The Killer's Bait
"Do you have any solid leads?" The middle-aged man among the two didn't seem to trust Xu Huo. Instead, he asked him for concrete evidence.
"I don't have any solid proof yet," Xu Huo said. "But I heard this from a friend at the Enforcement Bureau. If you don't think it's worth trading for, you can leave."
The middle-aged man's face was weathered. After hesitating for a moment, he handed over the information he'd brought and gave Xu Huo his contact details, asking him to get in touch if he found anything new. Quite a few people in the association were good at cracking codes and solving cases, and any lead might prove crucial.
Xu Huo agreed, then got another piece of information from the other man and ended the one-on-many meeting.
He found a hotel to stay in and used the terminal he'd just bought to read the information.
The three surreptitious recordings were much the same. Each began after the crime, before the victim's family had reported it and the Enforcement Bureau arrived. They included the Bureau's search process. Not only were the surveillance devices installed by the municipal governments checked, but the residents nearby were all interviewed as well. They hadn't seen the body, of course, but one of them had secretly entered the crime scene. From the blood on the floor, the victim had lost a great deal of blood before dying. The blood on the walls hadn't been sprayed directly from the victim; it looked more like it had been accidentally flung there by something. There was even blood on the ceiling.
The three files weren't long, and Xu Huo finished them quickly. Then he opened the middle-aged man's storage device.
The files nearly filled the entire projection, which genuinely surprised him.