Animal Detective

Chapter 224 Is a fool's life not a life?
"You need my help?"

Shen Xin was taken aback for a moment, and subconsciously thought, "You're the deputy branch leader of a city with tens of millions of people, what could you possibly need my help with?"

But he realized it the next moment.

"Chief Liu, are you talking about training police dogs?"

That seems to be the case. Last time I went to Pingyu, we ate by the lake and talked about short videos and my experience training police dogs.

However, if Shen Xin remembers correctly, Pingyu also has two police dog bases, so the police dog configuration should be sufficient.

Liu Jie shook his head: "It's not a police dog."

Then, changing his tone, he said, "Of course, if you'd like to train police dogs in Pingyu, I have no objection."

He had inquired about it and found that Shen Xin was an expert at training police dogs.

cough!
Lu Youwei coughed loudly, interrupting Liu Jie, and said, "Director Liu, let's get down to business."

If Shen Xin is poached by the Pingyu police, Zhao Hongjie will definitely get back at him.

Liu Jie smiled, gestured for Shen Xin to sit down, and then said, "It's like this, there's a case I'd like to ask for your help with."

As he spoke, he took a file out of his bag and handed it over.

"Take a look first, so you have a general idea. It's not an order, it's just me asking you for a favor."

He added another reminder.

That means it's acceptable if Shen Xinzhen refuses.

Shen Xin subconsciously took the file, feeling even more confused.

It doesn't make sense for Pingyu to ask me for help with his case.

Police officers from different cities can certainly cooperate.

But that was when I had a case, the suspect had fled to another city, and I asked for help.

But that's not the case right now.

Pingyu had a case he couldn't solve and needed his help.

When Shen Xin received the case file, he noticed that it was dated 2012.

It's a case from six years ago, so it's definitely an unsolved case.

If that's the case, that would be incredibly strange.

First, jurisdiction over the case.

This case belongs to Pingyu. Even if it can't be solved and becomes a cold case, it's still under their jurisdiction.

Of course, a special task force can be formed, drawing elite police officers from other cities to cooperate in solving the case.

However, in such cases, the case usually needs to be investigated by the provincial department.

The case before us is clearly not like that.

Even in this situation, the professional police officers who are seconded or the experts who come down from the provincial department to provide guidance only play a role in guiding the handling of the case.

The specific work still needs to be done by the local police.

In reality, things are even more complicated.

The most important point is that the capable should do it, but no one is a saint. If you can't solve the cases in your own jurisdiction and have to ask outsiders for help, wouldn't that make you look incompetent?

Let alone the subordinates, even the leaders might not be willing.

So at this moment, Shen Xin was truly confused and unsure of what was going on.

Don't let it turn out to be a trap.

Therefore, Shen Xin set his sights on Lü Youwei.

Boss, please give me an answer.

Lu Youwei understood Shen Xin's look and inwardly cursed him as a sly devil. He said, "Little Shen, it's rare for Branch Manager Liu to make a special trip to visit. Take a look at the case file first. It would be best if you could help Branch Manager Liu, but it's okay if you can't."

Upon hearing this, Shen Xin felt reassured.

It means we have to give them face, but whether or not we'll actually help them is something we'll discuss later.

"Liu Zhi, let me take a look first."

Shen Xin sat down and opened the file.

A murder case.

The incident occurred on July 13, 2012.

The location is in Wuba Village, Qingyuan Town, Songling District, which is under the jurisdiction of Pingyu County.

At 9:40 a.m. that day, the Qingyuan Town Police Station received a report.

The person who reported the case is named Luo Limei.

The 58-year-old woman went to the police station in person to report that her son, Han Xiaolong, had been missing for more than a day.

The police officer who took the case was named Zhao Peizhu.

The case file contained the police report, which Shen Xin immediately saw. Luo Limei claimed that her son, Han Xiaolong, suffered from meningitis when he was young, and because he was not taken to the hospital in time, he became mentally disabled.

