Silver Snow Line [Criminal Investigation]

Gan Tian is from another province. Her parents are both ordinary workers. The family bought a three-bedroom apartment in a small county town in her hometown when Gan Tian was in high school. Although the family conditions are not rich, Gan's parents never hesitate to give to their daughter. They enrolled her in interest classes according to her preferences since she was a child, cultivated her many talents, and made her a confident and bright girl.

Later, Gan Tian came to Shengzhou to attend university. In order to save money on tickets, she rarely went home during holidays, and she always kept in touch with her parents through phone calls. The couple was not familiar with the operation of smartphones, and they often had to wait for Gan Tian to take the initiative to call their daughter through the screen. They chatted for a few words, but they were afraid that it would affect her studies. When they saw that she was fine, they hung up. Over the past month, the situation was the same as usual. They had called each other through video and chatted on WeChat. Because the winter vacation was coming and they would meet soon, they didn't talk much on the phone.

In other words, after the police investigation, it was confirmed that Gan Tian did not return to her hometown for any family reasons, and her family was unaware of the reason why she asked for a long vacation from school. Her parents still thought that she stayed in school and studied hard.

Upon learning this, the police rushed to Gan Tian's dormitory without stopping, extracted her hair from the comb she often used for examination, and two hours later, the forensic doctor gave the test results, confirming that the body parts found and the bloodstains on Huang Xuyao's clothes belonged to Gan Tian. Not only had she disappeared long ago, she was also the owner of the body parts that the police were pursuing.

As soon as the Jinchuan City police received the news, they immediately arrested Huang Xuyao, and the police car is now on the way back to Shengzhou.

Xie Qingfei went to Shengke University to find Qin Jiashu again. The boy thought he was going to ask him about Huang Xuyao ​​again, and his face was not happy. After learning that the police said Gan Tian was missing, he was even more unbelievable.
"What nonsense are you talking about? I just called her yesterday!"
He pulled out his call records to testify: "I knew she might not have time because she had to take care of the elderly at home. Although I didn't call her every day, I never lost contact with her."
"We have already contacted her parents. The so-called family affairs are completely fictitious. Did she tell you the reasons for her leave in person?"
"certainly--"
Xie Qingfei asked, "What did you talk about every time you called? How long did the calls last? Did she always hang up because of the bad signal? Are you sure that she was the one on the other end of the line?"

Every time she asked a question, Qin Jiashu's face turned paler. He studied computer science and knew a lot about artificial intelligence. AI voice is the most widely used and basic function on the market. Most of the sales calls he received were from robots. The conversations were recorded in advance by the staff, and they could communicate with the caller based on the recorded words. But in the past two years, technology has developed by leaps and bounds, and even AI face-changing technology can be realistic enough, so the manual recording process can of course be directly omitted. Everyone's voice has its own characteristics, and the ability of the machine is to imitate - as long as a person has left his own voice, the machine will have a way to copy his voice and let him "himself" say all kinds of things he has never said.

And relatives and friends who are separated from them can hardly hear the difference.

Facing Gan Tian's parents who don't understand emerging technologies, she used a synthetic face to make a video call with her family. Even if there was a bug, they would think it was a network failure or a problem with the phone. Who would have thought that the daughter in the video was fake? Her boyfriend was informed in advance that he was in the mountains and the signal was not good, so it was reasonable that the chat could not be long, so there was no need for too many complicated words.

Thinking back on the sweet phone calls he had with his girlfriend during this period, Qin Jiashu suddenly broke out in a cold sweat and called Gan Tian again in disbelief.
"I'm Gantian." The familiar voice of my girlfriend sounded on the other end.
Maybe it was because of the police's reminder that Qin Jiashu suddenly realized that every time he called her, she would be picked up after three rings. Once, he and his classmates drank too late outside, and he drunkenly called her in the middle of the night to say he missed her. She answered immediately, and there was no trace of fatigue in her tone. At that time, he thought it was a sign that she loved him and indulged him.

Qin Jiashu felt it was so absurd that he didn't even notice his voice was shaking when he spoke: "It's me, I... I miss you."
Sweet: "I miss you too."
Qin Jiashu's heart sank suddenly.
He had just switched SIM cards when he called, and she didn't have the number saved on that card. Did she recognize his voice right away?
Qin Jiashu swallowed his saliva and continued, "There is a dessert shop at the south gate of the school. When you come back, let's go there together, okay?"
Gan Tian: "Okay, then wait for me to come back and go explore the store with you."
Qin Jiashu immediately hung up the phone, looked at Xie Qingfei with fear, and said incoherently: "There is only one dessert shop in South Gate. We had our first date there. She must remember it. Why did she say that? Did she...did something really happen to her?"
Without waiting for an answer, he called again. This time, after three rings, he took the initiative to say "Hello". The other party replied: "Hello, what can I do for you?"

Qin Jiashu had to believe it even if he didn't want to.

Xie Qingfei thought, however, that this person must know Gan Tian very well, as he knew her social circle and could respond to people of different identities in advance. Gan Tian was a college student with excellent character and academic performance, and she had never made friends with people in society. The suspect might be her classmate.

