Free Web NovelChapter 291: Chapter 286 Safe_1
Xu Dayuan lit a cigarette and asked the director,
"The Wang Family’s courtyard and the small two-story building inside seem quite old, when were they built? You must know that, right?"
The director pointed to the inside of the courtyard gate, and a few of them followed him there.
"We have a custom here, when our own house is built, one has to tie red cloth and offer sacrifices when the top beam is lifted, and another is to carve the year the house and courtyard were built on the stone behind the door.
Look, right here, their family built this courtyard in 1983, and the house was constructed at that time too. The foundation was laid very deep, by a professional construction team from the city, not just any group of bricklayers. Moreover, the courtyard walls are higher than those of ordinary households, a full three meters."
Zhou Ning didn’t listen any further, as this was of no help to the survey. After greeting Xu Dayuan, he entered the small two-story building of Wang Hongzhan’s house, only to see Yang Xuetong coming down with a suitcase.
"Didn’t find anything?"
Yang Xuetong shook his head.
"There are four bedrooms upstairs, the one on the farthest east has traces of previous investigations. I asked the local detectives, and they said it was the room where the deceased Ho Dongmei lived. The blankets and clothes placed inside are all for summer. There are two trolley cases on the ground filled with diapers, baby formula, and change of clothes. The cabinets were unused.
As for the other rooms, whether it’s the furniture or the beds, they’re all covered with old sheets. It seems they haven’t been lived in for years. We looked around, moved all the furniture, and found no hidden safes or places like compartments within the walls. The boxes and cabinets were basically empty."
Zhou Ning’s brow furrowed tightly. When he took over the case, he felt a sense of familiarity because in one of the books provided by the system previously, there was a similar case.
It was also a woman who was killed at home with her child, and the child was drowned in a water tank. When the police found them, the child’s little feet were floating on the surface. Even the textual description was shocking.
The identity of the woman was the same as Ho Dongmei’s, a rural teacher, who had gold bars hidden in her home that a student saw during tuition. One night, a child went to steal them, was discovered by the woman, and then the woman was killed, and the child was silenced too.
At one point, Zhou Ning was influenced by that case, and thought in that direction, but there was a clear difference between the two scenes. Someone entering through the north window of the kitchen would definitely leave traces, given the narrow window and the thick layer of grease. Yet both victims were clean, with no residue on them.
Climbing over the wall was also ruled out; the walls of the courtyard were three meters high, impossible to scale barehanded, and if tools were used, traces would have been left on the broken glass on top of the wall, and the noise would have been loud. Now the only remaining way in was the main gate.
Zhou Ning then looked at Yang Xuetong and said,
"Ask Bai Hua and Mr. Zhang, when they arrived at the scene, did they break in through the door? Is the lock still preserved? Also, on the key, are there any traces or substances from a key fitting, and have fingerprints and DNA been collected?"
Yang Xuetong’s eyes lit up, and he nodded and ran off quickly.
Zhou Ning then headed toward the room on the west side, and upon entering, saw Mr. Zhao kneeling on the ground, butting his butt, with Zhu Xingxing holding a powerful flashlight beside him, searching for something in a corner.
"Did you find anything?"
Mr. Zhao suddenly lifted his head and his head hit the top of the cabinet, with a loud bang. Zhou Ning felt the pain just by listening.
"Be careful, are you okay?"
Mr. Zhao crawled out from under the cabinet, took off his gloves, and rubbed the back of his head, complaining to Zhu Xingxing,
"Zhou Xiaozhou is here and you don’t say anything, you scared me!"
Zhu Xingxing kicked his leg and roared,
"Don’t you put the blame on me. Don’t you know how big you are? I said I would go look, but you insisted on doing it yourself, and now you’re blaming me for your bumped head."
Zhou Ning didn’t join in their usual bickering, cleared his throat, and moved closer, only then noticing that the part Mr. Zhao crawled into was a cabinet that was quite long, like a closet, occupying one entire wall.
Above were incense burners and a few plates that seemed to contain dried food items like fruits and steamed buns, though completely desiccated into dry pieces, some looking like chunks of charcoal.
With a light shake of the hand, Zhou Ning noticed the problem: the cabinet seemed to be embedded into the wall.
"Is there anything behind the cabinet?"
Upon hearing this, Mr. Zhao felt a bit deflated.
"I’ve already checked once, didn’t find anything special. The cabinet is all drawers, I took out the drawers, and they actually didn’t contain much. However, when I knocked on the wall behind them, it sounded hollow."
Zhou Ning crouched down and looked over it carefully, but indeed he saw no hidden door or movable bricks behind the cabinet.
Zhou Ning waved his hand to signal Mr. Zhao to get up and they both exited the room. He observed the wall where the cabinet was embedded, which was adjacent to the entrance of the living room.
There was a small room lined up on the north side that seemed to be a storeroom, but there was nothing placed inside, and it was only about thirteen or fourteen square meters.
Zhou Ning stretched his hand to Mr. Zhao and said,
"Give me a tape measure."
Zhu Xingxing found the tape measure and handed it to Zhou Ning. Mr. Zhao struggled to get up from the ground, continually slapping the dust off himself, as the place hadn’t been inhabited for a long time and was very dusty.
Zhou Ning measured the east-west distance of the storage room, and then measured the east-west distance of the room where Mr. Zhao and the others were. Seeing the values, Zhou Ning didn’t speak, and Mr. Zhao leaned in close.
