Animal Detective

Back in the office, Ding Yuwei and the other two were gathered around Teddy.

Zhao Tianxing kept trying to touch him, but Ding Yuwei slapped his hand away each time.

Yang Zeran was much more practical. He was on a video call with his wife, Song Xiangli, bragging that this was a bird worth seven million.

Teddy paid the three of them little mind.

But as soon as he saw Shen Xin return, his attitude changed completely. He waddled over to greet him.

’Where have you been?’

He let out a squawk, acting quite nosy.

Shen Xin had just gotten back from his business trip after a long drive. There was no reason for him to start working today, so he planned to head home first.

His dad had been constantly asking when he would be home and where the falcon was.

And then there was Yuexiao. He’d been gone for several days and needed to go see him.

"By the way, how’s the investigation into that poisoning case going?" Shen Xin asked.

He had been away on business for a few days, but the work in the office hadn’t stopped.

After the Oceanarium case was closed and entered the procedural phase, they had sifted through the files and selected a poisoning case.

It was a case from Tingyang District.

Shen Xin’s feelings about this case were rather mixed.

First of all, it was a homicide.

The municipal bureau had recently established a dedicated cold case office, showing how seriously they were taking these.

So, in terms of investigative direction, they definitely had to choose a relatively difficult homicide.

They couldn’t pick more common cold cases, like a theft that happened in a certain year and place, or a robbery of a driver where no one was killed.

Second, in Ding Yuwei’s words, the victim in this case had a cat, which was ’right up Shen Xin’s alley.’

’Thanks a lot,’ Shen Xin thought.

The cat from the case had been abandoned after the incident. Three years had passed; there was no telling if it was even still alive.

Furthermore, Shen Xin was skeptical about them choosing a poisoning case.

Among the many types of criminal investigations, two were notoriously difficult to solve.

One was a crime committed by a transient stranger—that is, I kill a random person at a random location and immediately flee the scene.

Shen Xin had experienced a case like this before. Whether it could be solved or not depended largely on luck.

The other type was a poisoning case.

And poisoning cases were even more peculiar, belonging to a category that was both easy and difficult.

They were easy in the sense that you could trace the source of the poison from the type of poisoning.

Moreover, poisoning is generally premeditated. Investigating the people around the victim could easily uncover leads.

But at the same time, poisoning cases were extremely difficult.

Some involved rare poisons whose sources were hard to trace.

Others involved delayed-action poisons that took effect slowly, making it difficult to secure evidence.

On top of that, they were not easily discovered.

This is because the symptoms of some poisonings mimic common illnesses, like acute liver failure, which can be caused by many factors in daily life.

Doctors and family members wouldn’t readily suspect poisoning.

If the person died from the illness, it would be treated as a death by natural causes. A hospital’s routine blood test is completely different from what a forensic examiner would look for.

Coupled with the relatively low autopsy rate for unnatural deaths in the country...

...some poisoning cases might never even be discovered, with the victim dying inexplicably.

So when a case like this becomes a cold case, you can imagine how difficult it is to solve.

Sure enough, when he asked, he learned that all they had done these past few days was sort through the old case files and re-interview the original persons of interest.

And they had found nothing.

As for the cat, Zhao Tianxing was in charge of finding it. Just mentioning it brought a tear to his eye. He complained that with the mosquitos out now, he’d been diving into bushes everywhere.

He’d also been scratched by more than a few stray cats and was only holding up thanks to rabies shots.

"Shen Xin, we have to use Da Mei," Zhao Tianxing said with a serious expression.

When it came to finding a cat, Da Mei, being the great beauty of the feline world, was a much better fit.

"Alright. You all can clock out early this afternoon. Then tomorrow, we’ll find some time to go over the case and discuss a direction,"

Shen Xin instructed before dragging his luggage and leaving.

First, he went to the Oceanarium.

Teddy still couldn’t be separated from him and had to stay with him.

Shen Xin was already very familiar with the Oceanarium. Li Fusen’s case was still going through the legal process.

The man remained uncooperative, refusing to confess to certain details.

But with the videos from the cloud drive, his confession didn’t really matter.

He just hadn’t done a crime scene reconstruction yet. According to Ding Yuwei, it was still due to his lack of cooperation.

The moment a reconstruction was mentioned, Li Fusen would start screaming that he’d rather bash his head in and die.

Actually, Shen Xin felt that Li Fusen was being overly dramatic.

Or perhaps, he just cared too much about what other people thought.

Like now, for instance. Only a few days had passed, and the staff at the Oceanarium entrance had already stopped asking about Li Fusen.

When he got to the Dolphin Hall and saw Chen Sili and Wang Hui, they didn’t ask about Li Fusen either.

To ordinary people, no matter how bizarre Li Fusen’s actions were, they were just a topic of idle gossip. Everyone has their own life; who would really keep paying attention to him forever?

When he saw Yuexiao again, the dolphin’s reception was incredibly enthusiastic. It zipped to the edge of the pool, flapped its pectoral fins, and squealed nonstop.

Chen Sili couldn’t help but mention that in the days Shen Xin was away, Yuexiao had been causing quite a stir.

Whenever it got agitated and was in a bad mood, it would go pick a fight with Xingbao and Yuebao.

It couldn’t win a two-on-one fight, so now they had someone specifically assigned to watch them at night to prevent them from brawling.

’Don’t go.’

This was Yuexiao’s inner voice.

Upon physical contact, Shen Xin could also see what he was thinking.

