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

"Understood!" Zhang Hui took the report and immediately gathered his team members, Xiao Li and Xiao Zhang, and drove to Li Jianjun's rented house on the outskirts of the city. It was an old residential building built in the 90s, with peeling paint on the walls of the stairwell, and a damp, musty smell mixed with the grease from the breakfast stalls downstairs. The door to room 302 on the third floor was ajar. Zhang Hui knocked lightly on the door, and a suppressed sobbing sound came from inside. After a moment, the door was opened by a middle-aged woman with a sallow complexion and red, swollen eyes. It was Li Jianjun's wife, Wang Li.

“We are from the Criminal Investigation Division. We would like to ask you about the situation before Li Jianjun disappeared.” When Zhang Hui showed his identification, he deliberately kept his tone calm, his gaze sweeping over the corner of Wang Li’s tightly clenched clothes—it was still stained with cement stains that had not been washed off, obviously from when Li Jianjun was working on the construction site.

Wang Li's tears welled up instantly, her body trembling slightly as she leaned against the door frame: "Officer, has Jianjun... has something happened to him? He left home last Wednesday morning saying he was going to the mountains, and he hasn't come back since. His phone has been switched off. I went to the police station to report him missing, and they checked the surveillance footage but there were no clues..."

"Please calm down. We have indeed found him, but the situation is quite complicated." Zhang Hui carefully chose his words, avoiding directly using the word "death" to upset her. "Now we need your cooperation in doing two things: first, to collect your and your child's DNA to confirm your identities; second, to tell us whether he mentioned which mountain he was going to or what he was going to do before he left home last Wednesday?"

Wang Li was helped to the sofa by Xiao Li. The living room was so small that it could only fit a folding table and two sets of old sofas. On the coffee table was a half-eaten bag of steamed buns, and next to it was Li Jianjun's blue work clothes—the cuffs were worn and there was a patch sewn on the elbow, which Wang Li had just patched up a while ago. "Last Wednesday morning around 7 o'clock, he cooked two bowls of porridge and said, 'An old colleague at the mine mentioned that there seems to be some unwanted scrap metal in the abandoned mine in Dongshan. I'll go see if I can scrape some and sell it for money.'" Wang Li wiped away her tears, her fingers running through the patch on the work clothes. "I advised him not to go, that the mine has been closed for several years and it's not safe. He said, 'I'll just go and take a look around, I'll be back by noon.' He even carried that black canvas bag with a wrench and a flashlight, and then..."

"Who is that old colleague? What's his name? How can I contact him?" Zhang Hui quickly asked, his pen hovering over his notebook, ready to record the key information.

Wang Li shook her head, her eyes full of confusion: "He didn't say his name, he just said that he used to work in the mine with me, and we hadn't been in touch for many years. We ran into each other at the construction site gate a while ago and chatted for a bit about scrap metal. I asked him what his colleague's last name was, and he said, 'I forgot, I just remember that everyone used to call him Old something.' I didn't ask any more questions."

Zhang Hui had Xiao Li make detailed notes about the style of the black canvas bag and the model of the wrench. He then took out a DNA sampling swab: "Ms. Wang, please cooperate with your child and have some oral mucosa sampled. This is a necessary procedure to confirm your identity." During the sampling process, Wang Li suddenly remembered something and pulled a crumpled piece of paper from the coffee table drawer: "This was written by Jianjun last Tuesday night. He said he was afraid of forgetting the location of the mine, so he wrote down a general direction. Do you think it's useful?"

The note was written in crooked handwriting, only stating "Go south from the main entrance of Dongshan Mine, the third fork in the road," without specific coordinates or any indication of what was being looked for. Zhang Hui took the note, his fingertips tracing the surface—Li Jianjun's handwriting was heavy, with traces of repeated tracing along the edges of the strokes, as if he was extremely nervous while writing down the address, but there was no clue as to why he was nervous.

After leaving Wang Li's home, Zhang Hui led the team to the construction site where Li Jianjun had worked. When the site manager, Lao Zhou, heard about Li Jianjun's accident, his safety helmet fell to the ground with a "thud": "Impossible! Jianjun asked me for leave yesterday, saying he was going to the mountain to look for something, how could he..." He suddenly realized he had said the wrong thing, quickly covered his mouth, and avoided Zhang Hui's gaze.

“You said he asked for leave ‘yesterday’? But he’s been missing for seven days.” Zhang Hui noticed this detail and pressed for more information. Old Zhou then stammered an explanation: “I misremembered. It was last Wednesday morning when he asked me for leave, saying, ‘Something came up at home, I need to go up the mountain,’ without specifying what it was. He’s been working on the construction site for over two years and has never been absent. He’s a reliable worker. Last time, a coworker broke his electric drill, but he wasn’t angry and even said, ‘It can still be used after some repairs.’”

Zhang Hui visited five of Li Jianjun's coworkers in the same group and received highly consistent feedback—honest, introverted, and not fond of causing trouble, even a bit "soft," rarely holding a grudge even when taken advantage of. Only coworker Lao Wang mentioned a vague detail: "About a week ago, I saw Jianjun talking to a man at the construction site entrance. The man was wearing a black coat and a baseball cap, and his back was to me so I couldn't see his face. He was speaking softly, and Jianjun seemed unhappy, frowning. Later, the man patted him on the shoulder and left."

"Do you remember the man's height and build? Did you see what kind of car he was driving?" Zhang Hui quickly asked. Old Wang scratched his head, looking troubled. "He was probably a little over 1.7 meters tall, of medium build. I didn't see him drive, I just saw him walk towards the bus stop. I was in a hurry to pick up materials at the time, so I didn't pay much attention. Now that I think about it, the man's jacket seemed a bit old, and the cuffs were worn white."

Just as this clue was starting to take shape, it became blurry again—no names, no physical characteristics, no means of transportation; the only clue, the "black jacket," was something you could see on more than a dozen people at any construction site in the city. Zhang Hui asked Xiao Li to retrieve the surveillance footage from the construction site entrance, only to find that the camera had been broken for half a month and the property management hadn't repaired it. It could only show blurry silhouettes, making it impossible to tell who was who.

At 2 PM, Zhang Hui led a team to visit several villages near the Dongshan Coal Mine, hoping to find the "old colleague" Li Jianjun had mentioned. However, the Dongshan Coal Mine had been closed for almost ten years, and most of the miners had either gone to work in other places or changed careers, leaving very few in the villages. When the old miner, Grandpa Zhang, heard that they were looking for "colleagues who went down the mine with Li Jianjun," he sighed, fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan: "Back then, there were so many miners, surnamed Li, surnamed Wang, and I can't even remember their names. Besides, after the mine closed, everyone went their separate ways; who still keeps in touch?"

Zhang Hui took out the note written by Li Jianjun and asked Grandpa Zhang if he knew anything special about the "third fork in the road south of the main entrance." Grandpa Zhang squinted and thought for a long time: "That fork used to be an abandoned winch house, but it collapsed halfway and was buried in the ground. There's no scrap metal there, unless someone deliberately lied to trick him into going there." (End of Chapter)