Zhou Xuan understood what Fu Yuanshan meant. It was because of his background that Fu Yuanshan didn't want to offend him. He would just accompany him and be considered fooling around this time. Anyway, it was within his authority and nothing would go wrong. So he took a few people to accompany him to Xichun River.
Of course, Zhou Xuan wouldn't tell him anything right now and force him to believe it. In everything, facts speak louder than words. Besides, he had already made an agreement with him, and he just wanted to help him secretly.
Fu Yuanshan first shoveled the white jade tiger into his desk drawer, then asked Zhou Xuan to go downstairs with him. In the elevator, Fu Yuanshan pressed the button for the third floor, then said to Zhou Xuan, "Mr. Zhou, that Zhou Hong from earlier, hehe, he has the same surname as you. He is the head of the serious crime unit of the branch bureau. I'll have him take a few criminal police officers to Xichunhe first!"
Zhou Xuan nodded and then said, "Director Fu, well, I think you'd better contact the salvage team first. I don't know how deep the Xichun River is. It's winter now, and the weather is very cold. If the water is too deep, the salvage operation might be difficult. We need to prepare the equipment first!" Fu Yuanshan smiled, seemingly indifferent, but not obviously, indicating that he didn't quite believe Zhou Xuan's words.
The third floor is the office of the Criminal Investigation Brigade of the branch bureau. Several groups are on the same floor. Zhou Hong was thinking about the relationship between Zhou Xuan and Director Fu. Just now in Fu Yuanshan's office, he felt that the two of them were not ordinary people. He didn't know about Zhou Xuan and Wu Jianguo's matter because he was out on a case today and was not in the bureau.
When Fu Yuanshan and Zhou Xuan appeared in front of Zhou Hong, Zhou Hong was still a little stunned. Fu Yuanshan waved his hand and instructed him: "Zhou Hong, bring three or four people, prepare a car, and come to the same place as me!"
Zhou Hong immediately jumped up. From Fu Yuanshan's tone, he could tell that something was wrong. Usually, the cases he was asked to handle were not small cases. However, the cases he had been handling recently had not made any progress. The case assigned to him was the "Twelve Zodiacs" theft and murder case. It had been half a month and there was basically no progress. What did Director Fu Yuanshan want him to do now?
Although he was speculating, Zhou Hong did not dare to be negligent. He immediately dispatched four criminal police officers under his command and drove a twelve-seater police van from the garage.
After getting into the car, Zhou Xuan didn't speak to the police officers. It wasn't that he looked down on them or was putting on airs; he simply didn't want to deal with them too much. The more time he spent with them, the more likely they would become suspicious. And his only bet was on Fu Yuanshan.
These police officers were naturally very familiar with the local situation. It only took them forty minutes to drive out of the city and arrive at Xichun River. However, Zhou Xuan had said that it was on a bridge over Xichun River, but he didn't know which bridge it was.
There are three bridges within 15 kilometers along the Xichun River. Zhou Xuan tried hard to recall the scenes he had seen while touching the white jade tiger in Fu Yuanshan's office, and wondered what other signs were on the bridge in those scenes besides the three characters "Xichun River".
After thinking for a while, I really remembered that in the middle of the three characters "Xichunhe" on the bridge, there was a gap in the stone in the middle of the character "Chun". The gap was not big, but there was some black mud stuck in the gap, which looked like it had been painted with black paint.
When crossing the first bridge, Zhou Xuan glanced at both sides. This bridge didn't even have any words on it, so of course he wouldn't cross it. When they reached the second bridge, there was a sign for "Xichun River" on it. The driver stopped the car, and Zhou Xuan looked at the three characters "Xichun River" on the stone railing by the car window. The bottom of the character "Chun" in the middle was clean, without any small black spots.
