The officer making the rounds had only asked offhandedly. He casually lifted the concrete cover, glanced down, and froze.
At the bottom of the well, floating headfirst, was a corpse.
The case had now escalated into a homicide.
Liu Jie, then the captain of the Songling District Criminal Investigation Division, responded to the scene with his team and took over the case.
The body in the water was identified as Han Xiaolong.
His skin had begun to wrinkle, and his body showed slight bloating from decomposition.
However, based on when he was reported missing, the ti of death was estimated to be the evening of the 11th.
On the evening of the 11th, around 6:00 p.m., villagers had still seen Han Xiaolong.
Luo Lii herself said that she had seen Han Xiaolong before going to work on the 11th.
She was 52 years old at the ti and worked at a clothing factory in town. Her job had rotating shifts, and for that particular two-week period, she was on the night shift.
She went to work at 8:00 p.m. and ca ho at 8:00 a.m., a twelve-hour shift.
That evening, she made dinner for her son and watched Han Xiaolong finish eating before she left for work. It was a little after 7:00 p.m. when she departed.
When she returned on the morning of the 12th, she didn’t see Han Xiaolong.
But she didn’t think much of it.
Han Xiaolong was simple-minded but full of energy. Sotis he would run out to play before dawn and stay out the entire day.
It wasn’t particularly dangerous.
He was a simpleton, and very few people would bother soone like him.
Besides, everyone in the village and even the surrounding villages knew him, so he couldn’t get lost.
So Luo Lii went to catch up on her sleep, her mind at ease.
She slept until a little after 2:00 p.m. When she got up to cook and went out to look for Han Xiaolong, she discovered he wasn’t in the village.
She asked around, but no one had seen him.
She searched and asked all over, but no one had seen him.
She also searched the nearby villages, but still with no success.
The problem was, she didn’t even know when he had disappeared.
Luo Lii didn’t know what to do. She thought about calling the police, but so villagers told her the police wouldn’t file a report until a person had been missing for 48 hours.
On top of that, by the ti evening ca, soone else said the local police station was already closed for the day.
Others said not to worry, that he had probably just wandered off sowhere and would eventually co back.
Luo Lii had never finished elentary school and didn’t have much worldly experience. With everyone around her chiming in, she grew flustered and couldn’t think for herself, so she decided to just wait a little longer.
Incredibly, she still went to work.
Missing a single shift ant a deduction of one hundred yuan from her pay.
She asked a neighbor to keep an eye out and see if Han Xiaolong ca back that night. If he did, the neighbor was to tell him not to run off again.
After an anxious night, Luo Lii rushed ho the next morning, only to learn from her neighbor that Han Xiaolong still hadn’t returned.
Only then did she finally run to the police station to report him missing.
This was why Liu Jie had deduced the ti of death to be the evening of the 11th.
Probably after 10:00 p.m.
Back then, there wasn’t much for entertainnt in the countryside, so many people went to bed quite early.
By 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., the village roads would be deserted.
The autopsy results largely corroborated this.
For instance, the food residue in his stomach contents matched the al Han Xiaolong had eaten on the evening of the 11th.
Shen Xin picked up the autopsy report.
Han Xiaolong had multiple contusions, suggesting he had struggled with his killer before death.
Furthermore, there was a two-centiter-long wound located three centiters above his left temporal region, deep enough to reach the outer table of the skull.
A linear skull fracture with cranial depression was present, and the wound edges were irregular.
To put it simply, he had been struck above his left temple with a rock.
The dical examiner speculated the weapon was a rock or a similar object.
Secondly, the presence of diatoms in his organs confird that the victim showed signs of having been drowned while still alive.
Therefore, Han Xiaolong had been struck hard on the head, knocked into a deep coma, and then thrown into the well, where he drowned.
Shen Xin continued to flip through the report.
The following section was the investigation report.
Wuba Village had 217 households and a registered population of 841, with no non-residents.
After the cri ca to light, Liu Jie and his team imdiately theorized that the culprit was a local villager.
The reasoning was simple: the location of the well in the village was rather awkward.
Wuba Village was bordered by a river to the south.
The river flowed from east to west, wrapping around the village before turning north at its southwest corner.
Thus, the village was accessible by main roads on three sides, all converging in the center. The northern road had security caras, and the eastern road led to Dade Village.
To the west, a concrete bridge crossed the river.
The well in question was located near the eastern road, 80 ters from the village entrance and then another 30 ters north of the road itself.
The location was awkward because that area had originally been an open lot.
Later, when land was approved for housing, newly built hos ended up concealing the well behind them.
Therefore, anyone walking along the main road wouldn’t be able to see the well directly.
Liu Jie theorized that an outsider would be unlikely to know the well’s location, whereas a villager would.
Only a villager who had killed Han Xiaolong would think of disposing of the body in that well.
They conducted a detailed examination of the area around the well and of the concrete slab that covered it.
They found drag marks as well as footprints.
However, the culprit had deliberately scuffed out the footprints on the ground as they left.
A trace amount of blood was collected from the concrete slab.
However, testing revealed it was Han Xiaolong’s blood.
It was theorized that the blood had been transferred onto the slab when the killer moved it.
Han Xiaolong was thrown into the well on the evening of the 11th, and his body was not discovered until the morning of the 14th.
The body had been subrged for nearly 60 hours, so no useful forensic evidence related to the killer could be recovered from it.
Judging from the case file, Liu Jie’s investigative approach had been very clear.
He traced Han Xiaolong’s recent activities and investigated his relationships with the villagers, looking for any potential conflicts.
Then, he used the most laborious thod: systematically investigating every single one of the over eight hundred villagers to determine if they had an alibi for the ti of the murder.
It was the most brute-force thod, but it was also undoubtedly the most effective.
Unfortunately, despite expending a massive amount of effort and investigating for over a month, they failed to identify the killer.
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