Anti-gang campaign: Female bureau chief

"Thank you for my brother's matter."

Song Ya suddenly said, "He illegally detained me for six years and should be sentenced according to the law."

However, your task force included a note in the arrest report stating that my brother was forced to participate in the crime under death threats, and recommended a lighter or reduced sentence.

I saw that footnote; it had your signature on it. I know that without your approval, that passage wouldn't have been included in the footnote.

"Your brother's case will be tried according to law, and his sentence will be determined by the court. The special task force is only responsible for truthfully reporting the facts of the case."

Song Ya didn't respond to that, but instead looked down at her hands, which were so thin they were just bones, and after a while spoke:

"I asked Officer Lu, and he said there was one person on the list whose identity had not been confirmed."

The woman wrapped in the bed sheet, you still don't know her name. I've thought about it for a long time, and I feel I should know who she is.

Once, when Zhou Wenxuan was drunk, he let slip a sentence to me. He said that one of the three women buried at the construction site in the east of the city was not killed by Tang Yuanqing, but by another man named A Gui under Ren Pengfei.

The woman came from Guizhou and worked with a construction team as a cook. She lived in the same work shed as Chen Xiufang and Wu Guilan.

Zhou Wenxuan said her surname was Qin, but he didn't mention her given name, only that her hometown was Tongren, Guizhou. "If you're searching through missing persons databases in surrounding provinces, try looking for a female member of an ethnic minority group in Guizhou with the surname Qin, probably in her early thirties."

Jiang Ruolan memorized this information.

After leaving Song Ya's house, she immediately called Lu Zheng and asked him to coordinate with the Tongren police in Guizhou to retrieve records of ethnic minority women with the surname Qin who had been missing for nearly six years.

Two days later, the Tongren police replied: There was a Tujia woman named Qin Guihua in Yanhe County, Tongren City. Her husband had reported her missing seven years ago, saying that she had gone out to work with a construction team and had never returned.

The husband's name is Tian Laosi, a local from Yanhe County, who works as a bricklayer on a construction site in the county town.

When the DNA comparison results came back, Lu Zheng was having lunch in the cafeteria. His phone vibrated, he glanced at it, put down his chopsticks, and ran to Jiang Ruolan's office.

"Qin Guihua, a member of the Tujia ethnic group, was from Yanhe Tujia Autonomous County, Tongren City, Guizhou Province. She was 33 years old when she went missing and had three children."

The husband, Tian Laosi, reported himself missing seven years ago, but he is illiterate and cannot write. When the police at the police station registered his address, they wrote a word wrong, so the DNA comparison has not been able to find a match.

"It wasn't until our targeted investigation that we were able to correct this typo." Lu Zheng finished speaking in one breath, placing the forensic report in front of Jiang Ruolan. "Thirty-seven people, all thirty-seven are accounted for."

Jiang Ruolan picked up the report and looked at it for a long time.

A photo of Qin Guihua was attached to the appraisal report—a faded old photo of a young woman in traditional Tujia clothing, with dark skin, simple features, and a shy smile at the camera.

Her husband and three children are still waiting for her to come home in Yanhe County, a wait that has lasted seven years.

It was the 28th day of the twelfth lunar month, two days before Lunar New Year's Eve.

Jiang Ruolan completed the final appendix to the annual work summary report of the Yi'an City Public Security Bureau—a case file over two hundred pages thick that she had spent nearly a month writing, which detailed the entire investigation process of Shen Wangshan's organized crime case and its derivative cases.

From Shen Wangshan and Gu Changhe to Ding Hai and Zhou Haipeng, from the back mountain of Qingshipu to the construction site in the east of the city to the old site of the phosphate fertilizer plant, thirty-seven lives were lost, more than four hundred pages of case files were filed, and a case closure report of more than one hundred thousand words was written.

When she typed the last period, she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes for a moment.

Fine snowflakes began to fall outside the window again, melting quickly on the glass and leaving behind winding streaks of water.

Her phone lit up; Lu Zheng had sent her a message:

Qin Guihua's husband and three children have already departed from Guizhou and will arrive in Yi'an tomorrow afternoon. The special investigation team has arranged for their reception, and after the family identifies their belongings, they will be taken to a temporary shelter at the municipal bureau. The forensic team has prepared the DNA test report and death certificate, which will be given to the family together.

Then it lit up again, and it was a message from Zhou Pei:

Ruolan, the Provincial Department has officially approved the Yi'an City Public Security Bureau's rectification plan. The Criminal Investigation Detachment will be expanded to sixty people, the Shiqiao County Public Security Bureau will be equipped with two additional criminal investigation teams, and the Chengdong Police Station will be relocated and rebuilt. In addition, the Department has approved special funds to replace surveillance equipment and criminal investigation equipment in all grassroots police stations throughout Yi'an City. All the suggestions you raised at the meeting have been adopted. The Director even specifically asked—Jiang Ruolan has been in Yi'an for almost two years; has she said when she wants to come back?

Before she could reply, her phone lit up again. This time it was a voice message from her mother, whose voice was as strong and authoritative as ever, carrying the unquestionable quality unique to the head nurse of the surgery department:

"I made dumplings, with chives and eggs. I asked Zhou Pei to bring them to you, they should arrive the day after tomorrow. Frozen dumplings aren't very good, but at least they were made by your mom, so don't just eat whatever's in the cafeteria again."

Jiang Ruolan picked up her phone, pressed the record button, and replied with two words: "Received."

Then she flipped her phone over and placed it screen-down on the table.

The snow outside the window was falling heavier and heavier, and the streets and alleys of Yi'an were being covered with a layer of fresh snow.

The excavated construction sites and the traces on the ruins, the corners once soaked in blood and sin, the names engraved on the thirty-seven appraisal reports, all slept quietly in this winter snow.

And the city is still awake.

The breakfast stalls on the street were still steaming, the police station's duty room was still lit, and the red and blue lights of the patrol cars were still silently turning in the night.

The asparagus fern on her windowsill, which she had brought from the provincial capital, quietly sprouted a tender green shoot in the warm air emanating from the radiator.

Jiang Ruolan spent New Year's Eve in the duty room of the Yi'an City Public Security Bureau.

This is her second Lunar New Year's Eve in Yi'an.

Last New Year's Eve, she was still with the special task force at the provincial department, where she and Zhou Pei each had a bowl of instant noodles and clinked paper cups together. This year, at least it was an upgrade—the head chef in the canteen specially made dumplings for those on duty, filled with cabbage and pork, and they were a size bigger than last year's, and the taste was also much better.

The chive and egg dumplings that her mother asked Zhou Pei to bring arrived yesterday. She cooked half a bag in the small electric cooker in the duty room. When she bit into the first one, she knew that her mother had added extra dried shrimp to the filling again. She had never liked dried shrimp since she was a child, but her mother insisted on adding it, saying it was good for calcium. This habit hadn't changed in twenty years.

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