Chapter 62 Pets
It can be seen that Liu Caiyang is quite strong at home. Keep your word and watch your money very tightly.
From her description, Zhu Shengrong was a dull and introverted family man who spent all day at home buying groceries and cooking. He was indeed worried recently, but Liu Caiyang did not ask much, perhaps he did not care. She watched the store for more than twelve hours every day, and had lunch and dinner in the store. She worked almost all year round except for the Spring Festival, and did not pay any attention to her husband's little worries.
Liu Caiyang repeatedly emphasized that Zhu Shengrong was an honest man, had little money, and would not have done anything stupid outside. As for why he made an appointment with someone at Qingming Hotel, who he had the appointment with, and why he brought a shoebox of cat food to eat, she had no idea.
"We don't have a cat at home, and I've never seen him buy cat food. I don't know where he got it from."
"When Liangliang was a kid, he did have a cat, but he failed to keep it alive. Later he got a dog, but it ran away within half a year."
Xia Mufan has loved small animals since he was a child. Hearing that their family had cats and dogs that didn't last long, he frowned and asked, "Since you've decided to adopt them, why don't you take good care of them?"
Liu Caiyang explained: "At that time, Liangliang was only a few years old, and he kept asking for a cat and a dog. When I went back to my hometown for the Spring Festival, I hugged a kitten in the village and refused to let go, so I had to bring it back. We rented a house at that time, the conditions were poor, and it was cold in winter. The cat sneaked to the balcony at night and froze to death."
"After I buried the cat, Liangliang cried for many days. Seeing him so sad, I had no choice but to find someone to bring back a two-month-old Pekingese to raise. When he was about six months old, he was naughty and kept running outside. One time, maybe the door was not closed properly, and he ran away."
Xia Mufan clenched his fists, wishing he could beat her up.
"Cats are afraid of cold weather. If the temperature drops below zero, you must take measures to keep them warm. Don't you know that? How could you lock it outside the balcony? Dogs are the most loyal. You can't drive them away. Even if they run out for fun, they will usually find their way back. Did you treat it well? Did you look for it seriously?"
Liu Caiyang waved his hand nonchalantly: "We were so poor back then that we couldn't even support ourselves, so how could we have the time to take good care of cats and dogs? If they die, they die. If they are lost, they are lost. Anyway, Liangliang didn't ask for a pet anymore, so that's good too."
Nowadays, many people have the same attitude towards pets as Liu Caiyang.
It is enough to give pets a bite of food and feed them enough, but there is no care or love.
Rural people keep cats and dogs freely, and they run around in fields and open spaces every day. Cats catch mice and dogs guard the house, each doing their own job.
City dwellers live in small apartments, so keeping pets is relatively troublesome.
Because of this trouble, many people do not have enough patience to treat pets.
Therefore, the abandonment rate of pets in cities is high and they have to wander around.
Like Coal Ash, it's an abandoned stray cat.
Xia Mufan was furious, but he couldn't vent his anger.
The current civil and criminal laws protect people, not animals.
Even though the Animal Protection Law prohibits the abandonment and abuse of animals, it is not taken seriously at the implementation level.
At this moment, Gong Weiguo came over with Zhu Shengrong's belongings, packed them one by one in transparent evidence bags, and asked Liu Caiyang to take a look.
Liu Caiyang's face showed sadness, and his hand holding the wallet was shaking slightly: "Yes, this is his wallet. I gave it to him on his birthday ten years ago, and he has been using it until now."
Brown cowhide wallet with badly worn edges.
All the items in the wallet, including a total of twenty-three dollars and fifty cents in cash, an ID card, and a family photo, were so plain that they looked a little shabby.
Xia Mufan glanced at Sun Xianbing who was standing behind Gong Weiguo. He was the one who took the record of yesterday's interrogation. "Zhu Shengrong fainted because he didn't pay the bill, right?"
Sun Xianbing nodded: "Yes."
Xia Mufan: "This little money is not enough to pay for the meal, right?"
Sun Xianbing: "Of course it's not enough. I heard from the waiter that his meal cost more than a hundred yuan in total."
Xia Mushige: "It seems that he thinks the person who asked him out will come and pay the bill."
Xia Mufan turned to look at Liu Caiyang: "Does Zhu Shengrong have any friends? The kind that are willing to pay for him to have a meal?"
Liu Caiyang curled his lips and said, "He stays at home all day, dealing with vendors in the vegetable market and those idle grandpas and aunties in the community. How can he have such a generous friend?"
Xia Mufan took Zhu Shengrong's pager.
Pagers, also known as call machines or BP machines, became popular in the market in the 1990s.
A small black square box with a large text display and a buckle chain on one side for easy attachment to a belt.
Xia Mushige asked: "Did you check the pager message?"
