Anti-gang campaign: Female bureau chief

Chen Yao stood up, walked to the whiteboard, picked up a pen, and drew several lines connecting the four names: Geng Changxi, Ma Biao, Ding Youtian, and Luo Dayong.

"Suppose these four people reunite after being released from prison. What do they all want? Money."

They were imprisoned for two or three years, and when they came out, they were penniless, had no legal skills to make a living, and were almost completely rejected by society.

In this situation, what would they do? Go back to their old ways. But Shen Wangshan has fallen, Nie Shichang has fallen, and they can no longer find the powerful backers they used to have.

They had to do it themselves, using the criminal methods they'd learned in prison to rebuild their territory in the least regulated industry of waste recycling.

"So Song Baogen wasn't silenced."

Lu Zheng reacted quickly, "He's the one who's being 'recruited'. He's been in the scrap metal recycling business for a long time and knows the sources and channels of scrap metal in the eastern part of the city like the back of his hand."

After Geng Changxi was released from prison, he contacted him, possibly wanting to recruit him and ask him to provide information, channels, or resources.

Song Baogen didn't want to join them—he was terrified by the Shen Wangshan era and hadn't dared to show his face for years, so he had no desire to get involved with these desperados again.

His refusal angered Geng Changxi, or perhaps Geng Changxi considered him a threat because he knew too much and didn't want to join the group. So, he executed him in the most brutal way, then slipped the note into his pocket as a warning to the other members of the gang.

Jiang Ruolan continued his train of thought:

"Song Baogen is just one thread. The real main thread is Geng Changxi and the group behind him—this number may be more than the four we currently know about."

They are doing in the waste recycling industry what Shen Wangshan did in the construction industry back then: using violence to drive out competitors, using intimidation to control upstream and downstream, and using organized criminal methods to establish a low-cost, highly concealed, and difficult-to-trace illegal monopoly network.

Song Baogen was the first to disobey, but certainly not the only one.

"If we can find the accomplice with the missing left ear, we can connect the whole story."

"search."

Jiang Ruolan put down her pen. "Issue an arrest warrant for Geng Changxi and deploy a city-wide checkpoint. At the same time, investigate all unfamiliar faces and unusual activities that have recently appeared in the waste recycling industry, and see if any other waste recycling station owners have been threatened, had their businesses disrupted, or been forced to sell at a low price."

If our judgment is correct, they won't just target Song Baogen alone—Song Baogen is just one of their targets; there are other victims along this line, they just haven't surfaced yet.

Less than six hours after the arrest warrant was issued, patrol officers from the Chengdong Police Station found Geng Changxi in a bungalow slated for demolition in the old city.

The bungalow was less than two kilometers from the scrap yard where Song Baogen's body was dumped. Geng Changxi was sleeping on a makeshift bed covered with old newspapers, covered with a dirty military overcoat, with a half-empty wine bottle and a half-pack of peanuts at his feet.

When the police broke down the door, he suddenly sat up and reached for an iron pipe under his pillow. Two police officers pounced on him and pinned him down. When they handcuffed him, he struggled fiercely, cursing filthy language, from the police officers' family tree all the way to Jiang Ruolan's name.

He was brought into the interrogation room after midnight.

The incandescent bulbs in the interrogation room hummed softly, casting a pale light on his rough face, making the old scar on his cheekbone particularly glaring.

His handcuffs were fixed to the iron table, and he sat in a crooked posture, as if he had an instinctive disdain for the rules of the entire interrogation room.

He would swing back and forth on the chair leg, pick his ear with his finger, and make faces at the security camera in the corner, acting like a dead pig that doesn't care about boiling water.

Jiang Ruolan sat opposite him, with an evidence bag in front of her containing the note.

She didn't rush to speak, but simply looked at him quietly.

The silence lasted for about two minutes before Geng Changxi couldn't take it anymore—it wasn't the silence that he couldn't stand, but her gaze.

That calm, expressionless gaze, devoid of anger or threat, sent chills down his spine.

"What are you looking at?"

He gave a sneer with a crooked mouth, "Director Jiang, I know you. I hear your name on the news every day while I'm in jail."

You took down Shen Wangshan, you took down Nie Shichang, and you even caught that kid Tan Jingsong. To be honest, I admired you a lot when I was in there—it's not easy for a woman to take down those big shots one by one in a place like Yi'an.

"But why are you arresting me? I just got out, I haven't done anything wrong. I haven't even found a job yet, I just had a few drinks and went to sleep, is that illegal?"

"Song Baogen".

Jiang Ruolan only said three words.

Geng Changxi's expression remained unchanged, but the fingers that were picking his ear paused for a moment:

"Who is Song Baogen? I don't know him."

"You don't know him, but your handwriting does."

Jiang Ruolan held up the evidence bag to show him the note inside. "This note was found in Song Baogen's pocket. The numbers on the note are yours."

The technical department's handwriting analysis results are in; would you like to take a look?

Geng Changxi's gaze lingered on the evidence bag for a moment, and the muscles at the corner of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.

Then he laughed again, a slick, oily laugh, like a seasoned haggler at a market:

"Even if I wrote the note, so what? Just because I wrote a note and put it in his pocket doesn't mean I killed him."

"If I wrote a note and slipped it under your office door, would you also accuse me of killing you? You police officers need evidence to solve cases, you can't just accuse me of murder based on a single note."

"The handwriting comparison between the numbers on the receipt you signed at Lao Feng's scrap yard and the numbers on this piece of paper indicates a greater than 99% probability of matching."

Old Feng said that the way you write numbers on the note with the last stroke curving upwards is your habit. Can you explain why your handwriting ended up in the pocket of a dead person whose face was scalded and mangled by caustic soda?

Geng Changxi's eyelid twitched.

He stopped talking, just leaned back in his chair, glaring at her with undisguised hostility.

The air in the interrogation room was like a tightly wound string, and time crawled by inch in silence.