Chapter 76: Children's Welfare Institute
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At the same time, Lu Yizhan and his colleagues were investigating the case of the missing child at the orphanage.
"You say, this matter should belong to the criminal police brigade, or some special department, right?" Lu Yizhan's coworker's face didn't look too good, "Look at that missing kid's surveillance footage, it's not something we can handle!"
"Four kids heard a siren last night in the wee hours of the morning, then lined up and walked out to play in the central children's park, and the weirdest thing about it is that these kids didn't seem hypnotized or sleepwalking at all, and they made a point of avoiding the security cameras, which means that all four of them were lucid, swinging on the swings in that crappy children's park, and then one hour later, all of a sudden, on the security cameras, the kids were suddenly gone! Suddenly they're gone!"
The coworker said and started cursing, "Shit, but the kid's gone, and the equipment keeps moving, and I didn't sleep well yesterday after watching the surveillance ......"
Finished, Lu Yizhan's colleague did not stop rubbing his arm, he got goosebumps: "Now there are five children left, was ready to transfer to other orphanages, but now the hospital and this incident, all must stay in this orphanage in place to receive the investigation, too fucking weird!"
Lu Yizhan frowns, "Go ask the Dean first."
"Dean? I don't think she'll say anything." Lu Yizhan's colleague skimmed his lips and muttered, "This old woman didn't report the children missing at all! If it wasn't for the fact that the hospital followed up with the death of a person from poisoned mushrooms, escalating the case to a higher level, and when we came over to clean up the children and realized that the number of children was incorrect with four missing, no one would have even known that there was a missing child here!"
"Then we'll have to go over and ask too." Lu Yizhan spoke in a steady tone, "She must know something."
In the dean's office, Mu Ke's father had finished discussing the donation with the dean and had gone to talk to someone else, leaving the old dean alone in the dean's office.
The old dean sat in her chair, her eyelids drooping as she looked at Lu Yizhan, who had come to her : "You asked me why I didn't report my child missing?"
Lu Yizhan nodded her head, and the old dean suddenly laughed as she trembled and opened a drawer, pulling out a pile of receipts and handing them to Lu Yizhan: "Young man, you're new here, aren't you? I've reported every time I've gone missing, but have you ever gotten my child back? So this time I simply didn't report it, and this orphanage is going out of business anyway."
Lu Yizhan frowned at the police receipt the old dean handed him.
The oldest of these returns are from ten years ago, all of which were reported as missing children, but the investigative references were [children running away from home on their own], and there was no follow-up.
"Every year, our private orphanage holds a June 1 performance for the good people who invest in our orphanage, so that these spendthrift bosses can see how the children they are raising are doing, but every year, after the June 1 performance, children go missing from our orphanage, and the findings are that the children have managed to run away on their own. "
The old dean said slowly, "At that time, your police still suspected that we, the orphanage, were abusing the children, and that's why the children [ran away from home], but the investigation found that there was no abuse here, it was that these children wanted to run away on their own, and that we hadn't done anything out of the ordinary to these children, and what with the trafficking of human organs and pedophilia □□□ trading, you've already investigated the place all over, haven't you found nothing? You've investigated this place all over, didn't you also find nothing?"
The old dean lifted his eyelids, "It's the very common, very ordinary child who runs away from home and then goes missing."
"Missing children are hard to find, these little dots of beans run out the same as a grain of rice falling into a sea of people, and you're looking for a needle in a haystack for these children who are intentionally trying to hide from you, so every year it just doesn't happen."
Lu Yizhan's colleague couldn't help but interject, "But this time look at the surveillance, in the park children people sitting on the swing is gone! This is not run out of missing cases!"
"What you're saying is so strange, how could it happen? On the contrary, our surveillance has been used for a long time, it's old and worn out." The old dean downplayed the situation, "Maybe it's broken and malfunctioning?"
Lu Yizhan's colleague was choked to a heart attack, just wanted to sound harshly forced to question the old dean, but was stopped by Lu Yizhan.
Lu Yizhan asked calmly, "Dean, it's our fault that we couldn't find the child, but you still should have reported it, and I don't think it's just this one year that you didn't report it, right? I just went through your return slip, and there were a few years where there were none, and you said that children went missing every single year, so what's the truth of the matter?"
The old dean was silent for a few minutes, then turned and rummaged through the bookcase behind her, where dust had fallen from the very inside, and pulled out a large filing bag, which she blew the dust off of, pulled the top threads, and drew out of it something like a thick book of albums, and opened it.
The first page is the [group photo of the 200x Children's Welfare Institution's cultural performance] - this is obviously the file book of this private welfare institution.
