Chapter 66.2: Everything Has Been Confessed
As Jiang Xia flipped through the documents one by one, looking for official seals from the surrounding villages, she casually asked, “Did people donate human remains to medical colleges in the past, too?”
“Yes. Both whole bodies and skeletal remains.”
Lu Yixing explained, “Although they’re all officially described as voluntary donations, most people aren’t willing to donate their bodies. So medical colleges and health schools offer financial compensation privately. The amount ranges from 50 to 300 yuan, depending mainly on how rare the specimen is and its research value.”
“In the past, though, more people donated their bodies, and it was rare for anyone to donate skeletal remains. But in just the past two years, the number has suddenly risen to forty-one sets of bones.”
Good grief! So there were some real professionals at work, too?
Jiang Xia remembered that the local police officer had said they’d only discovered twenty-three robbed graves so far. Now the number of skeletons had almost doubled!
Zeng Jun couldn’t help frowning. “These two gangs are getting far too brazen!”
“Money makes people lose their heads.”
In those days, farmers might toil away for an entire year and still earn less than a few dozen yuan. Meanwhile, these people could make that much in a single night. Naturally, some would find the temptation irresistible. And once they’d made money from it the first time, there would be no stopping them.
Jiang Xia shook her head slightly as she stared at the donation agreement in her hands. Suddenly, she stopped.
“From Bashang Village?”
In disbelief, she pulled the document out and held it up.
“Luo Youben has some nerve! He actually used his own production brigade’s official seal. Isn’t he worried it’ll lead straight back to him? He should’ve used the seal of a different brigade, at the very least!”
Seriously, had he been improving his criminal techniques or something?
Zeng Jun looked a little exasperated. “Wouldn’t that make him even easier to catch? If he’d used a different brigade’s seal, that would’ve been a real headache!”
Ahem.
Jiang Xia had been so dumbfounded by the man’s sheer stupidity that she’d momentarily forgotten she was the police officer investigating him. If he’d actually used some other brigade’s official seal, verifying the documents would’ve been considerably more troublesome.
Jiang Xia gave a light cough. “The things he had at home made me think he was pretty clever. I didn’t expect him to do something so stupid here, so I was a little surprised.”
“How could anyone think of everything?” Zeng Jun said. “If he were really smart, he wouldn’t have committed a crime in the first place!”
“That’s true.”
Take her, for example. She was already a member of the legitimate forces now.
As she spoke, Jiang Xia found two more donation agreements from Bashang Village among the documents.
She quickly finished reading the rest of them, then found five more donation agreements bearing local official seals.
Three of those were from Bashang Village, while another two came from Gao Family Village. The donor named on the latter two was none other than Gao Hongwu, and the people whose remains had been donated were his own parents.
That was downright diabolical.
This criminal really held a grudge against Gao Hongwu.
“Five agreements from Bashang Village? That’s way too conspicuous.”
Zeng Jun picked up the documents and looked through them. “I don’t think we even need to check these.”
“We’d better check them anyway. If they’re forged, that’s one thing. But if they’re genuine, then more than just the three members of the Luo family were involved in the crimes.”
Jiang Xia looked up toward the commune office. “The commune should have documents bearing the production brigades’ official seals, right?”
“Of course they do,” Li Henjian replied. “There are plenty of things that require official seals. It would be a serious problem if they didn’t keep such records.”
“Then let’s ask for some.”
With that, Jiang Xia led the way inside.
The working conditions at Xin’an Commune were hardly any better. Newspapers covered all four walls, and the floor was bare earth without even a layer of cement. Several old desks had been pushed together, their surfaces piled high with all sorts of documents, making the entire room feel cramped and claustrophobic.
At Zeng Jun’s request, a commune cadre quickly brought over several documents bearing the official seals of the two villages.
Jiang Xia and Li Henjian each took a set and began comparing them against the donation agreements.
The official seals of both villages were very simple. Each was a perfect circle, four centimeters in diameter, with an outer ring. Inside the ring, the words identifying the city and commune were arranged in an arc across the top, running from left to right. A five-pointed star sat in the center, while the village name was printed horizontally along the bottom. All the characters used the same standardized font.
