Chapter 239 - 239 230 The Cage is Empty

Words : 2221 Updated : Sep 27th, 2025

239: Chapter 230: The Cage is Empty 239: Chapter 230: The Cage is Empty The performance of the police officers in Qinghe City wasn’t much different from that of Wei Zhenguo. When they heard about the stolen monkeys, they laughed, but when they heard that one monkey was worth 150,000, they gasped in shock. Like monkeys themselves. However, despite the high case value, it was still treated as a theft, and the district police that arrived were still in charge. In total, there were four officers, including the trace evidence technician Cao Keyang from the City Bureau, who had volunteered to come. Cao Keyang had taken the initiative to get involved. He had regretted missing out on the Jianyuan Company case days before because he had been working on another case. This time, he was the first to show up when the district criminal police called for assistance. The main investigative force of the Qinghe City Bureau worked mostly at the district and county levels. However, unlike the county bureaus, district bureaus generally had fewer technical positions, including trace evidence and forensic doctors, and often borrowed personnel from the city bureau. After all, the technical staff of the city bureau also needed to go down to the townships and districts, so whoever used them, used them; additionally, it was more convenient and less expensive for the district bureaus to use them. Upon arriving at Qinghe College, Cao Keyang immediately asked Jiang Yuan, “Will there be any deaths?” The use of “will there be” drew particular attention. Cao Keyang’s thought process was quite straightforward. The case that Jiang Yuan had worked on days before, the Jianyuan Company’s, had started as a theft but then resulted in the deaths of two people, the son of Jianyuan Company’s chairman and his boyfriend. If Jianyuan Company represented the pinnacle of Qinghe City’s private economy, then the academic pinnacle would be Qinghe College. Although only a junior college, Qinghe College has a history of more than fifty years and its principal held a high administrative rank. For Cao Keyang, a trace evidence technician focused on logic, it was a subconscious and reasonable assumption that Jiang Yuan was being proactive. For instance, it made sense that there would be deaths associated with Jianyuan Company right before it went public. Therefore, it could naturally be inferred that it wouldn’t be surprising for deaths to occur at Qinghe College either. Yet, Cao Keyang’s look of expectation caused Jiang Yuan to shake his head with a chuckle. It was just four missing monkeys, after all, which had nothing to do with death. Valuable monkeys were still just monkeys. But in Cao Keyang’s view, that smile was all too intriguing. “I understand, let the evidence do the talking,” Cao Keyang said. Of course, this was the right approach. Although Jiang Yuan felt that Cao Keyang’s expression was a bit off, he still said in a professional tone, “Anyway, let’s start with the crime scene.” Cao Keyang readily agreed, then followed the other officers into the Veterinary Building. Jiang Yuan borrowed a white lab coat and followed them in. All of Qinghe College’s monkeys were kept in one room. Now, with the iron cages empty, it appeared that the locks were likely cut directly with hydraulic shears. Cao Keyang briskly took a couple of photos, the situation typically indicating an outsider’s job. Insiders usually wouldn’t bring hydraulic shears to falsify a break-in, as it might draw attention. Of course, this was the usual scenario. The monkey enclosure was relatively clean. Cao Keyang looked around and found a surveillance camera, then asked someone outside, “Are the recordings still available?” “It’s broken.” The teacher responsible for the monkey enclosure seemed a bit stunned at the moment. “When did it break?” “It’s been broken for a year or two. We reported it, but it hasn’t been fixed,” the young teacher answered. The monkey enclosure was only so large, and with the surveillance camera watching, it could feel somewhat uncomfortable. Therefore, it was somewhat understandable that there wasn’t much enthusiasm for repairing it. Jiang Yuan looked down at the floor again. The tables and chairs had been moved around, and there were scrape marks on the floor, making it look rather messy. Inside the room, there were no clear footprints left on the floor. There were, however, a few partial shoe prints, likely where someone had stepped on some food dropped on the floor, leaving behind a faint pattern. But the information they could provide was very limited. Cao Keyang turned to look at Jiang Yuan, and seeing no reaction from him, said to the fellow criminal police, “You guys go check the surveillance cameras, I’ll sweep here for fingerprints, see if there’s any breakthrough.” When a trace evidence technician speaks this way to colleagues, it’s as if a man were telling a woman, “Wait a second while I take a pill.” No need for embarrassment, it’s just routine. But it’s nothing to be proud of either. It was, after all, just another ordinary day. At the entrance. The officers were also busily making records. The person who was questioned the longest was the teacher in charge of the monkey enclosure, who also happened to be the one who reported the incident. He cooperated with a willingness to answer all questions. After the interrogation was completed, he asked in return, “When can the monkeys be found?” “That’s hard to say,” said the detective with difficulty. How could they guarantee the outcome of solving a case? The teacher in charge of the monkeys watched him intently and said, “This is for my graduation thesis.” “Huh, aren’t you a teacher?” “I’m a PhD student at the Agricultural University, working here while studying,” the teacher in the monkey enclosure murmured. “For three years now.” “What does the monkey have to do with your graduate thesis?” The primate caretaker said, “My graduate thesis is about breeding rhesus monkeys...” The criminal investigator took some notes and said, “You work at Qinghe College, are pursuing a doctoral degree at the Agricultural University, and then you use the state-owned monkeys for your thesis?” The primate caretaker thought for a moment and said, “That’s more or less the situation.” “Only you intellectuals can figure these things out,” the criminal investigator clicked his tongue twice, reopened the record, and said, “In this doctoral pursuit of yours, have you offended anyone... ” “No.” “How about in other respects, have you offended anyone?” The primate caretaker said annoyingly, “No! I’m a researcher, where would I go to