Chapter 2272 - 2232: Investigating the Child Disappearance Case Again

This woman really was treating him like dregs left over from medicine.

Ye Qiu got up and got dressed, and when he went outside, he saw Xia Jing, face glowing red, making breakfast.

"Go back after you’ve eaten breakfast."

Xia Jing went to get his toiletries ready for him.

After Ye Qiu finished washing up, the two of them didn’t say much. It seemed they only communicated with their bodies, and there was no other communication.

But as far as Xia Jing was concerned, she was already very satisfied with this kind of life.

After Ye Qiu finished the abalone congee Xia Jing had made for him and left to return to Peach Blossom Spring Villa, his parents and older sister had already gone to work.

Lin Xiang had gone back to school as well; only Xiaomai was left here.

"Ye Qiu, how come it took you so long to treat Miss Xia’s illness last night?"

Xiaomai found it strange.

"Her illness is hard to treat. It has to be me treating her."

Is that so?

Xiaomai felt Miss Xia looked very healthy, not like someone who was sick at all. Xiaomai really couldn’t figure out what kind of illness this Miss Xia supposedly had.

Ye Qiu knew that if Xia Jing hadn’t come looking for him last night, his cultivation might have broken through again.

Just as Ye Qiu was getting ready to head to school, unexpectedly, Zhao Ruxue called.

"Ye Qiu, where are you?"

"I just finished breakfast, I’m about to head back to school."

"Then can you come over to the City Police Bureau?"

What was going on over there?

Ye Qiu said, "Alright, I’ll come over."

As Ye Qiu headed toward the City Police Bureau, he couldn’t help wondering if Zhao Ruxue had another case she needed to investigate.

When he drove to the City Police Bureau, it was still early. Probably only someone like Zhao Ruxue would come in this early to work.

Ye Qiu parked the car and went straight into Zhao Ruxue’s office.

When he went in, he saw Zhao Ruxue pouring herself some water.

"Ruxue, what’s so urgent that you had to call me in?"

"That child disappearance case still hasn’t been solved."

Child disappearance case?

Wasn’t that from some time ago already?

Cases like trafficking—if you say they’re hard to investigate, they’re not exactly impossible, but if you say they’re easy, they’re really not either. They require a lot of effort.

So at the beginning, Ye Qiu suspected that those missing children had probably been trafficked.

After all, these days there are more and more patients with infertility issues, and on the other hand there are lots of only children. If one day the child suddenly disappears, and the parents can’t have another, then buying children on the black market becomes a possibility.

Those who sell children will certainly not sell their own. They can only find ways to purchase other people’s children and then sell them on.

Back in the days when the internet wasn’t developed, lots of women and children were trafficked. Now that the internet and everything else are much more developed, these kinds of cases have decreased a lot.

But they still happen from time to time.

"We’ve been investigating all along. There are already quite a few missing children. Every disappearance means one more family is torn apart, so we in the police are still trying our best to find them for these families. If we can find them, having the family reunited is definitely the best outcome."

That was exactly how Zhao Ruxue saw it.

Since she was in charge, she was definitely going to see it through to the end.

Ye Qiu really admired this part of Zhao Ruxue’s character. She was probably the only one who would go this far.

The others really didn’t have her sense of responsibility.

"Then bring me the files on the missing children and let me take a look."

Zhao Ruxue handed over the case files. Ye Qiu took them and started going through the missing children one by one.

First he checked their ages, dates of birth, that kind of thing.

They were all around three or four years old, just starting kindergarten.

These are the easiest ages to kidnap, and once they’ve been trafficked, it’s very hard to ever get them back to their biological parents.

So many kids later on, even when they find out they were trafficked, still have a hard time finding their birth parents, because at that age it’s hard to remember things from before.

"They all went missing from kindergartens?"

First Ye Qiu confirmed they were all children, then confirmed the site was kindergartens.

That narrowed the range a lot.

"Yes, all kindergartens, and specifically those in urban villages, the mixed-bag kind of kindergartens."

Ye Qiu analyzed as he read.

The missing children had all disappeared from kindergartens. Two of them were from out of town, and six had local household registrations.

The ages were mostly three, and two of them were four.

He checked their eight-character birth charts as well—nothing special about them.

Nothing odd there.

If that was the case, he could rule out this being the work of those warlocks.

So,

Judging from the dates when the children went missing, each case was separated by only a day or two, and it was only after the parents and teachers noticed that the children were gone that they hurriedly called the police.

It had been nearly half a month now. In other words, when Ye Qiu went to Siberia, the cases had already started while he was still over in Siberia.

"Have you watched the surveillance footage yet?"

"Some of the urban villages have surveillance, some don’t. And for the ones that do, some of them didn’t capture how the children went missing at all."

"Pull up the surveillance for me."

When Zhao Ruxue turned on the computer and brought up the urban village surveillance videos around those kindergartens, as she hit play, Ye Qiu came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her.

Zhao Ruxue shot Ye Qiu a glare. This was an office; they couldn’t fool around. It’d be bad if their subordinates saw them.

Still, since the door was closed now, Zhao Ruxue wasn’t too worried about someone suddenly barging in.

"See for yourself."

Once she had it up, Ye Qiu started watching, scrubbing through the footage one by one.

To go through surveillance footage like this requires a lot of patience. You have to stare at the playback without missing a single second, which is really not easy.

After Ye Qiu had gone through all of it several times, he paused every usable segment and captured screenshots.

There really were clues buried in there—it was just that Zhao Ruxue hadn’t noticed them.

"Ruxue, take a look."

When Zhao Ruxue came over, she saw that Ye Qiu had circled quite a few spots.

"This... what do you see?"

Ye Qiu asked.

"These few people look suspicious."

"Not just suspicious—the perpetrators are them."

Ye Qiu said directly.

However, the surveillance footage wasn’t very clear, and these suspicious people had clearly known about the cameras in advance and deliberately avoided them. You could only roughly make out the contours of their faces; you couldn’t see what they actually looked like at all.

Ye Qiu had just kept zooming in, but it was still very blurry.

But a person’s gait is something you can’t really change.

The problem was, there were a lot of people, and whether these suspicious individuals had already fled was really anyone’s guess.

"So what do we do?" Zhao Ruxue asked.

If you can’t see their faces clearly, how do you find these suspects?