These standardized official seals were easy to carve and reproduce. That was why, after completing the standard engraving, seal carvers would randomly add two extra scratches.
Because the scratches were highly random, it was difficult to reproduce them exactly, making them a unique anti-counterfeiting feature.
Jiang Xia immediately began comparing the two official seals. After examining them carefully for a few moments, she frowned, took out her horseshoe magnifier, and conducted an even more detailed comparison.
Once she had finished, she picked up the other two documents.
Twenty or thirty seconds later, Jiang Xia gave her definitive answer.
“The official seal on the Bashang Village document is genuine.”
Li Henjian looked equally serious. He put down the donation agreement and said, “I’ve confirmed that mine is genuine, too.”
“Hiss!”
Realizing what this meant, Zeng Jun sucked in a sharp breath. He immediately pressed on. “What about the other one?”
“The Gao Family Village seal is forged.”
Jiang Xia had already picked up the Gao Family Village document. After a single glance, she reached her conclusion. “It’s a typical radish seal—the color is too light, the edges are blurry, and the anti-counterfeiting marks are in the wrong places.”
“Right, I understand.”
Zeng Jun nodded slightly and picked up the five donation agreements. “I’ll go interrogate Ren Yongqin first.”
They had to find out as quickly as possible how a genuine official seal had ended up on those documents!
Beneath the tree, Luo Youben watched as Zeng Jun and Chen Dong, accompanied by the other two local police officers, escorted Ren Yongqin inside.
His heart immediately sank.
Inside the room temporarily being used as an interrogation room.
There was no traditional interrogation bench here, only a tall stool. Ren Yongqin sat on it while two local police officers sat on either side of him, staring fixedly at him to prevent him from suddenly turning violent or attempting to escape.
The pressure was even greater this way, and sweat kept beading on Ren Yongqin’s forehead.
Chen Dong took out his notebook, ready to record the confession, while Zeng Jun slammed the donation agreements hard onto the table.
He barked, “Five agreements for donated skeletal remains! Your Bashang Village certainly has a high level of civic consciousness! Are you going to confess now, or should I go fetch everyone involved and question them one by one?”
“I’ll confess! I’ll tell you everything!”
Ren Yongqin had already been wavering. The only reason he hadn’t said anything back in the village was that Luo Youben had been standing right beside him, and he hadn’t dared open his mouth. Now that he saw the police had even found this evidence, his psychological defenses immediately crumbled. He spilled everything like beans pouring out of a bamboo tube.
“My brother-in-law said there was a way to make money, so I went along with him. It wasn’t until we got there that I found out we were digging up other people’s graves. At first, I didn’t want to do it, but he said the schools needed the remains to treat illnesses and save lives, so we were doing a good deed. And… the schools paid pretty well, too. I just couldn’t resist.”
That was certainly a generous way of dressing things up!
Zeng Jun frowned and went straight to the crucial question. “So, how many graves did you dig up in total?”
Ren Yongqin thought for a moment before answering. “Twenty-six. No, twenty-seven.”
“Did all of them have donation agreements, complete with official seals?”
“I’m not entirely sure about that. My brother-in-law handled all of it, but they should all have had seals. Otherwise, those legitimate institutions wouldn’t have accepted them.”
“Then where did you get the official seals? Especially the ones on these five documents from your own production brigade.”
“Last year, we privately invited the village chief out for drinks. We told him we needed him to stamp a form for selling manure fertilizer. After he stamped it, we got him drunk and secretly stamped a bunch of blank sheets of paper. We made forty or fifty copies in total. But after we’d used a few, my brother-in-law said it was too easy for people to find out, so we stopped using them. He said he’d find a way to get official seals from somewhere else.”
So that was how it had happened.
Fortunately, no public official had been directly involved in the crimes. Still, the village chief’s behavior amounted to negligence of duty. Who in their right mind would take an official seal to someone else’s home just to drink and eat?
Zeng Jun nodded slightly and continued questioning him. “Then where did you get the other seals?”
