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墨書 Inktalez
"Alright, let's head over right away," Old Shao hung up the phone.
"What happened?" Jiang He asked.
Old Shao glanced at Xu Yiman beside him and said, "Your work has arrived. A body was found in the locker at Anxiang District Fourth Middle School. Captain Li's body is highly decomposed, and from Captain Li's tone, it seems the condition of the body is not good."
Xu Yiman's expression showed indifference as she replied, "The appearance of the body doesn't matter much. The key point is that different appearances can provide us with various pieces of information. Every body has a story to tell; they will inform us how they died and what killed them."
As they spoke, they had already reached the car.
On the way, heavy rain began to pour down, accompanied by continuous thunder.
The three soon arrived at Anxiang District Fourth Middle School.
Upon reaching the North Gate and looking out from the car, the Fourth Middle School appeared dark and gloomy. None of the classrooms had their lights on, and walking alone in such a vast campus would likely be quite terrifying. However, at that moment, there were quite a few people at the North Gate—criminal police officers and school leaders waiting for the special investigation team to arrive.
With umbrellas in hand, the three made their way to the crime scene while the school leaders provided an overview of the situation.
The body was discovered in a storeroom designated for teaching tools, specifically for biology teaching materials like cell models, specimens, microscopes, and human skeleton models. Many people had keys to this storeroom; each Biology Teacher had one, as did the biology representatives from each class, making it convenient for teaching purposes.
Since the biology storeroom didn't contain any toxic or harmful substances like a Chemical Laboratory would, its supervision wasn't as strict.
The locker where the body was found was previously used to store a human skeleton. To ensure students could see it clearly, this skeleton was made larger than usual, standing around six feet tall, which meant the locker itself was also quite large. Inside this locker were some human or animal specimens, some even preserved in formalin.
As they spoke, members of the special investigation team had already arrived at the storeroom.
In the storage room, a bright light illuminated everything clearly.
At this moment, the forensic team from the criminal police had arrived at the scene, taking photographs and collecting fingerprints.
The three of them had rain-soaked mud on their shoes, so they put on clean shoe covers and donned gloves and masks before entering the storage room.
As soon as Jiang He stepped inside, he surveyed the chaotic space. As the name suggested, it was indeed cluttered. The room contained all sorts of items, haphazardly placed without any particular organization. It seemed that the students had simply left things wherever they finished using them for convenience.
The locker where the body was discovered was located at the farthest end of the room. There were three such lockers, all of which were now open. Inside one of them lay a corpse, while next to the locker stood a human model leaning against the wall, seemingly occupying the space that belonged to it.
This model appeared taller than the corpse, which explained how it could be concealed within the locker.
In front of the locker was a pool of dried blood.
The blood spatter was evident; some had landed on the floor while other portions marked the wall. Jiang He noticed that some of the blood even reached the ceiling. Judging by the spray pattern, it seemed that blood had been expelled from a height of over one meter. Jiang He could clearly see that the bloodstains radiated outward from a central point.
He approached and imagined himself as the victim, repeatedly squatting at a specific spot until he finally found the most accurate position while slightly bending his knees.
This spot was one meter away from the locker.
Although Jiang He had not yet examined the body, he had already formed a hypothesis in his mind. He believed there was a sixty percent chance that the murderer had struck the victim's head right from where he stood.
Meanwhile, Xu Yiman, unaware of what Jiang He was doing, spoke up. "Go somewhere else to daydream; I want to see the body."
Jiang He nodded in response.
Although Jiang He had a general understanding of the murderer's methods, there were still many details he did not comprehend.
Jiang He stood beside Xu Yiman, both examining the corpse before them.
For Xu Yiman, seeing a corpse was nothing new; she had encountered so many that she had long since lost any reaction. Jiang He, having dealt with dead pigs for years, viewed all living beings as the same. To him, a human corpse was no different from that of a pig, so he remained calm.
However, the principal, who had followed them to see if the victim was one of his students, had never seen a corpse in his life. Just one glance made his stomach churn violently; he could hardly bear it. He covered his mouth and rushed outside, vomiting profusely as soon as he stepped out.