Just as Xie Qingfei was about to speak, she suddenly noticed a malicious gaze staring at her. She turned around, but only saw the back of a boy disappearing at the end of the road. He dodged quickly, but the huge trendy brand logo on his back was still caught by Xie Qingfei's sight.
She asked, "I heard that you and Jiang Ke don't get along well?"
Qin Jiashu almost felt heartbroken, but he was the most important person around the deceased, and there was no time for him to be sad.
Hearing the name, he frowned: "He pursued sweetness before."

According to Qin Jiashu, he and Jiang Ke had a good relationship when they first started freshman year. The two boys came from similar families, had similar hobbies, and got along well in all aspects. They became good friends soon after they met. However, Jiang Ke's biggest shortcoming was that he was fickle and changed girlfriends every now and then. Qin Jiashu disagreed with this, but he was not interested in interfering in his brother's private emotional affairs.

Later, Jiang Ke heard from somewhere that there was a beautiful girl named Gan Tian in the Japanese Department, so he dragged Qin Jiashu to the Foreign Languages ​​College to visit her. Qin Jiashu was reluctant at first, but after seeing Gan Tian in person, he could never forget this face in his heart.
Gan Tian is indeed a very beautiful girl with a warm personality. She is like a little sun in the crowd.

"Everyone who meets her will like her. She is a very good girl." Qin Jiashu said.
He had seen her take the initiative to help classmates and feed stray cats on campus. She would also greet the security guards on duty sweetly when entering and leaving the school gate. She was kind to everyone and was as lovely as her name.

Jiang Ke was simply attracted by her beauty, and whistled that he must seduce this girl. He also turned around and boasted to Qin Jiashu that he knew Gan Tian very well, and knew that she came from an ordinary family and passed the exam from a small county town. This type of girl has never seen the market of a big city and is very easy to deceive. He can easily win her over by taking her to a few high-end restaurants and giving her a few brand-name lipsticks. This is also his usual method to deal with other girls.

But he hit a wall with Gan Tian.
What she lacked the least from childhood to adulthood was being liked and flattered by others. She never felt inferior because of her not-so-wealthy family background. For a suitor like Jiang Ke who had an obvious purpose, if it wasn't for her polite upbringing, she wouldn't even bother to even glance at him.

After being rejected, Jiang Ke complained like crazy in front of Qin Jiashu, scolding Gan Tian for not knowing what was good for her. On the other hand, he tried every means to pursue her, which made Gan Tian very upset. During that time, Gan Tian was elected as the host of the campus music festival. Jiang Ke planned for a long time to confess to her in public on the stage, consciously giving her enough face, but it ended in failure. This also caused him to be a celebrity on the school confession wall for a long time. Perhaps it was too embarrassing, and Jiang Ke became much quieter after this incident.

Hearing this, the detective at the side asked: "Brother, you have suffered such a big setback, you will not be with Gan Tian after this, right?"
"I had little contact with her before," Qin Jiashu said, "and then I happened to take the same elective course with her, so we had more opportunities to talk. I really liked her, and I never thought she was the kind of person Jiang Ke said, so I couldn't help but pursue her." Xie Qingfei looked at the boy in front of him. He was indignant for his current girlfriend and former crush, and even regretted why he had made friends with someone like Jiang Ke. The most difficult thing to fake is innocence, and after meeting several times, Qin Jiashu is indeed a person who is loyal to his girlfriend and sincere in his feelings, no wonder he moved Gan Tian.

But when he was with Gan Tian, ​​he could no longer be brothers with Jiang Ke. The two lovers were both well-known in school, and their good looks would be praised for being a good match when they walked on the street. All these became a knife stabbing in Jiang Ke's heart. Of course, he had to turn against Qin Jiashu, and his love for Gan Tian turned into hatred.

Xie Qingfei asked: "What kind of person is she in Jiang Ke's words?"
Qin Jiashu found it difficult to speak, but he still spoke to cooperate with the investigation.
Maybe she was just pretending to be noble, and she looked innocent on the surface, but she had been with many rich men behind the scenes, so she looked down on him. Although these were all unilateral malicious speculations by Jiang Ke, he believed them after hearing them so many times. Gan Tian was versatile because her family trained her like a Yangzhou skinny horse. She majored in Japanese, so she must be very exciting in bed. As for why she was popular, it was because she wanted to use the mediocrity of the people around her to highlight her beauty. Although his words were childish and unfounded, the most cost-free way to ruin a beautiful girl was to spread dirty rumors about her. If more people talked about her, she would be the same.
Jiang Ke would naturally not blame himself for the expansion of the rumor. He only went further to smear the other party because of his unrequited love.

