"What's wrong?" I asked.

"When I first started investigating the theft of the body, I didn't have a direction in my head. To be precise, I didn't realize it was a paranormal event at first. Speaking of this, Ren Yonghai paused, "Until ......"

"Until?"

"Until you tell me about those two bloody handprints in the morgue!" Ren Yonghai raised his hand and made a downward slashing motion on the steering wheel.

He continued: "From that point on, our thinking was confined to that. Think about it, since the imp climbed in through the outside window, most of the people who instructed it were from the outside, so if it was an internal staff member of the hospital, why bother? ”

"So, we've been misled, was that body really stolen by the imp?" Ren Yonghai left a question.

"Is it even true that the body was lost in a state of a secret room?" My mind was suddenly opened.

With many questions in front of us, the two of us thought about the context, and we didn't speak for a while, and the car was temporarily quiet.

After a moment, my eyes lit up, a face emerged from my mind, I turned my head to look at Ren Yonghai, just in time to meet his gaze, as if he had also thought of something.

We almost said in unison, "The janitor!" ”

"That's right!" Ren Yonghai retracted his gaze, continued to look ahead, snapped his fingers, and said, "There are only two people at the scene, the janitor and Wang Bo, according to the normal logic of handling the case, this person cannot be missed." ”

"It's just that we were misled from the start by the locked morgue, the bloody handprints from the backyard and the 2-minute blackout, making the same preconceived mistake as the police, intentionally or unintentionally, omitting this key person."

I continued, "Whether or not this has anything to do with him, I think it's all necessary for us to go to the hospital again." ”

Ren Yonghai nodded and didn't speak again, and drove straight to the hospital.

When we arrived near the hospital, it was already around 12 o'clock in the evening, and we found a random restaurant around the hospital, and ate something hastily, and Ren Yonghai and I came to the morgue again.

The hospital's morgue, located in a remote corner with a long corridor connecting it to other buildings, was already inaccessible and in the early hours of the morning it was completely deserted unless medical staff brought the deceased.

From a distance, only the duty room at the end of the corridor was still lit.

Ren Yonghai and I walked in the empty corridor, and the sound of footsteps echoed in the extraordinarily silent space, which seemed exceptionally clear.

As if hearing our footsteps, Ren Yonghai and I had just walked to the door of the duty room when the janitor walked out with a bunch of keys.

Seeing that it was the two of us, he was stunned for a moment, then raised the key in his hand and said with a smile: "I thought that in the middle of the night, a patient passed away and was sent to me, but I didn't expect it to be two police comrades." ”

I've dealt with them before, but this is the first time I've looked at the janitor seriously.

He was in his early forties, wearing a set of washed blue overalls, and a pair of lacerations of faux leather shoes on his feet, some traces of repair could be seen, apparently worn for many years.

With a humble smile on his face, ordinary facial features, and a simple public face, there is nothing surprising about the typical image of a simple and honest working people in their forties.

Before coming over, Ren Yonghai asked a friend from the city bureau to find the personnel department of the hospital and read it

Here's the janitor's personnel file.

Although the process was a little troublesome, after all, in the middle of the night, the people in the personnel department had already slept, but finally got his file.

His name is Lao Youxin, 43 years old this year, a native of the countryside of this city, and his family is in the third group of Dasheng Village.

This person is a beginner in Chinese, and has been working in the morgue of the hospital for eleven years, don't underestimate this job, he is also a regular employee of the hospital.

Although I deal with the dead every day, but the wind can't blow, the sun can't be exposed, the work is easy, the salary is not low, there is no shortage of five insurances and one housing fund, and people may not be willing to change it if they change an office white-collar worker.

According to people from the personnel department, Lao Youxin is a veteran employee of the hospital, a good-tempered person, does not smoke or drink, and does not have the vice of gambling, and he himself is also very satisfied with his post and treats his work seriously and carefully.

The only thing is that he is more superstitious, and he likes to burn incense and worship a Buddha on weekdays.

But this is not a thing, and it is not even a disadvantage, after all, the job that people do is to deal with the dead every day, and it is also human nature to burn incense and worship the Buddha for peace of mind.

He has two sons, the eldest son works outside the home, the younger son studies at a university in the city, and his wife takes care of the fields at home on weekdays.

It is no wonder that the police easily let go of this suspicious person, just looking at his information, they can almost clear his suspicion, and no one will equate him with the thief who stole the body.

"This middle-aged man in front of him is really the real murderer behind the theft of the corpse and the murder of Wang Bo's family of three?" After another contact, Lao Youxin's impression on me was also very consistent with the description on the file, and I doubted my judgment for a while.

"Hey, it's all work, it's tight above, we can't help it, my brother is tired, open the door, we have to go in and have a look." Ren Yonghai patted him on the shoulder and said with a haha.

