eurekapd Chapter 976 The Source of Gold
Chapter 976 The Source of Gold
Following the lead of "gold," police began investigating all gold shops in Dongchuan City. At the Lao Feng Xiang gold shop in the south of the city, the owner pulled out surveillance footage from three months prior: in the footage, Zhang Chunli, wearing a baseball cap and mask, carefully took a cloth bag from his backpack. "He wanted to melt down this gold," the owner said, pointing to the scattered gold bars in the footage, "but we found the purity wasn't right and refused." The footage showed that the gold bars were covered in honeycomb-like pores, clearly indicating they were hand-cast.
When officers searched Zhang Chunli's rented apartment again, they found a USB drive hidden in a crack in the wall. The encrypted files inside, once decrypted, revealed construction blueprints for a building site, marking the location of an "underground vault." Li Ming immediately contacted the Urban Construction Bureau and learned that this area was the site of the "Shengshi Huafu" project, which had abruptly stopped construction three years prior. The developer had absconded due to a broken cash flow, leaving behind a cluster of unfinished buildings.
The unfinished buildings in the torrential rain resembled silent behemoths, their steel skeletons appearing and disappearing in the lightning flashes. Xiao Wang led the search team to pry open the rusty iron door, and a stench of decay mixed with the damp smell of concrete assaulted their senses. The beam of a flashlight swept across the second basement level, and next to the scattered tools, a makeshift furnace made of red bricks appeared, with molten gold slag still clinging to its walls.
"This is where the gold comes from." Xiao Sun crouched down, picking up a black lump with tweezers. "Alchemy has been performed here, recently." His headlamp swept across the corner, revealing a string of fresh footprints leading deeper into the wall. When the beam illuminated the wall, everyone gasped—the word "Death" was spray-painted in large red ink, the bloodstains not yet completely dry.
In the deepest room, police found Zhang Chunli's work notebook. The scribbled handwriting revealed a shocking secret: three months earlier, while delivering food, he had accidentally discovered that a construction site security guard was embezzling gold raw materials used in construction and melting them down to make gold bars. In order to keep the stolen goods for himself, the security guard murdered his accomplice, but Zhang Chunli filmed the entire process on his mobile phone.
"They said they'd give me money to shut up," the last page of the notebook was stained with tears, "but Grandpa said, once you take dirty money, you can never wash it away..." However, when the police were about to arrest the suspect, they found that the security guard had already disappeared. In his rented room, only half a bottle of sleeping pills and a note remained: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to..."
The case has once again reached a stalemate.
The lights in the Criminal Investigation Division's conference room were still blindingly bright at 2 a.m. The whiteboard was densely covered with photos and clues, the red and blue lines crisscrossing like a spiderweb. Li Ming pointed a laser pointer at the security guard's ID photo in the center; the man in the photo had an honest face, but his eyes betrayed a hint of wariness. "The deceased Zhang Chunli's notes indicated that the security guard involved was a key figure. Now he's missing, his phone is off, and all his identity information has been cancelled; he has likely fled to evade punishment."
Zhang Hui flipped through the crime scene investigation report, his brow furrowed: "The hair extracted from near the alchemical furnace, DNA testing showed it belonged to a male, but there was no matching record in the national database. This means either this person has no prior criminal record, or..." He paused, "His identity information is forged." The projector switched images, and several curly black hairs appeared on the large screen, gleaming eerily under a microscope.
Xiao Wang suddenly stood up and walked to the whiteboard: "I noticed a detail during my investigation." He pulled up a surveillance video; the missing security guard in the video was wearing overalls and had a habitual slight limp in his right leg. "This characteristic was also mentioned in Zhang Chunli's notes," he said, "that person walked as if stepping on cotton." We can start with the registration information for disabled persons to expand the scope of our investigation.
Xiao Sun adjusted his glasses and pulled up photos of physical evidence from the smelting site: "Besides hair, we also found a small amount of ceramic fragments in the furnace ash. After testing, these fragments were identified as a type of high-temperature refractory material, rarely seen on the market." He switched to his records from the building materials market visit: "The owner of the Chengxi Refractory Materials Factory said that three months ago, someone did indeed purchase a large quantity of this material, but it was a cash transaction, and the registered name was fake."
"Could it be related to the unfinished Shengshi Huafu project?" Zhang Hui suddenly spoke up. "Just before that project stopped, a batch of valuable gold raw materials was delivered for the decoration work. I checked the bidding records; the company responsible for escorting the gold was the security company the deceased worked for." He slammed the thick stack of documents on the table, and a yellowed contract slipped from between the pages. "There's too much shady stuff going on here."
A brief silence fell over the meeting room, broken only by the muffled hum of the air conditioner unit in the downpour. Li Ming wrote the words "Chain of Interests" in large characters on the whiteboard, connecting the developer, the security company, and the missing security guard with a red line: "Suppose Zhang Chunli's discovery wasn't an ordinary theft, but rather an inside job, an attempt to keep the gold raw materials for himself. Then, there's likely a much larger force controlling this security guard."
"But the problem is," Xiao Wang pointed to the hair follicle test report, "we don't even know the suspect's real identity. Even if he has a limp, with thousands of disabled people in the city, searching for him is like looking for a needle in a haystack." His gaze swept across the map on the wall, suddenly stopping on an area in the eastern suburbs. "Wait, Zhang Chunli was last seen at an abandoned logistics park, less than three kilometers from the unfinished construction site. Could it be...?"
Xiao Sun immediately pulled up a satellite map. Three red dots formed a strange triangle on the screen: "The logistics park, the construction site, and the urban village where the security guard was last seen!" These three locations formed a tightly packed area. He zoomed in on the urban village. Among the densely packed self-built buildings, a three-story building was circled in red. "According to the landlord, the security guard rented here until he suddenly disappeared a week ago, but he left behind a package."
When the officers opened the dusty package, inside were a few changes of clothes and a tattered diary. On the yellowed pages, crooked handwriting recorded shocking entries: "They said they'd give me half a million if I got the gold out of there. But I never imagined they'd even turn on their own brothers..." On the last page, a twisted smile was drawn in blood, next to which were written: "I don't want to die, I want to go home."
"Immediately test the fingerprints and DNA on the diary!" Li Ming's voice carried a suppressed excitement. Half an hour later, the technical department reported that the DNA on the diary matched perfectly with the hair extracted from near the furnace, and the fingerprints were strikingly similar to those of a fugitive in a jewelry robbery three years prior.
"So he had a criminal record!" Zhang Hui slammed his fist on the table. "He infiltrated the security company with a false identity to plan this theft. But why did he suddenly disappear? Was he silenced over a dispute about the loot, or...?"