Chapter 1013: Recovery

"Zhang Bing, nickname 'Li Gui'... do you know what you've done?" Meng Chengbiao blew on his tea leaves, looking as if he couldn't care less.

His mission was to get a confession out of Zhang Bing as quickly as possible. On one hand, it was to provide Jiang Yuan with more clues; on the other, it was to send him for prosecution and clear up space for the prisoners coming after him.

Zhang Bing sat up straight, causing the interrogation chair to rattle. He wore a face full of smiles and said, "Officer, ever since I was released after serving my sentence, I've truly turned over a new leaf and become a new person. My wife even says I'm very diligent in 'paying the public grain,' and that since I stopped messing around outside, my health has improved, and there's positive energy in my eyes..."

"Your attitude while speaking is fine, but your attitude toward confessing is problematic." Meng Chengbiao looked up at Zhang Bing. "Do you want to think about it again?"

"Officer, I've really turned over a new leaf." Zhang Bing shook his head and said, "I'm running a courier shop now, the kind like a Cainiao Station. I can earn quite a bit of money a month; I'm self-reliant..."

"Zhang Bing." Meng Chengbiao's voice sank.

Zhang Bing sat up straight again and smiled. "Officer..."

"Xingxing has already confessed. What kind of nonsense are you feeding me here?" Meng Chengbiao put down his cup, making a soft 'bang' sound.

Zhang Bing shuddered as if startled, then forced himself to say, "What Xingxing?"

"Do you really want to play games like this with our special task force?" Meng Chengbiao's look of half-smile instantly crushed Zhang Bing.

If he were truly an innocent person, he might still harbor a glimmer of hope, but he was not.

Xingxing was his superior. Since his superior had confessed about him, Zhang Bing could certainly refuse to admit it to the death, but the police's methods were not limited to that. There were phone records between them, money transfers, surveillance footage around the transactions, and so on.

In fact, just the fact that Xingxing had bitten him hard was enough to make it difficult for Zhang Bing to escape.

"How did you find me? How did you know who I was?" Zhang Bing made one last struggle. His relationship with Xingxing was only indirect; Xingxing knew that Li Gui was someone in the underworld and a human trafficker with a criminal record, and that was as far as it went.

Zhang Bing had never told anyone who knew Li Gui his true identity. At the very least, Xingxing shouldn't have known, nor was there any need for him to know.

All he did was act as a middleman for the goods, earning only a few tens of thousands of yuan in the process.

Meng Chengbiao smiled and said, "You don't need to know that."

He couldn't very well say that Jiang Yuan had investigated previous cases and had simply fished him out to keep him on the back burner.

Zhang Bing's eyes flickered. He truly couldn't figure out how his identity had been leaked. The police had charged in directly that day. But Zhang Bing was certain of one thing: Xingxing absolutely did not know his true identity.

In other words, he had likely been backstabbed by the person he trusted most.

"Officer, I want to perform a meritorious service!" Zhang Bing wanted to stand up to speak, again causing the chains to rattle.

Meng Chengbiao picked up his teacup again, took a sip, and savored the bitter-yet-sweet taste.

Working with Jiang Yuan was sometimes very fulfilling, and sometimes very unfulfilling; it was quite contradictory.

"Go ahead and talk." Meng Chengbiao let out a breath and began to scrape information from Zhang Bing.

Serial arrests were the mainstream mode of handling cases now. The former pre-trial system had been aimed at this very mode. Who could have imagined that now, when the pre-trial departments had been abolished, the mode of handling cases that pre-trial officers had once dreamed of was starting to become popular?

Zhang Bing himself worked as a middleman for human traffickers, which was the survival strategy for most traffickers, or rather, it was a trafficking channel deliberately established by some human trafficking gangs.

These channels couldn't be called very stable, and criminal gangs didn't care about that; they simply used money relationships to resell the trafficked people between one location and another.

For this reason, Zhang Bing had come into contact with many superiors and subordinates. However, just like his own confusion, for most people, he only knew their nicknames. He had met some, while others he had never even seen, employing contact-less transactions.

Meng Chengbiao thoroughly combed through Zhang Bing, and after squeezing him dry, he watched him sign and press his fingerprints on the interrogation record page by page.

Zhang Bing did as he was told, and in the end, without needing to be taught, he naturally wrote on the last page, "I have read the above record, and it matches what I said," signed it, pressed his fingerprint, and finally noted the date.

"After you get to the detention center, think carefully about your circumstances. If there's anything else to confess, notify the warden." Meng Chengbiao said a few words casually, ended the interrogation, and immediately went to report to Jiang Yuan.

Knock, knock.

Meng Chengbiao knocked open the door to Jiang Yuan's office and saw two other criminal police officers already inside, reporting to Jiang Yuan.

"Team Leader Meng, do you have results?" Jiang Yuan looked up.

"The interrogation went smoothly. The suspect Zhang Bing has spilled, and he also confessed to two other superiors and four subordinates. The subordinate in this case is a woman nicknamed 'Bell.' It's said she's about 30, looks decent, likes heavy makeup, has big wavy hair, and Zhang Bing always met her at the wholesale market for transactions..."

Meng Chengbiao stated the main information.

Jiang Yuan began to flip through his notebook at the same time.

His conditions for solving cases were too good, especially fingerprint and footprint identification, which were lethal weapons in ordinary cases. And many criminals were actually forged and grew step by step; early cases were relatively easier to solve.

Furthermore, Jiang Yuan wasn't purely solving cases. Solving cases required finding evidence and having a complete chain of evidence. But he didn't need that to find clues, especially for these small cases. Some had a maximum sentence of three years, and if the prosecution accepted a guilty plea, and the court was lenient, it might even end up as a suspended sentence.

"Found it." Jiang Yuan quickly flipped to the notes he had written himself and said, "The one nicknamed 'Bell,' real name Xu Min, ID number... was an accomplice in a case of counterfeit goods and was sentenced to two years and three months. Now she's in the antique and curio business."

"Selling children while in the antique business?" The criminal police officer next to him gasped.

"Perhaps the antique business helped her find clients." Meng Chengbiao recalled the interrogation process and said, "This 'Bell' was a very proactive trafficker. Every time Zhang Bing trafficked people out, he would prioritize finding her. He said she paid promptly and paid a lot, but she had certain requirements for the children..."

"En, if the chain stops at 'Bell,' there's still hope of finding the children." Jiang Yuan felt a bit more excited. Since the entire special task force had been operating, the most direct mission was to find the five children who had been taken. If they were sold to ordinary people, that would be a relatively better outcome.

In modern society, perverts who kidnapped and maimed children were fewer, but the types of perverts were increasing.

Jiang Yuan wasn't in a hurry to compare with others at this moment; he first called Director Zhou and asked him to arrange for personnel to arrest 'Bell.'

As soon as Director Zhou heard Jiang Yuan's voice, his emotions soared, and he said, "I'll immediately call the police officers for a meeting!"

"Uh... okay. Then I'll send over a list in a while." Jiang Yuan couldn't stop them from having a meeting, so he hurriedly compared the names Meng Chengbiao had just interrogated against his notebook and picked out a few more people.

That day, the police cars of the Yuwan Municipal Bureau never stopped.

Reporters familiar with the police bureau had already started calling to ask, "Are we conducting a 'Strike Hard' campaign now?"

Early morning.

A Coaster bus stopped in front of the Yuwan Municipal Bureau office building.

The five children walked off the bus one by one, then fell into confusion as they faced the vast crowd of people. ===== CHAPTER 1014 =====