Chapter 329 - Secrets of the Bas.e.m.e.nt
In the underground labyrinth just now, all the doors had digital pa.s.sword locks with a keypad from 0-9. For the real rooms, the door lock wasn’t electronic and couldn’t be unlocked with the code 6712.
There were 14 rooms in the bas.e.m.e.nt. They were all locked and needed to be opened with a key.
The Master Key could open any non-pa.s.sword door lock but it was a reward card for the perfect clearance of 3 of Hearts. Qu Wanyue, Long Sen and Old Mo didn’t get a perfect clearance and didn’t have the card. Yu Hanjiang’s card only had one use left and Ye Qi had three uses left. This wasn’t enough to open 14 doors.
Ye Qi scratched his head. “The number of Master Key cards isn’t enough. Do we just smash open the doors?”
Yu Hanjiang told them, “Stand back. I’ll open the doors.”
Yu Hanjiang had a way to open this type of simple door lock even without the Master Key card. He walked to the door of room 101 and found a piece of iron wire to stick into the keyhole. He listened as he rotated it left and right. After a while, everyone heard a small click and the iron lock really opened!
Ye Qi gave a thumbs up. “Great. Group Leader Yu can unlock it like this and the 14 doors can be opened.”
Yu Hanjiang told them, “We should hurry and search from the first room carefully.”
As he spoke, he opened the door of room 101 and entered first, his teammates following after him.
The scene inside the room gave the group a bit of a pause. It was an empty room that was nearly 10 square meters in size. There was a metal bed, a simple bedside table and an iron shelf used for infusions. It glowed with a dazzling cold light under the illumination of the Night Pearl. The bed was a thin foam mattress covered with white sheets commonly seen in hotels.
Ye Qi guessed in a low voice, “Is this a ward?”
Qu Wanyue looked around. “From the perspective of the layout, it should be a ward. It is a single bed ward to prevent people from communicating with each other and leaking secrets.”
Old Mo sighed, his voice hoa.r.s.e. “How can you rest well after an operation in such a simple ward? There is no air conditioner in the room. This is fine in summer but once it is autumn and winter, the temperature of the room is so low that I’m afraid they will freeze.” He was 66 years old now and the low temperature of the room made his hands and feet cold. His joints hurt as he walked. It was hard to imagine a person sleeping in such a cold ward after surgery.
Long Sen frowned. “We had surgery in the hospital and the wards we lived in at least had air conditioning and a TV. The environment was very clean. This place is really terrible… it feels like a horror movie with a hospital theme!”
Ye Qi agreed. “It isn’t surprising at all to develop postoperative infections and complications in such a bad environment!”
Yu Hanjiang didn’t speak. His face was extremely cold as he went into the room and searched quickly. After a quick search, no clues were found. Only then did he withdraw and continue to open the doors of the other rooms.
Next was the opposite 102 and then 201, 202, 301, 302… they were all uniformly arranged wards that were simple, damp and cold. Apart from the different house numbers, there was no difference in the furnishings of the rooms.
Yu Hanjiang asked everyone to put away the Night Pearls and sprayed the k2018;luminol reagent’ used to detect blood stains in each ward. Fluorescent spots appeared in the rooms, indicating that there had been blood stains in these places. They were just hastily cleaned.
In room 201, the blood stains formed puddles on the mattress and even around and below the bed. This should be blood oozing from the wound after the operation. To Yu Hanjiang’s surprise, under the effect of luminol, several clear footprints appeared on the floor of room 201!
The team members looked at the dark room covered with green messy footprints and felt all the hair on their body standing up! In the dark and cold s.p.a.ce, so many fluorescent footprints suddenly appeared. This was indeed very similar to the scene of a horror movie.
Ye Qi was scared and hid behind Old Mo, only showing his head to look at the ground.