“I don’t know.”
Ren Yongqin shook his head. “That was all my brother-in-law’s business. I don’t have a vehicle, so I couldn’t go into the city.”
After a brief pause, he asked hopefully, “Does reporting the other grave robbers count as rendering meritorious service? Could it get my sentence reduced?”
Zeng Jun immediately remembered what Jiang Xia had said earlier.
She’d actually called it perfectly!
What a strange turn of events. Zeng Jun had personally examined the eight graves that had been dug up. He hadn’t failed to notice how far down the excavations had gone, either. Yet somehow, it had never occurred to him that two separate gangs were responsible.
Reflecting on this, Zeng Jun replied decisively, “Of course it counts!”
Ren Yongqin clearly knew the identities of the other gang’s members. Once he named them, the police could simply go and arrest them!
When it came to rival criminals stealing each other’s business, nothing was more satisfying than using one gang to bring down the other. Ren Yongqin wasted no time in naming names.
“It’s the three Yuan brothers from Xiaobei Village! Yuan Jianshu and his two younger brothers!”
“Last winter, when we were digging up graves, he happened to catch us in the act. He threatened to report us to the police, so my brother-in-law had no choice but to teach them how to dig up graves and sell the remains to medical colleges and health schools.”
Speaking of the other gang, Ren Yongqin grew increasingly indignant.
“They’re a bunch of lazy idiots! They can’t even dig properly, and then they blame my brother-in-law for not teaching them well. They came back and demanded that we walk them through the whole process, step by step. They don’t do any of the work themselves, yet they still want a share of the money! What kind of people are they?!”
The sheer righteousness of his complaint left even the local police officer momentarily speechless.
Hold on. You’re committing crimes! What is this, a legitimate apprenticeship program? And what kind of decent person would threaten you into teaching them something like this? If they’d decided to work independently, instead of simply taking a cut from every grave you dug up, that would’ve practically counted as them having a conscience!
Zeng Jun wasn’t distracted by these complaints. Instead, he remembered the near-brawl that had almost broken out earlier that day and continued questioning him.
“Then was it your gang that dug up the grave belonging to Gao Hongwu’s family?”
“No.”
Ren Yongqin shook his head. “That grave was in the middle of farmland, where people passed by every day. It would’ve been far too easy to get caught. It was probably Yuan Jianshu and his brothers. Those two families have a deep-seated grudge against each other. Back during the Cultural Revolution, years ago, Yuan Jianshu was nearly persecuted to death by Gao Hongwu.”
“Last winter, his younger brother—the third Yuan brother—was beaten up by Gao Hongwu’s two sons. I heard he was bedridden for more than ten days before he could get up again. I’d guess that’s why they dug up the Yuan family’s graves.”
That gave them a very solid motive.
Zeng Jun had no reason to doubt him. He asked another question that was particularly important to him. “What did you do with the skeletal remains you stole? Do you still have any at home?”
“We just scrubbed them clean with a shoe brush and took them straight to sell.”
Ren Yongqin explained, “The flesh had already rotted away, leaving nothing but bones. There might’ve been a few bits of disgusting, smelly stuff still clinging to them, but we’d wash everything clean and sell it. We never kept any of it at home.”
“You sold everything? Were there any remains the medical colleges refused to accept?”
“We sold everything. They were all complete skeletons, and the medical colleges accepted them all. They just paid less for ones that weren’t in good condition.”
Zeng Jun immediately breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Excellent! That means we really don’t have to go searching for bone fragments in the manure pits!’
He then quickly asked a series of follow-up questions, such as where the graves had been located, when they had dug them up, what each person had done during the operation, how much money each had received, and so on.
After the interrogation, he had Ren Yongqin sign his confession and press his fingerprint onto it. Then Zeng Jun walked out of the room and immediately spotted Jiang Xia and Lu Yixing waiting outside.
“Waiting to hear the results?”
“Mm.” Jiang Xia nodded slightly. “I just got here. I could hear him confessing to everything inside. It sounded like he even named the other gang?”