"Yes, this body was stolen, and the leaders of our hospital are also in a hurry, comrade, you don't know, since the body was stolen, the family members come to our hospital every day to make trouble, and the amount of compensation is not negotiable." Lao Youxin didn't care, walked to the door of the morgue, and chattered while opening the lock.

While he was facing away from us, Ren Yonghai turned his head to look at me, raised his eyebrows at Lao Youxin, and asked me if I had anything to discover.

I looked intently for a moment, then turned my head and shook my head at Ren Yonghai.

Lao Youxin is just an ordinary person, there is not the slightest yin qi on his body, and I have not found anything.

The door of the morgue soon opened, Lao Youxin reached out and pressed the switch, and the fluorescent lamp on the roof flickered a few times, and soon it was lit up, illuminating the entire morgue in detail.

"Comrade policeman, you guys are busy, just call me if you have anything, I'm next door." Lao Youxin pulled out of the door, left a word, turned around and returned to the duty room.

Seeing Lao Youxin gone, Ren Yonghai and I walked into the morgue and searched the scene again, but we still found nothing, except for the two bloody handprints that only I could see, there were no other traces left at the scene.

"Lin Kun, could it be that our reasoning is wrong?" Ren Yonghai walked around and walked to my side and asked.

After reading Lao Youxin's file, he also had doubts about his previous judgment. No matter how you look at it, this middle-aged man with a harmonious family, a stable job, and 11 years in the morgue will have something to do with the theft of the body.

If it was he who stole the body, why didn't he steal it for so many years, just waiting to steal it, it was impossible

People have been working for eleven years just to wait for such a corpse, which is unreasonable.

As for instructing the little ghost to kill Wang Bo's family of three, it would be even more fantastical.

"I can't say it, Lao Youxin doesn't have yin qi on his body, he looks like an ordinary person, but I always feel that something is wrong."

I shook my head, frowned, walked to the window where I had found the bloody handprints, opened the window, and looked out.

Outside the window is the backyard of the hospital, separated by a small open space between the windowsill and the bicycle shed, which used to be a low bush and beyond the entire hospital wall.

This is the most corner of the hospital, although the gate is open on the fence, but usually no one enters or leaves, and there is an iron general hanging on the gate.

My gaze went beyond the fence and landed outside.

Compared to the seclusion of the hospital, the street outside the fence is not lively, but it is definitely not a sparsely populated place, it is now past 12 o'clock in the night, and there are many lights on the street outside.

But those passers-by probably won't know that across a fence and a small courtyard is the location of the hospital's morgue.

Directly across from the back door of the hospital, there was a huge sign hanging on the second floor of the building, which read: Kuike 24-hour convenience store.

My eyes stayed on the signboard for a long, long time, and suddenly my heart moved, and I found a key place.

"Officer Ren, we have been tracking down who stole the body, but we have overlooked a very important link." I turned around and said to Ren Yonghai.

"What?" Ren Yonghai was a little confused.

I walked back to the freezer, looked at the 032 freezer, and said, "This link is, how the body was sent out of the hospital." ”

"The corpse has been refrigerated in a low temperature environment of minus 9 degrees Celsius for more than 20 days, and it has long been frozen into a popsicle, even if it was stolen by the imp, the imp can hide his figure, but there is no way to hide the corpse. There was surveillance everywhere outside, but the power didn't stop for 2 minutes. I continued.

"And what do you mean?" Ren Yonghai pondered for a moment, and said a little suddenly, "The signal interruption time of the hospital's monitoring is only more than 2 minutes, that is to say, everything happened during this time. The next morning, the first wave of people who entered the morgue found that the body had been stolen, which means that the people behind the scenes may only have time to steal the body, but not have time to remove it. ”

"Yes, the body was probably still in the hospital at the time!" I concluded.

"But is it possible that the imp manipulated the corpse, disguised as a living person, and left the hospital through the gate?" Ren Yonghai proposed another possibility.

I shook my head and dismissed the possibility: "It was only the morgue that the power went out that night, and the rest of the hospital was monitored normally. Not to mention whether the imp can control the popsicle-like corpse, even if it can, the corpse is frozen like that, as long as it appears in the surveillance screen, everyone can see the abnormality. ”

"And!" I turned my head, pointed to the backyard outside the window, and continued, "There's an exit here, and there's no reason for the person who stole the body to go far." ”

"You mean, the body went out through the backyard gate?" Ren Yonghai's gaze swept back and forth in the backyard twice and said.

"That's right, it's the most likely." I nodded.

"So what do we do next?"

Next, my gaze crossed the fence and landed on the sign of the Kuike. "Next, let's go there first."

( = )