Chapter 800: Chapter 426: The Final Gamble
Inside Interrogation Room No. 3, Jiang An’s fingers were unconsciously tapping on the tabletop, and they suddenly stopped when the man on the other side finished his last word.
"Wait."
He leaned forward, eyes sharp as a blade. "Just now you said—what car? Did you see it clearly?"
"Had it been parked there all along, or was it a temporary stop?"
The driver opposite instinctively swallowed, his fingers twisting together.
"O–officer," his voice suddenly turned unsteady, "I admit what I said just now wasn’t very precise... The distance was actually pretty far, and the lighting was really awful that early morning."
He licked his dry lips and went on, "That car was parked by the roadside, and the weird thing was, it didn’t have any lights on."
"Think about it, driving under those lighting conditions—who wouldn’t turn on their headlights?"
"What’s even stranger, even the trunk light was off."
"And the spot where it was parked was really odd,"
he gestured as he spoke, "it was about two meters away from the road, totally unlike a temporary stop."
"I glanced at it and thought, could it be one of those guys who stay up all night fishing?"
"I like fishing myself. Sometimes I reel in at dawn and just find some secluded spot to park."
Hearing this, Jiang An pondered for a moment, then asked in a low voice, "Can you still remember the exact location?"
"Somewhere around the middle section of the East City River, there’s a dense little grove next to it, growing really wild, with branches almost stretching out onto the road."
Jiang An’s eyes narrowed slightly as he quickly ran the possibilities in his head.
This description matched the inference he’d made earlier.
After coming up from the riverbank, the suspect would most likely use the cover of the trees to get away.
If he had parked a car there in advance and left by car after the crime, it would be an almost perfect process.
And a motionless car really wouldn’t attract much attention.
"Your dashcam?"
Jiang An suddenly asked, "Was it on at the time?"
"On! It was on the whole time!"
The driver nodded quickly, then hesitated again. "But, officer, that car was in the oncoming lane and pretty far away, the footage might not be clear..."
"Don’t worry about that," Jiang An cut him off. "With current tech we can work a lot of details."
Then Jiang An said in a deep voice, "We don’t wrong innocent people. You can go."
"Thanks for your cooperation."
A flicker of disbelief crossed the driver’s face.
He muttered inwardly: Just now they were treating me like a suspect, and in the blink of an eye I’m fine?
In the end he only tugged at the corner of his mouth, got up quietly, and left.
As soon as he left the interrogation room, Wan strode up, lowered his voice, and asked, "Mr. Jiang, how credible do you think this guy is?"
Mr. Jiang’s lips curled slightly as he patted the notebook in his hand. "I came down hard on him at the start, he was in a rush to distance himself and ended up spilling quite a bit. Eighty percent of it’s true."
He paused briefly, his sharp gaze sweeping toward the other end of the corridor. "Pull his dashcam footage right away. Let’s see what that car’s really about."
"Oh! Right, how many are left outside?"
Mr. Jiang asked as he walked toward the observation room.
"We’ve questioned ten, five more waiting."
"No rush, we go through all of them first."
"Once we finish, we’ll review the dashcam together—everything has to be nailed down, one step at a time."
"Got it, I’ll send someone to pull the dashcam now."
Wan nodded in response and turned to dispatch manpower.
In the following hour, the Criminal Investigation Team conducted intensive questioning of the remaining five, but the results were less than ideal.
After one full round, there were no breakthrough clues, and no suspicious vehicles or individuals were identified.
Except for the "black car with no lights on" mentioned by that driver just now.
a.m.
The Criminal Investigation Division office was packed with people.
Nearly twenty team members clustered around the screen, the air thick with the mixed smell of coffee and tension.
The case had entered a white‑hot stage; no one wanted to fall behind at the final stretch, everyone wanted to be the one to push open the door to the solution.
At this moment, the dashcam video began to play.
The street in the footage was dim and blurry, with only the occasional streetlamp smearing weak trails of light across the scene.
Time ticked by second after second. No one in front of the screen spoke; the only sounds were mouse clicks and the occasional tapping on the keyboard.
Fifteen minutes later, a car finally appeared in the upper left of the frame.
Because it was still some distance away, they could only vaguely tell it was a sedan; the color was hard to make out.
As the car with the dashcam drew closer, the outline of that car finally sharpened a bit—it seemed to be black.
And sure enough, its lights were off!
"Mark the time!" Mr. Jiang suddenly called out.
"Already done," Wan responded quickly, his voice barely containing his excitement. "I’ll pull up the rear camera footage now!"
Very soon, another clip was opened.
The rear‑side camera’s image quality was worse than the front’s, with obvious graininess; in night mode the picture looked even more blurred.
But that black sedan did follow up, trailing behind at a steady, unhurried pace.
Unfortunately, no matter how they zoomed in or tweaked the enhancement, the license plate remained a fuzzy smudge, as if shrouded in mist.
"Pause."
Mr. Jiang suddenly raised a hand. "Is there any way to sharpen these images?"
The image engineer beside him pushed up his glasses and answered hesitantly, "We can try, but the raw quality is really poor. Please don’t get your hopes up too high."
"It’s fine," Jiang An’s gaze was firm. "We don’t need the whole frame crystal clear. As long as we can extract some local features for key comparisons, that’s enough."
The image engineer nodded and his fingers flew over the keyboard.
He opened a newly developed image‑processing program, dragged in the video clip, and began enhancing it frame by frame.
Waveform graphs and spectrum analyses flickered across the screen....
