“What are we looking at?” Hu Cheng lighted up another pipeful of tobacco as he asked.

“The person who delivered the letter.” Sun Fei projected the letter retrieved from Li Kui onto the screen. The handwriting was neat and the strokes were strong.

“Even though he was not caught on the surveillance footage and Li Kui did not reveal his looks, the fact that the murderer directed Li Kui to cause trouble repeatedly suggests that he was trying to draw our attention away from the case. He was scared!”

Initially, Xu Lan was unsure what purpose would it serve for Li Kui to cause trouble.

Would it not make sense for a murderer to keep a low profile? If Li Kui was not the murderer, who would the murderer be?

It was only until that night when Hu Cheng called him that he finally realized something.

The murderer would be the person who was giving orders to Li Kui! He left behind a fatal mistake! It was only a matter of time before they discovered the key leading them to the murderer.

Li Kui’s role was to generate public outrage and to cause pressure on the police. Meanwhile, the murderer would take advantage of the situation and destroy the lead!

Clap, clap, clap…

Li Xiu who sat at the corner started clapping. He straightened his legs and stood up, making his way to the screen.

“After hearing Officer Xu’s analysis, I must say that I’m impressed with his sharp observation and accurate analysis. However, I have a question,” he said.

“Pray tell.” Xu Lan shut his eyes out of reflex, something that he did subconsciously when he was thinking and when he sensed danger.

“According to Officer Xu’s hypothesis, the person who wrote the letter is the murderer. How do we explain Li Kui’s third attempt at causing a scene? I do play a role in it and for that, I shall apologize to everyone here.” He bowed as he posed his question.

“If Li Kui could potentially expose the murderer, why would the murderer take a chance and order him to cause more trouble? The outcome would contradict your analysis in its entirety. Moreover, we are only given ten days to solve this case. This would be undesirable to the murderer as we would scrutinize every lead that we come across.”

“Officer Li, you are right. However, I did not attribute Li Kui’s third attempt to the murderer. As Li Kui was leaving the police station, there is no way that he would have written a letter. Seeing how cautious the murderer is, he wouldn’t have given his order to Li Kui via handphone.”

“We can easily find out about this through an investigation. Moreover, some here mentioned the words on the victim earlier. Would it be possible to compare the handwriting with those in the letter? If this is fruitful, we could narrow down our search. There is no way that all of the surveillance rooms in this area broke down.

“As the murderer would have checked the area out, we just need to identify individuals who loitered around specific spots. After singling out the suspicious individuals who are not a resident here, wouldn’t it be possible for us to find a lead or two?”

After speaking to his heart’s content, Li Xiu took a huge gulp of water as he waited for replies to come through.

Prior to his little speech, everyone thought that Li Xiu was nothing more than a decorative vase and a pair of spying eyes for the higher-ups. His sickly appearance and his lackey made him stand out in all the wrong ways. With his little speech earlier, he managed to rewrite everyone’s impression of him.

If he was incapable, there was no way that he was chosen to supervise such a tacky case.

“That’s a great idea. It’s a lot of effort to go through the surveillance footage of all three areas. To think that I’ve excluded this method subconsciously…” Xu Lan murmured as he looked at the letter on the screen.

“Great! Let’s do this. Xu Lan, bring along Xiao Li, Zhu Hong and her team to check out Jingxin area. Sun Fei, bring along Xiao Xu, Qingyan and the rest to check out Lanshan area. Officer Li and I will bring the rest of the team to check out the surveillance footage at Honghe area. Understood?”

Hu Cheng quickly assigned everyone with their posts. Time was running out, the mission was important, and they had nothing to spare!

“Understood!” everyone answered in unison.

“What, what about me?” Wu Wendi stood up and asked embarrassingly.

“As for you… Just follow Xu Lan around will do.” Besides Xu Lan, no one else would take her in.

“Fine then.” Wu Wendi lost her confidence from earlier. She stood behind Xu Lan meekly.

“Director General, we have another emergency call coming in!” Xiao Zhang who was on duty shouted loudly from downstairs.

“What! Again…?” Everyone was surprised by the report, this would be three murder cases in a row. They rushed over immediately.

“The address is 29, Taiping Road!”

“Let’s head over to the crime scene now. Sun Fei, bring along your equipment. Xiao Li and I will head over first.” Xu Lan dragged Xiao Li along as he reached for the door, ready to hop into the car.

“Eh, Sergeant Xu! Don’t you think that this address is slightly familiar?” Xiao Li said hurriedly, trying to ignore the sharp pain shooting up his arm.

“Lao Xu, this seems to be your address!” Hu Cheng breathed out a long frustrated sigh.

“Who made the call?” Xu Lan walked over to Xiao Zhang, barely keeping his cool as he asked.

“It’s a child.” Xiao Zhang had never seen such a terrifying side of Xu Lan before.