Chapter 83

Changyang City.

The sun blazed overhead, traffic surged, sleek black stockings glided through the streets, slender white legs swayed back and forth.

Jiang Yuan opened his eyes, climbed off the hard bed, waited a few seconds, then realized he was now staying at the provincial bureau’s guesthouse.

He pulled back the curtain; outside was a lush green expanse of plants, presenting a scene of generous watering.

Jiang Yuan stretched, slowly folded his quilt, then washed and dressed at an even slower pace.

Two days after arriving in Changyang City to participate in the “Provincial Fingerprint Information Crime Solving Campaign,” Jiang Yuan had already learned that the morning laziness was the most relaxed moment of the day—and nearly the only one.

Once he stepped out that door, he would have to stand tall and maintain strict police decorum. Inside the office, however, was another kind of terrifying casualness.

You could eat freely, drink freely, dress freely, shout freely—as long as you could be freer than the fingerprint comparisons.

More than thirty fingerprint examiners from across the province’s prefectures and counties had gathered, exhausted from endless work. Each person had to examine three thousand fingerprints daily just to meet the average.

Zhu Huan, a police officer from Changyang City, was the province’s fingerprint king, routinely examining over six thousand fingerprints daily—an unbelievable figure to laypeople.

In fact, Zhu Huan could examine fingerprints for fourteen hours a day, averaging five hundred per hour, or eight per minute, leaving just about eight seconds to examine each fingerprint.

Under this intensity, he had already solved four cases from other cities and counties.

According to tradition—or the normal development pattern of fingerprint crime-solving campaigns—the number of solved cases would inevitably increase over time, as fingerprint experts gradually grew more familiar with fingerprints, solving more cases as the campaign progressed.

This was also why fingerprint crime-solving campaigns continued to be promoted.

In the past, fingerprint experts worked in isolation within their own units, often forced to handle mundane tasks that any ordinary colleague could do—like attending meetings—and could not focus fully on fingerprint comparison.

The fingerprint campaign was different.

During the campaign, the provincial bureau or ministry provided meals, accommodation, round-trip travel expenses, and travel allowances, bringing fingerprint experts from all over, freeing them from all other duties, and letting them spend every day solely comparing fingerprints, thereby steadily accumulating familiarity with fingerprints and increasing their probability of solving cases…

The fingerprint experts were also happy. Most were over thirty or forty, sleeping in dormitories, eating in the cafeteria, not worrying about whether their wives were happy, whether their children had finished homework, whether their parents had argued, and certainly not having to endure their superiors’ moods or colleagues’ hidden agendas. All they faced daily were dozens of familiar yet unfamiliar faces, hundreds of familiar yet unfamiliar fingerprints, and the “Solved Cold Case Leaderboard” on the wall—life was incredibly comfortable.

Yet this mutually beneficial arrangement still had a time limit, primarily because the provincial bureau feared the experts might actually be worked to death.

Of course, the experts’ conditions and solving efficiency varied greatly. For example, Jiang Yuan’s name on the “Solved Cold Case Leaderboard” hanging in the office showed zero solved cases, tied with over a dozen other fingerprint examiners for last place.

Yet Jiang Yuan showed no urgency. When he entered the office, he first brewed himself a cup of tea, then glanced around.

Comrade Zhu Huan was grinding through fingerprints, the screen flashing rapidly. Next to him, a female colleague was applying eye drops to herself. Beside her, a fat colleague was eating a large pancake, his screen also flashing with fingerprints.

Honestly, the atmosphere in this office looked exactly like a high-school self-study room—except for the extreme age of the students.

“Little Jiang, you still haven’t cracked a single case? Not worried?” The uncle at the next desk smiled over.

He had mooched half a pack of Zhonghua from Jiang Yuan yesterday, and they’d become bosom friends.

Jiang Yuan smiled and turned: “Aren’t you also at zero?”

“I’m used to it,” the uncle chuckled. “I’ll wait for you guys.”

“Then I’ll hurry up a bit,” Jiang Yuan finished his daily pleasantries and turned back to the screen.

Soon, the self-study room—no, the “Provincial Fingerprint Information Crime Solving Campaign” office—was filled only with the sounds of typing and clicking.

Jiang Yuan leaned back in his chair, staring at the computer screen, marking one feature point and then reviewing many fingerprint images.

Fingerprint comparison during the campaign was entirely different from daily comparison. First, fingerprints selected for the campaign were all submitted by local units, subject to quantity limits, quota restrictions, and entry-exit mechanisms.

Simply put: small cases were excluded, fingerprints without sufficient time to mature were excluded, and those not previously matched multiple times by their own fingerprint examiners were excluded.

Thus, fingerprints entering the campaign were either from major or serious crimes, or difficult, complex prints. Some might be as faint as one-fifth or even one-sixth of a normal fingerprint, yet still required matching attempts.

For these difficult fingerprints, trusting the fingerprint matching system was meaningless.

This was exactly the kind of work ordinary fingerprint examiners did—no need to waste effort filling out endless reports and submitting them to experts.

Precisely because of this, the experts in the office now faced candidate fingerprint lists of two hundred or even three hundred or more when dealing with difficult prints.

It meant maximizing human involvement—or human workload.

Fingerprints that experts previously might have filtered out with software were now all re-examined manually, by the highest-level forensic personnel available.

But without this, normal software use would make it impossible to match most cold cases.

This was one of the greatest differences between criminal investigation techniques and ordinary technology. Ordinary technology prioritized cost-effectiveness, willing to sacrifice some functionality to ensure cost and efficiency.

Criminal investigation techniques also demanded cost and return on investment, but at certain moments, criminal investigation would rather spend enormous sums without hesitation to solve a case.

This logical conflict had troubled experts from the very beginning.

Yet this struggle did not affect Jiang Yuan.

He simply wanted to match fingerprints simply and straightforwardly—and that was exactly what he was doing.

At that moment, a fingerprint shaped like a parallelogram passed before Jiang Yuan’s eyes.

Jiang Yuan’s mind immediately recalled a fingerprint he had seen yesterday.

The fingerprint seen yesterday had a similar parallelogram shape—an extremely rare fingerprint pattern, possessed by a rare and violent sexual offender.

Although the fingerprint just scrolled past had no connection whatsoever in the software system to the one seen yesterday—it appeared because Jiang Yuan was comparing a robbery case—

Jiang Yuan’s first thought was still to pair them together and manually compare them.

Both fingerprints were extremely blurred.

Although to the human eye both clearly showed a distinct parallelogram structure, the software system clearly did not agree—the overlap of ridges, dots, and bifurcations was less than thirty percent.

But the overall ridge flow direction was consistent.

This suggested one fingerprint had blurred precisely at critical points and might be severely distorted, while the other might be similarly degraded.

As Jiang Yuan thought, he compared, and after triple-checking, he lightly clicked the right mouse button on the right side, marking: “Recognize Identity.”

Instantly, “Ding-dong” alerts rang out from every corner of the office.

All experts with notifications enabled received the new message: someone had recognized identity on a fingerprint.