Thankfully, there were no illicit images, just scenes of Shen Xin keeping Yuexiao company, scrubbing his body, and playing with him.

It could only be said that, biological instincts aside, Yuexiao himself had already formed a deep bond with Shen Xin.

’Who’s this?’

Teddy popped out of the backpack, craning his neck to stare intently at Yuexiao.

Shen Xin ignored him.

Zhou Xianyong rushed over after hearing the news. Like Chen Sili and the others, his eyes lit up when he saw Teddy.

"Officer Shen, this must be the Hunting Falcon you brought back from the grasslands, right? It’s gorgeous."

Zhou Xianyong had already heard about it from the people at the neighboring zoo.

They were even discussing how a genetically mutated albino Hunting Falcon had appeared, and why it was so attached to Shen Xin that it had to be brought back to Nanjiang to be raised by him.

On this point, Zhou Xianyong certainly had something to say.

He had personally witnessed how Shen Xin had trained the dolphins to be so obedient.

Shen Xin asked about the matter of them selling a dolphin.

Zhou Xianyong said, "We’re selling Yuexiao. He’s too much of a handful and just can’t get along with Xingbao and Yuebao at all."

"We’re preparing to transfer him soon. If you have time, you can come and watch."

Transporting a dolphin is no small matter; accidents can easily happen.

If Shen Xin were present, it would probably be much easier.

Shen Xin felt a little relieved.

’Buying Yuexiao and taking him home is completely unrealistic anyway.’

Being sold to the New District would make it convenient for him to visit often.

As for the problem of him being so clingy, Shen Xin thought it would probably get much better once Yuexiao found a new favorite.

「The next day」

As soon as Shen Xin got to work, Zhang Hancheng called him into his office to talk about the gambling bust case. They had just spoken on the phone yesterday, but since Zhang Hancheng was the one who had made the call, his subordinates were bound to take it seriously.

"This crew is pretty interesting." Zhang Hancheng teased Teddy a bit before laying out the specifics for Shen Xin.

This group sets up their gambling dens in the mountains.

There are many mountains in the countryside of Ji Port Town. They’re generally not high, but they cover a large area.

Once they hide in the mountains, they’re quite hard to find.

Normally, cases involving gambling dens in the mountains are relatively easy to investigate.

For one, you can send in plainclothes officers as undercover scouts to get a feel for the casino’s situation.

Second, they have certain characteristics. They always choose a desolate, mountainous area with limited routes up the mountain, and there will inevitably be lookouts posted at crucial points.

In the past, those people who inexplicably parked a car to sell things at a sparsely populated intersection were, nine times out of ten, lookouts.

Finally, there are tips from the public.

In a big city, there’s almost no truly deserted wilderness.

And some people specifically go to these remote places for adventure, off-roading, and the like.

With these three avenues, once they’re discovered, there’s no way for them to escape.

But this crew is different.

Zhang Hancheng listed several points.

First, they are highly organized. All customers are picked up and dropped off by dedicated drivers, and they only accept regulars.

Before getting in the car, they check for any electronic devices.

Once at the casino, they also have mobile electromagnetic interference and signal jamming equipment.

Shen Xin found this odd. "If there’s signal jamming, how do the lookouts on the perimeter warn them?"

Catching these gambling operations is all about watching the perimeter lookouts, figuring out their patterns, and then arranging the bust.

The electromagnetic interference is omnidirectional, so if something happens, wouldn’t the lookouts be unable to notify the people up on the mountain?

Zhang Hancheng said, "That’s the interesting part."

He continued to explain the situation.

Tips like this either come from ordinary people who stumble upon it by accident, or from gamblers who have lost too much, gotten desperate, and reported it out of spite.

Li Fang and his team targeted this group based on such a tip.

After some investigation, they quickly locked onto the target and arranged a raid.

And the result? They came up empty.

To be more precise, they raided a fake casino.

But it was set up just like a real one. There were lookouts on the perimeter, and they had observed gamblers being driven up the mountain.

They confirmed the gamblers were on the mountain, even got close enough to spot a sun canopy, and only then did they move in.

But when they surrounded the place, the gamblers were nowhere to be found.

There were people at the scene, but they weren’t gamblers, and no gambling was taking place.

In other words, it was a diversion.

At the time, Li Fang and his team suspected that the real casino must be nearby.

They expanded the search area and actually found it—the real casino was nearly three kilometers away from the fake one, almost on the other side of the mountain.

But everyone was long gone.

So the question arose: how did they find out about the raid?

Li Fang’s team had launched a surprise attack. They controlled everyone at the scene immediately and checked all their phones, but they didn’t find anyone who had secretly made a call or sent a text to warn them.

Most importantly, the real casino had electromagnetic shielding, so they couldn’t have received a call anyway.

They then suspected that someone was posted as a lookout farther away, perhaps using binoculars or a drone to monitor the fake casino. When they saw the police move in, they immediately notified the other side to evacuate.

But that still led back to the same problem: the casino had signal jamming.

After this failed operation, the group’s movements became even more secretive. Now, they’ve been spotted not only operating in Ji Port, but also in Donglin, neighboring Yanling, and Pingyu.

The fake casino is already hard enough to find, let alone the real one.

Most importantly, Li Fang and his team still couldn’t figure out just how the message was being passed between the real and fake casinos.

"They even started to suspect they might have a mole on their own team."

Zhang Hancheng snorted, a hint of amusement in his voice, and then asked Shen Xin for his thoughts.

Shen Xin fell into deep thought. He had to admit, this little gambling bust case was actually quite interesting.