"It's not clear whether the gang committed the crime," Zhu Ansheng paused and said:

"But I have a very vague feeling... There may be more than one participant in this case, but the number of people should not be large."

"Is there any basis?" Xia Liang asked.

Zhu Ansheng shook his head: "It's just intuition."

Then there was silence.

Xia Liang already knew the reason why Zhu Ansheng felt tricky about this case, but he still didn't understand the correlation between the speed of the cold storage snow melting and the case itself.

When asked Zhu Ansheng, he just said:

"You will know in a while. You have nothing to do anyway. You can take advantage of this time to think about the reason."

This is equivalent to giving Xia Liang a test question. When he thought that Zhu Ansheng had said that he was not suitable to be a policeman, he had a little bit of competition in his heart, so he really didn't ask, and sat aside and pondered.

The cold storage was quiet again. The darkness and coldness penetrated into the skin bit by bit. Only when Xia Liang looked up at Zhu Ansheng's face that was pale by his phone could Xia Liang feel a little more realistic.

He restrained his random thoughts and curled up on the ground, but fell asleep in a daze.

"Wake up."

Zhu Ansheng's voice came, and Xia Liang sat up, feeling his brain drowsy.

“How long has it been…”

“It’s 3:50 am now.”

Xia Liang's eyes widened, his face full of disbelief:

"So long has passed?!"

He thought he had just been dozing for a few minutes.

"To be precise, it's two and a half hours."

Zhu Ansheng's expression was a bit solemn. He reached out and touched the floor, and the screen of his mobile phone showed his wet fingers.

The cold storage has been tide.

He said:

"Now, the conclusion is out."

Xia Liang sat upright with his lips pursed, feeling a little nervous.

"Xia Liang, do you still remember the death time of the deceased in the autopsy report?"

"Well... Expert Jiang said that the deceased had died at least 12 hours, that is, he was killed before 0:00 on the 11th, or around the time."

Zhu Ansheng nodded and held his pipe to his mouth.

"It takes two and a half hours to turn off the cold storage and tide on the ground. Zhang Jianhong checks the cold storage every day, and the time to close the door and go upstairs is 10:30 in the evening. In other words, if he was attacked at the moment of closing the door and the attacker turned off the cold storage power switch as soon as possible, that night, the time for the cold storage to tide was at one o'clock."

"It's true... Is there any problem?" Xia Liang was puzzled.

Zhu Ansheng slides his phone and turns out the function of the flashlight to shine at the door.

"The problem lies in these footprints."

"footprint……"

Xia Liang murmured, his brows getting tighter and tighter. The next moment, his hair exploded.

Zhu Ansheng looked at him:

"The victim died at 0 o'clock. The victim's footprints must be kept after 1 o'clock."

He continued, saying word by word:

"Diet people can't walk, and dead people... can't lie."

Xia Liang lost his spirit:

"These footprints were not left by the deceased... they were left by the murderer..."

After a pause, he began to reanalyze the case:

"What is certain now is that the deceased was killed between 10:30 and 0 o'clock, and the footprints were not left by the deceased, so it should be left by the murderer... However, there is a very strange place. Since the murderer left his footprints, it means that he left the cold storage after the tide on the ground. Why didn't he leave the footprints towards the door? Will this series of footprints walking towards the cold storage be some misleading clue..."

"Wrong."

Zhu Ansheng suddenly interrupted Xia Liang's murmuring.

Xia Liang was stunned for a moment and didn't react:

"Uh...wrong? Brother-in-law, where are you wrong?"

“It was wrong from the beginning.”

"ha?"

Zhu Ansheng turned his head and said quietly:

"Do you really think the deceased was killed between 10:30 and 0?"

Xia Liang widened his eyes in surprise.

Zhu Ansheng knocked off the ashes in his pipe and said lightly:

"You have been induced by the trick set by the murderer."

He stretched out his hand and raised three fingers.

"Three doubts..."

“First, this is an ‘absolute secret room’;

Second, why did the murderer choose the crime scene in the cold storage? Why did he turn off the power switch?

Third, no one could realize that it was the footprint of the murderer rather than the deceased. What do you think is the reason?”

Xia Liang was a little stunned, and Zhu Ansheng smiled:

"Finally, I'll give you another tip..."

After saying that, he turned off the screen of his phone and the entire cold storage suddenly turned into darkness.

