also included hotel room booking information. Their relationship suddenly reached a freezing point, and they had been quarreling every day for the past month.
On July 2, after another quarrel with her boyfriend, Lu Meiqin's mood became extremely bad. It happened that Zhang Xiaojuan, who usually learned the fastest and gave her the least worry, had a problem again. She didn't understand an action well. She corrected her several times, but she still didn't do it right. In a fit of anger, she pushed Zhang Xiaojuan, and accidentally used too much force, pushing Zhang Xiaojuan to the ground.
"Are you sure you corrected it several times?" Qin Shen looked at her, his voice was calm and without any fluctuations, but it revealed a sense of majesty without anger.
Lu Meiqin's eyes flashed and she avoided his sight: "Well, it was a few times..."
"How many times? Tell me clearly."
"I... I can't remember clearly. I was so angry at the time that my mind was a little confused. I really don't know... maybe two or three times? Anyway, when I came to my senses, Zhang Xiaojuan was already sitting on the ground crying." Lu Meiqin raised her head nervously to defend herself, "Officer Qin, I swear, I just pushed her that time, and then I quickly apologized to her. Nothing else happened. Her murder really has nothing to do with me, really."
"Since it has nothing to do with you, why did you hide it before?"
Lu Meiqin clenched her hands and said, "The company has a scoring and assessment mechanism for teachers. Every month, a form is given to students, asking them to fill out their satisfaction with their teachers. Then, our salary performance and bonus for that month are determined based on the score. It was a serious dereliction of duty for me to push the student to the ground. If the leader knew about it, I would definitely be deducted points. The principal was present when I was questioned before, so I didn't dare to say it. Moreover, this incident has nothing to do with Zhang Xiaojuan's disappearance. If I said it, it might cause misunderstandings and draw suspicion to myself..."
"So you just keep it secret?"
Lu Meiqin nodded.
Qin Shen: "Then do you know that if we ask someone else about this matter and you hide it from us, you will be more suspicious than if you tell it yourself?"
Lu Meiqin panicked and quickly said to Qin Shen, "Officer Qin, you have to believe me. I really have nothing to do with Zhang Xiaojuan's disappearance. I have no grudges against her. How could I attack her just because of a small friction? I'm not that cruel."
"We will investigate whether you have anything to do with this case." Qin Shen replied calmly, "As for what you need to do, it is to cooperate with our police investigation and tell us everything related to Zhang Xiaojuan without leaving out anything, so as not to add suspicion to yourself and cause trouble for us police officers."
Lu Meiqin seemed to be frightened by his words, and quickly nodded to assure him: "Yes, I will definitely cooperate with you to the fullest."
Xu Man was amazed as she listened to this, thinking that he was worthy of being the captain of the criminal investigation team. He had rich experience in interrogation and had gotten the whole truth out of him in just a few sentences. If it were her, she might still be struggling with the other party's daily information at this time.
After asking a few more questions, Qin Shen ended the conversation when he saw that there was nothing more to ask. "We'll end the conversation here for now. You can leave. We'll contact you if there's anything else we need your cooperation with. I hope you can keep in touch with us in the next few days."
Naturally, Lu Meiqin responded to every request.
After she left, Xu Man stopped writing with her signature pen and looked at the neatly written contents on the notebook with some emotion: "I originally thought she was a very good teacher, and she looked very friendly. I didn't expect that she was such a person, taking out her anger on her boyfriend on her students..."
"Do you think the teachers in these educational institutions really care about the students?" Qin Shen sneered, "They are originally profit-making commercial institutions. Everything is about money. How can you expect the teachers they recruit to have good moral character?"
"But I heard her say just now that teachers' salaries are linked to students' satisfaction with them. This mechanism should be okay?" Xu Man argued in a low voice.
Qin Shen was disdainful: "This mechanism exists for two reasons: first, to show that it is a formal educational institution, worthy of children coming to study, and to deceive parents into paying money; second, there is a good reason to deduct employees' salaries and bonuses. Who do you think will pocket the money in the end?"
Xu Man was silent.
"All businessmen are dishonest." Qin Shen added the final word to this sentence and stood up from the sofa. "Okay, we have checked almost everything we need to check. Let's go downstairs and ask the property management for a surveillance camera. This trip is done."
As he spoke, he pulled out his phone and checked the time, "It's almost noon, let's go have lunch once we're done with this. What do you want to eat?"
Xu Man was originally packing up her things. When she heard him say that, she looked up and said, "Captain, thank you for treating us last night. I'll treat you to lunch today."
