Breaking Through The Clouds

Chapter 30

You drink my family's bridal tea, you gotta be my little bride~

The night's darkness was ripped apart by a flash of light. In that fleeting moment, the world was pure white, and in the next, sinking once more into a black abyss.

With a soft clatter, Han Xiaomei dropped the keys into the crystal bowl in the foyer, then meekly turned around.

"So ... I'll order a take-out for you, Mr. Lu, and then I'll just be heading back to the scene then?"

The rain and wind battered furiously against the floor-to-ceiling window, rattling like hailstones against the panes. A warm-yellow floor lamp stood in a corner of the living room. Jiang Ting sat leaning back into the sofa cushions, watching the surveillance footage through Yan Xie's work laptop, one hand holding a pen, one hand intermittently pressing down on the pause button.

"Mr. Lu?"

"Hm?" Only now did Jiang Ting finally react, replying, "Order what takeout? It's already this hour. Don't head back out, it's raining too hard. It's not safe for driving."

Han Xiaomei struggled valiantly for a brief moment. "... I should still go."

Jiang Ting might've assumed that she was going to say that "the missing person still hasn't been rescued yet", or that "all my colleagues are at the scene even in this rain". Except who could've known that her next sentence turned out to be: "I still haven't had a chance to get Vice Yan to sign my internship report yet."

Jiang Ting broke into a chuckle, and waved her away without raising his head.

Although Fan Si and Hu Weisheng had both been killed, and that phantom, haunting-blue bag of drugs stolen away with not even the slightest trace left behind for the police, in truth, they had still far from reached the end of the line with Case 502.

The police had in their hands A-Zong and his lackeys, had the important drug-trafficking transit point that was Three Spring Trees, and had a living, breathing Diao Yong detained in the city bureau. As long as there was enough time, they'd eventually pry something out of them.

But right now, Chu Ci was in the drug traffickers' hands, his life and safety up in the air. What the police lacked the most, was time.

Jiang Ting yet again clicked open the chemical engineering plant's surveillance footage on the night of the crime, and sank into deep contemplation.

At 3:06 a.m., a red Camry with its license plates covered by mud drove out from the direction of the warehouse. Because the security footage had gotten overwritten after the power outage, they didn't know when exactly this car had entered the chemical engineering plant, only that it drove out of the south gate of the plant onto Third Ring Boulevard, and continued from there towards the southeast.

The car's side windows all had dark, one-way tint films on them, and the rear windshield was blocked out from the inside with cloth. This made the situation inside the car difficult to discern, even if they had high-resolution images. In addition, the front of the car also adroitly evaded a good majority of CCTV cameras as it drove, and the driver appeared to have worn some sort of mask or face covering - no matter how much they zoomed into the image, it was still very hard to conclude whether they were male or female.

However, Jiang Ting thought: Considering the driver's familiarity with the locations of surveillance cameras within the plant, the fact that they were driving at night but didn't look at the rear-view mirror, and how a female kidnapper would have had a hard time getting Chu Ci under control by herself alone, there was a very high possibility that the driver was a male accomplice.

A red Camry. Due to some hefty sales after its launch a few years ago, there were at least a few thousand of them, if not tens of thousands, just within Jianning city borders. Moreover, the provincial highway led to Gongzhou. If this car had come from Gongzhou, then their screening pool would be doubled.