Chapter 23: Suspicion Everywhere
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7:05.
When Officer Guo arrived at the scene, he had two auxiliary police officers with him, a man and a woman.
Since it had not yet been established whether this was a kidnapping, and according to the hospital, Wu Ping had been transferred to another hospital through the proper procedures.
“From your description, there are indeed many suspicious points.” Officer Guo pondered for a moment before confirming Fu Yuan’s assessment.
As he spoke, he took a small, upright black leather notebook from his breast pocket, opened it, and handed it to Nurse Liu at the front desk. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Guo Yu. This is my police identification.”
Fu Yuan glanced over as well. It stated that he belonged to the Lin City Police Station, that his date of birth was April 11, 2004, and that he was the captain of Criminal Investigation Squad One. There was even an anti-counterfeiting mark.
This good-natured young man, who looked as though he had only just entered society and still possessed the clear-eyed foolishness of youth, was actually already a squad captain?
Appearances could be deceiving.
“Hello, my name is Liu Xu. You can just call me Little Liu!” Nurse Liu immediately stood and gave him a perfectly formal military salute.
Officer Guo nodded. “Doctor Liu, there are many suspicious aspects to Wu Ping’s transfer. Could you take us to the security booth?”
Although phrased as a question, his words carried an unquestionable authority.
*
The security booth.
The security booth was not merely a little hut responsible for opening and closing the gates and raising and lowering the barrier. Beside it stood a small, warehouse-like building containing more than thirty small monitor screens. Farther inside was something resembling an electrical distribution room.
Three teams were responsible for monitoring the surveillance footage, each working an eight-hour shift.
Each team consisted of two people: one stationed at the security booth and the other responsible for watching the monitors.
“What happened?” Captain Guo asked as he watched the footage.
Several people nearby—especially the captain of the security team and a middle-aged man with a crew cut—had gone pale.
Captain Guo had pulled up the surveillance footage from 4:00 to 6:40 that morning.
According to Nurse Liu, sometime after four, Wu Ping had complained of feeling unwell. Liu herself had gone to check Wu Ping’s blood pressure. It was elevated, but still within an acceptable range.
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Considering that the patient had previously been poisoned, toxins might still have remained in her body, stimulating the sympathetic nervous system and causing a massive release of hormones. On top of that, she was still taking medication, so elevated blood pressure was entirely possible. Liu had therefore only adjusted the drip rate of the intravenous infusion.
In other words, Wu Ping had still been there at that time.
Captain Guo pointed at the monitor. In the replay, a person wearing a security uniform held a spray can filled with black paint and deliberately obscured every surveillance camera from the entrance all the way to the Nephrology Department on the fifth floor.
At 6:35, that person began wiping the cameras clean with a rag. He then returned to the monitoring room.
“Qiu Siyuan!” the security captain roared. “Has a donkey kicked your brain?”
The Qiu Siyuan he was shouting at was the middle-aged man with the crew cut—the same person shown in the footage wearing a security uniform, disabling the cameras and then restoring them.
He had also been responsible for the multiple-monitor surveillance system in the building that day.
“I don’t know...” Qiu Siyuan’s face was pale, and his voice sounded weak. “I don’t know. I was just too tired... I dozed off for a little while. I swear I didn’t touch the cameras...”
“Isn’t that you in the footage?” The security captain paused the video and enlarged the figure onscreen. “Don’t tell me you have an identical twin brother!”
“Stop arguing!” Captain Guo shouted, growing irritated at the sight of them.
“At the very least, this proves that something is wrong with Wu Ping’s departure from the hospital. The possibility that she left against her will is extremely high. We can open a case. I’ll contact the other members of the team.”
Then he said to Nurse Liu, “Please compile a list of all patients who left the hospital during this period, including those who were transferred.”
He turned to Qiu Siyuan. “I believe you are innocent, but everything must be decided by the evidence. You will still need to cooperate with the investigation.”
“There’s been a development. Meet at the main entrance of the hospital.”
Captain Guo made a phone call and relayed those instructions.
Fu Yuan followed him to the hospital entrance. Two people were standing there, a man and a woman who appeared to be in their thirties. They were dressed casually and looked like a married couple.
“Captain Guo!”
When they saw Guo Yu, they called out and came over.
Captain Guo looked at them thoughtfully. “There really is a problem. What did you find on your end?”
Only then did Fu Yuan learn that after the police call the previous night, the department had sent two criminal investigators to pose as a couple and stay at the hotel directly opposite the hospital. Their task was to watch for any suspicious people entering or leaving the hospital.
The two exchanged a glance. The man said, “We checked into the hotel at around nine last night. Until you called, thirty-two civilian vehicles and two ambulances entered, while twenty-eight civilian vehicles and one ambulance left. We recorded everything on our body cameras. We didn’t see any suspicious vehicles.”
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“No suspicious vehicles?”
Captain Guo frowned. It was precisely the absence of anything suspicious that made everything suspicious.
If Fu Yuan had not insisted that Wu Ping had not left voluntarily, the hospital might not even have realized she was missing by now.
Perhaps it would only have been discovered during a routine hospital cleanup, when someone noticed the black stains on the wall beside the surveillance cameras.
The man nodded. “From what I saw, there really wasn’t anything particularly suspicious. Should we track every vehicle that entered or left during that period?”
“If there were no suspicious vehicles, are you saying Wu Ping somehow followed a man and flew away?” Captain Guo frowned. Tracking every vehicle entering or leaving would not only waste manpower, but also precious time that could be spent on the rescue.
The woman agreed. Looking at the wall surrounding the hospital, she said, “I checked it out. The hospital walls are very high. Even if climbing them wouldn’t attract attention, getting over them at all would be difficult. If someone really kidnapped Wu Ping, they must have driven her out.”
“Let me see what you recorded. Start from 4:00.”
At four in the morning, the streets were deserted. Streetlights glowed faintly one after another, and only a few vehicles passed through. None of them entered the hospital.
The footage reached 4:05. A man stood quietly on the street and took out a cigarette. After smoking it, he casually tossed the butt onto the road and crushed it beneath his foot.
When he finished smoking, he leaned against the wall and sat down, apparently falling asleep.
For about twenty minutes.
Then he seemed to wake up. Shivering, he pulled the hand tucked into his trouser pocket farther inside and ambled away.
“Enlarge this part.”
Captain Guo tapped the screen twice. The video rewound to 4:05, to the moment the man had just entered the frame.
The man was bundled up in bulky clothing, making it impossible to discern his build. A huge hood concealed almost his entire face. The streetlights were not bright enough to illuminate him clearly; only the faint glow of his cigarette revealed that he was smoking.
Judging from his behavior, he looked somewhat like a vagrant.
Yet the coincidence was striking: the period during which he appeared almost exactly overlapped with the period when the hospital’s surveillance cameras had been sabotaged.
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