Yu Hanjiang explained, “The reagent I just sprayed is luminol and it will fluoresce when it reacts with blood. The footprints in this room were caused by several people with blood on the soles of their feet walking around.”
Everyone had heard that the police used special drugs to test for blood when investigating a crime scene but today was their first time seeing it in person. Ye Qi curiously asked, “Group Leader Yu, can you judge from the footprints how many people there were at the time?”
Yu Hanjiang lowered his head to observe carefully and an image gradually appeared in his mind. He closed his eyes to simulate the crime. “From the size of the footprints, there were three people in the room at the time. Among them was a man over 1.8 meters tall and a girl around 1.6 meters tall. The girl came down from the bed with messy footprints and rushed toward the door. She should’ve wanted to escape but was stopped by another person. The three of them had a dispute. In the end, the girl was forced back on the bed.”
The footprints only stayed around the bed and didn’t reach the door. It was obvious that the girl had failed to escape…
Qu Wanyue thought of her ending and her heart was stung. “She is bleeding so much. Did the operation fail or something unexpected happened? She wanted to run but these people didn’t let her run. So they just… got rid of her?”
Long Sen shuddered. “They just killed her here?”
Yu Hanjiang nodded calmly. “One of the five corpses we found did belong to a woman.”
Everyone, “……”
The room fell silent. Everyone seemed able to see the tragedy that happened in this room.
A girl who was only 1.6 meters tall struggled to escape in the dark and b.l.o.o.d.y ward, only to be caught by two tall men. They forced her back onto the bed. She had just finished an operation and was weak with no energy to resist. They only needed to inject her with a lethal dose of medicine and she could only lie helplessly on the bed, waiting to die.
Everyone looked at the messy footprints on the ground. The more they thought about it, the sadder they became. Yu Hanjiang took a few photos of the scene with his mobile phone and calmly said, “Let’s go. We have to continue searching for evidence.”
It had already happened and they couldn’t change it. They could only collect clues as soon as possible to find the culprit.
Yu Hanjiang took his teammates into the depths of the corridor. The moment room 401 was opened, there was a pungent smell… it was the smell of disinfectant.
The room was filled with two movable beds with rollers. Next to them was a gla.s.s cabinet that looked like the medicine cabinet in a hospital. The cabinet was empty at this time and there was an ECG monitor beside each bed. Yu Hanjiang pa.s.sed what he saw onto Xiao Lou. Xiao Lou thought about it before saying, “This should be the anesthesia room.”
Yu Hanjiang found no useful clues in the anesthesia room so he led his teammates to continue searching 402 opposite. Room 402 had the same layout as 401 and was also an anesthesia room.
Going further in, 501 was a temporary office and the environment was slightly better than the other places. There were two desks with power plugs underneath. There should’ve been two computers here but they took the computers with them when they withdrew. They didn’t leave any information.
502 was similar to a meeting room. There was a desk, office chair and table. This was likely to be the place where confidentiality contracts were signed and deposits paid.
The moment the door of 601 opened, Yu Hanjiang could tell even without Xiao Lou that it was an operating room. There was an operating table in the middle of the room with a cart full of instruments next to it. A light for surgery was attached to the ceiling that could be pulled at will and there was an old ECG monitor.
There were no clues left in the operating room but the small operating room made everyone angry!
Surgery had to be performed in a sterile environment. The operating rooms in a hospital were clean, tidy and bright. There was a special hand-washing area outside the operating room and all medical staff had to wear sterile surgical gowns when entering the operating room.
However, the operating room in front of them was more like a slaughterhouse for livestock! The ground was only covered with a layer of cement and there were holes here and there. It wasn’t even as good as a rough room. The walls were even more horrible. The painted white walls had lost their color and the walls had even cracked and expanded due to water leakage. Doing surgery in such an environment? What did they treat people as?
Yu Hanjiang clenched his fists and whispered, “Keep looking!”