Luo Limei's family was also poor. The couple ran around trying to treat their son's illness, but they couldn't get better and ran out of money.

As if things weren't bad enough, her husband was working in a factory when he got caught in the equipment and died in an accident.

The boss insisted that it was caused by her husband's improper operation.

In the end, the case went to court, and the court ruled that the boss was 30% responsible, and then awarded him 130,000 yuan as consolation money.

The money was quickly spent on funeral arrangements and medical treatment for his son.

Luo Limei raised her child with great difficulty, and when she disappeared, Han Xiaolong was already 33 years old.

The transcript states that Zhao Peizhu asked Luo Limei if Han Xiaolong had ever gotten lost on his own before.

Luo Limei rarely answers questions and only stays in the village.

Then the police station dispatched officers to visit Wuba Village and investigate the surrounding surveillance footage.

That was in 12. Even in cities, there were blind spots in surveillance, let alone in rural areas.

Only on the north side, there is a wider cement road leading into the village, and there are surveillance cameras on the utility poles at the village entrance.

It doesn't have night vision capability when facing outside the village.

Nighttime filming relied entirely on streetlights on utility poles for illumination, resulting in limited image clarity.

Then I checked, but found nothing.

I searched all day but couldn't find it.

The police station expanded the search area and went to several surrounding villages, but still couldn't find it.

At the time, they suspected that Han Xiaolong might have encountered an accident, so they searched the outskirts and corners of the village.

They also searched along the river to the south of the village, but found nothing.

It wasn't until the morning of the 14th that police officers from the local police station noticed a well near the village road on the east side of the village while they were visiting the village.

I asked around and found out that this well was dug during the collective farming era.

The village used to rely on this well for drinking water.

Later, tap water was installed, and then the groundwater in this well deteriorated, so it was gradually stopped being used and covered with cement slabs.

The police officer who was conducting the interview asked a casual question, opened the cement cover, looked down, and was stunned.

A corpse was floating upside down at the bottom of the well.

The case escalated to a murder case.

Liu Jie, then captain of the Criminal Investigation Brigade of Songling District, led his team to the scene and took over the case.

An investigation revealed that the body in the water was Han Xiaolong.

He has already shown signs of shrinkage and slight putrefaction.

However, based on the time the report was filed, the time of death should be the evening of the 11th.

Around 6 p.m. on the 11th, some villagers saw Han Xiaolong.

Luo Limei herself said that she saw Han Xiaolong before going to work on the 11th.

At the time, she was 52 years old and worked in a clothing factory in the town, working two shifts, and those two weeks happened to be the night shift.

I go to work at 8 PM and come back at 8 AM, a 12-hour shift.

She cooked dinner for her son that evening, watched Han Xiaolong finish eating, and then went to work. He left around 7 p.m.

When she returned on the morning of the 12th, she did not see Han Xiaolong.

But I didn’t think much about it.

Han Xiaolong is silly, but he is full of energy. Sometimes he runs out to play before dawn and plays all day long.

There's nothing dangerous about it.

He's an idiot, and few people would hold a grudge against an idiot.

Moreover, everyone in the village, and even the nearby villages, knows him; he won't get lost.

So Luo Limei could catch up on her sleep without worry.

As a result, I slept until after 2 p.m. When I got up to cook and went out to look for Han Xiaolong, I found that Han Xiaolong was not in the village.

I asked around, but no one saw it.

She searched everywhere and asked around, but no one had seen her.

They also searched nearby villages, but still couldn't find it.

The crucial point is that they didn't even know when they got lost.

At the time, Luo Limei was at a loss and wanted to call the police, but then someone in the village said that the police would only open a case if someone had been missing for 48 hours.

In addition, it was evening when they found out, and some people said the police station was closed for the day.

Others said it was nothing, that maybe it had run off somewhere and would come back eventually.

