PD -Chapter 78 Reflective Pupils

Xiao Xiao was so frightened by the fierce dog that she almost fell over. Fortunately, Liu Xiaopeng reacted quickly and caught her in time.

“Sorry, sorry.” A little girl rushed out after the dog. She grabbed the leash on its collar and smiled apologetically at us. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t scare you, did I?”

I looked at the still barking dog, shook my head, and asked, “Has your dog always been this aggressive?”

The little girl looked a bit embarrassed. She frowned and sighed. “Xiao Hu used to be very well-behaved. He never barked at people. But I don’t know why… he suddenly became like this.”

After apologizing a few more times, she finally pulled the dog away.

I turned to Liu Xiaopeng and said quietly, “That dog belongs to the house next door. It looks like they keep it in a small fenced courtyard on the first floor. Maybe it saw something.”

“You mean the dog saw something unclean, and that’s why its temperament changed and it started reacting like that?” Liu Xiaopeng asked.

I nodded. “Ancients believed dogs could sense spirits and see things humans couldn’t. There’s even an old saying: ‘If a dog stands and bites, it’s biting a human; if it sits and bites, it’s biting a ghost.’ It means dogs can distinguish whether what they see is a person or something else. Humans have physical bodies, so the dog can bite and scare them away—so it stands and barks. But ghosts have no physical form, so the dog just sits in place and keeps barking, trying to drive it away with its voice.”

“So you’re saying the dog might have seen something?” Zhu Zhu, who had been silent all this time, finally asked.

I nodded again. But this was tricky—we couldn’t exactly ask a dog to speak and tell us what it had seen.

“Let’s go…” I thought for a moment and motioned for everyone to return to the car.

I sat in the passenger seat and looked at Xiao Xiao through the rearview mirror. “Have you or your brother encountered anything unusual recently?”

Xiao Xiao frowned and thought for a moment before shaking her head. “Nothing unusual… except two nights before the incident, there seemed to be a burglary at our house. When we came back, we found the window broken and the place had been rummaged through… but nothing valuable was stolen. Only a few of my brother’s everyday clothes were missing.”

“Do you think, if your brother didn’t do this, who could have? Could someone be trying to frame him?” I continued.

Xiao Xiao shook her head again, very firmly. “My brother has always had a good personality. He rarely offends anyone outside. It’s impossible for him to have such deep grudges with someone.”

“When we examined the scene earlier, I noticed that the girl’s front door lock was intact. Police wouldn’t have repaired it so quickly. Before the case is concluded, the scene must be preserved…”

I recalled the details from the scene. “That means the victim likely opened the door herself that night. The killer must have been someone she knew.”

“The police said the same thing,” Xiao Xiao nodded. “That’s also why they’re so certain the person who went in was my brother, especially since his fingerprints and footprints were found inside.”

“If your parents hire a lawyer, they should be able to obtain the surveillance footage from the prosecution. We need to see it,” Liu Xiaopeng said.

After hesitating for a moment, Xiao Xiao took out her phone. “When the police showed us the evidence, I secretly recorded a part of it.”

She pulled up the video and handed the phone to Liu Xiaopeng.

“We insisted on forensic verification of the surveillance footage. In the end, they said there was no sign of tampering. We really don’t know what to do anymore,” Xiao Xiao sighed.

Liu Xiaopeng and I leaned in together to look at the video. It was very clear. A young man in a hoodie was turning a corner and walking toward the residential area. It was clearly footage from the surveillance camera at the community entrance.

After confirmation from Liu Xiaopeng and Xiao Xiao, the person in the video was indeed Xiao Xiao’s brother, Xiao Ming. As he passed the gate, he seemed to notice the camera above and glanced up at it.

“Pause!” I suddenly said, staring at the screen.

Liu Xiaopeng immediately tapped the phone, freezing the frame.

“Look at his eyes,” I pointed.

On the screen, Xiao Ming’s eyes looked strange. In the darkness, his pupils seemed to reflect a strong light, and faintly, they appeared to be vertically slit.

Because the camera was black and white, we couldn’t determine the color of the reflection.

But this eerie detail immediately made me think of animals like cats, dogs, or wolves—whose eyes reflect green light at night.

Human eyes are structurally different. They don’t reflect light like that in darkness.

“Maybe… it’s just camera glare,” Zhu Zhu said softly, but her expression betrayed her fear.

In the frame, Xiao Ming’s expression was also grim and sinister, no wonder Zhu Zhu was unsettled.

I shook my head. “Human eyes don’t look like that.”

“Do you know? People often say surveillance cameras, like dogs, can sometimes capture things that aren’t supposed to be seen because of how they work.”

“Remember that dog that went crazy?” I looked at everyone. “Maybe it saw the same thing captured by the camera—that’s why it panicked and reacted so violently.”

“What are you talking about?” Xiao Xiao asked, completely confused.

I sighed and hesitated before saying, “There are things in this world that ordinary people can’t imagine. You’ve probably already sensed something unusual.”

“What the surveillance camera captured might not even be Xiao Ming… or even a human being.”

“What?” Xiao Xiao’s face instantly turned pale. She looked at Liu Xiaopeng, tears beginning to well up again.

“Don’t worry,” Liu Xiaopeng comforted her. “Now that we know Xiao Ming might be innocent, we’ll definitely help clear his name.”

“Yes,” Zhu Zhu added, holding Xiao Xiao’s hand. “They’ve handled things like this before. They even helped me a lot last time.”

Xiao Xiao lifted her eyes and looked at Liu Xiaopeng with a complicated expression. After a long pause, she asked:

“Didn’t you say you worked at a design company… how do you know so much about this kind of thing?”