Room 602 was a garbage disposal room. There was a large garbage can that was used to store medical garbage. This large garbage can had been cleaned out and no obvious clues were found. This group of people might be cold-blooded and brutal but they weren’t stupid. They cleaned up the clues at the scene when they left!
There were only 701 and 702 left to check. The five of them walked to the door. Perhaps it was because the bas.e.m.e.nt temperature was too low. They couldn’t help getting a chill. Yu Hanjiang opened the door of 701. The scene that appeared in front of them made everyone feel numb.
They saw several empty beds side by side in the room, all of which were simple metal frames. Some were rusted and there was an awful, rancid smell in the air. Yu Hanjiang sprayed the luminol reagent used to detect blood stains in the room and found a large number of dense fluorescent spots around the room as well as on the beds.
There used to be a large number of mixed blood stains in this room but they were washed away hastily and weren’t visible on the surface. They could only be seen when using luminol for blood stain detection. Everyone looked at the mottled light specks and were frightened.
Ye Qi was shocked. “Is this also a ward? Isn’t the distance between beds too close?”
“It isn’t a ward.” Yu Hanjiang was expressionless. “This is the morgue.”
Everyone, “………”
A morgue! These empty beds were used to store bodies! The strong smell in the air should be from blood. Perhaps this was the true first crime scene. Those who failed the operation or those who might reveal the organization’s secrets were… dismembered here.
Everyone felt sick to their stomachs thinking of this b.l.o.o.d.y and cruel scene. Long Sen immediately held Qu Wanyue’s shoulder and stroked her back to prevent her from vomiting. Ye Qi resisted the urge to vomit and exclaimed angrily, “These people are simply inhumane!”
Old Mo thought of the photos of the dismembered corpses that Yu Hanjiang showed everyone and felt his temples throbbing. “The dismembered corpses should have been processed here.”
Qu Wanyue was the most attentive of the four teammates. She heard Old Mo’s words and raised a doubt. “The corpses were thrown into the garbage bin in the early hours of the 31st but it is possible that not all five people were killed on the 31st. Killing five people would cause too much movement. Some might’ve died very early. Were the corpses only kept in the morgue or is there another place to store them?”
Yu Hanjiang had also thought of this. The forensic doctor proved that the time of death of the five people wasn’t the same. So were the corpses simply killed in this room 701 morgue or somewhere else?
There was still 702. Yu Hanjiang turned and opened the door of 702. The moment he opened the door, an extremely strong wave of cold air hit his face. Old Mo, Ye Qi and Qu Wanyue were so cold that they sneezed several times. Yu Hanjiang and Long Sen’s bodies were unaffected but they felt the coldness that burrowed into people’s necks.
They all took out their Night Pearls to take a closer look…
The entire room was filled with rows of freezers. Ye Qi’s eyes widened and he trembled in disbelief. “Could it be that the people who were killed before were put in the freezer?”
Yu Hanjiang’s face was calm. “I’m afraid so. Previously when they rented this place, they said they were doing the beef and lamb business. It isn’t surprising to buy freezers. The residents of this community probably didn’t think that it wasn’t beef and lamb stored in the freezers but… human corpses!”
A slaughterhouse. A living slaughterhouse!
There were 14 rooms in the bas.e.m.e.nt. There were 6 wards, 2 anesthesia rooms, 1 operating room, 1 garbage disposal room, 1 office, 1 meeting room, 1 morgue and 1 cold storage room for storing corpses. It was like a butcher’s professional killing a.s.sembly line.
The butcher’s knives were gone and the blood was washed away.
However, they had evacuated less than three days ago and the blood stains could still be detected using luminol. The iron beds, equipment and freezers couldn’t speak but they were clearly telling Yu Hanjiang the truth.
The bas.e.m.e.nt of Unit 1 of the 13th Building of Antai Garden was transformed by the mysterious organ trafficking organization into a human slaughterhouse.
Proofreader: Paranoid Kitten & Fictional Reality