After My Rebirth, My Husband Pampers Me Everyday!

Chapter 238: Chapter 238: ONE OF THE VICTIMS ESCAPED

The call came through just past seven in the evening.

Lin Suyin answered, phone pressed to her ear, her husband seated across the table, both of them having left their food untouched for several minutes.

The house had grown quieter since Shen Zihao stopped coming to family dinners, and neither of them had said much of anything since sitting down.

"Mrs. Shen." The man on the other end identified himself as calling from Qinghe Psychiatric Hospital, his tone clipped and official. "I’m calling about one of our long-term patients. You’re aware of the arrangement surrounding his care."

"I’m aware."

"He’s escaped." He offered no cushioning around the fact. "Sometime overnight. Staff found his room empty during morning rounds. We’ve searched internally since then and alerted local authorities as a precaution, though we haven’t specified the nature of his case."

Lin Suyin’s face immediately drained of color.

"We’re searching for him ourselves," the man continued, "but I want to be honest with you. If we don’t find him soon, and he reaches the police first, there’s very little we can do to contain what he says. We’ve done what we agreed to do. Beyond this, I’ve washed my hands clean."

The line went dead before she could respond.

She lowered the phone slowly, her hand shaking against the table’s edge.

"Who was that?" Her husband read the answer on her face before she said a word.

"Qinghe." She set the phone down. "One of them escaped."

Color drained from him as well, following the same slow path as hers.

"Which one?"

"Does it matter?" Her voice cracked, panic bleeding through. "It doesn’t matter which one. What matters is he’s out there right now, and he knows exactly what happened to him. If the police reach him before we do, we lose everything."

"They won’t find anything." He tried for composure and didn’t quite reach it. "We handled it properly. The chemicals did their work. There’s nothing left to recover, even if someone went looking."

"That’s not the problem." Lin Suyin pressed a hand to her temple. "The problem is a living witness who can talk. Bodies don’t testify. People do."

Her husband said nothing, quietly thinking of a solution.

"We paid off every family that came asking." Her hands hadn’t stopped trembling, though her voice had steadied. "Every one of them took the money and stopped asking about their sons. There were no trails. Nothing that traces back to this house."

"We should find him first." He was already reaching for his own phone. "Before he reaches anyone. We can’t let him say a single word."

She looked at him, something hollow settling behind her eyes.

"And if we don’t?"

Neither of them answered that.

While the Shen household scrambled to contain a threat they could not yet locate, a different search was already closing in on the same man, though neither side knew it yet.

Three floors underground, in the basement facility Liuxian kept off every official record, one of his men leaned back from his monitor and rubbed at his eyes.

"I think I’ve got something." He kept his voice low, though the room held only two others.

Luo Cheng rolled his chair over without looking away from his own screen. "Got what?"

"A property registered under a shell company. Buried under three layers, the payment trail leads to an account we’ve tracked since the Ruijie Corp audit last month." He turned his monitor toward Luo Cheng. "Rural land outside the city. Recently renovated, according to the permits, though no one’s supposed to live there."

Luo Cheng’s eyes narrowed at the screen. "Don’t send this to Mr. Liu, not yet."

"Wasn’t planning to." He shook his head. "Not until we confirm it’s the location. I don’t want to hand him false hope if this turns out to be nothing."

"Good." Luo Cheng leaned closer, scrolling through the property records. "Get eyes on it. Quietly. No one nears the perimeter until we know what we’re dealing with."

The man nodded, pulling up a second window, cross-referencing the address against recent utility activity.

That was when a third monitor across the room flickered with an incoming alert, the man near the door sitting up sharply.

"Wait." He frowned at his screen. "There’s someone else tied to this account."

Luo Cheng crossed the room in three steps. "Who?"

"Don’t know yet." He scrolled further, brow furrowing deeper with each line. "But whoever it is, they’ve moved money through the same shell structure for over a year. Longer than Shen Zihao’s been using it."

Luo Cheng stared at the flagged name, unfamiliar, tied to nothing they’d previously investigated. A cold weight settled in his chest.

"Find out who that is." His voice went flat and serious. "Before we tell Mr. Liu anything, I want to know exactly who else is involved. If there’s a second player in this, I want their name, their history, and every account tied to them before he sees a single line of this file."

The man nodded, already pulling up a new search window, fingers moving quickly across the keyboard.

Neither the Shen family nor Liuxian’s men knew yet that the very witness both sides were searching for had already found his own way out.

The police station’s fluorescent lights buzzed faintly as the front doors slid open just past midnight.

A man stepped inside, barefoot, hospital scrubs hanging loose off a frame that looked like it hadn’t eaten properly in years. Dirt streaked one side of his face, and a fading bruise sat along his jaw, old enough to have started yellowing at the edges. His eyes darted across the room before landing on the officer seated at the front desk.

The officer looked up from his paperwork, startled by the state of him.

"Sir? Are you alright? Do you need medical attention?"

The man gripped the edge of the desk to steady his shaking hands, his breath coming fast and uneven, his voice barely rising above a whisper.

"I need to report something." He said it again, louder this time, though his voice still shook with every word.

The officer rose from his seat, reaching for a notepad, his expression shifting from confusion into something more alert. "Alright. Take your time. What’s your name?"

The man’s mouth opened, then closed again, something like fear flickering behind his eyes at the question.

"That doesn’t matter right now." He shook his head, gripping the desk tighter. "Please. I need to report something. Before anyone finds me."