Chapter 888: Is There Really Another Culprit?

The entrance of the village was obviously not a good place for an interrogation, so Lu Chuan first had them take Liang Jun back to the police car.

There were still plenty of people in the village collecting fingerprints, and the follow-up work would take time; they’d pull everyone back for now and deal with the rest later.

But while the police left, the village exploded.

The whole process of Liang Jun being arrested had been witnessed from start to finish by Sixth Uncle.

The police had actually taken Liang Jun away—that meant they’d found evidence that Liang Jun was the killer.

But someone like Liang Jun... was Hu Huihui really killed by him back then?

Very soon a crowd gathered, and some villagers who hadn’t seen it with their own eyes came up and started asking Sixth Uncle and the others who had been there what had happened.

The Hu Family all went straight to the Liang Family’s house!

They almost started a fight.

"Your Liang Family should all die a rotten death! Give me back my daughter’s life! Wuuuu..."

The front gate of Liang Jun’s home was tightly shut; nobody dared come out.

Old Hu and his wife sat at the Liang Family’s gate, wailing.

Who could have imagined that their daughter, missing for ten years, had been buried under the national highway right outside their own door, that they had walked back and forth over it so many times, crossing over their daughter’s bones every single time and never knowing a thing.

Now, Old Hu wanted every last one of the Liang Family hacked to pieces.

Inside the Liang Family courtyard.

The child was sobbing, and Liang Jun’s wife was crying.

"His dad... what is going on... wuuuu... did Xiaojun really... really kill Huihui..."

Liang Jun’s father was smoking, his face full of worry.

His son had actually killed someone...

There was a nine out of ten chance it was true; otherwise the police wouldn’t have come to the door, much less hauled him away.

And besides...

Old Liang suddenly thought of something.

Ten years ago they really had lost a shovel.

Liang Jun said he’d broken it while working and just thrown it away.

Old Liang remembered he’d even scolded Liang Jun at the time—a shovel cost twenty or thirty yuan.

Looking at it now, it hadn’t broken at all.

Clearly...

Clearly he’d dug a pit and buried a body.

In the police car.

Liang Jun was pinned on either side in the back seat by Wang Zhaokai and another criminal investigator.

"I really didn’t kill her... Hu... Hu Huihui wasn’t killed by me!"

Even in the police car, Liang Jun kept insisting that he hadn’t killed her.

Lu Chuan sat in the front passenger seat, looking back at Liang Jun.

"You say you didn’t kill her, then why are your fingerprints on the shovel?"

"I... that shovel... the shovel really was mine..."

"The shovel is yours, the pit was dug by you, and you buried the body, yet you say you didn’t kill her?"

Wang Zhaokai barked at him.

Liang Jun’s cuffed hands waved repeatedly. "Officer, you have to believe me, that pit really was... was dug by me, and I really did bury her under the roadbed, but I really didn’t kill her, she was already dead when I messed with her."

Lu Chuan frowned.

"Talk! What exactly happened?"

"Y-yes, I’ll talk, I’ll talk."

Liang Jun hurriedly began to confess what had happened back then: "Ten years ago, that day... around noon, I couldn’t sleep at home, so I went out to work in the fields."

"Not far from the edge of the village, I saw Hu Huihui..."

What Liang Jun confessed in the car was downright unbelievable.

According to him, he’d been working in the field all noon, and around two in the afternoon he saw Hu Huihui.

But she wasn’t alone then; with her was that town punk Zhang San.

The two of them had gotten into an argument.

"I saw Zhang San drag Hu Huihui into the cornfield, and he only came out after quite a while."

Liang Jun said he’d been terrified at the time.

Zhang San from town was a notorious lowlife in the area.

All the young men in the surrounding villages knew who he was.

He ran two video game arcades in town.

Always idle, liked to fight.

"And then?"

"Then..." Liang Jun sounded nervous as he spoke.

"Then, after Zhang San walked out of the cornfield, I snuck in to take a look."

"And then... then..."

"Back then, Hu Huihui had been stripped naked and was lying in the cornfield. I went up and touched her; she wasn’t breathing anymore."

"She’d been strangled! I saw a purple ring of marks around her neck; she definitely got strangled to death by him."

"Why didn’t you call the police at the time?"

"I..."

Liang Jun dropped his head to his chest. "She was the prettiest girl in our village, anyone would’ve wanted to marry her. Our family was poor, we didn’t have the money, didn’t even have the right to go propose."

"Back then... back then... back then I saw her lying there, her body still warm, and I... I just couldn’t hold myself back."

So after seeing that Hu Huihui had been killed, Liang Jun had actually had twisted thoughts.

"After I was done, I later saw on TV that if you left traces, the police might track you down. So I left the body there first and went home. When dusk came, almost night, I went back to the cornfield, and I did it again."

"They were building the national highway over there, so I put the body in a sack—no, I took advantage of there being no one at the construction site by the highway, dug a pit, and buried the body in it."

The police car quickly returned to the Criminal Investigation Team.

In the interrogation room, Liang Jun gave a full account of the entire process of digging the pit and burying the body.

p.m.

Conference room.

Lu Chuan was convening a case analysis meeting.

The first question was whether what Liang Jun said was credible or not.

From the clues they had so far, the evidentiary chain was closed: in the burial pit they found a shovel with Liang Jun’s fingerprints on it.

He also admitted he’d committed an illegal act against Hu Huihui.

But the key point was, he claimed that Hu Huihui had already been killed by Zhang San.

He had only desecrated the corpse and then dug a pit and buried it.

"I think that bastard Liang Jun is full of shit. The guy’s an animal."

One younger detective thought the man was obviously lying.

"Someone dying is that big a deal and he still dared to hide it? Then he has the nerve to say somebody else did the killing—where’s his evidence?"

"The killer supposedly didn’t leave a single trace, and instead the one who buried the body left all the evidence."

"I don’t think he’s being straight with us."

But others disagreed: "I actually think there’s a chance Liang Jun is telling the truth."

"Look, setting aside for the moment how immoral his behavior was, let’s stand in his shoes and think about it. A girl he grew up with in the village, like childhood sweethearts, whom he’d always secretly admired, but he never had a chance to pursue her."

"Then he sees her naked body... and after that, in order to hide his shameful deed, he buries the body. That’s not entirely implausible."

Chen Jiang glanced around and continued, "I think our focus now should be to follow up based on what Liang Jun said and investigate this Zhang San first."

"Was his encounter with Hu Huihui a coincidence or is there something deeper between them—what kind of relationship did they have? I think we need to clarify that before anything else."

"I agree with Captain Chen. Let’s first dig into Zhang San and see what the situation was back then."

Wang Zhaokai also felt Zhang San should be investigated first.