The crackdown on organized crime began with the arrest of the mother-in-law.

Chapter 987 Arrest of Li Dongfeng, the Cause Behind the Case

The team cautiously approached the Li family's old house. The decaying wooden door was half-open, creaking faintly. Xiao Zhou raised his hand to signal the team members to be quiet, while he himself moved slowly along the mottled mud wall. Just then, the intermittent sound of shovels digging dirt came from the backyard, one strike after another, sounding particularly abrupt in the quiet morning, like death knocking on the earth.

Xiao Zhou exchanged a glance with his teammate beside him, a hint of wariness flashing in his eyes. He gripped his gun tighter and led his team around to the backyard wall. Peeking through a crack in the wall, they saw Li Dongfeng frantically swinging a shovel, his black suitcase wide open, revealing bundles of cash and some metal parts. His dyed yellow hair was disheveled and plastered to his forehead, soaked with cold sweat, his face as pale as paper, and his eyes filled with terror and panic.

"Action!" Xiao Zhou ordered in a low voice. Several SWAT officers quickly scaled the wall and rushed towards Li Dongfeng like cheetahs. "Police! Don't move!" Xiao Zhou shouted, kicking open the rusty wooden door to the backyard, the sound of metal clanging echoing in the empty yard.

Li Dongfeng abruptly looked up, the shovel in his hand clattering to the ground. He stared at the police surrounding him, his pupils contracting sharply, his face drained of color, paler than a corpse. In a panic, he tried to grab his suitcase and run, but was tackled to the ground by a swift SWAT officer. "Let me go! What right do you have to arrest me!" he struggled desperately, his voice trembling with despair.

Xiao Zhou stepped forward and pinned him down, the cold handcuffs instantly locking onto his wrists: "Li Dongfeng, you are suspected of a serious criminal case, and you are now being arrested according to law." Li Dongfeng slumped to the ground, staring blankly at the gray sky, muttering to himself, "It's over, all over..."

A special police officer opened a suitcase, inside which, besides a large amount of cash, were several ledgers and some parts bearing the steel mill's logo. Xiao Zhou picked up one of the ledgers, casually flipping through it. A dense list of transactions came into view, each entry marked with an astonishing amount and shady dealings. "Take it away!" Xiao Zhou closed the ledger, his eyes resolute.

As Li Dongfeng was escorted away, the morning mist gradually dissipated, and sunlight pierced through the clouds, illuminating the orchard. The frosted persimmons glistened in the sunlight, and the arrest at the Li family's old house was like tearing open a corner of evil, allowing the truth hidden in the darkness to gradually be exposed to the light.

The interrogation room lights were so bright they made Li Dongfeng squint, and he kept wiping the cold sweat from his forehead with his handcuffed hands. "Those people...they said they'd give me benefits as long as I kept an eye on Song Houdong." He suddenly gripped the edge of the table, his knuckles white. "How was I supposed to know someone would die!" Li Ming slammed Li Mei's medical record on the table; the red stamp on the coma diagnosis was particularly striking: "It's not too late to talk now."

Li Dongfeng's Adam's apple bobbed a few times before he finally spoke. Three months ago, a man calling himself "Brother Chen" contacted him through an underground casino, asking him to monitor Song Houdong's freight routes. "Brother Chen and his group already knew about Song Houdong and Zhou Ming smuggling steel." He stared at the crack in the wall, his voice trembling, "But Song Houdong was too greedy; he always kept 30% of the goods for himself and resold them to another buyer."

The network of relationships on the whiteboard gradually became clear with the confessions. Brother Chen's real name was Chen Liqiang, a former "broker" in the black market for steel; his accomplice, Zhao Hu, was a thug with a criminal record; and Sun Wenbin, who always wore gold-rimmed glasses, was in charge of finances and the distribution of stolen goods. Li Dongfeng pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, on which three phone numbers were scrawled in crooked handwriting: "They set up a transit point in an abandoned warehouse. Li Mei... she was forced into it by me; I blackmailed her with the issue of her daughter getting into a top-tier middle school."

Li Ming pulled up the steel mill's surveillance footage, and the clip of Song Houdong arguing with someone in the parking lot suddenly took on a new meaning. The phone he was clutching that day might have been recording threatening calls; the tarpaulin on the truck he repeatedly checked might have concealed illegally intercepted precision steel. "Song Houdong realized something was wrong and tried to flee with the evidence." "Li Dongfeng suddenly broke down in tears, "Chen Liqiang said he wanted to teach him a lesson, I really didn't expect... They used a stun gun to knock him unconscious, then a dagger..."

As the confessions deepened, the truth of that stormy night gradually pieced together. When Song Houdong received his last "urgent job," he had already hidden a backup copy of the smuggling evidence inside his daughter's piano sheet music. When his truck drove into the abandoned warehouse, what awaited him wasn't cargo, but Zhao Hu, wearing a hood. Li Dongfeng huddled in the interrogation chair, his nails digging deeply into his palms: "I was in the truck, listening to his screams... Later they poured gasoline on him, saying that way there would be no way to prove anything."

In the operations room of the Criminal Investigation Detachment, a huge electronic screen flashed a 3D map of the Chengnan Industrial Zone. Li Ming used a laser pointer to draw a heavy circle around Warehouse No. 3 in Area B: "According to Li Dongfeng's confession, Zhao Hu habitually used the satellite phone in the warehouse to contact Chen Liqiang, and the most recent call was 48 hours ago." He pulled up the cell tower location data; red dots on the map formed a strange arc, "These call trajectories were all within a three-kilometer radius of the warehouse."

Xiao Zhou spread the crime scene photos all over the table, zooming in on the broken stun gun part that Li Mei had left behind when she was attacked: "The technical department extracted mixed DNA from the part. Besides Li Mei's, there was another set of male samples, which matched perfectly with the records of Zhao Hu's fight three years ago." In the photos, the metal casing of the stun gun was still stained with dark red blood, gleaming rust-colored under the cold light.

The industrial area was shrouded in thick fog late at night. Xiao Wang's reconnaissance team crawled through the weeds. Through their night vision goggles, the outline of Warehouse No. 3 resembled a lurking beast, a faint blue light emanating from the cracks in its rusty iron door. "Thermal imaging shows three heat sources on the second floor," Xiao Sun adjusted the instrument parameters. Orange-red dots moved on the screen. "One of them perfectly matched Zhao Hu's physical characteristics: 185cm tall, with a habitually drooping left shoulder."

The arrest plan was finalized at 2:00 AM. Li Ming laid out the combat model on the sand table: "One assault team will infiltrate through the west ventilation shaft, another team will take control of the watchtower, and the sniper team will be on standby on the opposite rooftop. Remember, Zhao Hu possesses homemade weapons and can use non-lethal ammunition if necessary." He held up an evidence bag containing steel balls found outside the warehouse; "These are ammunition for his modified stun gun; being hit by them will cause cardiac arrest."

The operation unfolded in the pre-dawn darkness. SWAT team members, clad in silenced combat boots, approached the warehouse like ghosts. As one team used hydraulic shears to cut open a ventilation shaft, a sudden metallic clanging sound rang out—a mousetrap in the corner had been triggered. The warehouse lights instantly switched on, and Zhao Hu's roar pierced the metal walls: "Get out of here, all of you!"