Sun Xianbing was a little depressed: "I only saw three messages from Liu Caiyang, at 9:20, 9:50 and 10:00 respectively."
The diners next to him said that Zhu Shengrong kept looking down at his pager during the meal. At first, Sun Xianbing thought he could find important clues here, but he didn't expect that there was only a message sent by Liu Caiyang after he was poisoned.
Xia Mushige pressed the view button and the screen lit up.
"Where have you been? Call me back right now."
"Where the hell have you been? Come back here!"
"If you don't come back, don't come back!"
The messages are all signed by my wife.
The words became more and more intense. It was obvious that Liu Caiyang was angry when she returned home and found her husband was not at home. When her husband didn't come home after ten o'clock and didn't answer her phone calls, she went to bed.
Xia Mufan asked Gong Weiguo: "Can the information be restored?"
Gong Weiguo frowned and said, "I have to go to the manual paging station to ask. It will take some time."
Before mobile phones were invented, people mostly communicated through letters or phone calls. However, there are time intervals between the exchange of letters, and it is possible that you cannot find someone over the phone. Therefore, the emergence of the pager brought people into an era without time and space distance. People could be found at any time and anywhere, making life and work much more convenient.
At one time, it was fashionable for everyone to wear a pager on their waist.
The earliest pagers could only display incoming calls through an automatic paging station. After receiving the message, the pager owner would call back according to the caller's number, and the two parties could contact each other in a timely manner through the phone. Later, Chinese display was gradually added. By dialing the manual paging station, the message would be displayed on the pager.
Chinese display is similar to current mobile phone text messages, which is also a way of communication. It is concise and saves time waiting for calls, making communication more convenient, for example:
Lovers express their emotions:
——Honey, I miss you.
——See you at the usual place at 8 o'clock tonight.
Intimate interaction between family members:
——Xiaobao, it’s time to go home and have dinner.
——Remember to buy a cake for Niu Niu after get off work.
The number of messages that can be stored on a pager is limited. If they are not deleted in time, the old ones will easily be overwritten by the new ones. Zhu Shengrong's pager was so clean, I'm afraid he had deleted a lot of things. If you want to retrieve the original information, you need to go to the manual paging station to investigate. However, the manual paging station is different from the telecommunications bureau, and there are a lot of paging messages every day. I don’t know if I can find it.
Liu Caiyang looked at the pager, whose surface had lost its luster and whose screen had been worn to a blurry state. He suddenly covered his face and burst into tears. "I bought him this pager two years ago for more than 2,000 yuan. We had a telephone at home, but not at the shoe store. If I had any problems, I would use the magnetic card phone to page him. We had lived through such a hard life before, and now we have finally made some money, why did he die!"
--
Shortly after returning to the office of Serious Crime Unit 7, Gu Shaoqi also delivered the autopsy report.
As expected, Zhu Shengrong died from taking a large amount of strychnine. In addition to the dishes ordered at Qingming, there was about 50g of undigested cat food in his stomach.
Zhu Shengrong found cat food residue on the fingertips and palm of his left hand.
A pound of cat food!
How does he eat so much cat food?
Using chopsticks to eat with the right hand and using the left hand to stuff cat food into the mouth, this picture seems abnormal no matter how you think about it.
Did he eat it voluntarily or was he forced to eat it?
None of this is known.
The whole case seemed to be shrouded in a thick veil, hazy and obscure.
Gong Weiguo raised an idea: "Is it possible that this was Zhu Shengrong's last meal? He didn't have much money, but he dared to come into the restaurant and order a lot of dishes because he didn't want to live anymore. He brought poisoned cat food to the restaurant, and when he was almost done, he grabbed a handful of cat food and ate it. Anyway, he wouldn't have to pay for it if he died, right?"
Sun Xianbing raised an objection: "He is alive and well, with a wife and son, why would he want to commit suicide?"
Feng Xiaoyu had been sitting next to Xia Mufan and taking notes, and knew something about Liu Caiyang.
"If you get to know Liu Caiyang more, you will know how strong this woman is. Zhu Shengrong takes care of the household affairs, while she takes care of the external affairs. She only leaves Zhu Shengrong some money for food every day, and requires him to deliver lunch and dinner every day. If she doesn't see him when she gets home at night, she will call him repeatedly. She knows that he is worried about something, but she doesn't ask. When she asks Zhu Shengrong whether he has a woman outside, her face immediately changes, and she threatens to grind him to ashes and make him a wandering ghost."
At this point, Feng Xiaoyu shook his head: "Living with such a wife, perhaps the introverted Zhu Shengrong was very depressed? So he didn't want to live. His family runs a shoe store, and there are empty shoe boxes everywhere in the house. He used shoe boxes to pack cat food with poison. It's normal for him to go to a big restaurant to have a good meal before he dies."
