Chapter 82 Investigative Footage Part 2

"Rewind to the part where she falls asleep." Officer Tang instructed. "There's something strange about that part."

Chao Ping did as he said, and they all rewatched it with baited breath.

"Do you guys see what I'm seeing?" Officer Tang asked, like a teacher questioning his students.

"I see the suspect seems to be knocked out. As though she's a puppet with her strings cut." Tianwei said, frowning at the screen.

"I see our suspect falling asleep." Chao Ping said, restraining the urge to roll his eyes in front of this stranger. Puppet with her strings cut? How pretentious of this guy who yelled at him when he tried to speak. He must be someone high up in the hierarchy - maybe the police chief's son, with how haughty he's acting, like he's too good for the peasants in the tech room.

But back to the question posed by Officer Tang. If this was a test, Chao Ping would have failed abysmally - but after staring at the screen for so long, he's no longer sure what he's supposed to be seeing. "Can you just tell me what you see?"

Officer Tang sighed and asked. "Is it possible to zoom in closer and improve the video quality?"

"Officer Tang, I'll do my best, but do you think I'm from CSI?" Chao Ping asked. "You know better than anyone how good our security cameras are."

That is to say, not very good at all. As Chao Ping did his best to zoom into the paused frame as much as possible, the pixels became too grainy for him to tell what was what.

Even after Chao Ping's efforts in sharpening, it was as ideal as what Officer Tang wanted.

"That's all you can do?" Tianwei asked.

? "Excuse me, when your security cameras record everything in 144p, there's only so much a human can do," Chao Ping replied dryly, restraining the urge to fling his cold coffee in his face.

His team had been called in since the crack of dawn thanks to this emergency, wrestling to regain access to the CCTV because some hacker took over and corrupted their footage. Meanwhile, this man with the smug glasses and shiny shoes clearly didn't give a shit about human limits!

"Yeah, I understand." Officer Tang grumbled. He knew all too well that the budget for upgrading the security cameras clearly wasn't used on the ones focused on the holding cells.

Some higher-ups back then probably thought they weren't needed seeing that officers were meant to be guarding them personally, and most criminals weren't in holding cells long enough to make the expense worth it.

Well. Until today, that is. Officer Tang swore he would send a strongly worded memo to the people responsible for their oversight. A murder in their holding cells was surely enough incentive to upgrade those outdated cameras.

But outdated as they were, Chao Ping's effort had borne a tiny fruit of success.

"There!" Officer Tang declared, pointing to a black smudge. "Do you see that?"

"It looks like a… shadow?" Chao Ping volunteered. He zoomed slightly out, and true enough, there was a hint of shadow cast on Xiumin's prone body.

"Yes, now replay the video and look carefully at the shadow." Officer Tang instructed. "Doesn't it look strange to you?"

With bated breath, all of them watched the screen and focused on that black smudge.

Chao Ping frowns at the screen. "There it is! And… it just remains there?"

"For the rest of the video." Tianwei continued grimly.

"Exactly. Whoever hacked into our security cameras to doctor the footage did a good job, but not good enough. They couldn't erase the presence of the shadow, and when they looped the clip, the shadow still remained."

"For a person to cast a shadow on her body, he must have gotten close enough to her to begin with." Chao Ping said, frowning. "Close enough to… "

He then made a slashing motion with his throat.

"Now, we don't know the exact cause of death yet," Officer Tang said. "But it stands to reason that someone did kill her… and they didn't work alone."

Someone had to sneak into the precinct while everyone was asleep to do the job, and there needed to be another person available to hack into the cameras and doctor the footage so that the tech team on night duty did not notice anything amiss.

"It's just fucked up." Chao Ping said, shaking his head. "And I can't believe this woman didn't scream when someone entered her cell and tried to kill her. I'm sure it would have woken these two sleeping lugs."

"Maybe she didn't scream because she knew who it was," Sun Tianwei said, consideringly. "She could have been waiting - no, expecting someone to rescue her from the cell."

"And they couldn't just hire a lawyer for her like a normal person?" Chao Ping exclaimed. "That's a lot of trouble to avoid arrest."

"More like they're criminals trying to tie up loose ends," Officer Tang said ominously. "Our suspect could have already been prepared to die the moment she got arrested, which could also explain the delirious behaviour Lin Tao claimed she exhibited before they fell asleep."

"Well, fuck then," was Chao Ping's eloquent reply. "So are you telling me there's like a group? Of people? Willing to murder their own if they fail? And they just strolled into our precinct and killed a woman?"

"Nothing is confirmed," Officer Tang said, "do not panic unnecessarily."

"Too late," Chao Ping said weakly, his face paling at the new knowledge. "I'm already panicking."

"If it's what you say, then there's not much chance of my client being the culprit, yes?" A feminine voice cut in from the doorway.

Tianwei knew who it was, even without turning his head. He could already smell the familiar scent of lilies. Everyone else in the tech room had also turned around at the sight of Lian Xingzi walking into the room.

"I thought you said she was gone?" Tianwei hissed angrily to Officer Tang.

Officer Tang merely blinked and shrugged. He was too old and too tired for this nonsense.

"So? Now she's back."