offend people?” The criminal investigator stressed, “Under normal circumstances, outsiders wouldn’t come with hydraulic cutters to steal your monkeys. Think carefully, have you recently been in any conflict, encountered any strange people, strange events, or heard any strange comments?” “Why must you insist on questioning me?” the primate caretaker said in dissatisfaction. “Clearly it was just a theft specifically for the monkeys.” The criminal investigator gave the primate caretaker a stern look and said, “We’ll definitely follow up on the monkey lead as well. But about your side of things, we need to ask you, don’t we? Say what you know, leave the investigation to us!” The tone grew slightly heavier and the primate caretaker felt a bit oppressed, bowing his head in thought. After a while, he said, “If you really want to know if something’s happened, recently there’ve been a few calls trying to buy monkeys, offering quite a high price. But these monkeys have their own tasks and obviously can’t be sold to them...” The criminal investigator frantically recorded everything. Jiang Yuan surveyed the scene, taking special note to photograph the footprints on the ground. He also found a fiber trace at the corner of a table and carefully collected it with an evidence bag before quietly leaving the scene. The fiber could have been left by a student or a teacher at the school, but it could also have been left by the thief. Jiang Yuan judged by eye that the most relevant possibility was that the thieves had used a sack-like bag to carry the monkeys, which brushed against the table corner and left some fibers. If this were a homicide, such fiber evidence would already have been pursued. But since it was a theft, it would be good enough to be considered evidence in the end. Following this lead directly would be slightly more troublesome; they’d only consider it if all other clues yielded no results. After leaving the scene, Jiang Yuan followed Wei Zhenguo to check the surveillance footage. Investigating a theft scene is just as exhaustive as a homicide scene; if one wanted to scan it thoroughly, it would still take several hours. Plus, it comes with backache, leg cramps, and a consumption of materials weighing three to five kilograms. Today’s case wasn’t Jiang Yuan’s, and probing further meant he had no right to scan the scene. Jiang Yuan also had no interest in scanning the scene. Human strength has its limits. If you have to handle every case that comes up, you’ll exhaust yourself, and if you’re unlucky, you might even offend someone. Even if Cao Keyang was extremely amiable, it didn’t necessarily mean he’d appreciate Jiang Yuan’s guidance. Qinghe College had a widespread distribution of surveillance cameras and a designated control room. Zeng Zhuohu and several students, also intrigued, followed behind Jiang Yuan and managed to enter with him. The school’s management was rather lax, so seeing the group grow larger, they simply stopped caring and just made one machine available to them. The officer in charge didn’t sit down but asked a staff member to search through the surveillance footage. At this point, Qinghe College’s extensive network of cameras showed its strength. Due to the sheer number of videos and too few people watching them, the viewers grew incredibly tired. That criminal investigator wasn’t a professional in image investigation; even identifying key frames was a struggle, let alone following up with the next key frames. In several surveillance videos, they could make out the figure of the thieves, a man and a woman, dragging two suitcases, but their faces were unclear, and their identities couldn’t be confirmed. The most challenging part was that just as they had finally found them in the footage, they would lose track of them again. The students were the first to grow bored with watching, and one of the girls approached Jiang Yuan and asked in a soft and sweet tone, “Is this how you typically watch surveillance, just like this?” “More or less, watching surveillance is quite boring,” Jiang Yuan recalled the work content of the image investigators and sympathized. Despite image investigation being a hot skill currently in criminal sciences and often associated with big data, at the operational level, it’s more about big eyes so to speak... Considering Qinghe College’s style of surveillance, the control room looked impressive, but half of the cameras were real-time without proper storage, only good for promotional news photos, and there were issues with the recording loop... It’s the same old story; if a few people died at Qinghe College, all these cameras would be precious. But if it’s just about stolen monkeys, these cameras were equivalent to the blind spot of image investigation. The girl beside him naturally didn’t understand Jiang Yuan’s musings. She moved even closer and whispered, “Actually, if there were spare machines, we could help watch too...” “Actually, there’s no need,” Jiang Yuan suddenly redirected his thoughts and coughed twice before saying, “Just check the surveillance of the walls. If there is no video of the exits, then they must have left over the walls.” “Climbing walls isn’t easy. Four monkeys look quite heavy,” said the officer in charge. “Each one weighs about ten pounds,” Zeng Zhuohu clarified nearby. “The suitcases have some weight too. It’s manageable to push them, but climbing walls with them would be quite tiring,” the criminal investigator pointed to a screenshot of the previous video. The two thieves were seen dragging two suitcases of different sizes, which definitely weren’t light. If they had to climb the walls, the suitcases would become a hassle. “Maybe they crawled through a hole in the wall,” the speaker this time was evidently older. People looked over in surprise and stood up straight, immediately saying, “Principal.” “Principal Heng,” Zeng Zhuohu also greeted. Qinghe College’s Principal Heng Wenxuan smiled and nodded, then made a special greeting to the police, saying, “Thank you all for your hard work. I’ve heard your discussion about the case and couldn’t help but say something. You see, our school’s walls have several holes that can be used to go in and out.” “Then check those cameras,” the criminal investigator said right away. The control room staff said with difficulty, “The camera over there was broken right after being installed and hasn’t been replaced recently.” “Hmm...” the criminal investigator frowned. “There’s a camera inside the small restaurant opposite the hole,” the Principal said with a smile. “It’s aimed right at the hole.”

Chapter 239 - 239 230 The Cage is Empty

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