A detective looked at the principal and comforted him, "It's perfectly normal. When I first saw a corpse, I couldn't hold it in either; I vomited even more than you."
This wasn't just about the principal's weak constitution; the "impact" of this particular corpse was overwhelming.
It was pouring rain outside, and fearing that water would seep in, the storage room's windows were tightly shut. With so many people inside, the air was already stagnant. Combined with the presence of a highly decomposed body, the stench penetrated the principal's nose and assaulted his brain. This odor was worse than anything he had ever encountered before. He had thought that the prank involving a can of herring left in the hallway by students was bad enough; now it seemed trivial by comparison.
After finally regaining his composure, the principal remarked weakly, "I never knew that such a stench could affect one's mind..."
Meanwhile, the three members of the special investigation team gathered around the locker showed no signs of discomfort; they seemed completely unfazed by the smell.
The corpse was not only repulsive in odor but also in appearance.
The locker stood about six feet tall with only thirty centimeters of depth and fifty centimeters of width—a rather narrow space. However, it was just enough to fit a body without considering its comfort inside.
At this moment, the corpse filled the entire space within the locker.
With sixty centimeters of horizontal distance completely occupied by the body and some vertical space remaining, it was precisely because of this that when Captain Li and his team opened the locker, the corpse did not fall out.
Old Shao glanced back at Captain Li, and from the grim expression on Captain Li's face, it was clear that he was also shaken.
As everyone examined the body, Captain Li began to recount how he had discovered it.
A few hours earlier, Captain Li and the members of the task force had split up. The Forensic Science Division quickly used various methods to determine the location of Zhuang Ziming's phone when the last call was made. However, the Technical Staff could only narrow it down to a circle with a radius of one hundred meters, leaving Captain Li to search for the rest.
After notifying the principal, Captain Li rushed to the school with his team.
Inside the school, it was pitch black; nothing could be seen. The staff responsible for power supply had not yet arrived. Impatient, Captain Li followed the security guard and led his team through the darkened classrooms in search of a signal. At that moment, Captain Li had no idea that there would be a body inside; he was only focused on finding a phone.
The area within a one-hundred-meter radius was neither too large nor too small, but the main difficulty lay in the fact that the positioning did not provide an elevation, so they did not know which floor the signal was coming from. To speed up the process, the criminal investigation team split up and conducted a thorough search of each classroom.
Captain Li was responsible for searching this floor.
With keys in hand, Captain Li went from classroom to classroom.
The air was stiflingly hot, and he frequently wiped sweat from his brow. The flashlight flickered along the long corridor, its beam dancing like a flying insect. The school was eerily quiet; any unknown sound echoed sharply in the hallway.
Surrounded by darkness, the sound of footsteps echoed in the corridor, and it seemed as if there was no end to the darkness ahead—an endless void.
Only Captain Li remained.
He continued walking from room to room until he reached a door that he found was not locked.
This immediately put Captain Li on high alert.
He gently pushed open the door and discovered a dark figure leaning against the wall, motionless. From the outline, it was clearly a person!
Captain Li did not act rashly; he turned off his flashlight and observed carefully, but the figure remained still. Sweat began to bead on Captain Li's forehead as he could no longer contain his curiosity. He shone the flashlight towards it and realized it was merely a skeleton model. He stepped inside, reassuring himself that he was only scaring himself.
He began searching for his phone in the storage room but found no clues.
At that moment, he caught a faint, unpleasant odor.
Captain Li started to trace the source of the smell and discovered it seemed to be coming from a cabinet. Without much thought, he approached the cabinet, and a pungent stench wafted out, confirming its origin. The locker was not locked; it was merely secured with a latch. He opened the latch and yanked the cabinet door open. Accompanied by a cracking sound, a heavy stench rushed out, causing him to instinctively step back.
Just then, a flash of lightning illuminated the contents of the locker, revealing a highly decomposed corpse stuffed inside. He nearly dropped his flashlight in shock.
Fortunately, Captain Li had seen his fair share of corpses over the years, which helped him gradually regain his composure as he dialed Old Shao's number.
It was fortunate that Captain Li found this; had it been someone else in that environment, they might have already wet their pants.
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