Chapter 147 — The Long-Awaited...

"Say, does your license even let you drive this thing?" Yang Ce was a little worried.

"Pfft. I'm a deputy captain of criminal investigation—who'd dare pull me over?" Xia Xue patted her chest proudly. "Besides, you underestimate me. We detectives have to be able to drive anything. In a crisis, sometimes one extra skill is one extra chance at survival."

Yang Lanxu said, "It's not just you—we killers are the same way." Naturally, Yang Ce did not dare say this to Xia Xue. His relationship with this girl was hardly rock-solid; if she turned on him and had him arrested, what then?

Xia Xue started the truck, and it crept slowly forward. Her driving, it seemed, really was quite good.

"This thing is actually pretty easy to drive. The steering's power-assisted," Xia Xue said.

"Xia Xue, you're not a traffic cop. That business back there shouldn't be your responsibility, should it?" Now that it was just the two of them, Yang Yanzhou no longer saw any need to hold his tongue.

Hearing Yang Juehuan's words, Xia Xue hesitated. About the case, she could not reveal anything to Yan—and yet, between her and Yan, there was almost the feel of comrades who had faced death together. Besides, Yang Shuoxuan had helped her crack a major smuggling case.

"Ha, you don't need to hide it from me. I was there the day Uncle Chen had his accident. I can put the pieces together," Yang Ce said with a smile when he saw her hesitate.

"Fine. Since you already know, there's no point in my hiding it." Only then did Xia Xue recall that Yang Ce had known a thing or two about the case before, and that Yang Shuoxuan had been present when she handled that other car crash. There was no hiding it from him anyway. "It's that case."

"What, has it gotten that serious now?" Seeing that Xia Xue had already begun printing and distributing flyers, Yang Ce realized the crime rate must have climbed to some frightening number.

"Yes. Three more in the past few days." Xia Xue nodded, then asked, puzzled, "You haven't heard? Don't you know what the people of Songjiang are saying these days?"

"I've been away for a few days, so I don't know what's happened recently." Yang Ce shook his head. "All three crashes were caused by the drivers seeing a ghost?"

"So you were out of town." Hearing Yang Cenbin say that, Xia Xue assumed Yang Ce had been making deliveries for someone for a few days, so she did not press further, only went on: "Not all of them. In one of the crashes, two people survived—both tourists visiting Songjiang from out of town. According to them, that night they got lost on a side road and could not find their way out no matter which way they turned. Then suddenly they spotted a fork ahead that led straight to the main road, so the driver followed it—and the next thing they knew, the car slammed into something and everyone inside passed out. By the time we got there, we found there was no fork at all, just a stone wall, and the car was crushed out of shape. Lucky for them they were out-of-towners who didn't know the road and didn't dare drive fast; otherwise the whole lot of them would probably have been finished. Only—by the time we arrived, the driver had vanished."

"A ghost wall," Yang Puqi blurted out, stunned. But after he said it, it struck him as unscientific, so he added, "Couldn't it have been a hallucination on the part of the people in the car?"

"Hallucination?" Xia Xue frowned at that. "But we gave those two survivors alcohol tests right afterward—not a trace of alcohol. In other words, both were sober at the time. And even if one person could hallucinate, it's impossible for everyone in the car to hallucinate—including the driver, all three of them clearly saw a road ahead."

"By the way, you said the driver vanished—he didn't abandon the car and run, did he?" At the mention of the driver, Yang Ce asked at once, puzzled.

"Run?" Xia Xue gave a bitter laugh. "If he'd run, that would be the good outcome. From our on-site survey and the degree of distortion in the cab, the driver could not possibly have survived. The other two passengers only escaped because they were sitting in the back.

But the driver's seat was awash in blood, and we found fragments of ruptured internal organs on the wiper control—meaning the wiper control had been driven into the driver's body. Tell me, under those circumstances, could the driver still be alive? And even if he were, could he abandon the car and run?"

"What?" Yang Xutang was visibly startled by Xia Xue's words, then said, "So you're saying someone made off with the body?"

"That would seem to be the case." Xia Xue nodded. "After several meetings, discussions, and analyses, we decided to merge this case with the earlier haunting cases. We don't know what means the suspect used to deceive the eyes of the passengers, but the methods bear a clear similarity.

And the reason we merged the cases so quickly is also that the driver's body went missing. It was the same with another traffic case: when we reached the scene, the driver had vanished strangely, and judging by the deformation of the vehicle, the driver could not possibly have survived."

"This person steals corpses too?" Yang Ce found the whole business more and more complicated. What use was a stolen corpse?

"That would seem to be the case." Xia Xue sighed. "At first we suspected an organ-trafficking ring was behind it, but we ruled that out quickly. The people who die in car crashes—their corpses may be fresh, but their organs are the most severely damaged. Such organs would be worthless. And we dismissed that theory for another reason too: the two other passengers in the car were only unconscious, not badly hurt. If this ring was after human organs, they could have killed those two passengers and harvested their organs—but they didn't. They took only that one corpse."

Yang Ce nodded thoughtfully, as if he had caught hold of a thread—but Xia Xue's next words set him adrift again.

Earlier, Yang Ce had suddenly thought of Chen Afu, that pervert who liked to dress up as a ghost and frighten people. Dressing up as a ghost to scare people—that, Chen Afu might do. But scaring someone to death and then stealing the corpse—that did not seem like something Chen Afu could manage. Chen Afu's current job seemed to be a hotel waiter; he had no use for a corpse, and besides, hauling a body around would easily be noticed.

"From what you're saying, then—it's not every time that the corpse goes missing?" Yang Yanchuan asked.

"That's right. But even so, the cases can still be merged, because in the instances where the corpse wasn't stolen, someone reported the accident very soon after it happened and we got to the scene quickly. In the other cases where the body went missing, it was a long time before anyone reported it and we arrived." Xia Xue said, "So we concluded that the reason the corpses weren't taken before was that the suspect had no time to do it."

"In other words, the perpetrator didn't move the body right after the crime." Yang Xutang thought for a moment, then suddenly asked, "Could it be that it wasn't one person? The corpse thief and the one dressing up as a ghost—two separate groups?"

To be continued

900. Sexy Xia Xue

900. Sexy Xia Xue "We considered that at the time too, but it's most likely not the case." Xia Xue shook her head. "If it were two groups, they couldn't time it so precisely—someone dies here, and over there they go steal the body. So we believe it's the work of the same suspect or criminal gang."

Yang Minlan was skilled at killing but a rank amateur at solving cases—especially deductive analysis, where he was far behind a trained professional like Xia Xue. And Xia Xue's analysis was clearly the product of a whole team of experts deliberating together, so Yang Shuoxuan stopped chiming in. This sort of thing was better left to the police; Yang Ce felt he could not be of much help for the moment.