Xichunhe is located in a remote suburb. The road is a prison road, and the bridge is not wide, only twelve meters wide. Even though Zhou Xuan could not see the other side of the bridge from inside the car, the ice energy was enough to travel such a distance. In his mind, the ice energy had already detected the other side of the bridge. The bottom of the character "春" was still flat and undamaged, without that small gap.
Zhou Shi glanced at Fu Yuanshan beside him and shook his head slightly. Fu Yuanshan waved his hand, and the policeman driving in front didn't need to say anything more. He had already explained when he came that when they reached the bridge over the Xichun River, "there are only three bridges over the Xichun River within this 15-kilometer radius. We have already crossed two bridges. Needless to say, there is only one bridge left. Drive straight over there."
The journey of a few kilometers took only a minute or so. As soon as they stopped on the bridge, Zhou Xuan got out of the car, and Fu Yuanshan followed him, wanting to see what made Zhou Xuan so certain. But in his heart, he guessed that Zhou Xuan was just being silly.
Zhou Hong and his four men went to the bridge to smoke. Since Director Fu was not available, he didn't want to interfere. Logically speaking, if there was something wrong, Director Fu wouldn't have brought them here, right? Was he just taking them out for a walk and a meal?
Zhou Hong thought it was very likely, because another outsider from their department, Zhou Xuan, also came along!
Zhou Xuan stood by the bridge, specifically on the side with the gap in the character "春" (Spring). Just as he had imagined, there was a small gap at the bottom of the character "春," with a tiny speck of black mud, about the size of a finger, stuck to it like a black dot. The sack containing the corpse had been thrown down about two meters to the right of the three characters "西春河" (West Spring River).
This area is relatively remote, with rural houses far apart. The river is not very wide, and the current is not rapid, but it is not very deep either, about three meters deep. The water is heavily polluted and is murky black. Even at a depth of only twenty or thirty centimeters, Zhou Xuan estimated that he could not see the bottom.
The bridge was only about ten meters away from the poisonous water, probably just eight or nine meters. This distance was well within the range of Zhou Xuan's icy aura.
Fu Yuanshan stood beside him, watching him without asking any questions. Zhou Xuan had already used his ice energy to probe down the spot in the image where the murderer had thrown the body. Underwater, Zhou Xuan's ice energy detected the location of the sack. Due to its weight, almost a third of it was submerged in the silt. The body parts inside the sack were already severely decomposed, probably due to high water pollution or the fact that it had been there for quite some time.
Once the location was confirmed, Zhou Xuan no longer needed to play games with Fu Yuanshan. He ran his hand along the stone railing and whispered, "Director Fu, this is the spot. The sack containing the body was thrown down from here. Besides the body parts, there was also a stone in the sack. It didn't float up because of its weight, right?"
Fu Yuanshan tried to look down at Jiao's body, but the water was too murky and dark to see into the bottom. After Zhou Xuan told him these words, he hesitated whether to call a salvage team.
Seeing Fu Yuanshan hesitate, Zhou Shi smiled and said calmly, "Director Fu, do you think I would be so bored as to joke with you like this? I'm not just doing this for fun. Let's talk about cause and effect. If I were to fool around and make you laugh, what good would it do me?"
Fu Yuanshan was indeed hesitant, but Zhou Xuan's words made him decide. It made perfect sense. What good would it do if Zhou Xuan lied to him? He would gain nothing—no money, no reputation, no connections. There was no need for him to do it!
Once Fu Yuanshan made up his mind, he immediately waved to Zhou Hong and the others who were smoking across from him and said, "Zhou Hong, come here for a second!"
Zhou Hong quickly threw away his cigarette butt and walked over, and the other policemen also ran over.
Fu Yuanshan thought for a moment before instructing, "Zhou Hong, immediately notify the bureau to arrange for two rubber boats to be brought over, along with salvage equipment, and get here!"
Zhou Hong was taken aback. "Salvage? Salvage what here?"
Fu Yuanshan snorted and said, "Hurry up and make arrangements. Why ask so many questions? You can't even solve a case, yet you have so many questions!" Zhou Hong blushed, took out his phone, and went to the side to make a call to arrange manpower.