Luo Limei didn't graduate from elementary school and didn't have much experience. With everyone around her offering their opinions, she became confused and decided to wait and see.

She still went to work anyway.

Because I missed one day of work, I was deducted 100 yuan.

She asked her neighbor to keep an eye on things and see if Han Xiaolong would come back that night, and if he did, to tell him not to wander off.

After a restless night, Luo Limei rushed home early the next morning and asked her neighbors, only to find that Han Xiaolong still hadn't returned.

Only then did he go to the police station to report the incident.

Therefore, Liu Jie made the speculation that the time of death was the night of the 11th.

It might be after 10 o'clock.

There weren't many entertainment options in the countryside back then, and many people went to bed early.

By eight or nine o'clock, there are hardly any people on the village roads.

The autopsy results largely confirmed this.

For example, the food residue in his stomach was the food Han Xiaolong ate on the night of the 11th.

Shen Xin picked up the autopsy report.

Han Xiaolong had multiple bruises on his body, suggesting that he had fought with the murderer before his death.

Then, 3 centimeters above the left temporal region, there is a 2-centimeter wound that extends to the outer table of the skull.

Linear skull fracture is observed, with skull depression and irregular edges.

In short, someone hit me with a stone on the area above my left temple.

The forensic expert speculated that it was an object like a stone.

Secondly, information such as diatoms in the body's internal organs confirmed that the victim had drowned before death.

Therefore, Han Xiaolong was thrown into a well and drowned after suffering a severe blow to the head and falling into a deep coma.

Shen Xin continued flipping through the pages.

The following is the investigation report.

Wuba Village has 217 households and a registered population of 841.

There are no outsiders.

After the incident, Liu Jie and others immediately deduced that it was a villager who committed the crime.

The reason is simple: the well in the village is in a rather awkward location.

The entire Wuba Village is bordered by a river to the south.

The river runs east-west, then turns north around the southwest corner of the village.

Therefore, the village is surrounded by main roads on three sides, which converge in the middle of the village. There is surveillance on the north side and the east side leads to Dade Village.

There is a cement bridge across the river to the west.

The well is located on the cement road to the east, 80 meters from the village entrance and 30 meters north of the road. The reason it looks awkward is that this area used to be an open space.

Later, the land for building a house was approved, and the newly built house blocked the well from view.

Therefore, if you walk on a normal cement road, you cannot directly see the well.

Liu Jie speculated that outsiders might not know the location of the well; only the villagers knew.

Only after the villagers killed Han Xiaolong would they think of throwing his body into the well.

They conducted a detailed inspection of the area around the well and the cement slab covering it.

Traces of dragging were found, as were footprints.

However, when the other party left, they deliberately wiped away the footprints on the ground.

Very little blood was found on the cement slab.

However, after testing, it was found to be Han Xiaolong's blood.

It is speculated that the murderer brushed against the cement slab while moving it.

On the night of the 11th, Han Xiaolong was thrown into a well, and his body was not discovered until the morning of the 14th.

The body was soaked for 60 hours, so no useful information about the murderer was extracted from the body.

Looking at the case file, Liu Jie's approach to handling the case was very clear.

Investigate Han Xiaolong's activity trajectory, his relationship with the villagers, and whether there have been any conflicts.

Then, using the most basic method, they investigated every single one of the more than 800 people in the village to confirm whether they had the opportunity to commit the crime.

This is the dumbest method, but it is undoubtedly also the most useful.

Unfortunately, despite expending a great deal of effort and investigating for over a month, the culprit was not identified.

Several suspects were identified, but they were all eventually ruled out.

Finally, find the murder weapon and the original crime scene.

Regarding the murder weapon...

Liu Jie initially tried to drain the well to search for the stone that killed Han Xiaolong at the bottom.

He speculated that the murderer might have casually thrown the stone into the well as well.

Unfortunately, no stones matching the wound with sharp edges were found.

Judging from the fractures, the stone that killed Han Xiaolong must have had sharp edges.

