Before we left the ward, I asked the police officers to track down a few clues for the case. Firstly, I wanted to see the rich lady’s phone records. I needed to know who she was in contact with recently. Secondly, I needed to see her bank account activities. Lastly, because she was the president of a pharmaceutical company, I wanted to see the list of drugs that her company had recently developed.
Dali, Xiaotao, and I then went down to the parking lot. I brought the Autopsy Umbrella with me too. When we got there, Dali stood under a surveillance camera and announced, “Dude, I’ve made a major discovery! The murderer is 1.8 meters tall!”
“Because the camera is 1.8 meters from the ground?” I laughed.
“Uh-huh!” Dali nodded enthusiastically. “You see, your reasoning skills have rubbed off on me!”
“You’re wrong, though,” I argued, pointing at the camera. “You don’t need to be as tall as the camera to reach it. I’d say the suspect could be anywhere from 1.75 to 1.8 meters tall.”
The sky was clear that day, so I opened the Autopsy Umbrella and scanned the area beneath the camera. I found a clear set of footprints there, and judging from the length of the feet, I inferred the suspect’s height to be about 1.7 and 1.75 meters.
Apart from that, I noticed another curious detail. The footprint of one foot seemed to be deeper and heavier than the other. “The suspect’s left leg is limp,” I concluded.
“Why don’t you say the suspect had a stroke this time?” Dali asked.
“While people who had a stroke might have a limp,” I explained, “not all of them necessarily had a stroke. Right now, there’s evidence that the suspect has a limp, but we can’t make any conclusions about what caused it yet.”
Xiaotao took pictures of the footprints with a camera that she brought. When the forensics team arrived later, they would make a mould of the prints and keep it as evidence.
I examined the positions of the three cameras and found that there were no overlapping areas between them, so the suspect was definitely not captured on camera after all.
I went back to inspecting the footprints on the ground with the Autopsy Umbrella. They led to a parking space nearby. Xiaotao examined the tire tracks there and stated, “It’s an SUV.”
“That doesn’t narrow down our search at all, I’m afraid,” I sighed.
“Let’s ask the employee at the parking ticket booth anyway,” responded Xiaotao.
We found the employee in question, but didn’t glean much information from her. She had seen up to a hundred cars by that time of the day, so we left without any further clues.
The police had all packed up and left the hospital at that point, so we had no reason to stay either.
“Let’s take a short rest for now,” said Xiaotao. “There’s a caf nearby. I haven’t had a drop of water to drink all afternoon!”
We entered the caf and sat at a table by the window. After ordering three cups of coffee, Xiaotao asked me, “Do you have any theories about this case so far, Song Yang?”
“Well,” I muttered, “so many things just happened so quickly. In half a day, two murders have occurred. I have no idea what’s happening anymore.”
“Why don’t you just run some ideas by me?” she suggested.
I thought about it for a few seconds and began to lay out my analysis of the case.
“From what we’ve seen so far,” I said, “both cases are clearly related to the rich lady. I think the mastermind behind this case has a deep connection to her. It’s likely that they’ve got some devastating information about her that forced her into committing murder.”
“But why kill the secretary?” Xiaotao wondered.
“I don’t think it matters at all who she killed,” I replied. “If the mastermind wanted the secretary dead, they had plenty of opportunities to kill him a long time ago. I think they just wanted to force the rich lady into a corner and make her do something to prove her obedience to them. Something that would prevent her from ever turning back. I think her next move is what we really should be worried about.”
“But we don’t have a single clue about what she’s going to do next!” Xiaotao grumbled.
Just then, my attention was caught by an old woman with gray hair by the road. She was carrying a burlap sack and her clothes were tattered. She wiped the windows of a car with a grimy rag then stretched out her hands to beg for some money. I suddenly realized that beggars like her usually stayed at one place for a long stretch of time.
“That beggar may have seen the killer!” I exclaimed. “Let’s go ask her!”
We rushed out of the caf and approached the old beggar.