“He told us everything! Jiang Xia, your analysis was spot-on. There really are two separate grave-robbing gangs!”
Zeng Jun wore a faintly pleased expression, but his relief soon gave way to a bit of worry.
“The other gang consists of the three Yuan brothers, led by Yuan Jianshu. According to Ren Yongqin, all three are idlers who spend their time lazing around. Whenever they have money, they go looking for somewhere to have fun. Once they’re broke, they dig up more graves. In the past, they usually stayed at the homes of women they were having affairs with in the countryside, or found somewhere to gamble. But now that they’re involved in something this heinous, they don’t dare come back very often, so they’ve been staying in the city instead.”
“That’s good news. The three of them probably still don’t know that we’ve uncovered their crimes, and they haven’t tried to flee yet. The problem is, we have no idea where to find them.”
Hearing this, Lu Yixing looked at Zeng Jun with a slightly peculiar expression.
Captain Zeng, you’re the deputy captain! Shouldn’t figuring out how to catch the suspects be your job? Why are you asking Jiang Xia instead?
Zeng Jun knew perfectly well that this was something he should be figuring out himself.
But thinking things through on his own was exhausting. Jiang Xia was much more useful, so it was faster to ask her first. If she couldn’t come up with anything, he could always—
Bah! What was he thinking? He was simply giving the younger generation more opportunities to show what they could do!
“They’re in the city?”
Jiang Xia was a little troubled by this, too, when she heard it.
The city was enormous. Finding three people there wouldn’t be easy.
They would have to trace their connections instead.
As soon as that thought crossed her mind, Jiang Xia suddenly had an idea.
“The three Yuan brothers used to hang around the countryside, right?”
After a moment’s thought, she continued, “That means they probably don’t know anyone in the city. Having money alone isn’t enough to settle there long-term. They’d either need temporary residence permits to stay at a guesthouse or someone willing to take them in. And as for that forged seal on the donation agreements, I doubt anyone in the countryside would know how to carve one. They probably found someone in the city to do it for them. In either case, they’d need someone to make the necessary connections.”
As she spoke, Jiang Xia turned her gaze toward Feng Yongqiang, who was handcuffed beneath another tree.
If she remembered correctly, this fellow had acted as a middleman between people in the village and the caitou in the city. He also frequently wandered around the graves of Gao Hongwu’s parents.
Her instincts hadn’t been wrong. Keeping him in custody until now had indeed paid off!
Jiang Xia stated directly, “I think there’s a good chance Feng Yongqiang knows where the three Yuan brothers are. He often goes into the city and has experience connecting people with the right contacts.”
“That really is possible!”
Zeng Jun immediately remembered what had triggered Gao Hongwu to instigate the near-brawl earlier.
“It’s extremely suspicious that this guy kept wandering around someone’s parents’ graves. There’s a good chance he knows what’s going on. He must be familiar with the three Yuan brothers. I’ll question him right now!”
With that, Zeng Jun strode over to Feng Yongqiang in three quick steps.
Using a mixture of bluffing and intimidation, he said:
“Feng Yongqiang, Ren Yongqin has already confessed to everything! If you tell us where the three Yuan brothers are now, it’ll still count as meritorious service. But if you keep quiet and that gives them time to hear the news and escape, we’ll make sure your case is handled with the utmost severity!”
The moment he heard the names, Feng Yongqiang shut his eyes, his face full of frustration.
It was over. They really had managed to get a confession out of Ren Yongqin.
He’d waited too long to talk!
Fortunately, there was still a chance to earn credit for cooperating.
“I never dug up anyone else’s graves! I just heard Yuan Jianshu mention it once when we were drinking. I thought it served them right, so I occasionally went over there to have a look!”
Feng Yongqiang wasted no time throwing the other party under the bus.
“I know where the three of them are staying in the city. One place is the home of Wang Dexing, the third household in Zuo Gou Alley on Niushi Street. They often drink and play cards together there. The other place is the home of Yuan’s second brother’s mistress, Shi Xiaoyue. Her address is Room 103, Xingfu New Village, Changxing Street!”
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