Chapter 22: Chapter 22: Organized Crime Is Inseparable From Desire
So many people, vanished from a single city...
Of course, it wasn’t unheard of for a major murder case to go undiscovered. But that was for a different time and place—perhaps a remote area, decades ago.
But for something like this to happen in Jiangsan City—in its most developed area, Jiangdong District, no less—was completely unheard of!
Moreover...
"None of them even match the profiles of reported missing persons..."
Li Jianye frowned.
They had run multiple queries simultaneously, with the internal affairs unit supporting the frontline officers. They had pulled all the missing person reports from the past year, only to discover that the families likely hadn’t filed any reports at all.
’What the hell is going on?’
Li Jianye fell silent for a moment, his eyes scanning the surroundings.
"We need a breakthrough," he muttered.
’Where was the breakthrough?’
Normally, the victims themselves would be the key. But these victims... their bodies were perfectly intact.
It was a world apart from a typical murder case.
’Not a single clue!’
Xu Huo paused, his gaze falling upon two bodies that had been isolated from the rest.
These were the two who had turned on each other.
"Did the background checks on them turn up anything?" Xu Huo asked.
"Nothing. At a glance, they don’t seem to be from Jiangsan City." Li Jianye mused for a moment, then glanced at the other victims. "Are these people from out of town too?"
It was difficult for the police to identify people from out of town. In most cases, an ID could only be confirmed after a family member filed a report.
But... no families had filed reports.
’Not a single one!’
That was practically impossible in the Eastern Country.
"This shouldn’t be possible," Li Jianye mused. "In a place like Jiangsan City, there’s no way the police wouldn’t notice so many people dying or disappearing at the same time. And yet, here’s the proof... What is going on?"
Xu Huo was silent for a moment, then shook his head. "Let’s use the formula."
"Captain Li, you remember the principle of antisymmetric relations, right? If a > b, then b
Li Jianye paused as Xu Huo looked up, then said:
"You mean... work backward from the effect to find the cause? Create the conditions if we don’t have them?"
"Exactly," Xu Huo nodded.
Theoretically, something like this should never happen in Jiangsan City. But since it did, we must find the reason why.
In other words, for this scene to exist, there must be a logical premise that makes it possible!
"For now, let’s stop focusing on the dead. The answer isn’t with the victims."
Xu Huo shook his head. He had run through the case from start to finish in his mind, and something felt off about one particular point.
After a moment of contemplation, he spoke:
"These two accomplices... what was the official police conclusion on their cause of death?"
"Infighting."
Li Jianye answered automatically.
They had already been to the crime scene. Xu Huo had smelled the reek of urine, but hadn’t caught the scent of a fourth person. The most likely scenario was infighting.
"There are many reasons for infighting, but they can be summarized into four categories."
Xu Huo nodded. "Emotion, money, coercion, and silencing."
"So which category do these two fall into?"
Let’s rule out the last two first. For there to be infighting, they have to be on the same side. Coercion is more likely when one party isn’t a criminal. If a law-abiding person is being blackmailed, they might snap and kill their blackmailer.
In essence, that’s still partially driven by emotion.
But these dead men were criminals... It’s not that criminals can’t be coerced, but it’s rare.
The reason infighting is rare among criminals is that they’re all in the same boat!
For example, if you murdered someone with a partner, what does it matter if you find out they’re cheating on their spouse or stealing petty cash? What good does that information do you? Are you going to expose them? Can you even use it as leverage?
As long as the crime remains a secret, that shared guilt creates one of the strongest bonds in the world.
Of course, it’s also one of the most fragile, because you can always kill your partner to tie up loose ends.
"But it’s obvious they weren’t trying to silence each other."
Xu Huo said slowly, his gaze drifting toward the refrigerated truck.
"From the looks of it, this was a multi-person operation, and these two were involved in transportation."
Two people couldn’t have pulled off a case this big on their own. There had to be others involved.
"If there was transport, there must have been a destination. And if there was a destination, there must have been a recipient who knew what was going on."
"Too many mouths to silence."
So, if we rule out coercion and silencing, that only leaves emotion and money.
"So, a crime of passion?"
Crimes of passion can generally be divided into two types: those born from long-simmering resentment and those from sudden, explosive conflicts.
To put it simply: premeditated murder and a crime of passion.
It doesn’t fit the premeditated model. The first one to draw a knife was poorly prepared—he stabbed his partner as he was getting out of the truck, and the wound wasn’t even fatal.
An unplanned event like stopping to urinate doesn’t fit with a premeditated murder plot.
’A crime of passion, then?’
But a crime of passion needs a passionate conflict. Conflict, a contradiction, a clash... it needs an argument!
If they had been arguing, how could the one who got stabbed have been so careless? To get out of the truck and turn his back to urinate, knowing full well his partner was a desperate criminal...
"So it wasn’t a crime of passion, either?" Li Jianye’s brow furrowed.
"No. It was emotion, but it wasn’t. It’s better to say it was the only thing left on the list: desire."
Xu Huo mused for a moment.
Desire and emotion are two sides of the same coin. The buildup of desire can be subtle, but its eruption has all the impulsive force of a crime of passion!
"The vast majority of attempts to silence someone, or cases of infighting, boil down to disputes over profit. In other words, an explosive surge of inner desire."
"You could even say that some would-be bank robbers plan on how to kill their partners and take all the money for themselves before they’ve even finished planning the heist."
