Chapter 336: The Method Doesn't Have to Be New—As Long As It Works

"Tell me in detail." The officer sitting across from him said with a cold face:

"From the beginning."

"Alright, alright, I'll talk." That man hurriedly replied:

"If I'm starting from the beginning, it was probably three years ago. I'd just gotten out of prison not long before, and a former cellmate of mine contacted me, saying he wanted me to work with him."

"Right, the one who got caught together with me, about the same age as me."

"At first I thought it was just driving and delivering goods. It wasn't until I got into it that I realized what was being transported was people—people with intellectual disabilities, no less."

Yu Dazhang, watching all this from the observation room, immediately ordered another officer to share this information with the other two interrogation rooms.

At the same time, Yu Dazhang also realized that this person had joined later; the one who had originally been in charge of transporting might very well have been reassigned to other duties by now.

"When I realized this was illegal, I did think about quitting. After all, life inside isn't easy, and I didn't want to go back."

Seeing that no one interrupted him, the young man continued:

"But the pay they offered was simply impossible to refuse. Whether there was work or not, the monthly salary was a fixed twenty thousand, plus bonuses on top."

"Every time I made a delivery, I personally got a five-thousand-yuan bonus. By the second year, the monthly salary had risen to thirty thousand, and the bonus went up to seven thousand each trip."

Liquor reddens a man's face; wealth moves the human heart.

And the other side was simply offering far too much... Yu Dazhang looked at the surveillance feed and let out a helpless sigh.

These released prisoners already had a hard time finding work, so when a money-making opportunity like this suddenly appeared, very few people could refuse it.

Someone like Ye Zhiyu, willing to stay up all night sorting parcels at a sorting facility, was rare indeed.

Faced with the choice between poverty and crime, many people chose the latter.

"Have the three of you been working together all this time?" the officer across from him asked.

"Yes." The young man answered:

"I don't know what it was like before, and I never asked. In the three years since I joined, it's always been the three of us escorting the vehicles together."

This kind of illegal activity usually involves recruiting acquaintances to work together, which minimizes risk as much as possible.

Once enough people are in place, they won't easily swap anyone out, unless someone voluntarily quits or there's an accident like illness.

"Where did you pick the people up?" The officer's tone was very serious when he asked this.

Yu Dazhang tensed up when he heard it.

The other party's answer would determine how the case progressed.

If they had picked the people up directly from that underground prison, the rest would be easy—mobilize police to strike at the heart of it, and the case could be wrapped up with a bow.

But Yu Dazhang knew it wouldn't be that simple.

Because in Fang Peng's earlier statement, he had mentioned that when he was being transported out, the vehicle had been switched once mid-journey.

The other side had surely long since taken precautions.

Still, Yu Dazhang held on to a sliver of侥幸 psychology.

Three years—such a long time—surely there must have been at least one occasion when they needed someone urgently?

And such a long stretch of time was more than enough to make people let their guard down.

"At the border between Yancheng and Jianning."

The young man answered very crisply:

"The other side would randomly pick a stretch of road with no surveillance—a remote, rarely-traveled spot—but the range never changed; it was always at the border between the two cities."

This kind of handoff method was very common. In his previous life, when Yu Dazhang investigated cases, he had run into similar situations many times.

Although this method lacked novelty, its practicality could not be ignored.

People like them, responsible for transport, were vividly called "feet."

These "feet" didn't know each other.

Their only contact was the brief moment during the handoff.

The purpose of this arrangement was clear: to keep each "foot" isolated from the others.

Once a "foot" was caught, the lack of direct contact between them meant the trail would go cold right there.

Does this method seem a little familiar?

Because crime dramas often reference this kind of plot—it's one of the few tropes that actually mirrors reality.

Like right now, for instance.

The three people who had been caught had no idea how to contact the other side.

Every time they picked someone up, it was the other side who contacted them, and they always used internet phone numbers.

"Not even once did you go somewhere else to pick people up?" the interrogating officer asked.

It was obvious he wasn't willing to let the trail end here.

All of them had been staking out the place for a full five days.

"No." The young man shook his head:

"Not even once. The handoff location never strayed from the border between the two cities."

Too cautious... Yu Dazhang was somewhat惊叹 at the other side's style of doing things.

Three years, strictly following the established rules, and not once had they made an exception.

The trail was about to go cold!

Hearing all this, he already had a rough judgment forming in his mind.

The other side had foreseen this day years ago and had long since prepared for it.

Couldn't they use these three people to lure out the "feet" one level up?

It was already too late.

From the moment the rescue operation began, the police side had been exposed.

The other side will soon learn that the Yancheng industrial district has been busted, and no matter how much it pains them, they will have to make a clean cut from this end.

They will not only abandon the "feet" here, they won't even contact Hong Liuwen anymore.

The other side will sever everything connected to Yancheng.

Still, it wasn't a complete wash—at the very least, they now knew which direction the other side had been sending people into Yancheng from.

The interrogation continued.

With the first person breaking the silence, the other two also began to talk one after another.

The other young man had been at it for a relatively longer time—he had already started sending people into the industrial district five years ago.

He had been recruited by the oldest of the three; the two were distantly related and from the same village, and once he heard there was money to be made, he went along with it.

When Yu Dazhang heard this person's statement, a faint smile appeared on his face.

Don't look at this "foot" operation having only three people—the relationships among them were actually quite tangled, each one having found the next, thrown together of their own accord.

The oldest one was the last to speak.

"I started doing this seven years ago."

What he said immediately caught Yu Dazhang's attention.

Seven years!

Just this one city of Yancheng had already gone on for seven years—it was hard to imagine the scale the other side had reached.

"I was pulled into this by a middle school classmate of mine."

At this point the ruthlessness still hadn't left the man's face, but his eyes were calm and his tone had eased considerably:

"At the very beginning, this industrial district hadn't developed yet—there were only a few scattered factories, and the earliest ones to hire intellectually disabled workers were just two panel factories."

"My classmate took me to Jianning to pick up people; sometimes we'd go months without making a single trip."

Hearing this, Yu Dazhang immediately picked up the microphone on the desk:

"Ask him, where in Jianning did he pick up the people."

Clearly, what this man said differed from what the other two had said.

He didn't mention the border between the two cities, but said directly that they went to Jianning to pick up people.

This indicated that at the very beginning, the place where they picked up people was even closer to that underground prison.

The officer handling the interrogation, upon hearing this, immediately relayed the question:

"Give a specific address—where in Jianning did you go to pick up the people?"

"In a warehouse at an industrial park." The man thought for a moment, then answered:

"Every time we got there, the other side had already left; the warehouse only had the intellectually disabled people, all tied up."

(End of chapter)