In the terrifyingly deep darkness, fear gradually spread to my heart, and every sense except vision became sharper. The next moment, Xia Liang's shocking scream came from the darkness.

"ah!!!"

"I understand! I understand..."

"No one realized that it was the footprint of the murderer. It was because the murderer deliberately wore shoes like the deceased. The cold storage was dark at that time, and no one knew what the deceased looked like. In fact, the victim was probably in a state of deep coma or sleeping pills that killed him. He was placed in the corner of the warehouse. He spent the night with the two suspects, and accompanied them to shoot the door and call for help. The person who moved the shelf was actually not the victim, but the murderer himself!"

"The temperature of the cold storage is below zero. If you wear less clothes, staying here for one night will have a chance to be frozen to death. Turning off the switch will not only ensure the survival of the two, but more importantly, because the murderer himself is also hiding inside, while ensuring that he will not be frozen to death, he can perfectly disguise himself as the deceased..."

"The most important point is to create the illusion of a double secret room, and it is impossible to block the door with a shelf, because as long as the murderer is a gang committing the crime, several people can push the shelf away together. Therefore, the plastic box on the shelf is the key to the entire secret room... And in order to create this secret room, the murderer absolutely cannot just watch coldly in the corner. He plays the deceased to induce two suspects to put the box on the shelf..."

A flash of fire, Zhu Ansheng lit the tobacco in his pipe with a match and nodded:

"The reasoning is pretty good. Choosing the crime location in the cold storage is all the key to creating this secret room. It is not only to pretend to be the dead, but also to make the forensic doctor unable to accurately determine the death time of the body. The murderer's mind is quite meticulous. Of course, there are many doubts in this..."

"Suspicious?" Xia Liang pondered for a moment: "Does it refer to those footprints?"

"That's one of the doubts." "If the problem is footprints..." Xia Liang pinched his chin and frowned:

"Shouldn't this be the most exquisite part of the murderer's layout? All of us have ignored the details of the time of snow melting. If it weren't for your brother-in-law, you had a sudden idea and wanted to sneak in, we wouldn't have found out that the footprint was actually left by the murderer. Instead, we would have been investigating the reason why the deceased did not return directly to the cold storage after moving the shelf... This is equivalent to a huge smoke bomb, confusing the direction of the police's investigation..."

Zhu Ansheng smiled faintly:

"Liang, you have turned the cause and effect upside down."

"ha?"

"It wasn't that I suddenly had a whim and discovered the flaws of my footprints. To be honest, it was these footprints that made me feel something was wrong, so I thought of the time of melting snow and decided to sneak into the cold storage for investigation."

Xia Liang was stunned.

Zhu Ansheng narrowed his eyes and said coldly:

"In other words, this is not the most exquisite part of the murderer's layout, on the contrary... This is the biggest failure in the murderer's entire layout. Without these footprints, I would not have suspected that the deceased was played by the murderer."

He paused, his tone slowed down a little:

"But, this flaw always makes me feel very wrong. It is inconsistent with the criminal experience shown by the murderer. It seems that there is a very critical clue hidden in it... There must be something, and the reason for footprints to be left..."

Xia Liang sighed and realized the gap in ability between himself and Zhu Ansheng. He heard some clues from Zhu Ansheng's words, remembering what Bai Tian said to Jiang's expert, and asked:

"Brother-in-law, you seem to have always emphasized that the murderer is meticulous and very smart. Yesterday, expert Jiang said that the deceased left a dental record. You immediately thought it was the murderer who did it intentionally. Why is this?"

Zhu Ansheng touched the stubble on his face and smiled a little:

"There is no decisive evidence, it can only be said to be intuition at best."

He said:

"When you first talked to me about this case, I kept wondering why the two people who were locked up in the cold storage were the owner of the aquatic products store and the security guards on that street..."

"If the murderer's intention was to frame the murder, these two people should never be chosen as the target of framing. As Xiao Jiang said, they are permanent residents of the Huangsha Seafood Market. If they make a living in this area, they are not very suspicious of being a murderer in nature, because once a crime is committed, it is easy to find out the clues. The only thing that these two people have in common is that they are very close to this cold storage, so they can easily trick them into entering the cold storage..."

"But if this was a carefully prepared murder case, the murderer would not be lazy in such details. It would not be difficult to trick other irrelevant people into the cold storage in other forms. Since they can bring the dead... So, I have an indefinite speculation."
To be continued...