Chapter 639 - 529: Venting Tendency

Chapter 639: Chapter 529: Venting Tendency

By the time they crossed the mountains and returned to the protection station, it was already night.

The group stayed at a hotel in the town that night. The next day, they had to go to the scene of the second case in Tielou Town.

Shen Xin and Ding Yuwei shared a room that evening.

When she came out of the shower, Shen Xin was still at his laptop, writing and drawing.

"Is that a topographical map?" Ding Yuwei leaned over for a look.

Shen Xin nodded. He was currently using the topographical map to reconstruct the various patrol routes of the Liujiaping Town protection station.

Before leaving, Shen Xin had made a point to ask Zhou Huayong and the others for their records.

Not just the current ones, but those from previous years as well.

Changes to their patrol routes were based on three factors. The first was the need to focus on key areas, for things like fire prevention.

The second was the periodic maintenance of the various wildlife surveillance devices within the reserve.

The last was determining routes based on giant panda tracks.

For example, if giant panda droppings were found in a certain location, it meant a panda was active nearby. The route would then be adjusted to try and find and observe that panda’s habitat.

Shen Xin said, "Look, Captain Zhou said that Liu Baoli was a fair man."

Some patrol routes were easy, and some were hard. Nobody wanted to be stuck with the most difficult routes all the time.

They had to be rotated.

The captain held that power. If he favored someone, their job would be easier.

In this matter, Liu Baoli had been fair and impartial.

’If the schedule was unpredictable, then the suspect only had a few options. Either they tailed Liu Baoli, or they found a spot in the mountains to lie in wait.’

’I don’t think the first option would be easy. Liu Baoli used to be a hunter. Tailing him in the mountains would have been difficult.’

’As for the second option, waiting in the mountains, it’s not certain how many days that would take. They would have left traces of their presence. I don’t believe Chang Zhi and his team didn’t search the mountain back then.’

’The only other possibility is that they somehow got ahold of the duty roster. So, could the suspect have visited the protection station beforehand?’

Shen Xin considered the possibilities.

Ding Yuwei pulled over a chair and sat down. After a moment of thought, she said, "Shen Xin, what if it was like this? Look, their station is responsible for a fixed area."

"First, they ride motorcycles into the mountains. There are two fixed routes for that. When the road ends and the motorcycles can’t go any further, they start walking."

"The different patrol routes after that all start from these two points. So, could the suspect have been staking out the area near these two spots? For example, they could use binoculars to see from a distance who was taking which route."

"Then they could take a shortcut to get ahead of Liu Baoli’s group and ambush them."

"Of course, you have a point too. I think it’s highly likely the suspect knew something about the protection station’s operations and their common routes beforehand."

"Captain Zhou also said that the routes were all more or less the same, because they always chose the easier paths."

There were only so many easy paths in the mountains, so they could only vary the routes around those areas.

Shen Xin nodded slightly.

What Ding Yuwei said made sense.

So, figuring out which route Liu Baoli would take probably wasn’t too difficult.

But one thing was certain: the suspect had to have some familiarity and understanding of the nature reserve.

Looked at that way, it seemed more like a local had committed the crime.

For example, someone who worked at the protection station and held a grudge against Liu Baoli and Wang Shulin for some reason.

That would explain how they knew the routes.

But that line of thinking had its own problems.

’If a Patrol Officer from inside the station had a grudge against Liu Baoli and the others, that would have been a primary line of investigation. Chang Zhigang would have definitely looked into it.’

’And since the case has dragged on for so long without a suspect being identified, I’m still leaning toward the perpetrator being an outsider.’

"Forget it. Time for bed."

Shen Xin closed his laptop, done thinking for the night.

That night, Shen Xin had a dream. He dreamt he was running endlessly through a vast forest.

It was as if he were chasing someone.

The woods stretched out in every direction, seemingly without end, never changing. And the person he was chasing was always just ahead, forever out of reach.

Finally, just as Shen Xin’s anxiety peaked, the person stopped.

Shen Xin rushed forward, grabbed his shoulder, and spun him around. He stared at the face and woke with a start.

It was the face of a monkey.

The dream had gotten completely mixed up.

Shen Xin gasped for breath, staring at the ceiling, his heart still pounding.

He glanced out the window. The sky was just beginning to lighten. Beside him, Ding Yuwei was still fast asleep.

Shen Xin sighed to himself, feeling the pressure mount.

A case this big was bound to bring with it an immense, invisible weight.

After calming down, Shen Xin turned over, hugged Ding Yuwei, and went back to sleep.

Ding Yuwei snuggled into his embrace and fell still again.

「That morning, the group headed to the neighboring Tielou Town.」

The patrol team captain from when the case happened in 2011 had already resigned and left to find work elsewhere.

However, a team member who had been in the same unit as Wang Shulin and Wang Erpeng was still around.

On the way to the crime scene, Shen Xin asked the same question, inquiring about what kind of people Wang Shulin and the other victim were.

The old team member accompanying them was named Fang Yongfei. He said, "I’m the kind of person who speaks his mind. That Wang Shulin guy... he was just plain bad."

"He’d shirk his duties, was gluttonous and lazy, and loved to play cards. He had a serious addiction. He basically gambled away his entire salary at the card table."

"On top of that, he had sticky fingers. You might not know this, but our Wudu is known as the ’thousand-year home of medicine.’ The mountains here are full of medicinal herbs."

"A lot of people used to come up the mountain to dig for herbs, and they dug the place clean. It was only after the reserve was established and we started cracking down on it that the numbers dwindled."

"But because it’s a protected area, there are actually more herbs inside. And him? He was the fox guarding the henhouse. He’d go on patrol just to dig up herbs."

