Overly Intense [Criminal Investigation] 142

Chapter 142: Caught

Her headset was not taken off, and the sound was transmitted to the central control room through the headset.

What was that sound?

Piao Zheng was startled by the scolding and suddenly looked up, but the body camera had already been turned off by Shen Yiyi, and the screen was pitch black.

“What’s wrong?” Piao Zheng was extremely nervous, thinking that the missing Yanli had appeared. “Is the scene chaotic again?”

“No, it’s my own private matter.” Shen Yiyi was afraid of causing unnecessary trouble and pressed the on/off button on her headset. “I’ll close it on my side first.”

Qin Luo had not finished scolding. She reached out and grabbed Shen Yiyi’s collar, checking her body.

“Do you like to show off?”
“Are you sick?”
“Why didn’t you turn back when I called you?”

Is it always like this?

Zhan Luo was caught, Liu Jia was fine, and Shen Yiyi was also fine. The story had finally ended without any danger, but her anxious heart had no one to put it to rest. It was still flying in the sky, unable to land.

“What if you had died?”
“Did you consider me?”
“You didn’t say a single word?”

The eyes that were shining in the darkness were covered with a dampness. She asked repeatedly.

“The situation was urgent at that time, and with so many police officers around, what could have happened?” Shen Yiyi comforted her. “Isn’t it to save Liu Jia?”

Save Liu Jia.

Hearing the name, Qin Luo immediately extinguished her fire.

Without Shen Yiyi, Liu Jia would indeed be in danger. Qin Luo knew that Shen Yiyi had saved Liu Jia’s life, and she had nothing to complain about.

The streetlights on the highway lit up again, and the valley was illuminated. The pounding heartbeat calmed down, and the person had returned intact. Qin Luo stretched out her arms and pulled her into her arms, embracing her in the shadow of the night.

“Don’t be like this next time. It scares me when you walk away without looking back.”

But Director Shen was a little embarrassed. There were many people in front of and behind her, staring at them. “There are a lot of people. We can talk about it when we get back.”

Qin Luo held her and did not let go, saying in a muffled voice, “I want to go back to Shanghai to see her tonight.”

Shen Yiyi could hear the fatigue in her voice, like a soaked sponge, wrinkled and heavy. “But I can’t go back with you. I have to go to the work group in a bit.”

Yanli had not yet been found, and the farce of the live stream had not yet subsided. The farce caused by Zhan Luo had not ended with the police. Shen Yiyi could not let her guard down.

The two hugged in the corner for a long time, until the military uniform team layered the crowd and brought the criminal Zhan Luo out of the courtyard.

The handcuffs clanked behind his back, and blood was seeping out from his abdomen. His face was wretched, but his eyes were always looking in a certain direction.

Under the streetlight not far away, Qin Luo was holding someone.

The noise behind him and that silence formed a boundary. The police were pushing him forward, but he stopped, his body stiff, and looked at the woman in the distance.

The person who had written his anger, the person who had created a utopia, was so calm now.

He suddenly understood. She did not belong to the fire.

He had chosen the wrong person.

He hated it.

Not that he hated her for being a coward, but that he had misjudged her.

“I want to see her.”

Zhan Luo shouted in the darkness, his voice piercing through the mountains, and the village began to be restless again.

He had gone crazy. No matter how the police urged him to move forward, pulled his clothes, or even grabbed his hair, he was still shouting, “I want to see Qin Luo, I want to see Qin Luo.”

Qin Luo heard his shout and wanted to look up, but she was held tightly by Shen Yiyi.

Shen Yiyi gently patted Qin Luo’s back. “I’m still not at ease with Wang Xi driving. I’ll have the colleagues who have come to go back with you.”

But her voice could not cover Zhan Luo’s screams. Qin Luo had already made eye contact with him in the light and shadow, as if through a mist, watching a strange ending.

It was this pair of eyes that was staring at her.

Qin Luo had found the eyes she had been trying so hard to find.

Zhan Luo was forcibly pushed into the car by a few strong police officers, but he was still shouting in the car, “I want to see you.”

Alright, let’s see.

Qin Luo thought in her heart and let go of her arms. She wanted to break free from Shen Yiyi’s embrace to see the murderer, but Shen Yiyi did not give her a chance and held her waist tightly with both hands.

“Don’t mind him. It’s not necessary.”

Shen Yiyi could feel that Qin Luo’s extreme emotions had not yet subsided. Her wrist was trembling, either from fear or from anger. But no matter which one it was, in the end, it would only hurt herself.

She did not want Zhan Luo to hurt Qin Luo.

“Everything he did was for himself.” Shen Yiyi changed the subject. “Weren’t you going to see Liu Jia? Nothing is more important than Liu Jia.”

“Right.” Qin Luo suppressed her impulse. “Liu Jia is the most important.”

There was no time for a few tender words. Shen Yiyi was called away by the work group, and Qin Luo also hurriedly got into the car to return, preparing to rush back overnight to see Liu Jia.

By the time Qin Luo was almost on the highway, Shen Yiyi had finally remembered to call Lu Shimao back to ask.

Lu Shimao was also at the police station, giving a statement. “Anyway, her condition was not good at that time. I felt that she had no consciousness and couldn’t be sure how long she had been in a coma.”

Hearing this, Shen Yiyi was a little flustered. “What do you mean?”

Lu Shimao repeated what she had just said in her statement, but she added the video content that A Mian had stolen from the platform’s cloud. “I had someone check the backend of that surveillance. From the surveillance footage, she was in a coma when she came in.”

