Chapter 153: The One That Slipped Through the Net

For the entire next day, Yu Dazhang was reviewing the surveillance footage inside the funeral home.

Since the deputy director wasn't talking, he could only start from the surveillance to trace where the bodies had gone.

The special task force that had been set up at the Qingpu branch was long since disbanded; this case now officially belonged to the Hongkou branch.

As for whether the municipal bureau had taken over completely, he couldn't have cared less.

"They really aren't hiding it at all."

After watching surveillance all day, Yu Dazhang's eyes were bloodshot.

He discovered that the funeral home used its own internal hearse — the vehicle meant for transporting remains — to ship bodies out.

Different places call this kind of vehicle by different names: funeral car, mortuary wagon, and in some places they even call it: Little Black Flower.

Unlike a corpse transport van, a hearse can carry at most two or three bodies at a time.

At first Yu Dazhang had assumed the funeral home would use secret passages or hidden mechanisms to move the bodies.

At the very least, they'd have to stay clear of the cameras.

So at the start he kept watching the body-transport process, looking for any blind spots in the surveillance.

But as it turned out, he watched body after body get loaded straight onto the hearse.

He scrubbed back through the footage — even the recordings from a month earlier were the same.

This showed that the funeral home had never bothered to conceal the outgoing bodies; they simply loaded them onto the hearse and drove off.

Later, Yu Dazhang figured it out.

There really was nothing to hide.

A hearse is meant to carry remains; outsiders who saw it wouldn't think twice.

And if a case broke, hiding wouldn't help anyway — find the blind spot in the cameras and you could still trace the vehicle that carried the bodies.

At noon, a colleague had already gone to pull the traffic-camera footage from the relevant road sections.

Yu Dazhang estimated that, at the latest, they'd have the bodies' destination by tomorrow.

Another day passed.

The colleague checking the traffic cameras sent word back: there was no footage of the hearse unloading any bodies.

Nor was the hearse seen meeting up with any other vehicle during transit.

Every time the hearse pulled bodies out of the funeral home, it would head to a random location to pick up new remains.

Sometimes a hospital, sometimes the deceased's home — then it would haul the remains back to the funeral home.

And the bodies it took out vanished during the trip to pick up the new remains.

The moment Yu Dazhang heard this, he immediately guessed how they were doing it.

"They must have switched the bodies onto another car on a stretch of road with no cameras."

That trick was nothing new.

They'd used the same method when they stole bodies from Qingpuer Academy.

Clearly old hands at it.

"This is going to be tough," Yu Dazhang muttered to himself.

Hongkou District had no shortage of roads without surveillance, and on top of that, the hearse's route was different every time.

Under those conditions, trying to track down the other vehicle through traffic footage was next to impossible.

Back at the detachment, Yu Dazhang found the officer in charge of interrogations.

"Get me a copy of the hearse driver's statement."

"There's no hearse driver among the people we've interrogated, is there?" the officer shot back:

"Who told you we have a driver's statement?"

"There isn't one?" Yu Dazhang froze, but caught on quickly:

"I see — the hearse driver isn't on the permanent staff."

This time, the Hongkou branch had only arrested the funeral home's full-time employees.

Contract workers and temps were outside the scope of the arrests.

At the time, that decision was made because Yu Dazhang was certain the suspects' circle was limited to core personnel.

After all, this was criminal activity — if contract workers and temps had been in on it too, the whole thing would have been exposed long ago.

And besides, the funeral home couldn't be allowed to shut down, even temporarily.

An oversight… Yu Dazhang hadn't expected others to be involved as well.

He had heard, though, that the municipal bureau had brought the contract workers and temps in to assist with the investigation. Yu Dazhang immediately reported this matter to Li Jun.

"You can go straight to the municipal bureau and ask for the statements," Li Jun reminded him:

"So far, you're still the one leading this case."

"You really know how to flatter me," Yu Dazhang figured he was joking with him.

The municipal bureau had already taken over the investigation — when would it ever be his turn to lead it?

Cooperating on the case was more like it.

"Go on, don't worry," Li Jun said in an encouraging tone:

"I can't speak for anyone else, but once you get there, they'll definitely cooperate with you."

Just as Li Jun had said, once Yu Dazhang arrived at the municipal bureau, he really did have smooth sailing.

Everyone seemed to go out of their way for this big guy — any question asked got an answer.

That hearse driver had been brought in by the municipal bureau on the night of the incident and had already been interrogated.

He quickly found the officer who had interrogated the hearse driver.

Please... subscribe.... to.... 6... 9.... book....!

"Hello, I'd like a copy of the driver's statement."

"No problem, one moment."

The officer didn't even ask, just printed one out directly and handed it to him:

"The driver has been interrogated twice so far, his attitude toward confessing is fairly cooperative, the interrogation records are all here."

After thanking him, Yu Dazhang took the documents and left the city bureau.

He didn't know why, but he felt the atmosphere of the city bureau made him very uncomfortable.

Sometimes when the other party is too polite, it comes across as distant, as if deliberately widening the gap—in short, it gives people a very strange feeling.

Coming out through the city bureau's main gate, he walked up to the car, just about to pull open the door, when he suddenly felt someone staring at him.

Yu Dazhang's nerves instantly tensed up.

He swiftly pivoted his body, his gaze sweeping the surroundings like a flash of lightning.

However, nothing unusual was found anywhere his gaze passed.

But even so, that inexplicable sense of unease still lingered in his heart, impossible to shake off.

Could it be someone from inside the city bureau?

The moment this thought flashed through his mind, he immediately dismissed it.

If it really were a colleague, it absolutely wouldn't give him this feeling of heart-palpitation.

In that brief instant just now, he had clearly felt a sense of crisis he hadn't experienced in a long time.

It reminded him of the scene on the mountain in Fenglin Town when he encountered that group of desperadoes.

When those people had been staring at him back then, it was exactly this feeling.

Yu Dazhang stood in place for a moment, then pulled open the car door and sat down in the driver's seat.

After starting the car, he waited another two minutes or so before slowly driving away from the city bureau.

Along the way, he deliberately drove very slowly.

But every time he turned a corner, he would immediately accelerate, while watching the vehicles behind him through the rearview mirror.

"No one following?"

He trusted that his intuition wouldn't be wrong.

When he was at the city bureau, someone was definitely spying on him.

But once on the road, the other party gave up the tail.

A pro!

Some friends asked, can this thing called intuition really be trusted?

Put it this way—so-called intuition is actually the subconscious mind's prediction of the surrounding environment.

There are many things people can't remember, but experiences can form vague impressions in the subconscious.

For example, if you've met countless people, you've come into contact with just about every type of person.

At this point, when you encounter a stranger again, through simple contact you can roughly judge the other person's temperament.

Actually, this is the subconscious conducting a fuzzy search.

When encountering a similar type, or a type resembling one you've known, you'll think of a certain person.

Then, through the experience of contact with that previous person, you predict the newly met person.

In this life Yu Dazhang was already more perceptive in his senses, and combined with having gone through a life-and-death standoff on the mountain in Fenglin Town, that feeling was at the very least still fresh in his memory.

So he was certain that the anomaly he had detected earlier at the city bureau entrance was absolutely not an illusion.

(End of chapter)