"What’s up? Is there a problem?"
"The east-west distance of the two rooms is different, but from the outside, there doesn’t seem to be any difference in the width of these two rooms."
Mr. Zhao’s eyes bulged as he darted to Zhou Ning’s side.
"There’s a bit of a difference, that’s possible since the houses in the village are built irregularly. How much of a discrepancy is it?"
"Twenty-two centimeters."
"That much? Could there be a compartment in this room’s wall?"
Zhou Ning didn’t reply, instead he turned and walked to the living room, where on the other side of the wall stood four bookcases of identical height and size, arranged side by side and packed full of books. Zhou Ning glanced over briefly—these weren’t novels; they seemed to be textbooks Wang Hongzhan had used from childhood to graduate school.
The arrangement was quite orderly, with books of various subjects from elementary school through graduate studies. The upper half of the bookcase was made of transparent glass, and the lower half had wooden doors. One could tell that the bookcases were of very good quality and quite old.
Zhou Ning walked over, opened the cabinets above and below. That’s when he discovered that all the bookcases had books placed above, while the bottom part housed only a few scrolls.
Mr. Zhao changed his gloves, unrolled the scrolls and saw that each one contained various award certificates, each one separated by newspaper clippings, some of which were very old.
Clearly, this was not the work of Wang Hongzhan and Ho Dongmei; it was evident that the Wang family parents valued Wang Hongzhan’s education deeply. There was no discovery of note inside the few scrolls, and Mr. Zhao hurriedly restored everything to its original place with a kick to the room.
Zhou Ning stood in front of the bookcases, considering this wall in particular to be the issue.
He squatted down to inspect the partition boards in the lower cabinets, reaching to remove a partition, with Mr. Zhao next to him, holding a strong flashlight, carefully illuminating the corners inside the cabinets.
When checking the fourth bookcase, Zhou Ning hadn’t even touched the partition when he saw two light-colored wooden strips with several black spots on the edge of the back panel, lying right across the edges—it seemed like there was a gap around the edge of the back panel where the flashlight beam shone.
Zhou Ning was exceedingly excited, Mr. Zhao was about to grab a partition but Zhou Ning stopped his movement.
"Hold on, let Zhu Xingxing go call Mr. Yang and the others. Mr. Zhao, get fingerprints from the partition, wooden strips, and the back panel, collect samples, and especially for the wooden strips, spray them with Luminol reagent. There are black spots on the strips, I suspect they’re bloodstains."
Mr. Zhao was invigorated, pulling Zhou Ning to the side to inspect the floor. There were no footprints compared to the surrounding area—the dust on the ground here was slightly thinner, the boundaries clearly defined, traces left by wiping.
Mr. Zhao took photographs, then with an evidence survey pad in place, knelt down directly on it, his brush sweeping over the partition revealed two thumbprints left on either side; obviously, these were marks made by gripping to lift. Accordingly, there would naturally be other fingerprints below, so Mr. Zhao lay directly on the ground.
Once he determined there was no issue, he found more fingerprints underneath, although to Mr. Zhao’s slight disappointment, the prints were made by latex gloves and didn’t leave any actual fingerprints. However, this discovery still excited Mr. Zhao.
He sprayed the Luminol carefully over the fingerprints; a significant fluorescent spot appeared in the middle of the print, and Mr. Zhao then removed the partition.
Yang Xuetong and the others had already run over quickly and seeing Mr. Zhao’s posture, Yang Xuetong too hurried to kneel close by while Sun Gaotie placed the partition on an evidence bag on the side.
Mr. Zhao sprayed the wooden strips with Luminol reagent, and sure enough, the two black spots identified by Zhou Ning were bloodstains. Mr. Zhao turned to look at Zhou Ning.
"I’ll open it now!"
"Hurry up and stop dawdling."
Zhu Xingxing couldn’t help but yell out before Zhou Ning could speak.
Yang Xuetong held back a smile. He and Mr. Zhao each grabbed one of the wooden strips and twisted them a bit. As they removed the wooden strips used as a barrier, the back panel behind them sprung open toward the outside.
Mr. Zhao was quick to catch the back panel; this action exposed what was hidden behind it. Yang Xuetong was so astonished he opened his mouth wide, and Zhou Ning, unable to see from his angle, grew somewhat anxious.
"What’s behind it? Is the wall hollow?"
Mr. Zhao handed the back panel to Zhu Xingxing and then moved away from the evidence pad.
"There’s an old-fashioned safe embedded in the wall, one side has already collapsed, probably the reason why when I knocked on the other side, it sounded hollow."
They quickly collected various information from the safe, finding bloodstains and several glove prints. Faced with a pair of combination locks and a keyhole, Yang Xuetong was stumped. frёewebnoѵēl.com
"We can collect fingerprints from the safe, but who could open it, especially since it’s such an old model? I doubt any random locksmith would do, right?"
Mr. Zhao waved his hand dismissively and kicked Yang Xuetong’s shoe.
"Get up, I have a way."
Yang Xuetong quickly stepped aside, Mr. Zhao stepped back half a step, and kicked the top left corner of the safe. Following his action, the previously lifted side fell down with a snap, and the safe tilted forward. Mr. Zhao grinned with a chuckle.
"There’s nothing a kick can’t fix—if it doesn’t, then just kick it again!"