They searched the village again, expanding the search area, but still couldn't find any bloodstained stones.

It is also speculated that it was thrown into the river.

They even sent people down into the river to search, but finding a single stone in a river is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Then, at the scene, a detailed search was conducted within a 200-meter radius of the well, and they actually found it.

It is located southeast of the well, south of the cement road, between two houses.

Bloodstains were found on the ground.

However, the houses on the east side are vacant and uninhabited.

In the house on the west side, there was only an elderly couple left. They repeatedly asked, saying that they vaguely heard voices, but they didn't go out to see what was happening.

A thorough search of the scene yielded no useful clues.

This concludes the first phase of the investigation.

Liu Jie returned to square one, attempting to investigate from other angles.

For example, people from other villages.

He then organized a team to conduct a preliminary investigation of Dade Village in the east and Lijiabang in the west.

Several suspects were identified, but they were all eventually ruled out.

The investigation went on until the end of October, at which point the case reached a stalemate and was shelved.

Shen Xin put down the file.

Subsequent investigations continued to supplement the findings, but by 14, they had ceased to exist.

Shen Xin glanced at Liu Jie, who was chatting with Lü Youwei, and his first question was why Liu Jie was looking for him.

At the branch office, Shen Xin solved some cold cases and went through a large number of cold case files.

Shen Xin concluded that there are two main scenarios that lead to unsolved cases.

First, the case is too old and lacks the necessary conditions for investigation.

In 2012, Pingyu was still a remote rural area.

There's also Qingyuan Town. If Shen Xin remembers correctly, this should be the poorest town in Songling District.

In this case, the body was submerged in the well for almost three days, which contaminated and destroyed much of the evidence.

The second type is chance.

You can never guess what happened back then.

Just like Zhu Guishen's case.

The fact that this case has become an unsolved case is more likely to fit the first scenario: insufficient conditions for investigation.

But to be honest, this kind of case is quite common.

With the passage of time, it has become very difficult to solve the case.

Why did Liu Jie suddenly ask me for help?
Seeing Shen Xin put down the file, Liu Jie immediately stopped, turned to Shen Xin and asked what he thought.

Shen Xin glanced at Lü Youwei.

It's not really appropriate to interfere in other people's cases.

Shen Xin doesn't think he's invincible or a genius detective just because he's solved a few cases.

What you can think of, they've already thought of long ago.

So after thinking about it, Shen Xin said, "Director Liu, you've investigated so thoroughly, I really don't have any ideas."

Liu Jie laughed and said, "Don't hold back, just say whatever you want."

Shen Xin shook his head again, not really having any ideas at the moment.

But after reviewing the case file, Shen Xin felt that it was most likely the villagers who committed the crime.

It's unlikely to be an outsider.

Han Xiaolong is an idiot. People might tease him or make fun of him, but Shen Xin thinks it's unlikely that he would commit murder.

Seeing that Shen Xin didn't say anything, Liu Jie didn't press the matter. He sighed and said, "You must be wondering why I came to you."

Shen Xin nodded.

He really couldn't understand why Liu Jie wanted to contact him.

Even if he handled the case himself.

It's understandable that he has a thorn in his side and can't get over it, but he is now the deputy head of the criminal investigation branch and has enough power to reopen the investigation of this case.

There's really no need to make a special trip to Nanjiang to ask for my help.

Liu Jie said, "Because of a dog."

dog?
Shen Xin was stunned for a moment, then suddenly realized what was going on.

It must have been during our last meal by the lake when he heard about Wu Jiawang's case, and that inspired his words.

Looking back now, he was deep in thought for quite a while after hearing about Wu Jiawang's case.

But the case file doesn't mention any dogs.

Liu Jie continued, "It's not written in the case file, but I know it. In the past, there were many guard dogs in the countryside. Han Xiaolong's family also had one. It was a common mongrel, black or yellow, with two dots on its eyes."

He gestured with both hands over his eyebrows.

