Chapter 1034 — A Strange Case
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Had a similar incident not occurred within a short time, this seemingly accidental case would never have caught Qiu Lingshan's attention. Now the case file had once again landed on Qiu Lingshan's desk, and the unusual aspects of it made her frown.
Although Wang Lieqian had beaten the contractor, the contractor had in truth suffered no great harm, only some bruises and a bit of scraped skin on his face. The bodyguards were the same; not a single bone was broken.
Under such circumstances, was there any need for Wang Lieqian to flee? Even the police had no intention of arresting him, so what was he running from? And judging by the contractor's attitude, he had clearly written it off as bad luck. Wang Lieqian could have learned all this with a few simple inquiries, and yet he had disappeared.
Sun Kaoli was a loader at a freight company. On the job, he had accidentally smashed a shipment of glassware. His boss had said nothing about it and had not even proposed docking his pay, and yet Sun Kaoli had gone missing.
What exactly was Sun Kaoli running from?
It was only after Sun Kaoli vanished that the boss sensed something was wrong and reported it to the police. But after the report, they found that nothing in the company had been stolen, which left the reason for Sun Kaoli's flight open to question...
Of course, that alone still did not amount to much. If those two disappearances could be put down to coincidence, then what about the case that came up today—was that a coincidence too?
Yang Maoling was a small-time thug who ran a protection racket around the vegetable market. Today, while he was collecting his protection money, he ran into a stubborn sort who would not play along, so Yang Maoling grabbed a scale pan lying nearby and beat the man until his face was a bloody mess.
This so-called bloody mess, once the blood was actually washed away, amounted to nothing more than a bleeding nose. It was hardly any great matter at all. Everyone assumed the business would blow over just like that, and that the man who had been beaten would duly show up the next day and hand over his protection money like a good boy.
Yang Maoling had beaten vendors before; plenty of those beatings had been far worse than this one, and none of them had ever counted as any great matter.
Only this time, the man he had beaten refused to take it lying down and called the police. But when the police came, all they did was mediate. After all, Yang Maoling's official position was manager of this farmers' market, and the money he collected, the cut he took, could be understood as a commercial transaction on the market's part—collecting rent. True, the rent was a bit steep and collected a bit too often, but you were perfectly free not to come.
If you really pressed the matter, there was no clear conclusion to be drawn. The market was privately owned, and Yang Maoling's collecting fees was perfectly normal. You refused to pay, you took a punch—that was an ordinary civil dispute.
But the strange thing was this: after beating the man, Yang Maoling simply vanished. He was never seen again.
On the face of it, it looked as though he had feared he might have injured the man badly and had fled to escape punishment. But in reality, the man he had beaten was not injured in the slightest.
Take any one of these three incidents on its own, and it could be classified as coincidence. But put all three together, and there was something decidedly unusual about them.
In the space of a few short days, three cases of "fleeing to escape punishment" had occurred—and those were only the ones with police records. What about the ones without police records? Were there similar scenarios still to be found?