Reborn in 97, I solved a cold case at the Municipal Bureau

Chapter 240 The Suffocating Feeling of Helplessness
On Sunday, Zhou Yi hadn't even gotten out of bed when she heard someone open the door.

I got up and saw that it was my mother, carrying some vegetables.

"Mom, what are you doing here so early?" Zhou Yi asked groggily.

"I'll get you some groceries so you don't have time to buy them all by yourself."

Zhou Yi looked at the dishes on the table and said, "No need, I can eat in the canteen at the bureau. Besides, these dishes can't be stored for long. You can take them back, just leave me some eggs. If I need them, I can just cook some noodles and make a couple of poached eggs to tide me over."

"Well, I've already brought it, so how about I cook you a meal today?"

"No need, I have to go back to the station to work overtime later." Zhou Yi went into the restroom and started brushing his teeth.

"Didn't you just finish working overtime? Why do you have to work overtime again?" Zhang Qiuxia said with concern.

"There's a case I need to check at the bureau. You can take the vegetables back with you; I don't have time to cook them here, and they'll just rot and go to waste."

"Okay, okay, I'll save the eggs for you," Zhang Qiuxia said, and started preparing the vegetables.

Turning my head, I saw that a lock had been added to the door that used to be the living room partition.

I went over to take a look and found that the lock was secure, so I asked, "Son, why did you lock the room you usually live in?"

Zhou Yi was washing her face, rubbing her face with a towel as she peeked in and said, "There are some study materials and some things from work inside. Just to be safe, I added a lock. It's okay, you don't need to worry about it."

"Oh, then I'll make you some breakfast, you can eat it before you go."

"No need, I'll just buy two steamed buns on the way." Zhou Yi changed her clothes and hurriedly went out, calling out before leaving, "Mom, please close the door properly for me later."

Watching the departing figure in the corridor, Zhang Qiuxia sighed, "If I had known being a policeman would be so tough, I shouldn't have sent him to police academy. He could have gone to university, joined the Second Steel Company, and become a reserve cadre or something. That would have been so much better."

Zhou Yi had arranged to meet with Qiao Jiali and Shi Tao at the bureau this morning to discuss the Donghai residential area matter.

Then, taking advantage of the fact that many people were still at home on Sunday, we quickly began to conduct a survey of the Donghai community to avoid making the survey more difficult when people went to work on Monday.

After eating two steamed buns and drinking a cup of soy milk on the way, Zhou Yi greeted his colleagues at the gate's duty room.

As soon as I entered the office building, I saw Xu Nian's back in front of me.

"Xu Nian," Zhou Yi called out.

Xu Nian turned around, seemingly unsurprised by Zhou Yi's appearance.

"Isn't Elder Qin from the Provincial Department supposed to arrive tomorrow? Why did you come here too?" Zhou Yi asked.

“Teacher Song came back yesterday, but he didn’t go home all night. He said he wanted to do another check on the body parts he had retrieved before Old Qin arrived. If he hadn’t called me because he couldn’t find some documents, I wouldn’t have known,” Xu Nian said with a frown. “So I came to see if I could help in any way.”

As they walked and talked, Xu Nian's words surprised Zhou Yi greatly.

Song Yiming's dedication is amazing. The provincial department has already sent experts, so he could have just waited for them to arrive and then assisted them. There was no need for him to do it himself.

What I admire even more is that one person spent an entire night in an empty office building, facing a pile of body parts.

Even though Zhou Yi had been a criminal investigator for two lifetimes, the thought of such a thing still sent chills down his spine.

"Didn't you find anything unusual when you performed the autopsy?" Zhou Yi asked.

Xu Nian shook her head: "The body parts that were retrieved were too rotten and contaminated, and there were no obvious abnormal features, such as two left ears, so we really didn't find anything. If it were just me, I might not have noticed anything due to lack of experience, but even someone as experienced as Teacher Song didn't find anything, so we can only say that we really didn't find anything."

Xu Nian said with lingering fear, "Without DNA testing, we would never have known that there was another person among these body parts."

At the corner, the two parted ways without exchanging any further words.

Regardless of what happened in their past lives or in this one, one of them is a criminal investigator and the other is a forensic doctor. They cannot let personal feelings interfere when handling cases; this is the awareness of law enforcement officers.

When Zhou Yi pushed open the door to the Third Brigade's office, he found that Qiao Jiali was already there.

"Sister Qiao? Why are you up so early? I thought I was early enough."

"It's not that I came early, it's just that I live nearby, and my husband drove me there." Qiao Jiali smiled, picked up a bag of biscuits, and said, "Have you had breakfast?"

"I ate on the way. Director Zhang is quite supportive of your work, personally driving you here to work overtime," Zhou Yi said with a smile.

"No, he was going to hold a seminar in Wuguang next door and gave me a ride on the way."

Zhou Yi noticed a stack of documents in front of Qiao Jiali; these were missing persons reports submitted by various local police stations after the Searchlight Project was launched.

"Sister Qiao, have you found anything?" Zhou Yi sat down and picked up a stack of documents to start checking.

Qiao Jiali shook her head: "Not yet, I just arrived recently. Zhou Yi, do you have any thoughts?"

