Seeing the crime scene flashbacks made me the darling of the police station.

Chapter 287 Missing Persons
"This is information about people who went missing in Yanjing Village a year ago." Zhao Yongliang pulled up the information about missing persons in Yanjing Village and showed it to Duan Wenrui.

All three cases in Yanjing Village are marked with numbers.

1, 2, 4.

If all the cases are indeed related, then where did the "3" go? It's very likely that it happened but hasn't been discovered yet, so they're checking for missing persons.

After Duan Wenrui looked at it, he showed it to Su Miaoyi.

Wu An, male, was 57 years old when he went missing. It had been more than a year since then. He was unmarried and lived alone.

Regarding family information, Wu An came to the family when he was very young, following his mother's remarriage.

In Yanjing Village, Wu An has two half-sisters.

They all married into other villages at a young age.

Ten years ago, Wu An's stepfather passed away, and Wu An's mother remarried, so Wu An stayed in Yanjing Village.

Chu Xingrou and Lu Zhishen looked at Wu An's photo together.

"What happened to his leg?" Lu Zhishen asked.

"I was sick as a child, I had polio," Su Miaoyi said, looking at the information in the file. "It left me with a disability in my leg."

Su Miaoyi looked at the information in the police report.

Because Wu An has a leg disability and cannot do farm work, he usually goes to the market to sell small trinkets.

I don't earn much money, and sometimes I'm short of cash.

So his two younger sisters would come to see him every few days.

The exact time of his disappearance is unclear, but he had already vanished when Wu An's sister came to visit him at home.

It was the busy farming season, so none of the neighbors noticed when Wu An had left.

They initially searched the area around the village. When they couldn't find him, they called the police.

The police searched Wu An's house and found no signs of a struggle, no signs of a fight, and no signs of it being ransacked.

No strangers have entered the room.

It can be confirmed that Wu An did not return home after going out.

Wu An's phone could not be located.

Many people in the village helped with the search.

However, they searched almost all the nearby villages and mountains, but still couldn't find the person.

"His legs aren't good, he won't go too far, will he?" Chu Xingrou said.

“He doesn’t need a cane to walk, but he walks slowly and limps,” Zhao Yongliang said. “He might have gone out to do something and suddenly got lost, so he just kept walking further and further away. But the nearby villages all say they’ve never seen him.”

"Is this the only missing person in recent years?" Su Miaoyi asked.

“This is the only one in our town,” Zhao Yongliang said. “We’ve had other elderly people get lost before. As they get older, they tend to get confused. But the furthest they’ve ever gone is outside of town.”

Su Miaoyi glanced at the documents again but said nothing more.

Wu An has difficulty walking, so he probably won't go too far. Apart from his leg problems, the information states that he is in good health.

In his fifties, unless he has a mental illness, he shouldn't suddenly lose his way and get lost, after all, this is the place he has lived in for decades.

It's also possible that they are sick but haven't been diagnosed.

This case was handled as a missing person case.

After breakfast, Duan Wenrui led his men back to the mountain to investigate the location where Wan Shuang was murdered.

When it gets light, you can see more clearly and see more things.

Zhao Yongliang took Su Miaoyi and the others around the village to ask everyone some questions.

"Where should we go first?" Zhao Yongliang asked. As the group emerged from the village committee office, Lu Zhishen asked, "Is Tian De's house unoccupied?"

"Tian De's house was sold. Tian De needed to stay in a sanatorium, which cost a lot. His son has settled down and has his own house in the city, but he doesn't come back much anymore. A year after Tian De's accident, his son sold the family house and land." Zhao Yongliang was quite familiar with the case, so he knew these families well. He knew almost everything that had happened in the past three years. "Anyway, no one came back to live there anymore. They sold the house to pay for Tian De's sanatorium expenses. Now their house has been rebuilt and is occupied by others."

"Where is Tian Dajiang at home?" Chu Xingrou asked.

“Tian Dajiang’s parents live with him.” Zhao Yongliang turned the corner ahead toward Tian Dajiang’s house. “The old couple are almost eighty, but they are in good health. Tian Dajiang originally lived with his parents.”

"Why isn't Tian Dajiang married?" Lu Zhishen asked.

Su Miaoyi listened to their conversation and looked ahead.

The road they were on led to the street with the convenience store just around the corner.

From afar, I could see people buying things from the convenience store and leaving.

“We were poor,” Zhao Yongliang sighed. “Everyone was poor back then, and we relied entirely on our labor. Which family wouldn’t want their daughter to marry into a good family? I heard that Tian Dajiang’s parents weren’t in good health back then, and Tian Dajiang was the only able-bodied man. The three of them couldn’t even get much food all year round.”

“Some families have many children and many laborers. The parents are young, healthy and capable, so they have plenty of food and don’t go hungry.”

“Doesn’t having more children mean more food? Raising children also requires food,” Chu Xingrou said.

“Back then, children were easy to raise and didn’t cost much. Once they were eating a lot, they were all able to work and become laborers,” Zhao Yongliang said.

Chu Xingrou nodded.

Zhao Yongliang continued, "When a family marries off their daughter, they will try to marry her off to a family with relatively good conditions. Otherwise, life is already hard enough, and if she marries into a poor family, wouldn't it be even harder? Tian Dajiang's parents were in poor health back then, but now that they are old, they are in good health."

"Are you from here?" Su Miaoyi asked.

Zhao Yongliang looks to be over fifty years old.

He speaks fluent Mandarin without any accent, and he speaks Mandarin with the villagers, so you can't tell where he's from at all.

But he also has an exceptional understanding of this area.

“My hometown is another village in this town. Back then, my family had a little money to support my studies, so I left home early,” Zhao Yongliang said. “Later, I came to the town’s police station and stayed here until I retired.”

As they talked, they walked to the entrance of the convenience store.

Su Miaoyi entered the small shop, where there were five or six people buying things.

Business was good. As Su Miaoyi walked this way, she watched people coming and going from the small shop.

They met the shop owner last night.

It was a woman named Tian Liu, who was thirty-four years old.

My house is right next door, so last night I went straight to her house after leaving the convenience store.

She and her son were at home.

Her husband works away from home.

She slept soundly last night, and although it was very close, she didn't hear the horn while she was asleep.

Someone from the village called her, and her son woke her up when he heard the phone ringing.

She then heard the song coming from the loudspeaker.

She was too afraid to go outside to check, so she called the police.

She was sleeping so soundly that she didn't hear any other noises.

"You cleaned up so quickly? The door is already fixed?" Lu Zhishen looked at the door that Duan Wenrui had kicked open last night.

"I didn't sleep last night. As soon as it was light, I contacted the village carpenter to help me put it on," Tian Liu said. "It wasn't damaged much, and it was fixed very quickly."

"Business is pretty good," Chu Xingrou said, casually touching the banana next to her.

"What's so good about it? They're all here to ask what happened last night." Tian Liu looked at the people who were buying things.

(End of this chapter)