Shen Yiyi was confused. “What surveillance?”

Lu Shimao explained, “Didn’t I say I’d have Xue Tong find someone to check? She saw the news today and took the initiative to help. We found an expert to unlock the surveillance of the same user with the key on the surveillance. That person had installed more than a dozen of them.”

More than a dozen…
This was new evidence.

“Two of the surveillance cameras have names.” Lu Shimao covered her phone and whispered, “One of them is the basement of the reading group.”

So that’s how it was.

Shen Yiyi had not expected Lu Shimao to be so capable, to get the surveillance footage and quickly find Liu Jia’s whereabouts.

She had originally thought that Liu Jia would be taken with Zhan Luo, perhaps in some corner of the mountains. But after she had seen through the fact that the image in the live stream was a substitute for Yanli, she had thought that Liu Jia was not with him.

The reading group.

The last package that Zhan Luo had sent was at the reading group. Then the possibility of Liu Jia being left at the reading group was the highest. Shen Yiyi had had a “let’s try it” attitude, and she had not expected to be right.

But, it was unexpected for Shen Yiyi that Liu Jia had been placed in the basement.

She had originally thought that Zhan Luo would lock Liu Jia on the second floor and use the stage where Qin Luo had had her curtain call as a trial room. She had not expected that he would just lock Liu Jia in the basement.

“He modified the ventilation system of the basement. In short, when we went in, the smell was not right, and the oxygen concentration was also not right.” Lu Shimao described the scene at that time to Shen Yiyi. “I remember that there was also a countdown under the surveillance. It was highly likely that he was slowly killing her. When we went, the concentration was almost at a critical point, so it’s hard to say if the hostage’s condition is good or bad.”

“You mean…” Shen Yiyi’s face was troubled. “Even if she wakes up, she’ll be a vegetable?”

Lu Shimao did not dare to say for sure. “I’m just guessing.”

Shen Yiyi’s hand in her pocket was clenched into a fist. She hated herself for being soft-hearted and not really giving Zhan Luo a stab just now. She suppressed her emotions and hung up the phone, then turned and ran to the detention room to find Li Peng. She wanted to see Zhan Luo.

It just so happened that Li Peng was also looking for Shen Yiyi.

At twelve at night, Li Peng was standing in the corridor with a boxed lunch. “The case is going to be tried here. I’ll let you see him.”

Now that the issue of the prisoner’s jurisdiction had not yet been decided by the leadership, no one dared to act rashly. What if they were framed by the procedure, and the prisoner refused to tell the truth or changed his testimony at the last minute? No one could take the responsibility, especially since there was still a suspected accomplice who had not been found.

In the work group, jurisdiction was greater than position. Even though it was Shen Yiyi who had gone to great lengths to catch the person, Li Peng still stood guard at the door and would not let her in. The two were at a stalemate. Shen Yiyi did not make things difficult for the other and turned to call Piao Zheng.

Piao Zheng was on his way with the case. He was sleepy and advised her not to touch the person first. The two had talked for a long time and had disagreed. In the end, the matter of seeing the person had come to nothing.

Shen Yiyi walked back to the guesthouse in the dark. Qin Luo was not there, and Liu Jia’s situation was uncertain. She could not sleep on the unclean bed, so she sat silently in a chair, recalling her conversation with Zhan Luo.

Besides being an expert witness in court, she rarely talked directly with criminals.

The hollowed-out memory was like a snowy screen with no signal. She patted it lightly, and a certain electronic component was reset. A few seconds of a flashing shadow suddenly appeared, and then it disappeared in a flash.

“Hates red.”

Shen Yiyi looked at the table lamp in the corner and muttered to herself, “Hates red.”

“You didn’t dare to watch those films.”

Zhan Luo’s face kept appearing in her mind. Shen Yiyi couldn’t help but take out her phone and open the search engine.

Before she could search for her mother’s name, she saw the news about the old case on the trending topics. It turned out that the two posts that Zhan Luo had sent had caused a heated discussion, and the netizens had compared her mother’s case with Zhan Luo’s.

Humans can’t resist curiosity. This kind of bizarre and suspenseful gossip is the most eye-catching.

She clicked on the relevant title content. There were all kinds of discussions. Some people were analyzing the criminal’s psychology, some were analyzing the historical background, and some were making up stories.

She didn’t know who in the police force had leaked the news, but the netizens had found out that the police officer who had confronted the criminal tonight was the surviving child from back then. In a flash, she had become an inspirational protagonist who had overcome hardships and had healed her life with her profession.

The news was like boiling water, overflowing the screen. Pairs of numb eyes were staring at her in the corner. Strange imaginations, inexplicable projections, and information were exchanged like the smell between animals, quickly identifying like-minded people, and then quickly developing a hatred for them. In thirty minutes, they had absorbed enough water, and then in twenty minutes, they had shriveled up again, like the glass balls in a pinball machine, constantly rolling back. The people who had just voted to judge Liu Jia had forgotten their fear in a flash and had started to explore the next glass person.

It wasn’t that funny. Shen Yiyi suddenly understood the fatigue that Qin Luo had talked about.

She exited the relevant topic and turned to search for her mother’s name. She hadn’t expected that so many people would have searched for her tonight. As soon as she had typed the two words “Xu Meng,” the tag had already appeared.

“The Tragic Case of Xu Meng”
“Xu Meng’s Daughter”
“Xu Meng’s Paris Theater”

The first two were not attractive to Shen Yiyi at all. She lightly pressed the third tag, waiting to uncover that dusty, untouchable dream.