Read Chapter 19: — ZHAO’S LAST CASE

The cancer progressed.

Old Zhao kept working anyway.

Some days he moved like a man much older than fifty-three. Other days the old energy returned and deceived everyone into believing decline had paused.

The Zou investigation became the case he refused to leave unfinished.

Then his body made the decision for him.

Li reached the hospital while Zhao was deteriorating rapidly.

Chenxi was still on her way.

Zhao opened his eyes when Li leaned over the bed.

“Xiangyang.”

“I’m here.”

“Thank you… for me. For her.”

“Save your strength.”

“She’s the only thing I worry about.”

Li’s throat tightened.

“You tell her that yourself.”

Zhao gave the faintest smile.

“I’m tired.”

“You still have a case.”

“I know.”

His breathing slowed.

“I solved a lot of cases,” he whispered. “Never thought Professor Zou’s would turn into this.”

Then he was gone.

Li wept without restraint.

When Chenxi arrived, she rejected the fact of death as if refusal were a police power.

“He hasn’t even retired,” she said. “He can’t be dead.”

No one answered.

The last hours stripped away every professional identity.

Zhao was not a detective.

Chenxi was not a forensic specialist.

Li was not the doctor who always found a useful explanation.

They were simply people in a room where knowledge could no longer reverse time.

When Chenxi finally sat beside her father’s body, she removed his watch. The metal was scratched from decades of desk edges, steering wheels and doorframes hit in a hurry.

“He was always late for dinner,” she whispered.

Li answered, “And always early for everyone else’s emergency.”

That was the closest they came to a eulogy that night.

After the funeral, Li buried himself in work.

Chenxi buried herself in the investigation.

The criminal-investigation chief, Zhao’s longtime colleague, treated solving the Zou case as a debt to the dead.

Then the Zou family revealed a detail that should have been ordinary.

Professor Zou Shiming had a twin brother.

Zou Shiyuan.

The room seemed to tilt.

Li thought of eighteen months of contradictions.

Quiet surgeon.

Explosive administrator.

Technical master.

Man who avoided surgery.

Two temperaments so sharply divided that everyone had called it personality.

Chenxi looked at him.

“You’re thinking it.”

“I’m thinking it would be absurd.”

“That has never protected us before.”