Animal Detective

Chapter 225 - 222: Liu Zhi’s Future Contact

"Let me tell you about a case, and you’ll understand."

Shen Xin briefly recounted Wu Jiawang’s case.

"Seven years?"

When Liu Jie heard that Lele had guarded the grave for seven years and had instantly recognized Gao Jinrui on sight, he was filled with amazement.

"What a good dog."

Liu Jie sighed with emotion and fell into deep thought.

His brow was furrowed; it was unclear what he was thinking.

With their superior silent, Shen Xin and the others didn’t dare say more and just drank their tea quietly.

After a good while, Liu Jie snapped out of it, glanced at the time, and said, "Alright, it’s getting late. You two should hurry back to Nanjiang. If anything comes up here, we’ll stay in touch."

With that, he got up to pay the bill.

Since he had said that, it meant they could only wait for the results of the Songling investigation for Jiang Qi’s case.

After they walked out, Liu Jie even made a point of asking for Shen Xin’s phone number, added him on WeChat, and oddly told him they should keep in touch.

Shen Xin was a little confused.

’I’m just a junior officer, and he’s a deputy captain. What would we need to keep in touch about?’

The two of them drove back to Nanjiang.

In the car, Ding Yuwei soon brought up Jiang Qi’s case and asked Shen Xin for his thoughts.

She hadn’t entered the scene or seen the body.

Shen Xin recalled the scene.

He hadn’t gone up to the second floor, so he didn’t know the building’s exact layout.

But from the outside, it looked like a setback-style house. The staircase was against the back wall, and because the living room wasn’t spacious, the stairs were quite steep.

His gut feeling was that she had died from falling down the stairs.

Shen Xin had noticed a hematoma on the right side of Jiang Qi’s forehead.

"It’s hard to say. If we’re calling it a suicide... Bai Jifei said the illness had already progressed to the mid-to-late stage. She could barely even move her torso."

Bai Jifei had said that Jiang Qi’s speech wasn’t very clear anymore. If no one helped her, she could only wriggle on the floor like a caterpillar.

Under these circumstances, intentionally rolling down the stairs seemed like it would not have been an easy thing for her to do.

At this point, Shen Xin said, "Actually, I’m quite curious. She said she wanted to find a place with no one around to end it all. How was she going to do it? Starve herself to death?"

Her idea was not to trouble anyone.

If someone helped her commit suicide—no matter how, like buying sleeping pills for her—it would be a crime.

It would drag someone else down with her.

And in her current condition, she couldn’t even hold a knife. When he thought about it, the only option she seemed to have was to starve herself to death.

Ding Yuwei frowned slightly. "Starving to death must be agonizing."

Shen Xin nodded.

Or rather, die of thirst.

You might not die from not eating for ten or fifteen days, but three days without water could really kill a person.

Her body had started to decompose, so it was estimated that she died on the 7th or 8th of the month.

She went missing on the morning of the 6th.

If she had stopped drinking water from that moment, she could have indeed died of thirst by the 8th.

’But how incredibly painful that must have been.’

Back at the police academy during a major competition, Shen Xin had once competed until he got heatstroke, and that had felt like a fate worse than death. To dehydrate yourself to death... he couldn’t imagine how many times more painful that would be.

The two of them fell silent.

They were already entering Nanjiang’s jurisdiction when Ding Yuwei suddenly spoke up. "Do you think maybe her plan was to die of thirst, but when she was on the verge of death, she just couldn’t take it anymore? Maybe she tried to get from the second floor to the first to find water, and then she rolled down the stairs and died from the fall."

Knowing there’s a faucet and water downstairs, the brain would force you to search for it.

In a dazed and groggy state, it wouldn’t be strange to fall down the stairs.

Shen Xin blinked his tired, aching eyes and said, "If that’s the case, then she must have suffered immensely before she died."

On the evening of the 6th, she was brought to the house by her foreign friend. With no one to care for her, unable to do anything, she just quietly waited for death to arrive.

She would have had to endure all the body’s reactions to dehydration. Every second must have been torture.

Until her brain sensed the danger and compelled her to go downstairs to find water.

And then she tumbled down the stairs.

If she didn’t die instantly from the fall, lying there unable to speak clearly, with no one to help, just dying all alone... who knows if that was the kind of death she wanted.

It was already past eleven at night when they returned to the branch office.

A lot of people were still working.

Chen Chao had even prepared a late-night snack. When he saw the two of them return, he called them over to eat.

"No, thanks. We already ate."

Shen Xin sat down and asked about Bai Jifei’s parents.

He had seen them sitting in the reception room when he came in.

The old couple were both there.

The old man had pushed a few chairs together and was lying on them.

The old woman, on the other hand, sat there motionless, as if in a trance.

"Don’t even mention it. We couldn’t persuade them to leave no matter what. We told them to go rest in the dorms, but they refused," Zhao Tianxing said while shoveling fried noodles into his mouth.

Zhou Zhongyi said their relatives had been notified and were on their way from Pingyu. They should be able to persuade the couple to leave then.

Shen Xin nodded, then asked Chen Chao if they had told Bai Jifei about Jiang Qi’s death.

"We did."

Chen Chao nodded. Jiang Qi’s death is under investigation. Of course we had to tell him.

Shen Xin was about to ask how he reacted, but Zhao Tianxing cut in, "Don’t even ask. He wailed for ages. We still have someone keeping an eye on him now."

Shen Xin fell silent.

Bai Jifei’s actions were certainly reprehensible, but now that Jiang Qi was truly dead, it was all rather tragic.

Shen Xin didn’t want to talk about it anymore. He changed the subject, turning to Li Haifeng in the distance.

"Brother Feng, any progress with Li Yihao? Did he say anything about Wang Qiang?"

They still hadn’t found Wang Qiang’s parents.

The missing person video had been posted online, but even after a week, there were still no leads.

The video’s popularity had already faded.

Li Yihao had been transferred to the detention center, and Li Haifeng was now in charge of the follow-up investigation.