Just then, the phone on the coffee table suddenly rang.
Jian Wanyan set down his lotus root tea and answered it.
"Secretary, I hope I haven't disturbed your rest. There's something I need to report. Yuan Minglang just called me and said an extremely serious crime had occurred in Yangcheng. The deputy director of the county commerce bureau and his family-all five of them-were murdered..."
The caller was Deng Yadong, secretary of the provincial Political and Legal Affairs Commission and director of the Provincial Public Security Department. The case he mentioned was precisely the Yangcheng family massacre.
The main reason he reported it to Jian Wanyan so late instead of waiting until the next day was that several major criminal cases had occurred in Liaodong Province that year. They had not only attracted close attention from the Ministry of Public Security, but even alarmed Liu Haiqing, a leader in Capital City.
Liu Haiqing had personally called Lü Qiang, then secretary of the Liaodong Province Provincial Party Committee, demanding that Liaodong Province make maintaining social order and eliminating all threats to public safety a priority. He had specifically emphasized the need to solve major cases promptly.
As the final stop on the Ministry of Public Security's inspection tour that year, Qingyuan City would also welcome Vice Minister Tang Lei and his delegation on December 1.
Against this particular backdrop, yet another family massacre had occurred in Yangcheng. For the province's entire public security system, it was a textbook case of "when it rains, it pours"!
If the case could not be solved promptly, the Yangcheng police would undoubtedly be the first to be held accountable.
And Zhou Yi, Yangcheng City's current Public Security Director, had been handpicked by Secretary Jian!
"Tell Yuan Minglang to have the Qingyuan City Public Security Bureau