Chang Zhigang, who was walking beside them, nodded in agreement. He explained that there were many medicinal herbs in the mountains, such as Three-Branch Nine-Leaf Grass, notopterygium root, gastrodia, and angelica.

The town police station had always focused on cracking down on this kind of illegal harvesting.

Zhao Tianxing asked, puzzled, "Then didn’t your protection station do anything about him?"

The current patrol team captain, Li Hongshuang, who was leading the way, said, "It’s not that we didn’t. The thing is, you have to catch a thief red-handed. We could never get any evidence on him."

"Besides, Captain Cui was on good terms with him back then and protected him, so nothing was ever really done about it."

Fang Yongfei truly did speak his mind. He scoffed, "What good terms? Old Cui was just taking his bribes."

Li Hongshuang quickly waved his hands, signaling for him not to speak so recklessly.

Shen Xin looked at Chang Zhigang.

Chang Zhigang shook his head slightly, indicating that they had investigated this but it hadn’t yielded anything.

This was the experimental zone, the outermost of the reserve’s three areas. Most of the reserve’s scientific research on flora and fauna was conducted in this zone.

As a result, human activity was most frequent here, and the paths were much easier to walk.

After trekking through the mountains for nearly an hour, they reached the crime scene.

It was about a hundred meters off from the patrol route recorded back then.

The crime scene was a clearing. Broken police tape still hung from the trunks of two birch trees on the perimeter.

"Look, the bodies were right here."

Shen Xin had said he wouldn’t look at the case files first, but Chang Zhigang had brought them.

He handed the crime scene photos to Shen Xin and pointed to the area in front of them, explaining the situation.

Seven years had passed. The seasons had turned, plants had grown and withered, and all traces from that day had been erased by nature’s restorative power.

Fortunately, with winter approaching, there wasn’t much vegetation on the mountain. With the crime scene photos, they could get a clear picture of how it had looked back then.

"It’s pretty brutal, especially this Wang Shulin," Yang Zeran said, pointing at a photo.

The crime scene photos were gruesome. The head, in particular, had been hacked to a pulp.

Yang Zeran continued, "Shen Xin, I feel like the suspect’s hatred for Wang Shulin was greater. Mutilating the face wasn’t just about concealing the body’s identity."

Shen Xin nodded. He had noticed.

Judging by the bloody mess in the photos, Wang Shulin had been hacked at least twenty or thirty times.

Meanwhile, Cao Hui, who was with him, had only been hacked about ten times, and unlike with Wang Shulin, the blows weren’t concentrated on his head.

It was just as Yang Zeran said; there was a clear element of venting fury.

However, considering the suspect’s targets were likely the three of them—Liu Baoli and his partners—that was also to be expected.

Chang Zhigang added, "We also looked at Wang Erpeng’s body. He was also hacked with a blade, but honestly, not to the same extent as Wang Shulin."

"So we speculated that Wang Shulin might have been the suspect’s primary target for revenge."

Shen Xin turned and looked toward the patrol route to the west.

After a moment of thought, Shen Xin asked, "Chang Zhi, did you find anything along the way here?"

The patrol route was planned. In practice, they wouldn’t deviate too much from it.

A hundred-plus meters from the patrol line—that wasn’t a short distance.

The suspect was controlling two adult men, one of whom was a good-for-nothing punk like Wang Shulin. Wouldn’t he have resisted?

Even if he was tied up, he should have struggled and tried to escape.

It seemed it wouldn’t have been easy for the suspect to control them and get them to the crime scene.

Chang Zhigang guessed what Shen Xin was about to ask and shook his head. "We had over a hundred people search every inch of a one-kilometer radius for nearly two months. Aside from some footprints, we found nothing."

Shen Xin fell silent, his brow furrowed.

If that was the case, it could only mean the suspect was either an experienced killer or had spent a very long time planning this.

Or, perhaps, he had evolved after the first murder of Liu Baoli, becoming more thorough in his considerations.

The scene itself still offered nothing useful.

For example, why did the suspect choose this spot for an ambush? Did he consider topographical factors?

After staying for a while longer, Shen Xin headed back the way they came.

Visiting these two scenes only increased the pressure on Shen Xin. He didn’t even have to think about it to know the third crime scene would be in a similar state.

The second murder was committed in 2011, and the killer waited a full three years before committing the third.

The suspect must have planned it for even longer, which meant the clues left behind would be even scarcer.

On the way back, something occurred to Shen Xin, and he asked Chang Zhigang if they had checked the cell towers.

Chen Chao had once told him about a case—a murder in the middle of nowhere, with no surveillance cameras. It was a dead-end case, just like this one, with no leads to follow.

They ended up checking the cell towers and found that only two phones had connected to the local tower during the time of the murder, which led them to the killer.

Shen Xin had even joked at the time that you have to turn off your phone when you’re committing a murder.

This was a mountainous region with poor reception, but some areas still had a signal.

Checking the phone numbers that connected around the time of the murder might yield a discovery.

Chang Zhigang shook his head again. "We checked. Of course we checked. Back then, President Wu ordered it. We pulled all the phone numbers that connected to any cell tower near the crime scene for a whole month before and a month after the incident. We checked every single one."

"It took a massive amount of manpower and resources, and in the end, we found nothing."

Shen Xin was quiet. As expected, every method and investigative angle he could think of, the special task force back then had thought of too.

And to be honest, when it came to solving criminal cases, his experience wasn’t necessarily greater than that of Chang Zhigang, Wu Kaiwei, or even Xu Jinguang.

Thinking of this, Shen Xin came to terms with it.

’Looks like there’s not much hope at the crime scenes. I guess I’ll have to rely on my special ability and try to find a new lead through the pandas.’

’Time to go to the capital.’

’I wonder if this ’security captain,’ Walnut, will be easy to get along with.’