I bring bad luck to my husband, you bring bad luck to your wife.

You might say this man is cowardly, but he dared to deceive the head constable of the yamen.

You said he was bold, he confessed everything before he was even tortured.

Interesting. Yang Tongchuan decided to go down and meet this guy.

We had just arrived at the dungeon entrance and hadn't even had a chance to go down yet.

"Officer Yang, someone is looking for you at the yamen gate."

The bailiffs stopped Yang Tongchuan and whispered something in his ear.

"It's TieTong's boss looking for you."

"He came to see me? What's up?"

"They wouldn't say, only that they needed to speak with you urgently."

Yang Tongchuan understood, and he had someone take Tie Tong to his private police station.

This used to be Officer Wang's room. After he left, the people in the yamen wisely cleaned it up again, painted the walls white, varnished the tables, chairs and cabinets, and even polished the floor tiles until they shone.

"Why is the railway company in such a hurry? What happened to me?"

"Officer Yang, I heard you found a sixty-year-old woman's corpse. What did she look like?"

"It's hard to say, but the railway boss has a relative who has gone missing."

"She's my adoptive mother. We had an argument a while ago, and she went out to clear her head in a huff, and then she disappeared. Your constables just came to my place to investigate, and I'm worried that it might really be her..."

"Boss Tie, it's not that I deliberately didn't mention the female corpse's characteristics, it's just that this situation is really a bit special, you should be mentally prepared."

Yang Tongchuan deliberately concealed the fact that the criminal might be imprisoned in the dungeon.

He led Tie Tong to the morgue to identify the body.

Tie Tong was on the verge of collapse just by looking at the deceased's clothes; he couldn't believe his eyes.

Clinging to a sliver of hope, he shakily reached out and peeled back the woman's hair, revealing a patch of baldness the size of an egg on the back of her head.

This is a scar left on his adoptive mother when she was young after being beaten by a drunken customer. Since then, hair has not grown in that spot.

"Mother!" Tie Tong knelt heavily on the ground with a thud.

Yang Tongchuan stood to one side, observing coldly.

After Tie Tong had an argument with his adoptive mother, she tragically died. What a coincidence!

Watching this gangster boss cry his heart out for his foster mother who was a prostitute, Yang Tongchuan's sixth sense was: he's overacting.

After Tie Tong had finished crying, Yang Tongchuan helped him up and took him back to the police station.

"Boss Tie, what exactly happened? Why did your foster mother suddenly leave home?" Yang Tongchuan poured Tie Tong a cup of hot tea and placed it in front of him.

They made it seem like they wanted to have a long talk.

"Officer Yang, I know what you want to ask. I didn't kill her."

In Changxing County, Tietong's reputation isn't exactly bad, but it's fair to say that anything associated with him is never clean.

"Officer Yang, do you know why they call me Iron Bucket? Actually, it's not Iron Bucket, it should be Bucket Carrier. My birth mother and adoptive mother were both prostitutes. Back then, they and a few other women banded together for warmth, rented a courtyard, introduced customers to each other, and worked together in the sex trade. From as far back as I can remember, I started carrying water for those men to wash their bottoms. They didn't know my name, so they would shout, 'Hey, you bucket carrier, hurry up, don't delay me from cleaning my gun.' Gradually, I lost my name, and everyone just called me Bucket Carrier."

Tie Tong rubbed his face, wiping away his tears and snot. His eyes were much clearer now.

"Later, my birth mother died of an illness. My adoptive mother was close to her and adopted me. Then I just kept going, struggling and struggling, until I went from carrying buckets to working as a lumberjack." Lumberjack didn't want to talk about those precarious days in detail.

During his days of drifting along, nobody respected him, and some even joked about him, saying: "Tie Tong is lucky, half the men in Changxing County could be his father."

"I, Tie Tong, am indeed not a good person, but I also remember how good she was to me when I was a child. I truly treated her like my own mother. We argued because that day I went to see her and heard her kneeling in front of the Buddha statue through the door, confessing that the prostitute who caused my birth mother to die from an illness was arranged by her." When Tie Tong talked about this, the veins on his neck bulged.

"The man was originally going to stay overnight in her room. When she was helping him bathe, she discovered that he had rashes on his body. She recognized the disease and knew it could be transmitted to women, but she couldn't afford to offend the client, so she tricked the man into having a threesome. Then she pulled my birth mother in, made her lie on the bed, and pushed her from behind."

Tie Tong himself also supported girls in prostitution, so he naturally knew how serious this disease was.

After a woman gets this disease, she can only watch her body slowly rot away and then die in excruciating pain.

"On one side is the woman who gave birth to me, and on the other side is the woman who raised me. I couldn't pretend to be confused. I rushed in and had a huge fight with her."

"And then?"

"After that, I stopped visiting her. I just had my men wander around her door every now and then to see if she was doing well, and occasionally bring her some living expenses. Last month, my men came back and told me that she wasn't home. They asked the neighbors and they said she had gone out."

"Does she have any other relatives besides you?"

"I also have a biological son, a few years younger than me, but that child was lucky; he was taken away by his biological father right after he was born. I don't know where he is now."

Tie Tong has finished speaking.

It was watertight and flawless.

Yang Tongchuan had Tie Tong help them complete the portrait of his adoptive mother.

Then, with some skepticism, he personally escorted the person out of the yamen.

And I promise to get to the bottom of this case.

After seeing Tie Tong off, Yang Tongchuan finally had time to go to the dungeon to see the lotus picker.

The man who was picking lotus flowers was bound hand and foot to the rack, his pants were already wet with urine.

When the jailer saw that Yang Tongchuan had finally arrived, he presented the boy's statement.

According to this guy, when he found the woman's body, there were two carpenter's chisels stuck in her body.

He recognized the chisel; it was made by his own father.

The man's father was a carpenter, but the man didn't want to do carpentry work, so he came to town to make a living. He picked lotus flowers and lotus pods because he had run out of money and wanted to earn some money for flatbreads.

"How can you be so sure those two chisels are yours?"

"I was born in the Year of the Horse, and the ends of those two chisels are carved with horse heads. My father carved them by hand and gave them to me. There's no mistake."

"Where are the two chisels?"

"I was afraid you would think I was the murderer, so I pulled it off and threw it into the water." The man's voice trailed off.

"A set of chisels has four chisels. Where are the remaining two?"

"I really don't know. This thing should be in my house. I don't know how it ended up in a corpse. I really don't know."

"Officer Yang, we've already investigated this. The man's surname is Lao, his name is Lao Hong, and he's from Hougezhuang Village. His father is indeed a carpenter. Also, we checked the small boat that Lao Hong used, and there were no signs of a struggle or fight on it. That boat might not be the crime scene."

"Gather the brothers. Those who can swim, take Lao Hong to Lotus Pond first thing tomorrow morning and find those two chisels for me. The rest, come with me to Hougezhuang Village immediately and meet this carpenter."