met free Chapter 986 A New Discovery, Brother-in-law Li Dongfeng
Chapter 986 A New Discovery, Brother-in-law Li Dongfeng
At the same time, Xiao Wang led the search team to the residential area where Li Dongfeng lived. It was an old community without property management, with cluttered stairwells and motion-activated lights that flickered on and off. When they arrived at Li Dongfeng's door, Xiao Wang knocked for a long time without getting an answer. He and his team exchanged a glance and decisively broke down the door.
The room reeked of cigarette smoke and alcohol. Beer cans and half-eaten takeout containers littered the coffee table, and playing cards were scattered all over the floor. The bedroom closet was wide open, its designer clothes haphazardly pulled out, clearly having been hastily rummaged through. Xiao Wang crouched down and found a black suitcase under the bed. Inside, he found only a few changes of clothes and a small amount of cash.
"Boss, we've found something!" A team member walked out of the study holding a USB drive. "The data on the computer has all been deleted, but this USB drive hasn't been dealt with yet."
Just then, a noise came from the bathroom. Xiao Wang immediately drew his pistol and signaled his team to surround the area. "Come out! Hands behind your head!" Xiao Wang shouted. The door slowly opened, and a disheveled young woman emerged, her hands raised, her face filled with terror: "Don't kill me! I don't know anything!"
Upon questioning, the woman was identified as Li Dongfeng's girlfriend. "He...he suddenly came back this afternoon, saying he was going on a long trip and told me not to tell anyone," the woman said, her voice trembling. "Before he left, he kept making phone calls, sounding very anxious, and he even deleted everything from his computer."
Xiao Wang immediately had the woman taken back to the police station for questioning, and at the same time arranged for technicians to recover the computer data. Meanwhile, Xiao Zhou also made new progress—bank surveillance footage showed that the person who handled the 30 yuan transfer was a man wearing a hat and mask, whose build was similar to Li Dongfeng's, but his face could not be identified because he was heavily covered up.
“It seems Li Dongfeng was well-prepared,” Li Ming analyzed at the task force meeting. “He not only forged signatures but also deliberately concealed his identity when making the transfers. Immediately issue a city-wide notice for assistance, retrieve traffic surveillance footage, and track his movements. In addition, closely monitor Li Dongfeng’s relatives, especially his sister Li Mei, to see if she has any contact with her brother.”
The investigation proceeded intensively. The transportation department reported that at 10:23 PM on the night Song Houdong disappeared, a man resembling Li Dongfeng was seen riding a motorcycle at an intersection two kilometers from Yongsheng Farm. The technical department recovered some chat logs from Li Dongfeng's USB drive, showing frequent contact between him and someone with the online name "Dark Night Walker." The conversations mainly concerned steel transactions, but specific details were replaced with coded language.
Meanwhile, the police officers monitoring Song Houdong's wife, Li Mei, also made some discoveries.
Investigator Lao Zhou parked the black sedan at the foot of a sloping hill 300 meters away from the abandoned warehouse. In the rearview mirror, Li Mei's electric scooter was parked crookedly in front of the warehouse's rusty iron gate. The way she wrapped her dark red scarf tightly reminded Lao Zhou of a frightened bird folding its wings.
"Target number three is in view. Repeat, target number three is in view." Old Zhou said in a low voice into the walkie-talkie, while raising his infrared binoculars. The warehouse's tin roof gleamed coldly in the setting sun, and the broken windows looked like empty eye sockets. When Li Mei pushed open the iron gate, the metallic scraping sound startled the sparrows under the eaves. In the instant she turned to look back, Old Zhou saw a fine layer of sweat on her pale face.
Twenty minutes passed, and there was still no movement from inside the warehouse. Xiao Zhang, in the passenger seat, gripped his camera tightly, the lens fixed on the half-open iron gate. "Something's wrong," Lao Zhou suddenly turned the car key. "Last time she only stayed for eight minutes, this time it's been too long." Before he finished speaking, a dull thud echoed from inside the warehouse, startling both of them.
Old Zhou quietly pushed open the car door and crept along the earthen slope and bushes to the ventilation opening on the side of the warehouse. The smell of rust mixed with the stench of rotting wood hit him. Through the palm-sized iron mesh, he saw Li Mei kneeling on the dusty cement floor, her hands trembling as she sorted through black plastic bags. Moonlight leaked in through the cracks in the broken tiles, illuminating a section of metal pipe protruding from the bag opening—a core component of a precision machine tool, perfectly matching the characteristics of the stolen goods from the steel mill.
"Report to command center, suspicious goods transaction site discovered!" Old Zhou's breath condensed into white mist in the cold air. Just then, hurried footsteps suddenly came from the back door of the warehouse. Li Mei hurriedly got up and kicked over an iron bucket at her feet, the clanging of metal echoing in the empty warehouse. Old Zhou quickly retreated and glimpsed three masked men through the crack in the door, one of whom held a stun gun that flashed with a ghostly blue light.
"Did you bring the things?" The leading man's voice was hoarse. Li Mei nodded and took an envelope from her canvas bag: "This is the last 300,000 yuan. My brother said he'd stop after this." The man sneered, roughly tearing open the envelope, scattering hundred-yuan bills all over the floor: "Song Houdong is lying in the morgue now because he wanted to stop!"
Old Zhou's heart clenched, and his fingers pressed hard on the record button. Suddenly, the sound of fighting erupted inside the warehouse, and Li Mei's scream pierced the night: "You promised not to kill him!" Old Zhou didn't hesitate any longer, and Trash appeared.
"Don't move! Police!"
bump!
He fired a warning shot, and the three men immediately ran away upon seeing it.
Old Zhou chased after them, but seeing them already lying in pools of blood, he didn't have time to pursue them any longer. The three of them immediately called the team and dialed 120 (emergency services).
The sirens ripped through the silence of the suburbs. As paramedics carried the unconscious Li Mei into the ambulance, her bloodied fingertips still clutched a broken piece of a warehouse doorplate. Li Ming squatted on the muddy ground, his flashlight beam sweeping across the messy footprints. Beside the tire tracks, he found several loose steel balls—remnants of a stun gun. "Immediately retrieve the surrounding surveillance footage and check all vehicles that entered or left during the time of the incident." He gave the order over the walkie-talkie, his voice particularly cold and stern in the autumn night.
Three days of investigation unfolded like peeling back layers of a mystery. The technical team recovered deleted chat logs from Li Mei's phone's cloud storage, revealing a string of encrypted phone numbers appearing frequently. Traffic surveillance footage showed a black SUV driving along a small road behind an abandoned warehouse towards a neighboring province on the night of the incident. When Xiao Wang led the team to investigate Li Dongfeng's social connections, a detail caught their attention: Li Dongfeng's second uncle, an elderly man living alone deep in an orchard on the outskirts of the city, had recently been receiving large express delivery packages late at night.
The thick, inky morning fog of late autumn clung to the branches of the persimmon trees in the orchard, casting a hazy, greyish hue over the entire place. The persimmons, laden with white frost, hung heavy, appearing and disappearing in the mist like countless pale eyes. Xiao Zhou led his SWAT team, spreading out in a fan shape, their black combat boots crunching softly on the frost-covered leaves.