Overly Intense [Criminal Investigation] 140p1

Chapter 140 p1: The Struggle

Qin Luo sat in the back row, dazed. The police outside the car were on strict guard, and she didn’t even have the right to roll down the window.

Ten minutes ago, there had been a lot of commotion outside the courtyard. The walkie-talkies were all ringing. It seemed that an accident had happened in the house, and even the special police had climbed over the wall with their guns.

The plot was a bit abstract and detached for Qin Luo. Her consciousness was blurred, and she began to be unable to distinguish between reality and illusion. She couldn’t understand how the story had come to this point.

A lot of questions rolled out of her mind. The first thing she thought of was how she would face it if both her friend and her partner were dead. But as soon as the thought came up, she forcefully suppressed it.

Qin Luo buried her head, holding back the tears in her eyes. Just then, the phone that Shen Yiyi had left in the car rang.

She glanced at it. It was Lu Shimao.

“Sister Shen!!!” Lu Shimao’s voice was very excited. “We’ve found her.”

Before they had found Zhan Luo’s address, Qin Luo had heard Shen Yiyi say that Liu Jia was not in the mountains. But no matter how she had asked, Shen Yiyi had been unwilling to reveal any other information. Now, this call was like a life-saving medicine. It was good that they had found her. At least it could keep her alive for half a day.

Qin Luo held her chest and kept taking deep breaths. “Where is she? How is she?! Is she not injured?”

Lu Shimao was very surprised to hear that it was Qin Luo. She thought for a long time and didn’t know how to answer.

They had indeed found her…

***

With Shen Yiyi’s speculation and the video that A Mian had hacked, Lu Shimao had immediately found the community police.

The police in the Cloud Top area were all her old acquaintances. As soon as they had heard that it was about Liu Jia’s kidnapping, they had immediately gotten into Little Lu’s sports car and had driven to the scene.

The complex was pitch black. A few of the art galleries had not yet closed. The police had had the security guard call the person in charge of the complex.

The main door of the reading group was tightly locked. Lu Shimao couldn’t wait to find the person in charge to open the door. The police were law-abiding and did not dare to trespass. It was a matter of life and death, and she didn’t care about anything else. She picked up a large brick from the side of the road.

She raised her hand and, with a clang, she had smashed the art glass that was worth more than a hundred thousand.

The pitch-black entryway was covered in shattered glass. Lu Shimao nimbly slipped in, turned on her flashlight, and turned on all the door lights.

The light had rushed in for a short time, but the bottomless corridor was terrifyingly quiet. Even the wall clock seemed to have lost its sound.

Lu Shimao’s goal was direct. She had seen the recording at A Mian’s place.

The camera was monitoring a basement with no light. Perhaps Liu Jia was hidden there. She ran around the first-floor corridor and finally saw the security passage door that led to the garage.

But the security passage door was locked.

Fortunately, Lu Shimao had a toolbox in her trunk. She ran back to her car and got a pair of technical pliers. Without a word, she had directly cut the lock.

The lock was cut. The moment she pushed open the door, a musty smell that had been sealed for years rushed out, like a rag that had been pressed on rotten leaves, with a cold and fermented smell.

“Hoo—”

Lu Shimao, who was walking in front, subconsciously turned her face away. “The smell is so strange.”

Although she had already taken off her police uniform, Lu Shimao still had her combat skills. She had immediately requested the rescue personnel to retreat and to enter after the anti-poison equipment had arrived.

So everyone had evacuated the security passage. It just so happened that the command room had received a reminder from Shen Yiyi in the courtyard, thinking that the criminal was very likely to use a poison attack, and had immediately notified the fire brigade to come and support.

The fire brigade’s response was very fast. About ten minutes later, Lu Shimao, wearing a fire mask, had gone to the basement with the rescue personnel.

It was more of a library than a basement. Not only were there a large number of public welfare donated books, but there were also some filming supplies.

The firefighters had first checked the ventilation.

Sure enough, they had found a strange device in the ventilation system. A small vortex engine was humming, and it was extracting and replacing the oxygen in the basement.

The oxygen concentration here was very low.

The firefighters were quick on their feet. Before Lu Shimao could stand firm, they had already quickly found the hostage. Lu Shimao looked up and saw a figure blocked by a pile of books in the distance, leaning against the back of a chair, looking as if she were on the verge of death.

“Wake up!”

A sharp blade cut through the hemp rope. The strong man from the fire brigade patted Liu Jia’s shoulder, but no matter how he shouted, Liu Jia did not respond.