Shen Xin immediately understood; the four-eyed iron-clad gold dog was one of the most common mongrel dogs.

Liu Jie continued, "I don't know exactly how old he was, but he should have been an adult at the time."

How could Liu Jie have noticed a dog at that time?

“When we had dinner last time, you told me about the case of the missing child, and that’s when I started to think about this matter seriously.”

“I remember during my visit, someone said that Han Xiaolong was always running around the village, and the dog often followed him and was very close to him.”

"And I remember that when we were investigating the well, there was a dog that often wandered around nearby."

"Then think about the case of the child you mentioned. Is it the same situation, like the dog witnessing the crime?"

"And most importantly, will you also remember what the murderer looked like?"

Shen Xin suddenly realized.

It seems that Wu Jiawang's case inspired Liu Jie to come to him.

Liu Jie leaned back in his chair, lost in thought, and said, "I investigated this case myself, and I think about it often."

"Then, based on my intuition and experience, I still believe that the murderer is from this village, and since we couldn't find him, he must have lied in his statement."

"But we can't confirm who lied. We found some suspects, one of whom is quite suspicious, named Wang Chenghui. It's written in the case file that someone witnessed him arguing with Han Xiaolong."

"Han Xiaolong pestered him and they had a heated argument. Nobody knows what they argued about."

“He has an alibi, but it’s not sufficient. We’ve investigated for a long time but haven’t found any other evidence. We can only say we have doubts.”

"There are several other people like this, so it's impossible to pinpoint who they are."

"If we can identify a person through this dog, the case might take a turn for the better."

Shen Xin nodded.

Liu Jie believes the murderer is from the same village, a view Shen Xin agrees with.

But there are several hundred people, and some of them don't have a sufficient alibi. If you suspect them, you can't find evidence to refute their alibi.

Therefore, it is easy to get into a stalemate.

At this point, Liu Jie asked again, "How about it, Xiao Shen, could you do me this favor and make a trip?"

Shen Xin looked at Lü Youwei.

In this kind of situation, the leader definitely needs to give the order.

Lü Youwei was clearly also very cautious.

After all, he had never encountered such a precedent before.

It's perfectly normal for you to ask an expert to take your pulse and offer some advice.

They ended up finding Shen Xin, a young policeman.

And they still hoped to find clues from the dog.

Therefore, Lü Youwei had reservations.

He interjected, "Director Liu, how about this, let Xiao Shen consider it? He still has cases to close."

He made up an excuse for Shen Xin.

That's true; the unresolved issues surrounding Bai Jifei's case are still ongoing.

Liu Jie nodded in understanding, put away the file, and got up to take his leave.

However, just as he was about to leave, Liu Jie stopped, turned around and asked, "Shen Xin, do you want to know why I still want to investigate this case thoroughly, even after six years?"

Shen Xin shook his head.

Liu Jie continued, "Of course, this is a case I handled myself, and I certainly hope it will have a proper conclusion."

“But the more important reason is because of Luo Limei. I remember very clearly that when we decided to temporarily put the case on hold, Luo Limei said something to me.”

"She asked why the investigation stopped. Doesn't a fool's life matter?"

"I've always remembered those words."

“We said it’s only listed as an unsolved case, but we will continue to investigate it as long as conditions permit. I also believe that the truth will come out sooner or later.”

"But I really want to solve this case and then tell her in person that in the hearts of us police officers, everyone's life is the same, and we will not give up the investigation just because he is an idiot."

"So Shen Xin, do you understand what I mean?"

He asked rhetorically.

Shen Xin frowned, understanding.

Liu Jie probably didn't want to bear this misunderstanding.

"Chief Liu, I..."

Meeting Liu Zhina's resolute gaze, Shen Xinyou was moved and subconsciously wanted to agree.

But he swallowed the words back and said, "Please let me think about it."

Liu Jie nodded slightly, then turned and left.

(End of this chapter)