Qin Jiashu himself thought of this and asked with red eyes: "Is it Jiang Ke? What did he do to Gan Tian?"
Xie Qingfei did not answer directly: "When was the last time you saw Gan Tian?"
"It was probably... the 2nd of last month. That day was a Saturday, and my parents asked me to go home for dinner. My family is from Shengzhou." Qin Jiashu recalled, "She sent me to the subway station. By the way, I asked her if she would be bored spending the weekend alone. I tried to come back to accompany her after dinner, but she said she had already made an appointment with friends to go out that night, so I should just stay at home and relax."
Xie Qingfei: "Did she say which friend she was going with and where she was going?"
Qin Jiashu frowned and said, "Going clubbing with Huang Xuyao."
Then he couldn't help but say, "Gan Tian can't go to these places by herself. Ever since she got together with Huang Xuyao, she would ask her out all the time. She's not only not making progress herself, but also dragging others down."

Because there was an unspeakable emotional dispute between Qin Jiashu and Huang Xuyao, and the other party was also a friend in the dormitory of his girlfriend with whom he had a good relationship, he could not express his dislike for Huang Xuyao ​​in front of Gan Tian. Every time he faced Gan Tian's excited expression, he could not say something to dampen her mood and not let her go out to play.

"We had a phone call that night, and she said she wasn't going back to school tonight," Qin Jiashu exhaled a breath of cold air, "I was very worried, and I remembered that her period was during those days, so I said I would go pick her up, but she told me not to worry, saying that she and Huang Xuyao ​​had already returned to her off-campus rental house, and it would be inconvenient for me to go over. The next day I accompanied my mother to a physical examination and was unable to make it back to school. I didn't have time to contact her until late at night, and she told me on WeChat that something had happened at home, and that she had bought a ticket and was on a bus back home. Maybe, maybe it was from that time on..."

Gan Tian has no record of leaving the province. From that time on, the person who used her WeChat to chat with the outside world was no longer herself, and the last person who saw her could be basically confirmed to be Huang Xuyao.

Xie Qingfei immediately asked someone to check the address of Huang Xuyao's rental house. After giving all the instructions, Qin Jiashu looked nervously at the serious criminal police in front of him and asked in a hoarse voice: "Is she really just... missing?"
Xie Qingfei was silent for a moment, then said softly, "You should have heard that workers found a bag of body parts on a construction site not far from your school."

Qin Jiashu reacted slowly for a few seconds, as if he was thinking about the meaning of the word "body parts" in his mind. He did remember the recent news about a dismembered body case in the university town. Although the police had disclosed the case information, the school suppressed the news in order to prevent the students from being affected. Therefore, this matter is currently only spread on a small scale. Because it is too mysterious and bloody, no one believes it when it is mentioned among students.

He didn't take it seriously at the time. An ordinary person would never encounter a vicious case of this magnitude in his lifetime. Now he could not accept that the victim of the incident was his beloved girlfriend.

Qin Jiashu nearly fell down, and was helped by a criminal police officer nearby. He sat down on the bench in a daze. After calming down, he was surrounded by shock. He touched his eyes as if waking from a dream and caught a handful of cold tears.
Then he broke down and said, "Can I... go see her?"
It's not that the police didn't allow him to meet Gan Tian, ​​but they didn't find any complete body tissue of Gan Tian, ​​so it wouldn't be easy to ask people to go and identify the body from two piles of rotten meat.
Before he could say anything to refuse, Qin Jiashu suddenly covered his chest and ran to the trash can and vomited violently. When Xie Qingfei handed him a tissue, he grabbed his wrist tightly.

"You must investigate thoroughly. No matter if the murderer is Huang Xuyao ​​or Jiang Ke, I beg you..." Qin Jiashu choked up, "It's all my fault."

Huang Xuyao ​​might be jealous of her roommate because of her admiration for him.
Jiang Ke was also more likely to take revenge impulsively because of a past emotional dispute.
It is indeed difficult to separate himself from Qin Jiashu. Gan Tian’s death must have been a huge blow to him.

On the other side, Lu Shaohui had already led people to find Huang Xuyao’s rental house.

The community is located in the residential area around the university town. The houses are decades old and the highest one is only five stories high. Most of the residents are elderly people. Huang Xuyao ​​lives on the fifth floor. The house has been unoccupied for a month, and many small advertisements have been stuffed on the door.

When the door was opened, a strong and pungent smell of detergent hit me in the face, as if it was deliberately trying to cover up something. The blackout curtains were tightly closed, and the light from outside the door shone in, creating a terrifying atmosphere with the cold smell. Lu Shaohui raised his hand to turn on the light at the door. There was dust floating in the air. The investigators immediately searched the room and saw signs that the surroundings had been carefully cleaned.

A single girl's temporary residence, it doesn't have many items and everything is tidy.
Lu Shaohui entered the bedroom and found that all the sheets and quilt covers had been removed. There were a few coats hanging in the closet, and the skin care products on the dressing table were the brand that Xie Qingfei told him last time that was suitable for young girls. He was about to leave when he suddenly saw a shallow and barely noticeable dark scratch on the white wood at the foot of the bed. He was about to ask the technician to take a photo when his name was called first.

In the bathroom separated by a wall, the smell of rust could not be covered by detergent, mixed with an indescribable stench. The blinds and lights were not turned on, and the fluorescence after the luminol reaction lit up everywhere, the ground, walls, and even the ceiling... all glowed with a cold blue light.

(End of this chapter)