Chapter 180: The Blackmailed Murderer (2/2)
“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…”
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