Chapter 252: Someone Wants to Delay Time
After Lu Zhenping arrived at the Provincial City and joined the main force, he began meeting with colleagues from the Ministry of Public Security. The mission they were tasked with was peculiar: not to capture extremely vicious criminals, but to rescue a group of women and children who had been abducted. Documents were passed around during the meeting.
"Two years ago, the granddaughter of the head of the sales department in the steel factory vanished while playing outside the plant. There were not many people around at that time. After investigating, our comrades preliminarily concluded that it was an insider’s job. Despite observing for a month, the suspect was not located. At the same time, at the food processing plant and the machine factory, and near the hutongs, many boys and girls mysteriously disappeared. Moreover, the night school set up especially for progressive youth was targeted by a group of people. Within two months, nearly ten female comrades disappeared from various areas. In pursuit of these missing cases, three public security officers died in the line of duty. Recently, we obtained an important clue that the wife of the steel plant’s sales manager had been to Deep Water Alley, a slum area where she has no relatives or friends, yet she visited three times within a month. This inevitably arouses suspicion, especially since their granddaughter disappeared, and within a year, the manager’s daughter-in-law was pregnant with another child. Apart from the young couple, almost no one in the family went looking for the missing girl."
The spokesperson for the mission paused here, and everyone in the room seemed to already grasp the answer. Clearly there was a preference for male children. But as the manager, his family wouldn’t be short on wages; all were from working-class families, how could they not afford to raise a little girl?
Lu Zhenping repeatedly reviewed a stack of documents and then began to frown.
"Who reported the disappearance of this little girl initially?"
"It was the manager’s wife. According to her, she finished work early and after picking up the child from the daycare, she didn’t go home right away but stayed in the plant area playing with the child. In the blink of an eye, the child was gone."
After hearing this, Lu Zhenping nodded thoughtfully. If this steel plant’s wife was out of the ordinary, then their entire family could be suspects. He was internally strategizing the situation.
The spokesperson waited for a good while before continuing, "Following this clue further, we noticed two young people in the slum area who were clearly unemployed but often left early and returned late. From the local community, we learned that these two people would take a trip once a month, usually for about a week. We followed them once, and discovered that a route south from our Provincial City on the national highway, and this was just one of the dens. Our mission this time is to rescue the victims."