Attending ex-girlfriend's wedding, arresting the groom's officer on the spot

However, the license plate was obscured by the shade of the trees, and only the last two digits, "28", could be vaguely seen; the characters in the middle were completely illegible.

After the van remained parked for about 20 minutes, a man wearing blue overalls and a baseball cap emerged from the factory's back door and bent down to get into the passenger seat. "This man is about 175-180 centimeters tall," Xiao Li said, comparing the height on the screen with a ruler. "His shoulders are about 45 centimeters wide, he's a little hunched over, and he habitually puts his right hand in his pocket when he walks. This perfectly matches Jia Qingwu's description of the man in blue overalls with a slightly hunched back!" After the man got in, the van didn't leave immediately but remained in place for 5 minutes before slowly driving away from the back door and disappearing from the surveillance footage.

"Check the vehicle's travel route," Wang Shuai said into the walkie-talkie. "Contact the traffic department and retrieve the surveillance footage from the roads surrounding the factory between 4 PM and 5 PM on July 11th. Focus on the silver-gray Wuling Hongguang PLUS with the license plate ending in 28." He turned to Xiao Li, "Keep watching. Where did this man go after entering the factory?"

Xiao Li pulled up the factory's internal surveillance footage. At 3:50 PM on July 11, a man in blue overalls entered the factory through the back gate, walked along the wall towards the woodworking workshop, and kept his head down the whole time, his baseball cap pulled low, covering most of his face. "He avoided the main surveillance camera at the front gate, specifically choosing blind spots in the corners," Xiao Li switched the footage. "At 4:02 PM, he entered the woodworking workshop and didn't come out until 4:12 PM, carrying a black cloth bag that was bulging at the opening, as if it contained something heavy."

After leaving the woodworking workshop, the man didn't take the main road but instead went around to a side path behind the paint shop and headed towards the garbage room. "At 4:13, he lingered at the entrance of the garbage room for about a minute," Xiao Li pointed to the screen, "and then quickly left, heading towards the back door—this time coincides with the time the van arrived at the back door, and the black cloth bag was also gone, most likely he threw the bag into the garbage room, which is where we found the severed finger!"

Team member Xiao Zhang was responsible for reviewing the surveillance footage from the evening of July 11th. He suddenly exclaimed, "Team Leader Wang, at 9:30 PM, the lights in the woodworking workshop are still on!" In the footage, a figure in blue overalls was walking around the woodworking workshop, holding a saw blade and operating a horizontal planer. "The factory closes at 10 PM, and most workers have already left by then, except for the 10 workers who are working overtime," Xiao Zhang pulled up the list of overtime workers. "But the person in blue overalls with a slightly hunched back isn't on the list—this person is likely the suspicious man from before, or one of the overtime workers deliberately disguising his identity."

The figure lingered in the woodworking workshop for about 40 minutes, repeatedly entering and exiting the scrap heap area, the saw blade in his hand occasionally flashing coldly. "What is he handling?" Wang Shuai frowned. "The footage is too blurry to see the specific actions, but judging from his gestures, it looks like he's cutting something heavy, which matches our hypothesis of 'sawing a corpse.'" At 10:10 p.m., the figure left the woodworking workshop carrying a black cloth bag, walked towards the factory wall, and then disappeared into the blind spot of the surveillance cameras—this time point is basically consistent with the timeline of the "wall climbing traces" discovered by Yang Sen.

"Could the suspicious figure during this overtime period be the same person as the one from this afternoon?" Xiao Li asked. "The height, build, and clothing are the same, but he wasn't wearing a baseball cap at night, and his hair is short, similar to the hair characteristics we found on the paintbrush." ​​Wang Shuai nodded: "Very likely. He entered the factory area in the afternoon to dispose of the body parts, returned in the evening to deal with the remaining bodies, and then escaped through the wall. The silver-gray van was his means of transportation."

However, the surveillance investigation also encountered many obstacles. Most of the factory's surveillance cameras used analog signals, resulting in blurry images, especially at night when there was severe noise, making it impossible to clearly identify the facial features of suspected individuals. The surveillance cameras around the back gate and perimeter wall had many blind spots, only capturing partial images and failing to track complete movements. The road surveillance coverage outside the factory area was low; after the silver-gray van left the factory, it completely disappeared from the surveillance footage after passing Yingbin Avenue at 4:30 pm on July 11, leaving no follow-up trace.

“We need to further confirm two key points,” Wang Shuai said to his team. “First, we need to obtain the owner information and complete license plate of the silver-gray van through traffic department checkpoint monitoring to expand the scope of our investigation and find the vehicle’s final destination. Second, we need to identify the suspicious man in blue overalls—is he an employee of the factory, or an outsider posing as a worker to enter the factory area? If he is an employee, is he on the overtime list, or is he a former employee returning?”

The team members immediately divided up their tasks: one group continued to review the factory's surveillance footage from July 10th to 12th, looking for more suspicious individuals, especially close-ups of their faces; the second group contacted the vehicle management office to investigate silver-gray Wuling Hongguang PLUS vehicles with license plate numbers ending in 28 throughout the city, based on the vehicle model and the blurry license plate; the third group visited the factory's overtime workers to confirm whether any strangers entered the woodworking workshop on the night of July 11th, or whether any workers were working overtime unusually.

During the interviews with the workers who were working overtime, Wang Shuai noticed what carpenter Lao Li said: "I was indeed working overtime on the evening of July 11th. Around 9:7 pm, I saw a person wearing blue overalls walk into the carpentry workshop. I thought he was a new temporary worker, so I didn't pay attention. Later, when I looked for him again, he was gone." Lao Li recalled, "He was holding a saw blade, which was exactly the same as the one I received on the afternoon of the 11th. I thought he had borrowed it, but I didn't expect that he still hasn't returned it."

Workers in the paint shop said they did not see any strangers enter on the afternoon of July 11, but when they were working overtime that night, they smelled a faint bloody smell in the paint shop. At the time, they thought it was the smell of wood and did not pay much attention. "Now that I think about it, the smell was not right," said worker Lao Zhou. "It smelled like rust mixed with something else. At the time, one of the lights in the paint shop was broken, so the light was dim and I did not look carefully."

Wang Shuai and his team returned to the factory to inspect the surveillance equipment in the woodworking and painting workshops. They discovered that the hard drive containing the woodworking workshop's surveillance footage had been deliberately deleted—part of the footage from 9:30 PM to 10:10 PM on July 11th had been removed, leaving only fragmented clips. "The suspect is aware of counter-surveillance measures and knows how to delete surveillance footage," Wang Shuai said gravely. "This means he is likely familiar with the factory's surveillance system; he is either an insider or he scouted the place beforehand."

By that evening, the surveillance investigation had not yielded any significant progress: the complete license plate and owner information of the silver-gray van had not yet been found. (End of Chapter)