Chapter 234 - 156: Severity Skyrockets! The Special Fifth Bureau Can’t Handle It! Lock Down the City

There’s a very common type of dye. With just a slight touch to the human body, it seeps deep into the epidermis and settles into the pores.

You can’t scrub it off. In the last life, many influencers who used this stuff for jokes learned this the hard way before fading into silence.

This stuff is usually stamped on dead things.

Dead things don’t have a metabolism, so the dye often remains until the object itself is gone.

And the place where you find this stuff is usually...

"A slaughterhouse!?"

In a daze, Zhang Liang uttered the two words. Everyone around him froze for a second, then shuddered.

"That’s right, a slaughterhouse! They have inspection stamps there!"

"And the smell! How could someone who works with large livestock all the time not stink..."

You could go get a whiff of a pig farm owner, a butcher, or even a pork vendor.

Even the cleanest meat vendors, relatively speaking, always carry a nauseating, greasy smell of pork!

And the scent at the scene...

It was a near-perfect match!

The police dogs couldn’t describe the scent, but Xu Huo could!

The stench left in Lin Miao’s home was almost identical to the smell of a slaughterhouse.

If that was the case...

"A butcher!?"

"No, the drugs... Dammit, they really could have used drugs to kill someone legally!"

Zhang Liang swore, his expression turning grim.

He had said it before.

The killer could never have gotten their hands on anesthetics from the Capital City’s official channels through illicit means. It had to be through a legitimate channel.

Not many professions have access to anesthetics.

But, a slaughterhouse just so happens to have one such position...

"A veterinarian!"

Zhao Gang, the head of the Special Fifth Bureau’s task force, raised an eyebrow.

"That must be it. The intel we got from the Baihan Clubhouse is that there isn’t just one killer, but at least three."

"If these three are slaughterhouse workers, there’s a good chance one of them is a vet!"

As he finished speaking, the atmosphere in the room grew heavy.

In other words...

The killers might have taken an eighteen-year-old girl, ignored her fair skin, her beautiful features, her captivating figure, dragged her to a slaughterhouse, and then...

’Skinned her alive?’

’Lunatics!’

’Absolute lunatics!’

No one could think of any other word to describe the killers.

The most crucial part was...

"Are there... other victims?"

In the heavy silence, Li Jianye spoke up, raising a question no one wanted to consider.

Were there?

Judging by the killers’ practiced methods...

Not only were there others, but there were probably quite a few.

Xu Huo took a deep breath. He looked at the inky black sky, at the white snow beginning to fall, and his voice emerged, slow and steady.

"Investigate."

...

...

Slaughterhouses. There weren’t many of them in his last life.

Food safety regulations had become progressively stricter, requiring slaughterhouses to meet certain standards to operate. This forced a lot of small-scale pig butchers to change professions.

But things were different in ’03.

Back then, the number of small-scale slaughterhouses was astonishing!

Likewise, with quantity came a drop in quality, leading to a glut of substandard meat on the market.

Like pork from pigs with swine fever, or uninspected products like tapeworm-infested pork.

It would be very difficult for the police to conduct a comprehensive search, but...

The clue came from the dye that rubbed off onto the clothes.

In other words, the killer had an inspection stamp on them!

This meant it was a seemingly legitimate, officially licensed, professional slaughterhouse.

That filtered out the private pig-butchering operations.

At the same time, they also had a veterinarian...

That was the second piece of information.

How could they tell?

It was simple...

Have you ever seen a doctor performing CPR in a funeral home?

Normal slaughterhouses have veterinarians to comply with inspection procedures and sanitation standards, and to check for diseased pigs. But they aren’t responsible for treatment.

If it’s a healthy pig, it goes in and gets slaughtered.

If it’s a sick pig, it also goes in and gets slaughtered.

So, anesthetics are basically useless.

But for a veterinarian who could legally use anesthetics and was also in collusion with a slaughterhouse...

There was only one possibility left.

"This is Baishan Village. The higher-ups have already designated it as a development zone."

"And there’s a facility here that combines farming and slaughtering."

"We tried to contact the factory’s owner and workers but couldn’t reach anyone. Combined with the fact that it’s not far from Lin Miao’s house, we quickly locked it down as our target."

「December 26th, 12:30 PM.」

Xu Huo and the others trudged across the vast, snow-covered ground, leaving a series of footprints that stood out starkly against the white backdrop.

"My initial guess is that there’s an extremely high probability this is the murder scene!"

Zhang Liang appeared, his voice grave as he stared at the large, well-built facility before them.

This was a combination farm and slaughterhouse, a two-in-one operation.

It was built at the foot of a mountain in a relatively remote location. The surrounding villagers had already moved out after receiving compensation for the demolition of their homes, making the area feel even more desolate.

"Search."

Xu Huo glanced around, listening to the incessant mooing of cattle, and uttered a single word.

In the next second, countless black-clad figures appeared from all directions, swarming into the facility.

They moved quickly and methodically, taking control of the entire factory in a short amount of time.

"Here’s the file on the owner, and the few employees who work here."

Zhang Liang rubbed his hands together, bringing some warmth back to his cold, stiff fingers, before pulling out a freshly printed file.

Xu Huo took the file and began to read through it slowly.

"The owner of the slaughterhouse is named Chen Family, forty years old. Nothing much to say about his personality or hobbies; we couldn’t find anyone to ask about that."

"But it’s not a big problem. Following our usual procedure, we used our special privileges to directly investigate his financial sources."