The light in the basement was dim, but you could still see that Liu Jia’s face was pale, her lips were light purple, and she had no clear consciousness at all.

She should be in a coma, and her vital signs were not optimistic.

The ambulance was waiting at the door. Lu Shimao watched as the firefighters carried the person out of the basement, and then watched as she was carried onto the ambulance.

It wasn’t until the ambulance had left the complex that she had come back to her senses from the thrilling rescue and had taken out her phone to call Sister Shen to report the situation.

But Lu Shimao had not expected that it would be Director Qin who would answer the phone.

When she had come, A Mian had mentioned that the surveillance in that trial room had been manually adjusted. The time was exactly three days ago—which meant that Liu Jia might have been locked in this basement since that day.

Three days, without light or water, a fear that an ordinary person could not resist.

And, just now, when the firefighters were checking the ventilation pipe, she had taken a special look. She had looked at that strange device a couple of times. There was an unknown absorbent material inside, and there was also a layer of filter-like material hidden at the pipe’s interface.

This was not a conventional method of suffocation, but a terrifying controlled hypoxia.

The air was still circulating, but the oxygen concentration was being continuously and slowly replaced with nitrogen or an inert gas.

There was no strange smell, no smoke. The victim would only gradually feel dizzy and weak, as if they were falling asleep, and would finally fall into a coma, until they suffocated to death.

When they had found her, Liu Jia had already lost consciousness, which meant that Liu Jia had been suffering in a low-oxygen environment for a long time. The lack of oxygen to her brain had been for too long. Even if she could be saved, she might have irreversible brain damage, and the risk of becoming a vegetable was extremely high.

Therefore, Lu Shimao did not dare to speak.

The other end of the line was silent for a second, and then Qin Luo’s uncontrollable anxiety came through. “Is she really okay? Was she not scared? Can I talk to her?”

She stammered, “There are no obvious external injuries. The ambulance just took her away. The police have already sealed off the scene… I have to go and give a statement now.”

Lu Shimao was at a loss for words. She was not good at lying.

She knew that the Qin Luo who was far away could not see the way Liu Jia had looked when she had been carried onto the stretcher, that face that had almost lost all its color. Anyone who saw it would be terrified.

Sure enough, the other end of the line was silent for a moment, and then there was a suppressed gasp.

“It’s good that she was saved.”

Lu Shimao said, “Where’s Sister Shen? I have something to talk to her about.”

Qin Luo smiled wryly. “She’s confronting the killer.”

Confronting?
“Is she alone?” Lu Shimao asked.
“Yes.”

Qin Luo had no strength to talk and hung up the phone. She looked out the window. The night wind was blowing through the unresponsive valley—it was good that she had been saved. She no longer expected much.

Qin Luo’s frustrated tone had instead ignited the Lu Shimao who was far away in Shanghai.

Sister Shen had asked her to save the person and had gone to confront the criminal alone, which meant that she had already anticipated it. But she always felt that there was something strange about it.

Lu Shimao wanted to go down and take another look at the scene, but she was stopped by the firefighters halfway. Now she was not a police officer and had no right to return to the scene.

So she could only sit back in her car and watch the live stream.

The live stream voting was still going on, and the number of participants was increasing.

The hostage had been successfully rescued, and the police had already surrounded the criminal, but the game had not yet stopped.

This meant that the criminal’s intention was not to kill at all…

Lu Shimao was unwilling to give up. She called A Mian, hoping to restore the video stored in the cloud through technical means, to confirm the situation from three days ago.

A Mian’s skills were excellent. On the way when Lu Shimao was driving to save the person, she had already restored the deleted video through a key.

A short two-minute clip had made Little Lu’s hair stand on end.

The time stamp on the screen was from three days ago, the time when Liu Jia had just been brought in.

In the video, a man with a hat was adjusting the camera position, and then he had looked down and had fiddled with his watch. There was no beating, no screaming in the whole video, only the unconscious Liu Jia being placed on a chair.

And the camera had been on like this, fixed and motionless.

The low-oxygen device was a punishment. It seemed to be a way to stall for time and wait for the voting result of the trial, but the actual condition that would trigger death was earlier, which also meant that Liu Jia’s death might have nothing to do with the live stream countdown.

Was it a sense of ritual?

When she had just entered the scene, Lu Shimao had not felt that the scene had been arranged. Instead, Liu Jia had been placed casually, and the camera’s position was also a panoramic view. The surveillance could not capture the subtle changes in her expression.

He also did not seem to want to monitor the punishment process. It felt like it was just to film a result.

***