“Did you see an SUV driving out of the hospital an hour ago?” asked Xiaotao. “There should be a tall man and a fat woman wearing a hospital gown inside.”
“Who wants to know?” the old beggar replied curtly.
Xiaotao showed her her police badge, to which the old woman immediately waved her hand and answered, “I didn’t see nothing!”
It was typical of beggars to be secretive, especially towards police officers. Xiaotao then handed her a hundred yuan and asked again, “Do you remember anything now?”
The old woman’s eyebrows raised. Then she tapped her head with her knuckles and crowed, “I’m starting to remember something… But it’s all very blurry…”
Xiaotao handed her another hundred yuan and spat, “What about now?”
“Ah, yes!” exclaimed the old beggar. “I did see a man like that today. He had a scowl on his face and kept shooing me away when I got near him. There was a woman in his back seat too.”
Xiaotao showed the old beggar the picture of the rich lady and asked if the woman in the car looked like that.
“Yes,” nodded the old beggar. “That’s definitely her!”
“Do you remember what the man looked like?” Xiaotao asked. “Would you come to the police station with us and help us sketch a portrait of him?”
“Oh, no, no, no!” the old beggar refused vehemently. “I don’t remember anything at all! I’m just a confused old woman!”
She then tried to walk away from us immediately. Beggars were generally very reluctant to go anywhere near the police station, so her reaction was unsurprising. I pulled her aside and told her, “You must’ve been cold and hungry standing outside all day. Why don’t you come and have a bowl of noodles with us?”
It was an offer she couldn’t refuse. I asked Dali to take her to a nearby Lanzhou beef noodles stall. He tried to shirk off the task at first, claiming that it would be too embarrassing for him to be seen with a beggar. I glared at him until he finally relented.
“Oh, god,” Xiaotao sighed. “I just spent two hundred yuan in exchange for a few words!”
“You should get Xiaozhou to install a portrait software on his laptop and meet her here,” I said.
“What a great idea!” Xiaotao clapped her hands in excitement.
Xiaotao called Xiaozhou instantly. It would take him some time to get here from the station, so we went into the noodle stall and joined Dali and the old woman. She must’ve been starving, because by the time we got there she’d already devoured a whole bowl of noodles. We hurriedly ordered another bowl for her so we could make sure that she didn’t leave before Xiaozhou got here.
In order to distract her, we chatted with her and asked her about her life. She told us that her old house and her crops were flooded, and her son and daughter-in-law were both killed in the flood. Then, her husband contracted a terminal disease soon after that so she lost him too. Beggars would usually exaggerate their misfortunes, so I knew I had to take her words with a grain of salt. It was more likely that the beggars on the street were secretly connected to underworld gangs and black organizations.
As the old woman was busy chowing down the third bowl of noodles, Xiaozhou finally arrived in a police car. The old woman was startled. She put down the chopsticks and tried to run away, but Xiaotao assured her, “Relax, he’s only here to deliver something to us.”
The old woman sat back down hesitantly. Xiaozhou came over to us with a laptop in his hand and chirped, “Huang-jie! I just got the results from the lab testing!”
“Nevermind that,” Xiaotao waved her hand. “We’ll talk about that later.”
She then opened the laptop and said to the old woman in a coaxing voice, “Why don’t we play a little game? Let’s see, which nose looks the most like the one that man in the car has?”
The old woman then went on to identify the features of the man until there was enough data for the portrait software to produce a complete sketch of a face. She looked at the sketch and confirmed that it looked just like the man she saw earlier.
The old woman left soon after that. Then Dali exclaimed, “This case turns out to be an easy one, huh? It’s barely been a day, but we’ve already found out what the suspect looks like!”
I wasn’t so optimistic, though. “We can’t really do much with just a face. At best, this can help us get an arrest warrant.”
“Song Yang is right,” agreed Xiaotao. “There are many cold cases where we have the suspects’ sketch, fingerprints, and even their DNA, yet they remain unsolved. Catching criminals isn’t always a straightforward affair. Sometimes, when luck is against us, the case remains shrouded in mystery no matter how many clues we uncover…”