Xiao Wenhui had never been seen by other students. Lan Yarong and Lin Manluo, who were responsible for sorting out the employees’ information, did not pay special attention to him. However, Yue Xingwen and Jiang Pingce had a deep impression on him, after all, this person was the team leader who shared an office with both of them.
This slightly fat middle-aged man, with a beer belly, smiling when he spoke, and had a very amiable attitude. It was difficult to link him with the mad ‘murderer’.
Hearing the two men say Xiao Wenhui’s name, Ke Shaobin immediately took out his laptop and opened the information sheet on Chemical Factory’s employees that senior sister Lin organized, found Xiao Wenhui’s resume, and enlarged it for everyone to see.
Lin Manluo glanced at it and quickly remembered this person. “Xiao Wenhui? He is the team leader of the Project Department, and he is usually the one to discuss the project with the Chemical Factory and other pharmaceutical companies… Do Xingwen and Pingce suspect him? I remember that when we were compiling the information, there was nothing suspicious about him.”
Lan Yarong echoed, “Yeah, he is 35 years old this year. When Zhou Jianan was killed in a fire 20 years ago, he was only 15 years old. It’s impossible for him to be Zhou Jianan’s husband or son at this age, he filled in his data sheet as an only child with no siblings, plus his last name is Xiao, and neither of his parents have the last name of Zhou, so it’s also impossible for him to be Zhou Jianan’s younger brother.”
Lin Manluo said, “What’s more crucial is that Xiao Wenhui’s information shows that he has both parents, a wife who is a teacher, and a 7-year-old daughter, a happy family. He had no motive to commit the crime at all, so we ruled him out at that time.”
There really wasn’t much doubt about such a piece of information. But, was Xiao Wenhui really just as simple as he was on the surface?
Yue Xingwen asked, “What faculty did he graduate from in university?
Ke Shaobin pointed to the information and said, “It’s the Applied Chemistry Department of the Faculty of Chemistry, but 40% of the employees recruited by this Chemical Factory graduated from the Faculty of Chemistry, so based on this alone, how can we assume that he’s the murderer?”
Yue Xingwen was just about to speak when he heard Jiang Pingce whisper, “Chen Xiumei’s time of death, and the process of death.”
Jiang Pingce just said what he was thinking, and Yue Xingwen turned his head to look at the other party. “Chen Xiumei resigned this afternoon, and senior brother Xu personally watched Chen Xiumei leave the Chemical Factory with her luggage, so she must have been killed outside the factory. Lin Yusen, which we suspected before, did not leave the Chemical Factory this afternoon, and it’s impossible to kill people outside the factory.”
Xin Yan said, “Yes, Lin Yusen is the director of the laboratory, in the office next to mine. He was indeed at his post all day today.”
Jiang Pingce followed Yue Xingwen’s words and said, “But Xiao Wenhui didn’t come to work all day today, and he called me and XIngwen early in the morning, saying that his daughter sprained her foot during dance lessons, and he wanted to accompany her to the hospital.”
Liu Zhaoqing carefully pondered the reasoning of the two, touched his chin and thought for a moment, and suddenly said, “By the way, there is another thing, the corpse in the wastewater tank is divided into many parts. If it was killed in the factory, and the movement for splitting the body is too big, it’s easy to attract the attention of others! It would have been a lot easier to divide the bodies outside the factory and move the pieces back.”
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
Yue Xingwen nodded. “So, I suspect that the three who resigned before were also killed outside the factory.”
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Everyone was silent.
If Xiao Wenhui committed the crime, the motive really did not make sense. He seemed to have a happy family, and he had no relationship with the deceased Zhou Jianan 20 years ago. Where did the deep hatred come from to kill people in a series?
Yue Xingwen carefully sorted out his thoughts and said, “Chen Xiumei’s murder must have been outside the factory, so Zhou Qiqi and Lin Yusen, who had been working at the factory this afternoon, can be ruled out as suspects. What about the director of the workshop, Yu Chenming? Is he at his post this afternoon?”
Zhuo Feng said, “No, when you said that you doubted him before, I purposely kept an eye on him. I didn’t see him appear in the workshop all day today, he should have taken a leave of absence.”
Jiang Pingce and Yue Xingwen looked at each other and concluded, “The murderer is between Yu Chenming and Xiao Wenhui? After all, only someone who isn’t at the factory today can kill Chen Xiumei.”
Ke Shaobin analyzed, “If it’s a choice between the two, I think Yu Chenming’s possibility will be greater. His age is only a year older than Zhou Jianan, and with the ‘widowed’ in his profile, if he’s Zhou Jianan’s husband, his motive for coming to the factory to take revenge would make sense.”
Liu Zhaoqing scratched his head and said, “But I also feel that it’s too logical if the murderer is Yu Chenming.”
Xu Yishen said with a smile, “Let’s not forget that the Library often plays cards out of common sense, and our analysis may be wrong until we find more clear evidence.”
Everyone looked at each other with a somewhat helpless expression.
Xu Yishen was right, everything still needed evidence.
At present, the analysis based on the information was their subjective judgment and might not be entirely correct.
The only thing that could be certain was that the murderer was related to the ‘incident’ mentioned by Chen Xiumei, otherwise, Chen Xiumei would not have nightmares all day after three consecutive disappearance of her companions, and talked on the rooftop late at night, mentioning words like ‘retaliation’.
What was ‘that thing’ that Chen Xiumei was talking about?
