A real killer playing a villain; the guy surnamed Zhen in Detective, run!

The door to the special task force meeting room on the fourth floor of the municipal bureau was kicked open with a bang.

A dozen or so people in the conference room turned around in unison. The air was thick with the pungent smell of leftover coffee, takeout meals, and sweat fermenting together, making it stifling and suffocating.

Jiang Yan strode in, her right hand gripping the map tightly.

"Snapped!"

She slammed the map heavily onto the center of the long table.

Jiang Yan leaned on the edge of the table, panting for a few breaths before finally managing to squeeze out the words from her dry throat.

"The abandoned cotton mill's power distribution room." She pointed her index finger to the location circled in red in the bottom right corner of the map. "Each area has a radius of 800 meters, centered here! Everyone, gear up, move out now! This is very likely the new body dumping site!"

The conference room instantly went silent, as if someone had pressed the mute button; you could hear a pin drop.

"Team Leader Jiang."

Sitting in the corner, Old Qi slowly took off his reading glasses and rubbed the two deep red marks on the bridge of his nose.

"What are your sources of intelligence?"

"Informant," Jiang Yan uttered.

"What kind of informant? Which system did they report to? Have they been registered and filed? Has their reliability been assessed?" Old Qi bombarded him with a barrage of questions.

Jiang Yan's lips tightened into a sharp line. She couldn't explain.

Should she tell the room full of elite criminal investigators that this map, which they were clinging to as a lifeline, was drawn casually in less than ten minutes by a nobody next door, wearing a tattered apron and holding a strainer?

If word got out, she herself would be arrested as a lunatic.

"I can provide evidence for the behavioral profile." Jiang Yan avoided the direct confrontation and simply flipped the map over, revealing the lines drawn by Lu Yuan.

"The killer's logic in choosing where to dump the body is completely opposite to that of a typical criminal. The body is not a trophy to him, but pure garbage. The precision of the cutting, the perfect ratio of chemical reagents, and the extreme cleanliness of the path—all of these point to the same psychological core: he has a morbid fear of 'filth'."

Old Qi's hand, which was about to bang on the table, froze in mid-air.

"The developmental window for this kind of morbid fear is usually between six and ten years old. He must have lived in an extremely filthy environment for a long time, such as excrement, putrefied matter, or his guardians had created extreme scenes of physical humiliation. He dismembered the body not to destroy evidence, but to perform a morbid purification ritual. He was actually wiping away the indelible stain on his body, only in a different form!"

Jiang Yan paused for a second, then raised her voice by half an octave.

"Therefore, the blind spots in the surveillance system were not something he planned on a whim at all!"

"He's lived in this area for at least two years! The number of seconds it takes for the streetlights to switch on and off, the frequency of the garbage trucks passing by, the intervals between convenience store shifts—all of these have long been internalized into his bodily rhythms. The blind spot network is like muscle memory to him—taking that route that avoids the surveillance cameras is as instinctive as you going back to your living room to use the bathroom in the middle of the night with your eyes closed!"

Cui Lei, the head of the image analysis team, was the first to lose his composure and jumped up from his chair.

"absurd!"

Cui Lei's finger jabbed angrily at the trajectory diagram on the whiteboard behind him, where the red and blue lines intertwined like a tangled mess.

"Captain Jiang, look at this distance! It's a straight-line distance of seven kilometers from the cotton mill to the garbage compression station, crossing two administrative districts! This is completely contrary to all the route simulation models we've developed so far!"

"And this crappy place perfectly bypassed both Phase I and Phase II of the Skynet surveillance system, even circumventing all the new surveillance cameras added last year! You're telling me now that a serial killer would run seven kilometers away to an abandoned factory that has absolutely nothing to do with the case to hide something? This route is practically rubbing our image investigation team in the face! Where's the logic?"

"Captain Jiang, your profiling angle is indeed refreshing," Old Qi admitted, but tapped his pen on the table twice. "However, an unverified psychological profile alone is not enough to justify deploying a large number of police officers. The entire city is already stretched to its limit—"

"So, no!"

Jiang Yan walked to the end of the long table, drew her Type 92 pistol from her waist with a "whoosh," and slammed the gun and holster heavily onto the table.

Immediately afterwards, the police officer's ID was also thrown up.

The sound of metal blocks and leather striking the table was crisp and deafening in the deathly silent conference room.

"If we run into problems and can't find anything, I'll take my clothes off and walk away, taking full responsibility!" Jiang Yan's cold gaze swept over everyone present. "I won't lay a finger on one of your men. The thirteen people from the Criminal Investigation Division who follow me are more than enough!"

Old Qi stared intently at the gun and documents on the table, his lips twitching violently.

Before anyone could speak again, Jiang Yan turned and strode out the door.

In the corridor, she pressed the intercom on her shoulder and switched to the Criminal Investigation Division's hotline. "Everyone assemble! Underground parking lot, five minutes! Bring your full set of crime scene investigation equipment!"

Four minutes later, three police cars sped out of the city police station's underground parking garage like arrows, disappearing into the deep night.

……

The three police cars, all with their lights off, drove into the southern suburbs in the dark.

The road narrowed further and further, until the last 300 meters ended without any streetlights. The car headlights swept two fan-shaped beams of white light across the abandoned factory wall, and the tall weeds swayed like ghosts in the light and shadow.

Jiang Yan got out of the car.

Everyone followed behind, but their steps stopped at a corner of the wall.

In the dim light of the distance, two abandoned utility poles, less than 80 centimeters apart, could be seen, left over from last year's municipal renovations. The light slanted in from the side, and the shadows of the two poles overlapped perfectly, casting a narrow strip of darkness between the wall and the drainage ditch.

The width is just enough for an adult man to pass sideways.

This is an excellent visual tactile paving path.

The deputy leader of the image reconnaissance team, who had accompanied the vehicle, squatted on the hood of the engine, his tablet rapidly displaying satellite images of the area. His finger zoomed in and out on the screen, eventually overlaying the Skynet deployment map.

He looked up at the two utility poles, then looked down and stared intently at the screen.

"Hold."

This guy had been doing image surveillance for eleven years, experiencing countless system upgrades and battles against hackers, but he was completely overwhelmed by what he saw.

"This tactile paving path happens to pass right through the only gap in the field of view between the two supplementary cameras in Phase III of the Skynet surveillance system! Within the entire 72 square kilometers of the southern suburbs, this is a true, system-wide, ultimate blind spot!"

The deputy team leader swallowed hard, his voice trembling: "Did this killer have some kind of X-ray vision cheat? They can pinpoint even blind spots with satellite positioning accuracy!"

Jiang Yan didn't say anything, but strode forward along the tactile paving.

The beam of a powerful flashlight pierced the darkness, sweeping across the broken bricks on the ground and landing on a heavily rusted iron door. Hanging on the door was an old-fashioned square-headed lock, its surface covered with a uniform layer of dark red oxide.