If we look at it that way, then these corpses must have represented some kind of profit for those two.
And if profit was involved, then there must be a complete supply chain.
No one wants to be the fool doing all the work for nothing.
Transporting the bodies would require multiple people. Only the promise of profit could get a group of hardened criminals to work together. That’s the only thing that makes sense!
"If the motive is profit, then let’s think about it like a business. For a commodity to circulate, what roles do you need?"
Xu Huo said suddenly, shifting the line of reasoning in a new direction.
"We have transportation and we have a receiver. What’s missing?"
For any supply chain to work, you need at least three things: a supplier, a distributor, and a market.
All three are linked by transportation. We already have the transportation part. We can think of the culprits as the distributors. We don’t need to worry about the market for now. That means we just need to focus on...
"The so-called ’supply’?" Li Jianye faltered, frowning as he tried to follow.
This was the first time he had ever approached a case with this kind of logic.
But it made sense.
Mass murder cases are almost always linked by profit.
The exceptions are cases with only one or two perpetrators, which might be motivated by revenge against society or some twisted psychology.
But a mass murder orchestrated by a criminal syndicate...
...could never build such a vast criminal network without profit!
Drug trafficking, human trafficking, smuggling...
Only things connected to money can get this big!
Money is desire, and desire is money. Money might not be able to satisfy every desire, but it can certainly fulfill ninety-nine percent of them!
It’s the only thing that can make a group of people willingly turn to crime.
If you adopt that perspective, then in these people’s eyes...
...they’re just conducting business.
And even people... are just commodities.
The case wasn’t actually that difficult. Once you deduced it was a group operation from the transportation aspect, and then worked backward to deduce that the group was driven by profit, you could add that profit motive as the core of the case. Suddenly, the whole thing came to life!
"The scale of this case means it had to be a group effort. And ninety-nine percent of the time, a group’s actions aren’t guided by individual whims. Only desire—money—is their guiding principle."
Xu Huo explained the logic behind his shift in thinking.
"Once you’ve worked backward to establish the business logic, you can start reasoning forward again."
"The ’goods’ needed to be transported, but transportation is just one part of it. These two... where did they pick up the corpses?"
The question circled back to the beginning.
The point of supply!
"Captain Li, first, I want you to focus your thinking on a single idea: the commodity is a ’corpse.’ Now, consider if there’s any difference between a regular corpse and one from a murder," Xu Huo reminded him.
’The commodity is a corpse?’
Li Jianye’s brow furrowed. ’What does he mean by that?’
’Are all corpses the same?’
’A corpse... Wait a minute.’
’A corpse... There’s no difference between one corpse and another!’
Realization dawned, and a look of stunned disbelief crossed his face.
"There’s no difference!"
"Exactly. Fundamentally, a corpse is a corpse."
Xu Huo nodded. "The only difference is the cause of death. And that distinction only matters to the living. Murder, natural causes, accident—fundamentally, it makes no difference. It’s just a different way to die."
This world may be chaotic.
But in at least one respect, everyone is the same.
And that is death.
It’s like buying fruit. A murder victim is just a bruised apple with a wormhole.
A regular corpse is a normal apple.
"None of these bodies show any signs of a struggle on the surface... Captain Li, do you remember the female corpse we found hanging at Wang Hu’s door?"
Xu Huo suddenly spoke up. "Why were there no signs of a struggle when Liu Jie raped her?"
’Why not?’
’Because it happened after she was already dead...’
’What if these bodies weren’t murdered by the perpetrators? What if they were also obtained post-mortem?’
The perpetrators’ commodity is the dead. It’s corpses.
But do they have to kill people to acquire them?
’The places in Jiangsan City where one could get ahold of corpses...’
In that instant, a thousand thoughts raced through Li Jianye’s mind. A cold sweat beaded on his back, and a chill shot through him, as if he’d been plunged into an ice cellar.
’If their target is just corpses...’
’And in large quantities, at that!’
’There are three places that would be unavoidable...’
Xu Huo wasn’t worried about that. He was more concerned about...
"Corpse smuggling is never a one-time affair. The supplier will be easy enough to track down. What the police need to worry about is where all the bodies went."
Xu Huo rubbed his temples.
Cases involving the smuggling of human remains are never small. They’re only ever discovered after they’ve grown to an enormous scale.
During that time, the bodies involved, the families affected... if they ever found out...
’What would their reaction be?’
’And how many families would be affected?’
"And what were the bodies used for?"
Xu Huo’s voice was grave. "Plastination for anatomical display? Making them into specimens? Heh. Specimens would be the best-case scenario. I just hope they weren’t..."
In his past life, back in ’24, there was a case involving a group in the Western Country. Their main crime was organized cannibalism.
That’s right. Eating people.
And their source of ’meat,’ besides human traffickers, was corpses.
’Are they tasty without being bled first? You’d have to ask a cannibal.’
"Served on a dinner plate?"
Hearing those four words, the surrounding air seemed to grow colder.
Canni...balism!?
Li Jianye was silent for a long moment. A sudden, vicious glint appeared in his eyes. They couldn’t afford to wait for the higher-ups to step in on this case.
There were only a handful of places that could supply corpses in such quantities. What Xu Huo said wasn’t just fearmongering.
If Jiangsan City didn’t perform its own surgery now, and waited for the higher-ups to come in with their ’miracle cure’...
...then they would truly be finished!
Therefore...
"Investigate!"
’What in God’s name were these corpses being used for!?’
Comments