Qin Shen smiled and said, "You're so clear about the division? That's fine. There's a store downstairs anyway. If you want to treat, then treat me."
Xu Man smiled at him.
When going downstairs, Qin Shen called Li Shijie and learned that the police from Siyang District Police Station had asked for the surveillance footage of the office building the night before and had copied a copy to the detachment. Since then, they did not ask the property for it again. But at the same time, they also got bad news: due to the construction of a ground parking lot, the road section near the mall was being renovated and the surveillance footage was ineffective. It had not been working for a month, which greatly increased the difficulty of tracking Zhang Xiaojuan's whereabouts. They had to take a roundabout way to save the situation and retrieve the surveillance footage of several nearby roads and carefully screen them one by one.
Qin Shen let out a long breath, his expression relatively calm. It seemed that he had encountered this kind of bad thing more than once: "It's really bad things happening at the same time...Okay, I get it. You guys continue to investigate and tell me if you find anything."
Then he called Liang Guang, the head of the investigation team of Team 2. "Hello, Lao Liang, it's me. Zhang Xiaojuan's class teacher assigned a summer diary assignment to the students, asking them to write a diary every day. There may be some clues in the victim's diary. Go ask Zhang Xiaojuan's parents if there is such a diary. If there is, come here and bring it back to the team for careful analysis."
After giving all the instructions, he hung up the phone and turned to Xu Man: "Let's go to the mall. What do you want to treat me to?"
Xu Man opened the food app on her phone and looked for nearby stores. "What flavor do you like, Captain?"
Qin Shen couldn't help laughing when he noticed that she had changed the way she addressed him back to its original name. It seemed that the little girl was nervous again. Did he look that scary?
"Whatever. I don't have any dietary restrictions. How about you?"
Xu Man hesitated for a moment, "...I don't eat spicy food, beef, or mutton."
He was surprised: "So many?"
"Um……"
Qin Shen seemed to want to say something, but gave up: "So what do you like to eat?"
"It's okay with me." Xu Man said quickly, "It's my treat today, Captain, what do you like to eat?"
"Would you like to eat claypot rice?"
"It's OK. I like it."
"Then let's go eat clay pot rice." Qin Shen took her out of the office building. "It just so happens that there is a chain of clay pot rice restaurants in this mall. It's quite famous. There are also many in Xinjing. Have you ever eaten there in college?"
“Which clay pot rice?”
Qin Shen told her the name of the restaurant. Xu Man thought it sounded familiar. After thinking about it carefully, she smiled and said, "I've been to this restaurant before. At that time, their discounts were the biggest among the restaurants around the school. My roommate and I ordered takeout from them for a month. We tried every type of food and ended up not wanting to eat there anymore."
Qin Shen was a little surprised and said to her, "Then let's change to another one?"
"No, we didn't order it again after they gave us a discount. We haven't eaten it for about a year, so it's nice to eat it again."
"Really? Then please recommend a flavor to me."
"Hmm...the ham and chicken nuggets taste pretty good..."
The two of them walked into the mall chatting and laughing. The difference was that Qin Shen laughed more openly, while Xu Man was a little reserved. However, when they ordered food and sat down in the restaurant, her nervous mood had almost dissipated. Just as she had thought, her superior, the captain, was very approachable and pleasant to get along with.
While waiting for the meal, Xu Man received another message from Tang Yourong, asking her if she had eaten. She was about to reply that she was having dinner outside with the captain, but when she thought of the conversation with her mother yesterday, her face felt slightly hot. She deleted the words "with the captain" and just said that she was having dinner outside and replied to the message.
It's really magical to say. During the three years she was in college, there were boys who pursued her, but she never accepted anyone's date invitation. She went to meals and classes with her roommates. When she came to Minnesota for internship, she had two consecutive meals with a man she had only known for two days. Although he was her immediate superior, she always felt something was weird.
It is obviously normal for superiors and subordinates to have a meal together, so why does it become so strange for them? Is it because they are of opposite sex and close in age?
Even the waiter in the store misunderstood and enthusiastically recommended a couple's set meal to them, which made her embarrassed. Qin Shen didn't seem to care and directly chose a signature set meal.
Xu Man reminded herself in her heart that it was just a meal while investigating a case, which was normal. Besides, someone treated her to a meal yesterday, so there was nothing wrong in treating them back today. But it just felt a little wrong. Fortunately, Qin Shen took the notebook from her after ordering the meal, opened it and read the interrogation records, and occasionally said a word or two to her about the case, which eased her embarrassment a little.
The author has something to say:
Captain Qin: Picking up girls invisibly
Author: My poor daughter, she didn’t even know she was being pursued…
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