Gong Weiguo became excited when he saw Feng Xiaoyu supported his idea. "Yes, Zhu Shengrong has been cooking for his whole life and may be tired of it. So he wants to have a big meal in the restaurant and eat his fill."
Sun Xianbing and Yu Jing did not support the idea of suicide.
Sun Xianbing said: "Even if Liu Caiyang is strong, it is because of life. She is a woman who has to guard the shoe store for twelve hours and eat and drink in a small store of more than ten square meters. Isn't it hard? Zhu Shengrong is fat and big-eared. It can be seen that he eats a lot and moves little, which shows that he lives a good life at home. His wife is making money outside, so why is he wronged for delivering a meal? He still wants to die, huh!"
Yu Jing had some information with the police from the police station today and had his own thoughts: "I think Xiao Sun is right. Every family has different divisions of labor. In their family, the man is responsible for the interior and the woman is responsible for the exterior. The couple works together to make a living and they still have feelings for each other. When Liu Caiyang saw Zhu Shengrong's belongings today, he didn't seem to be pretending to be sad. Moreover, both the wallet and the pager were given to him by Liu Caiyang. This shows that although Liu Caiyang usually manages money tightly, he is not stingy with Zhu Shengrong and has given him everything he should have and bought for him."
"I wonder if you have noticed Zhu Shengrong's belt? It's made of very good material and is from a big brand. You can tell it's not cheap. His shirt and pants are also very delicate and fit well, which shows that Liu Caiyang is still attentive to her husband. It's normal for a woman to curse when she's angry."
Each side holds its own opinion and it is difficult to reach a consensus.
Gong Weiguo said: "If it wasn't suicide, who would bring poisoned cat food to a restaurant and eat it with their bare hands?"
Sun Xianbing immediately retorted: "If it was suicide, there are so many ways to commit suicide. Who would commit suicide by eating cat food?"
Feng Xiaoyu said: "There was no one else at the scene except the waiter and the customers. There is no evidence to support the claim of homicide."
Yu Jing: "What if the other party used the pager to force him to eat cat food? Didn't Liu Caiyang say that Zhu Shengrong was worried and couldn't sleep well recently? Maybe he used some weakness of Zhu Shengrong to threaten him?"
Sun Xianbing immediately followed up, "Yes, didn't Zhu Shengrong ask the waiter to leave two sets of dishes when he ordered? He waited for an hour before the kitchen served the dishes, which shows that he had an appointment to meet someone at the restaurant. The person who never showed up could be the murderer."
Gong Weiguo snorted, "Maybe this person doesn't even exist. Zhu Shengrong had the idea of committing suicide and wanted to have a good meal at the restaurant. But after sitting down and looking at the lively crowd next to him, he hesitated again, so he made up a person who didn't exist at all to give himself time to think and wait. It was not until the waiter urged him twice that he agreed to serve the food. After he was full, he made up his mind and stuffed a handful of poisoned cat food into his mouth."
Yu Jing still felt that it was unreasonable: "Since Zhu Shengrong was planning to poison and had obtained the rat poison, wouldn't it be better for him to just put it in the soup and drink it in one gulp? Why would he eat cat food?"
When asked this question, Gong Weiguo and Feng Xiaoyu looked at each other and shut up at the same time.
Regardless, the appearance of cat food is really weird.
The contradiction in the problem still lies in the existence of cat food.
Zhu Shengrong doesn’t have any pets at home, so why is there cat food?
Where did he buy the cat food? Is there any left at home?
Why does he eat cat food? Is it a quirk or is it forced?
Xia Mushige walked to the whiteboard, picked up a blue marker and wrote the word "cat food" on it: "Next, we will focus on finding the source of cat food."
Sun Xianbing raised his hand: "Dayu and I will go to the flower and bird market to ask."
Imported cat food is still a new thing in the market, with few stores selling it and few people buying it.
Xia Mushige nodded: "Okay, I'll take Coal Ash with me too."
Gong Weiguo asked hurriedly: "What about Xiaoyu and I?"
Xia Mufan said, "Go to the manual paging station and ask what information Zhu Shengrong's pager had yesterday."
Gong Weiguo and Feng Xiaoyu said in unison: "Okay."
Suddenly a voice came from the corner of the office: "Can I go to the flower and bird market with you?"
Everyone turned their eyes to the person who was speaking.
Gu Shaoqi sat quietly, half of his body hidden by green ivy, and his existence was ignored by everyone.
Xia Mufan then remembered that Gu Shaoqi had not left after delivering the autopsy report.
When did Forensic Doctor Gu become so interested in the process of solving cases?
Xia Mushi asked: "What are you going to do?"
Gu Shaoqi raised his eyes and looked at her: "Didn't you say you wanted to find a companion for Xiao Mo? I'll just take this opportunity to go over. With Xiao Mo around, your behavior will seem more reasonable and won't alert the boss."
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