Fu Yuanshan didn't mean to mock Zhou Hong, but he himself only trusted Zhou Xuan's words to a certain extent, so what could he say? If there really was a sack containing a body after the retrieval, that would be a different story, but right now, who knows? Since he himself couldn't figure it out, how could he tell Zhou Hong?
The Xichun River is neither wide nor swift, so this salvage mission was not a big task for them. Apart from the cold weather, it was nothing special and not difficult at all.
Forty minutes later, the Dongcheng Branch arrived in two vehicles: a patrol car and a box truck used to transport the prisoner. The box truck towed two rubber boats, a manual air pump, and a dozen long steel bars such as retrieval hooks.
[ .]
Volume 1, Chapter 257: The Secret on the Corpse
Without Fu Yuanshan giving any instructions, Zhou Hong automatically prepared the rubber boat with the people from the branch office and used an air pump to inflate it. In just over ten minutes, the rubber boat was fully inflated.
The dozen or so policemen who came over split into two groups. One group of several people carried the rubber boat from the sloping road at one end of the bridge to the riverbank, then pushed the boat into the river. Two people then boarded the boat and rowed it to the middle of the river with wooden oars.
Next, another rubber boat was pushed into the river. After the two rubber boats were rowed to the middle of the river, Zhou Xuan accompanied Fu Yuanshan on the bridge and pointed out the location to him. Fu Yuanshan then directed the police on the rubber boats below from that location, shouting, "Right here, use the tools to retrieve it!"
The police officers on the two rubber boats put away their oars, then picked up their scoops and fished the dumplings out of the river at the spot that Director Fu had pointed out from the bridge.
The water was murky and heavily polluted, with a foul odor. It was impossible to see into the river from the surface. However, the river was not deep, only three meters at its deepest point and a little over one meter at the edge. Iron claws easily reached the bottom. Because Zhou Xuan used ice gas to determine the location, the police on the rubber boat easily located the sack.
After the hook caught the sack, the policeman shouted, "Something's here! It looks like it's hooked something!" He pulled hard, but the sack was too heavy, and the hook came off easily.
The policeman then tried using an iron hook, but the sack was too heavy and fell off again when he tried to pull it up. He immediately said to the policeman on another rubber boat, "You two, come with me and hook it up at the same time. Pull together and see if you can get it out!"
Then, the four policemen on the two rubber boats used iron hooks to reach down into the river and hook the sack. The four men counted "one, two?" and on the count of three, they all pulled together. The weight of the sack was distributed among the four men, and the force on each iron hook was much lighter. This time, the sack did not fall off, and the iron hooks lifted it up.
When the sack surfaced, several policemen smelled a strong stench of decay, and one of them shouted, "It's a corpse!"
Actually, he didn't need to shout. Everyone on the bridge and by the river could see clearly that a hand was sticking out of the burlap sack—a human hand, an adult's hand! Fu Yuanshan on the bridge was stunned. He reached out and grabbed Zhou Xuan's shoulder, squeezing hard!
Zhou Xuan actually guessed correctly. Is it because he has this special ability, or is he the one who started it all?
This is simply unbelievable. Unless Zhou Xuan is the murderer, how could he know so accurately that there was a body in the river and that the location was so precise?
But Fu Yuanshan also clearly realized that Zhou Xuan didn't seem to have been to this place before, yet he knew the exact location of the body in the water. Moreover, Zhou Xuan was definitely not a fool. As the director of the public security bureau, his years of experience made him realize that if Zhou Xuan were the murderer, why would he have brought them here to retrieve the body? Wasn't this a blatant attempt to cover something up?
Four policemen on a rubber boat in the river used their strength to drag the sack to the riverbank. Then, the policemen on the riverbank took over and carried the sack onto the road. Then, the policeman with the camera started taking pictures of the river and the sack containing the body.