After many explorations on the reef, he gathered bits and pieces of information about this half-grown boy.

Some people say that the boy is only eleven or twelve years old, and others say that he is fourteen or fifteen years old, and he should be a tall and thin man with a boyish face, who behaves like a child who has not grown up, and wears a slightly short and tight cotton coat. According to him, his family has prepared a new padded jacket for him, which he can wear in the New Year. Such a description makes it easy for outsiders to believe that he is a young child who has just begun to develop. But no one actually knows how old he is. The younger he looks, the less people will suspect him.

He is neither black nor white, not ugly or handsome, and dresses ordinarily. His cheeks were like those of the children in the nearby Zhuangzi, red from the cold, but he always gave people a feeling of being unclean, as if he had been stained with a lot of black ash, and he was a little embarrassed. He wore a half-worn sheepskin hat, wore his sleeves around all day, bent his neck, and raised his hand from time to time to wipe his nose with his sleeve, which made people disgusted and did not want to look at it more. But ask everyone what he really looks like? But no one could say it clearly.

He spoke with a local accent, but it wasn't very standard.

He didn't know what was popular among the kids of the local farmer, but he was able to pick it up quickly.

He did not know the rules that had prevailed in Zhuangzi for many years, nor did he recognize the famous people in Zhuangzi, claiming that his relatives had never told him.

As for the child on the Zhou family's veteran Zhuangzi, he claimed that he lived in a nearby village and came to visit relatives.

For the children of the Zhou family's three-room village, he claimed that he was a relative of the Zhou family's veteran Zhuangzi's family, and he came to play with his friends.

But any child in the village is sure that he is not an old neighbor in his village.

There are seven or eight hundred families in the three nearby Zhuangzi of different sizes, and although they come and go with each other frequently, it is impossible for anyone to remember all the members of the family, as well as the members of their relatives' families. This young man seems to have taken advantage of a loophole, and he is also very good at improvising, and easily deceives people.

He was interested in the people who went to Zhoujiazhuang's three-room village in Zhoujiazhuang, and was interested in the murder that happened the night before, and even instigated others to go to the nearby Yizhuang to see the victim's body and relics, and was scolded away by the guards in charge.

He was interested in the Hai family, who had just left, in the Zhou family's three-room village, and in the Jin family's young man who was rescued by the Hai family, and he also wanted to meet Jin Jiashu with his own eyes. But Jin Jiashu lives in a mansion where the three owners of the Zhou family live, with high walls and deep courtyards, and it is not something that idlers and other people can enter at will, so of course he failed to do so.

However, he tried to climb the wall to peek into the house, and was found and scolded by the servants.

Probably because he looked too much like a naughty child, and he was very familiar with the children of the two Zhuangzi, and the people in the other village did not suspect him at all. If it weren't for the fact that Hai Jiao came to inquire about his situation afterwards, even the old military advisor didn't expect that this kid might be the killer spy they had been investigating for a long time, and he had had so many suspicious behaviors under their noses.

Will he be the eighth killer who has not been caught?

When Zhuang Tongju met the killers head-on that day, he only knew that the seven killers who were responsible for intercepting and killing the Jin family had joined the eighth accomplice not far from him, but he had never seen the appearance of the eighth person. If, because the eighth man was a young man, the others did not take him to kill, but told him to stay nearby and guard the horses, it would have been reasonable.

When the old military division got the letter, he immediately sent people around to inquire about it. The children who had been playing with the half-grown boy that day said the direction they had taken when they left. The reef followed the trail and kept tracking.

At the end of the path are several families living on the very edge of Zhuangzi, next to a forest. They are also a branch of the big families in the village, and there are many children of relatives and neighbors who have come to visit the door recently, and they don't know which of the children has left here. Even if someone leaves the village from here, they will only think that the other party has gone into the forest to play.

The reef circled around the forest twice and found a trail of footprints. Judging from the size of the footprints, its owner seems to be a thin young man, with very light steps, but walking very fast, and a well-trained spy seedling who is not very good at light body skills.

This reminds Hai Jiao of what he looked like when he first entered the industry in his previous life. At that time, when he walked in winter, he would leave similar footprints on the snow.

He followed the footprints, walked a little through the forest, and diagonally through the whole forest, and saw the snow-covered yellow earth again.

There had been no snow for the past two days, and the surrounding fields still bear traces of the heavy snow from the previous morning. Thanks to the cold weather and the fact that few people passed by, some footprints were found on the reef, except for some of the elephants left by the nearby farmers who went into the woods to cut wood, and the rest of the elephants were left by the young man, which were very similar to the footprints found earlier, and were the same size and characteristics.

The reef followed the footprints and walked for miles, during which it passed almost all sparsely populated fields and ravines, with the occasional few small farm yards, and from a distance, the people living in them were dressed as local farmers. At the same time, the footprints left on the road began to increase. It takes a lot of effort to find the footprints left by the target and keep track of them.

But when he came to the side of a relatively flat and spacious dirt road, the clue was broken. There were many footprints, horseshoe prints, and rut marks on the dirt road, and it was obvious that there were so many pedestrians passing here that it was impossible to tell which footprints were left by his target.

Haijiao found that this dirt road leads to the direction of Chang'an City at one end, and the other end leads to Qinling, and there is a fork in the road leading to Zhuangzi where Zhuangtong's friend is located, and from the vicinity of Zhuangzi, there is another fork in the road leading to Zhuangzi, a veteran of the Zhou family.

Did the eight killers pass through here that day and go to the place where the Jin family was killed?

Speaking of which, when Zhuang Tong was in distress, he saw the direction in which the killer fled, it should be this one, right?

The reef scanned the surroundings and decided to inquire around, to see if the residents of the neighborhood had spotted any suspicious characters passing by on the night of the Jin family's murder and the night before Jin Jiashu's second distress.

Eight young men dressed in the same clothes and holding weapons pass by this place together, no matter how you look at it, it will be an eye-catching scene, right?

Haijiao thought it would be easy, but when he walked around the neighborhood, he realized that it was not as easy as he thought.

There are almost no scattered households in the vicinity, but there are two relatively large Zhuangzi, and the families who live in this area are basically tenants of these two Zhuangzi.

One of the two Zhuangzi is surnamed Tu, who is the eldest son of the Zhou family, Zhou Jinpu, who is a relative of his deceased mother's mother's family; Another Zhuangzi master, surnamed Du, is the current commander of the Chang'an avant-garde Du Boqin. The latter is not a big man that the reef can easily provoke, and the former is related to the current pattern of the Zhou family's three rooms, and it is easy to bring trouble to the aunt Zhou Ma as a reef, after all, Zhou Ma has always been recognized by Zhou Jinpu as a bad stepmother with a ghost in her heart.

Haijiao returned to Zhuangzi, a veteran soldier of the Zhou family, and told the old military master the results of his tracking, hoping that he could send someone to take over the follow-up tracking work.

The old military advisor was a little surprised, and glanced at the youngest son, who immediately went out.

The old military advisor praised Haijiao with a smile: "Brother Hai is really a young talent. So many self-proclaimed old brothers in our village are not as bright as you, and you can easily find the traces of the killer. ”

"It's not certain that the boy must be an accomplice to the killer." Haijiao said calmly, "It's just that his behavior is suspicious, and it is better to find his whereabouts as soon as possible to determine the truth." I don't know how many people there are in this group of killers, and even their companions say that they will kill their mouths, but they are extremely vicious. I hope to catch them as soon as possible, lest they poison Jin Jiashu again. ”

The old military advisor smiled slightly: "Don't worry, they won't have another chance." ”

(End of chapter)