When Yue Xingwen thought of this, he suddenly said, “Our reasoning is likely to enter the wrong area, the ‘that thing’ mentioned by Chen Xiumei and Lin Yusen during their conversation on the rooftop, does it really refer to the death of Zhou Jianan? If not, then the death of Zhou Jianan has become the biggest interference item that will completely deviate our thinking.”
Ke Shaobin rubbed his temples with a headache, “But I searched all the news in the past 25 years, and there has only been one murder in the Chemical Factory in these years, that ‘Zhou Jianan’s Death Case’. If ‘that thing’ that made Chen Xiumei have nightmares and run away in a hurry was not a murder, what else will it be?”
Xin Yan suddenly said, “Some injuries are actually worse than death.”
Ke Shaobin looked back at him, just in time to meet Xin Yan’s calm gaze, only to hear him say in a calm voice, “Do you still remember the disfigurement by sulfuric acid incident that happened in the library?”
When everyone heard this, their heart tightened at the same time——
It was when everyone first arrived at the library. In the first school-wide Public Elective course <Orienteering>, there was a conflict between student groups over the points card, and a classmate from the Faculty of Chemistry, without distinguishing between the seriousness of the matter, directly used his special ability to pour concentrated sulfuric acid on his classmates, resulting in the disfigurement of the four girls on the spot.
The sulfuric acid strengthened by the library could quickly melt a fierce beast into blood, and the entire face of several girls who were splashed at that time was instantly corroded into a bloodied flesh. The skin and muscles on the face were melted into blood, and the scars were deep enough for them to see the bones!
That kind of grievous injury was indeed worse than death.
Even if the injuries automatically repaired themselves after returning to the library and their looks were restored, this nightmarish experience was something that a few of the girls would surely remember for the rest of their lives.
In order to prevent such a tragedy, the University Alliance jointly issued the ‘Library Student Convention’, and also found a senior sister in Psychology to conduct psychological counseling for several disfigured girls, and this turmoil gradually passed.
Later, there were no more incidents of students beating each other in the library, and everyone would use their abilities in a controlled manner without hurting their classmates. However, at the beginning, this matter was like a shadow hanging over everyone’s heads, and when it was mentioned again, it still made people’s spines chill.
Looking at Xin Yan’s serious expression, Yue Xingwen frowned and asked, “You mean, the murderer’s revenge is not because of Zhou Jianan, but, there are other people in the Chemical Factory who were harmed by Chen Xiumei and the others—— Wounded but not death, but crueler than death?”
“En.” Xin Yan calmly said, “Actually, we can think more carefully about the murderer’s modus operandi. At first, we all suspected that the murderer used sodium cyanide, a highly toxic chemical, because cyanide only needs a few grams to poison an adult, and the effect is fast, plus the factory warehouse also stores this dangerous goods. If the murderer can find a way to get it, the murderer can kill people in the Chemical Factory without anyone knowing it.”
Yue Xingwen followed Xin Yan’s train of thought and said, “But now, we found that the murderer didn’t kill people inside the Chemical Factory, but did it only after Chen Xiumei and the others left the Chemical Factory?”
“That’s right, since it’s a murder outside a Chemical Factory, the murderer does not necessarily poison people quickly with sodium cyanide, he can also slowly torture people to death.”
Xin Yan looked at Yue Xingwen and Jiang Pingce and said, “The place where we found the body was in the wastewater tank and the wastewater treatment link of the Chemical Factory definitely did not use hydrofluoric acid, a very corrosive dangerous product. Then there is only one possibility—— There is no hydrofluoric acid in the wastewater tank itself, but when the murderer threw the body into the wastewater tank, the body had hydrofluoric acid on it.”
He paused and summarized in a low voice, “That means the murderer didn’t use sodium cyanide to kill, but hydrofluoric acid.”
Xin Yan’s words made everyone at the scene widen their eyes in surprise.
Although he did not know much about chemistry, after Xin Yan’s science popularization in the past few days, everyone also knew that sodium cyanide was a highly toxic substance, and taking a trace amount would die in just a few minutes; And hydrofluoric acid was a very corrosive acid, it would not cause death immediately, but like sulfuric acid, slowly corrode human skin, flesh and blood…
People would be gone in just a few minutes if the murderer killed them with sodium cyanide.
But if the murderer used hydrofluoric acid to torture people slowly, then the tragedy that Chen Xiumei and the others experienced before they died was simply unimaginable! What would it feel like to splash something on your skin that could even corrode jade?! Was the pain of corroding the skin, flesh and blood inch by inch with chemicals worse than ‘Ling Chi execution’ in the top ten torture?
The Chemistry subject, if it was used by people with bad intentions, was really terrible!
Yue Xingwen clenched his fists tightly.
Xin Yan’s analysis made his mind clear.
It was worthy of a 6-credit reasoning course, and there were too many misleading information and interference items. If the murderer had nothing to do with Zhou Jianan, the direction of their previous investigation would have been all wrong!
On second thought, the murderer really corroded the bodies of these people with hydrofluoric acid, or did he kill them and then corrode them afterward? Or did he soak the people in a solution that corroded them to death while they were still alive and then threw the bodies into a wastewater tank?
Now it seemed that the latter was more likely.
The murderer killed people outside the factory, and there were countless ways to dispose of the corpse, but he chose the extreme method of ‘hydrofluoric acid corroding the human body’. The first modus operandi the murderer chose to commit the crime was usually related to his motive. Perhaps, in these years, some innocent people had also been corroded by chemicals over the years and were worse off than dead?
It’s really scarry
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The murderer is not right in the head with such a method, it’s so interesting