Chapter Four: The Ten-Million-Word Business

On Trace Evidence's first day, no flowers arrived. Thirty-two collection calls did. Chenzhou rented the second floor of Nine Bends and kept the dead clocks behind its glass wall. Qiao Mi said the office looked like a pawnshop. He said clocks did not update themselves, which made them useful reminders: evidence left by time was more dependable than the cloud. Their two-million-yuan commission came from Hengyue Logistics. Expensive medical chips had vanished from its warehouse for three months, while automated inventory reported no discrepancies. The board suspected all eighty warehouse workers. Trace Evidence had forty-eight hours to find the thieves or pay for the shutdown.