That night, the Special Task Force closed the net.
Special police surrounded Warehouse No. 2 at the abandoned docks from three directions. When the assault team broke down the door, the ringleader was frantically deleting transaction records from his phone. They caught him with the evidence, without firing a single shot.
The interrogation lasted into the early hours, and the principal offender's psychological defenses crumbled far faster than expected.
The technical division recovered the encrypted files on his phone one by one: lists of buyers, money trails, and original registration photos of the trafficked women, spanning more than twenty years.
The records of Shen Dayong's payments for buying people were right there among them. The payment dates, amounts, and intermediaries all matched.
The identity of Shen Wangjing's mother had remained an impossible knot to untangle.
She had no identity card or household registration when she was sold into Shiban Village. Several runs of her DNA sample through the missing persons database had yielded no matches, and the Special Task Force had already given up hope.
But a set of photographed fingerprint records was extracted from the ringleader's phone.
After running a comparison, the technical division discovered that the same fingerprints had been preserved in the crime scene investigation files of a missing person case in South City twenty years earlier.
Li Wanhua, the most doted-on youngest daughter of the Li family in Capital City, had traveled alone to South City at eighteen and unexpectedly vanished.
The Li family had searched for her like people possessed. The missing person case had caused an uproar throughout Capital City's media.
A thick stack of police requests for cross-border investigative assistance had accumulated at the S Provincial Public Security Department, yet every lead had ultimately gone cold at the hotel opposite South City's bus