Zhou Yi shared some of his thoughts from yesterday. After listening, Qiao Jiali nodded in agreement: "You're right, this must have happened before Zhang Hui was murdered. The second team will be here soon. Let's divide the tasks and then go to Donghai Community to conduct a search."

"Yes, I think there are a few key directions. First, single men or women are the most suspicious, because dismemberment requires a suitable environment. Also, single men and women might have partners visiting their homes, and these partners' registered residence and address are not in Donghai Community, which would explain why there are no matching missing persons." "Second, similar to Zhang Hui and Xu Jiaguang, there might be serious conflicts within their families. But this type of possibility is relatively small, because the chances of not being reported missing are very small, especially given such a major case in the community."

"Third, transient tenants, especially those who suddenly move out before their rent expires in the last three months, are the most suspicious. Donghai Community is an old community with a long history and outdated management, so the neighborhood committee probably doesn't pay much attention to tenant registration."

This kind of thing is actually quite normal in Hongcheng in this era. It can't be said that these neighborhood committees and property management companies are just sitting idly by; it's simply that their concepts and management are outdated, and they feel that there's no need to do these things at all.

This also made it more difficult for them to carry out their work.

Zhou Yi had seen the mascot gatekeeper of Donghai Community before.

Qiao Jiali agreed with his analysis and made her decision to first chat with the neighborhood aunties to find out what gossip had happened in the neighborhood before Zhang Hui.

Zhou Yi knew that this was Qiao Jiali's strength and also an advantage for plainclothes policewomen.

Almost half an hour later, Shi Tao finally arrived, repeatedly apologizing for oversleeping.

Zhou Yi looked at his messy hair and knew he wasn't lying.

Zhou Yi was very polite, saying that they had arrived early and were waiting for Team Leader Shi to preside over the meeting.

Shi Tao was not a bureaucratic captain at all. He waved his hand and said, "What am I in charge of? You do it. When it comes to criminal investigation, your Third Brigade is the best."

Then he shouted towards the door, "Old Gu, Old Gu, tell them all to come to Zhou Yi's place for a meeting."

The office of the second team is right next door.

Shi Tao turned his head and saw the cookies on the table.

"Oh, I haven't had breakfast yet." Without even asking whose it was, he picked it up and started eating.

Zhou Yi thought to himself, "Yes, it's that unconventional Captain Shi."

Zhou Yi then explained to the second team the situation regarding the discovery of a second person's genes in the DNA test, which startled everyone.

After all, they participated in the initial salvage and large-scale search for the remains; who would have thought that there was another dead body among them?

"Is this thing accurate? Could it be a mistake? For example, the body parts might be severely decomposed or contaminated, which is why the test results are different?" Shi Tao asked, chewing on a biscuit.

In 1997, criminal police officers were not unfamiliar with this technology, but in reality, no one had actually seen it, so they were unclear about the specific principles behind it.

"No, theoretically speaking, DNA does not change due to the decomposition or contamination of a corpse. Even after decades, the DNA sequence can still be detected from the bones," Zhou Yi said. "If we really want to say that DNA can change, it seems there is only one possibility, which is nuclear radiation. But that stuff is something that ordinary people like us will never come into contact with in our entire lives."

Shi Tao nodded and said, "That's right, we're not the Japanese."

The members of the second team burst into laughter.

Shi Tao then said, "Zhou Yi, you really know a lot. Teach me sometime."

"I was watching TV," Zhou Yi said with a smile.

Then, Zhou Yi explained his analysis of the case and the targets that needed to be investigated.

"Zhou Yi, how many households are there in Donghai Community?" Gu Changhai asked.

Qiao Jiali said, "I have this information. Let me look for it. We compiled it during the Zhang Hui case last time."

Qiao Jiali pulled out previous investigation data and said: "Donghai Community has a total of 38 buildings and 496 households. The registered population is over 1,900, and the number of transient population such as tenants is unknown."

Shi Tao looked at the people in the room and grinned. Nearly five hundred households, that's at least forty households per person. They still had to investigate the transient population and tenants who had moved out—that was going to be hard work.

But you have to grit your teeth and do the physical work anyway.

Shi Tao took the initiative to take over the resident survey, allowing Zhou Yi and Qiao Jiali to focus on investigating tenants who had moved out and any unusual sights or sounds in the community.

After making the arrangements, everyone wasted no time and set off immediately, with three cars heading straight for Donghai Residential Area.

When Zhou Yi returned to Donghai Community, he felt a mix of emotions, but more than that, he felt a strange sense of panic.

Because he discovered that, in addition to unsolved cases, there were so many other murders and homicides that had never been known to anyone.

Last night, he sat in his secret archive room at home and searched through all the case files in his mind about Hongcheng, but he couldn't find any case that matched this matter.

In other words, this case, like the Zhang Hui case, was a murder that had never been discovered in the previous life.

But what's even more terrifying than Zhang Hui's case is that, at least in her previous life, Zhang Hui was a missing person.

But this other person isn't even a missing person.

The thought of this made Zhou Yi feel as if something was choking him, giving him a sense of powerless suffocation.

(End of this chapter)