Make a Fortune and Become Well-off [90] - Chapter 145

In a public security bureau located in the provincial capital, Officer Wu, who had just returned after a long day of visiting and investigating, tiredly poured himself a glass of water.

Seeing that Officer Wu appeared so exhausted, his colleague walked over to pour some water for him and asked, “Still no progress in the case?” Officer Wu shook his head.

They were currently chasing down a murder case in which a family of five had been killed. However, despite investigating their social relationships, they hadn’t been able to identify the murderer. They had been investigating the case for a long time now, and as time dragged on, fewer clues came to light. The further the case progressed, the harder it became to uncover the truth.

In that era, this situation was not uncommon. Criminal investigation techniques and technology were still underdeveloped, and police officers mostly relied on their experience to solve cases. They often came across situations where the murderer would kill, flee to another location, change their identity, and remain free for years. Many such cases went unsolved for decades. If the killer wasn’t found, the case would simply end up in the files, never to be reopened.

Sometimes, more than ten or twenty years later, the murderer—now a well-established and respected entrepreneur in a different location—would finally be discovered.

Officer Wu sat back in the wooden armchair in the office with a sense of frustration and irritability, his eyes heavy as he gazed at the birds outside the window. After days of exhaustive work and constant dead ends in the investigation, his mind felt drained, and he was mentally fatigued to the point of sleepiness.

He opened his pocket, took out a cigarette, placed it in his mouth, and began searching for a lighter on the table. “Do you have a lighter? Let me borrow one.”

On the wooden coffee table, there were scattered newspapers and magazines.

Sometimes, when they weren’t too busy, they would read the newspapers. The magazines, however, were mostly decorative, only occasionally picked up by the office clerical staff to browse through.

One of the magazines was Wuxia. People in the office had heard that there was an author in their system who wrote about criminal investigation methods, which were said to have some practical reference value. As a result, someone had purchased a copy and left it there, though no one ever really had the time or inclination to read it.

Officer Wu picked up the Wuxia magazine, and a lighter fell from between its pages. “Who left a lighter in this book?”

He lit the cigarette in his mouth, tossed the lighter back onto the coffee table, rested his elbows on his thighs, and opened the Wuxia magazine.

The lighter must have been placed there before, leaving an empty crease in the pages. The spot where he opened the magazine just happened to be the page with a story set in the Song Dynasty.

It was a new case. At first, Officer Wu was simply bored, skimming through it casually. But as he continued reading, something caught his attention—something felt off.

How could the case in the story bear such an uncanny resemblance to the one they were currently investigating? Many of the details matched exactly. The more he read, the more shocked he became.

If it weren’t for the story being set in the Song Dynasty, he might have thought one of his colleagues had written it.

He couldn’t resist flipping back to the front, checking the author’s name, and then glancing at the publication date of the magazine. Intrigued, he wanted to read further, but it was a serialized story, and the rest of the content wasn’t there.

He picked up the magazine and walked into another office to ask his colleagues if they had the next issue.

The publication date of that issue of the magazine was half a month ago. If it were a monthly or semi-monthly magazine, there would be no subsequent issue yet. However, if it were a weekly magazine, there might be one or two more issues available.

What troubled Officer Wu was how the case in the story had details so similar to their ongoing investigation, even down to the methods of searching for clues, which were almost identical to what they had experienced over the past few days.

Logically, no one but him and his immediate colleagues should know those details. Even others in their office, who weren’t directly involved in handling the case, wouldn’t be aware of these specifics.

Unbeknownst to him, Jiang Ning, the author, had drawn inspiration from archived cases in the Public Security Bureau. She had specifically chosen serious, long-unsolved cases to make her stories more dramatic. Some of these cases had remained unsolved for decades before more advanced investigative techniques were applied in recent years, which helped find new clues.

A number of the cases involved missing persons whose bodies were accidentally discovered years later, leading to the eventual resolution of the case. These were all difficult cases, and many of them had been recounted to Jiang Ning by veteran officers who had worked on the investigations. The officers shared vivid details of their pursuit of criminals, some of which had made it into official records, while others remained undocumented.

After artistic embellishment, Jiang Ning used these details into her stories, creating an immersive and realistic narrative. As a result, some police officers within the system who read her stories were convinced that “Ning Meng”, her pen name, must be one of their own, possibly a retired officer.

Initially, Officer Wu suspected that the article’s content had been written by one of his colleagues. But then, he realized something unsettling: the details about hunting for clues in the story closely mirrored what had happened to him that very same day. Not even his colleagues, let alone the author, could have known those specifics in advance.

This led him to briefly consider a chilling possibility: could the author be the murderer? Perhaps the killer had meticulously recorded all the details of their crime, published them as fiction to taunt law enforcement, and then followed the script to carry out the murder before vanishing.

But that idea quickly unraveled. There was no way the author could have predicted what would happen on that particular day, half a month before it even occurred. No matter how hard Officer Wu tried to piece it together, it didn’t make sense. In the end, he wondered if it was just a bizarre coincidence.

But the uncanny resemblance between the case they were investigating and the story in the magazine, with far too many similar details, made it impossible for Officer Wu to ignore. He became eager to find the next part of the story.

And he did find it.

The problem was, he and his colleagues were constantly out in the field, running around and working late into the night. Sometimes, they were as tired as dogs, spending hours investigating and chasing down leads. Overtime became the norm, and even when they returned to the office, they barely had time to glance at the newspapers, let alone sit down to read magazines. When they did pick up a magazine, it was usually a quick flip through a couple of pages without really reading a word—always preoccupied with the case.