The photo shows dozens of small children standing somewhat restrainedly next to a group of successful men in suits, wearing the good-natured, fake smiles they've been taught to wear a million times over, a little lipstick dot mark on their foreheads, and their lips painted red, gaudy, and old-fashioned.
"Every year there are children missing, but I did not report it every year." The old dean looked at the children on the photo, his tone pulled long, "This children's welfare center can't last long even if someone smashes a year or two's investment, it's going to close down, and it won't hurt to talk straight with you guys about these old stories."
"A lot of the kids here aren't really that well disciplined, at best they're individualistic, at worst they're just wild and used to running outside."
"Some of them aren't runaways, they're crime fugitives."
The old dean said and turned another page, this page is something like a diary of early childhood training records, which reads: [Orphans Bai Liu, Xiao Ke and other five people after the June 1 performance beat up the investors who came to watch the performance, robbed the investors of their belongings as well as cell phones, given the punishment of cleaning the whole courtyard and one day's fasting, and the subsequent depending on the situation of the correction of whether to continue to impose additional punishment].
"For example, these kids beat up the investors right after the rendezvous and then ran away that night, and I didn't report it, turned a blind eye and let them run away because if they didn't run away, these kids wouldn't have ended up very well in this orphanage that was invested in by these few investors."
The old dean's finger nudged at that punishment, meaningfully, "At least the punishment can't be just a day of fasting."
"Dean, can I see that group photo?" Lu Yizhan's focus was elsewhere, an expression of unprecedented gravity on his face.
The dean handed the file bag to Lu Yizhan, who flipped to the previous page of the [200x Children's Welfare Institution Cultural Performance Group Photo], his eyes quickly searched through the children in the photo, and finally locked on a child on the edge of the corner.
This child, even with lipstick and a big red dot on his brow, did not look funny, but had a very light little girl's beauty, but this beauty was ruined by his unperturbed eyes, showing a kind of precocity beyond his age, and the other children in his cold eyes seemed like a bunch of fools, very eye-catching.
No one else will be more familiar with this period of the face than Lu Yizhan.
Lu Yizhan's eyes fell motionless on this child in this photo, and he pointed to him and looked up at the old dean, "Who is this child? What is his name?"
"This kid?" The old dean looked at him for a moment and seemed to fall into a memory, "He's the kid who led the fight against the investors and ran away, so I remember him very well, when he came into the orphanage he only said his name was Bai, Bai Liu."
"No." Lu Yizhan propped his hands on the desktop with a "pop" and stared at the old dean, "His name is Bai Liu, he was indeed once called Bai Liu, but he changed his name when he was fourteen years old, and he has never been called by this name since then, and he came out of the public orphanage together with me! out, he couldn't have been in this private orphanage at the same time!"
"But ......" the old dean looked at Lu Yizhan with a somewhat perplexed look, "are you mistaken? This child, Bai Liu, escaped and shortly afterward the investor retrieved him by some means, and he didn't make it out of here, Bai Liu died not long after he was retrieved."
"Dead? What was the cause ...... of his death?" Lu Yizhan asked in an oddly vocalized voice.
The old dean sighed, "A very strange way to die, he mistakenly ate a strange coin which broke a hole in the middle and was swallowed into his windpipe, and in a few minutes the person was gone, because he suffered some very bad things in this orphanage of ours, before he left and after he came back, so... . we all suspect that Bai Liu committed suicide."
Lu Yizhan stiffly moved his eyes to look at the black and white photo of Bai Liu who didn't have any expression on his face at all, his eyelids were loosely drooping as if he was a little bit sleepy looking to the side, his hanging hair was wet as if it was soaked with sweat from the performance, Lu Yizhan felt his chest being invisibly and heavily pressed by all these weird things, he looked at the photo with a deadpan look at that He looked at the boy in the photo with a deadpan figure, and felt that he was a little out of breath.
That was Bai Liu ten years ago.
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Bai Liu went up to pick up the doll next to the seesaw, this is a handmade doll, it is clear that the reference template is him, but the texture is very old, but there is also a residual trace of a bit of ribbon on the legs of his doll line, the feeling that it should be a handmade gift dolls - usually on this kind of gift dolls will have a gift or the date it was made.
Bai Liu turned the doll over to try to find a date, and eventually found a handwritten date line on the inside of the screwed-off head.
This is indeed a ten year old doll.
Bai Liu work is only two or three years only, he is working only after the start of this doll on the shirt suit pants social animal dress up, that hangs on the neck of the coin is not long ago Bai Liu joined the game only after the system of the concrete carrier.
His current costume had been used to order a doll ten years ago, and he had been left here with his head and limbs twisted off.
Bai Liu narrowed his eyes.
Published at: 03/18/2024 04:00