Chapter 237 156: Severity Surges! The Special Fifth Bureau Can't Handle It! Lock Down the City

It was actually quite hard to believe.

Prostitutes, unless they were coerced, were almost always in it for the money. They enjoyed the feeling of making fast cash and spending it lavishly.

A handbag for thousands or tens of thousands, a bottle of perfume for hundreds or thousands—these were their goals.

But Lin Miao never bought any of it, at most sparing them a second glance. This didn't fit the profile of a prostitute who was only in it for the money.

Take the "fly-in escorts" from his previous life, for example.

A good number of them might have been minor internet celebrities who had a brief period of fame. Once they got a taste of money, they fell in love with the spending and the lifestyle. Later, when their popularity waned and the money dried up, they found they couldn't go back to a normal life of working for a wage...

So, they entered the trade, earning money to continue supporting their lavish lifestyles.

Most prostitutes were like that.

But Lin Miao did the exact opposite, spending all her money on her younger sister.

'No wonder she went insane after seeing the body...'

Xu Huo thought to himself.

'Sewing the skin onto her face... Was it to hypnotize herself? When she looks at that face in the mirror—Lin Miao's face—it's like she's seeing the real Lin Miao...'

Li Jianye had come to the same realization.

He sighed inwardly but continued to answer Xu Huo's question.

"It's not that easy to investigate."

"Those bastards all vanished overnight. We can't find a single trace."

"We contacted their parents and wives, but got no leads. They didn't even know the suspects had committed any crimes!"

Li Jianye clicked his tongue in frustration.

Xu Huo sighed internally.

This was a limitation of the era, and it was the very reason why Xu Huo had been so reluctant to get involved in the first place.

'In my previous life, what would we have done in a situation like this? It would have been simple: check the surveillance cameras, track their phone locations, and pull up their entire travel history in minutes! As soon as you had a theory, you could thoroughly investigate it and verify your suspicions in no time. It was nothing like now, where all leads vanished the second someone ran...'

"Heh..."

Zhang Liang let out a cold laugh from the side.

"You think you can just walk away after crossing the Special Fifth Bureau?"

"Not a chance!"

"Don't worry, they won't get away."

"Thanks to the heavy snow blocking the roads, the Special Fifth Bureau and the police have had plenty of time to position our people."

"Of course, even if they don't show their faces, a carpet search will turn them up sooner or later."

Hearing this, the furrow in Xu Huo's brow eased.

'As expected, having ample resources makes investigating a whole lot easier. I didn't even have to say anything, and Zhang Liang immediately arranged for a carpet search. It was nothing like in Zhaozhou Linlan City, where they had to desperately rely on a hundred or so people... A carpet search with just a hundred people? Honestly, if I had given that order, I'm afraid I would have laughed out loud. But it was different here. For any half-baked theory, Zhang Liang would throw an astonishing amount of resources at it!'

Li Jianye, however, didn't share that feeling. His mind was on something else.

"Right, from what we can see, there's a third party involved—the true mastermind behind the scenes."

"And the bodies only appeared because of him."

"So, could the Chen Family and the others targeting Lin Miao... also be related to him?"

Xu Huo nodded. "It's possible. In fact, it's highly likely!"

"But for now, there's no information suggesting Lin Miao knew him."

"Lin Miao isn't an ungrateful person. She had a very good relationship with Lin Miao, and she knew that her education was her best chance to change her fate. She absolutely wouldn't associate with shady characters."

"And based on the current information, the killers only discovered Lin Miao by chance because Lin Miao was moonlighting."

"So... what was the screening criterion the Chen Family and the others used for choosing their victims?"

Here's an example.

You want to eat. That's your objective.

But that objective is too broad, so you need to filter it down.

You change 'eating' to 'eating a specific type of food,' like rice.

But that's still too broad, so you filter it again, adding 'pork trotter.' Eventually, you narrow it down to 'pork trotter rice' itself.

Lin Miao is the 'pork trotter rice' in this analogy.

The mastermind is the objective: 'wanting to eat.'

And the Chen Family are the ones using certain criteria to do the filtering!

They used specific traits to gradually filter out the general population and zero in on Lin Miao.

"If that's the case..."

"Could the other five bodies be people who were also selected using the same criteria as Lin Miao!?"

The realization seemed to strike Xu Huo all at once, and he suddenly spoke.

Everyone paused, and then it was as if a lightbulb had gone off in their minds.

"That's right! The other five victims were also selected!"

"It makes no sense for them to just grab five random people and then specifically go after Lin Miao. It's almost certain that all six of them share some common trait!"

Li Jianye was a little ashamed and annoyed.

The gruesome state of the bodies had shocked them, clouding their normal judgment.

It couldn't be helped. Six bodies, hanging upside down...

Even the top criminal investigators in the country would have their thoughts thrown into chaos for a while.

However, they still had a chance to make up for it now!

"What's the trait?"

Without hesitating, Zhang Liang pulled back the body bag covering one of the corpses.

A blood-drenched corpse was revealed.

What was the common trait!?

Honestly, it was hard to tell.

They say beauty is bone deep, meaning that after death, people all look more or less the same—just the shape of their skulls.

Although the corpse before them still had muscle, it wasn't much different from a skeleton.

Having been flayed alive, the raw, red marks left behind made all of them look completely identical.

If not for Xu Huo's Wang Die's Scent, he wouldn't have been able to discern anything, either...

However...

"These people... are all women?"

Xu Huo paused, his brow furrowed, as his gaze swept over the bloody corpse's lower and upper body.

That was it. All six corpses, without exception, were female.