Chapter 1208: Climbing Point

After finishing their hot pot meal, the group returned to the office and began their overtime work as a matter of course.

The officers who hadn't managed to slip away because they were craving hot pot looked slightly annoyed, but no one ran off at this point. They all took out their respective tasks and began investigating the route used to climb in via the exterior wall.

With the direction changed, the evidence that needed to be collected and the content that needed to be investigated would change drastically.

Take the act of climbing the exterior wall, for example. The average person's line of thinking might be that they should have checked the surrounding surveillance long ago. In reality, if the word "surrounding" isn't qualified, it's enough to make one despair.

The number of surveillance cameras capable of capturing the exterior wall of the Avi Apartments might not be large, but they weren't necessarily official government cameras; they might have been installed by private businesses or individuals. Of course, the more likely scenario was that no surveillance captured the exterior wall of the Avi Apartments, or the parts that were captured didn't necessarily record any people.

If one were to draw a line for the flow of people coming and going around Avi, using just the four nearest intersections as a standard, it would involve dozens of cameras. Watching them one by one, even with Jiang Yuan participating and narrowing the time frame, would still require thousands of hours of police manpower.

If the determination of the time of death were looser—for instance, changing it to the term "nighttime death"—the manpower cost for watching the surrounding surveillance would skyrocket.

Of course, as the difficulty of this case gradually increased, the investment of resources would increase proportionally. The manpower brought by Jiang Yuan's Cold Case Task Force alone could well make up for the personnel shortage at the Zheng Guang Bureau.

Besides collecting surveillance footage and reviewing it, taking more detailed and high-pressure statements from the people inside the Avi Apartments was also a rather heavy task.

Foreign-related matters always require careful handling; in other words, they are inevitably slower.

Early the next morning, Jiang Yuan returned to the Avi Apartments and began an inspection of the entire building and the courtyard walls.

The Avi Apartments followed a model where a building surrounded a large courtyard. The courtyard wall wasn't high—about two meters or so—the kind that an average person couldn't climb, but an expert could easily vault over with a running start.

The apartment building itself wasn't large, totaling 6 floors, with five to eight rooms per floor, varying in size.

In terms of Beijing's scale, the apartment building or complex could be said to be tiny, but checking room by room to see if there were traces of doors or windows being pried open was a very heavy job.

Tao Lu pulled Huang Qiangmin over, and before Jiang Yuan could start arranging the direction of the inspection, he said, "Jiang Yuan, if we can avoid entering the rooms, let's try to avoid it. It would be better to find the room the killer visited first before entering to search."

Jiang Yuan couldn't help but look at Huang Qiangmin.

Huang Qiangmin had served as a chief in the criminal police brigade himself, so he could understand Tao Lu. He simply spread his hands toward Jiang Yuan: "It also saves the trouble of the foreigner asking you for a search warrant."

"Then let's have everyone leave the apartments. We don't need to tell them what we're doing either." Jiang Yuan had handled so many cases, he had his own methods.

Tao Lu suddenly felt like he had been played by Jiang Yuan and hurriedly said, "If we let people out and then go in to search, there will be many follow-up problems. Especially with a search of this scale, it's best to avoid it if we can."

"Let them come out, and we won't enter the units to search first." Jiang Yuan paused, then continued: "We'll inspect the outside first. However, I'm worried that once I start inspecting the courtyard walls and the building, the suspect will realize it and wipe away traces on the windows and such."

Tao Lu frowned: "This... the residents have already been cleared of suspicion, right?"

"Even if they are victims, they might have all sorts of ideas. We can't predict the thoughts of foreigners." Liu Jinghui had originally come to wait for evidence, and at this moment, he said: "The residents might not know the situation. If they see us searching with such fanfare now, who knows, they might go begging to some resident or something..."

Tao Lu looked at Liu Jinghui with sharp eyes: "Do you think the residents are still involved in the case?"

"We are just discussing a possibility." Liu Jinghui smiled: "This case involves so many people; to be honest, anything could happen with anyone. Now, because the victim is a foreigner, it's very difficult for us to investigate her interpersonal relationships, and we don't know if she had any fatal economic dealings here, so we don't even know why she died. But..."

Liu Jinghui said "but," habitually paused, waited two seconds, and then continued: "Actually, the fact that the killer posed the victim in a state of sexual asphyxiation shows that the killer is very likely familiar with Martina. And people familiar with Martina might have some kind of relationship with the residents in this apartment. So, even if the residents themselves have been cleared of suspicion, we should still treat them all as suspects."

"You... this..." Tao Lu couldn't help but point at Liu Jinghui: "What you said isn't entirely wrong."

None of them chatted deeply about this topic, but Tao Lu still arranged things according to the requests of Jiang Yuan and Liu Jinghui.

Suspects, or people in the know, or the group involved in the case—to the police, this is also a very complex form. Tao Lu felt that Liu Jinghui was still stuck in the mindset of *Murder on the Orient Express*, believing that there was a possibility that everyone in the apartment was a villain, or that many people were involved.

If such a thing happened in reality, it would be too terrifying, but Tao Lu had to admit that Liu Jinghui's guess had some logic to it.

Many times, for men and women like Martina who are famous for their beauty and have countless friends coming and going, enemies are constantly increasing in the corners.

It's not rare for love affairs to lead to murderous intent. Moreover, it is already known that two residents in the apartment had affairs with Martina. One can imagine that she must have been one of the most popular and envied members in the entire apartment building.

In this environment, when a killer enters the apartment, they might have an accomplice, or they might have utilized some psychology of a resident, or it might even be the accidental help of a resident—"Those who follow the Dao get much help, those who oppose it get little" isn't very appropriate, but to the police, many homicides actually happen just like this: the intentional or unintentional help and indulgence of those around them, the intentional or unintentional indifference and negligence of those around them...

Because of the events of the past few days, there weren't many people living in the Avi Apartments to begin with. When the police cleared them out, although there were some squabbles, with the help of Avi Aviation and embassy personnel, they finished the evacuation very quickly.

Jiang Yuan, however, started his inspection from outside the apartment complex.

When he did this, not only the residents but also some reporters waiting outside realized that something had changed.

The reporters waiting outside the Avi Apartments at this time included a few Chinese reporters, but mostly foreign reporters.

A reporter from Italy immediately rushed over, holding a microphone, and asked: "Excuse me, does the police believe that the killer entered the Avi Apartments from the outside?"

To them, a murder committed by one of their own and a murder committed by an outsider were obviously two different concepts.

The police on the scene naturally wouldn't answer the reporter's question and just kept pushing them further away.

Jiang Yuan had circled the courtyard wall before, but hadn't found any obvious traces.

This time, he circled around and looked again. He did find a few points that seemed plausible, but he couldn't be sure. The courtyard wall was too low, and its material wasn't easy to leave marks on. After a few days, the dust of Beijing had already begun to cover up the traces.

Jiang Yuan had to spend a great deal of effort to carefully distinguish these points, and only stood up after looking for a long time.

"How is it?" Cui Qishan asked impatiently.

"It is indeed a climbing point." Jiang Yuan nodded, then said slowly: "It proves that someone did enter by climbing... Let the lift platform enter the scene."

He needed to look at the traces on the exterior wall of the apartment, so naturally, he needed to observe while pressed against the wall. At this time, he needed things like a lift platform or a crane to help.

And the reason they hadn't done this project before was naturally because the commotion was too big. However, for the established task force, as long as there was a confirmed direction, using some equipment was a small matter.

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 1209 =====