Chapter 254: Chapter 231: Guilty Conscience (2)

He’d mentioned chumming the water before, and now he was using a fishing metaphor again. He was clearly a fishing enthusiast.

"Not at all."

Liu Jie waved his hand. "I wouldn’t call myself an expert. When I go fishing, I get skunked eight times out of ten."

"But I love puzzling over and researching fishing methods. The result? The more I research, the less I catch. This time, though, I hope to land the fish."

After he finished, he hesitated for a moment before asking Shen Xin if he could stay for a few more days.

He felt that with Shen Xin around, the case was going particularly smoothly.

They had just been worrying about the lack of leads, and one immediately popped up.

Shen Xin nodded in agreement.

’There probably wouldn’t be any issues back at the station.’

More importantly, Shen Xin also wanted to see it through to the end.

On the surveillance footage, after Zhou Hui left Yang Maocai’s house, he stayed at his own home for a while before driving off.

They kept him under surveillance.

He drove directly back to his home in town.

That evening, Ding Junbao obtained the official report on Yang Maocai’s traffic accident.

The incident occurred on the She Dou Village section of Zhangqing Road, which connects Zhangwang Town in Lishui to Qingyuan. The police were called at 11:42 PM.

To get from Lishui to Songling, the most convenient route is Provincial Highway 119.

But if you’re going from Qingyuan Town to Lishui, the shortest route is actually Zhangqing Road.

"Liu Zhi, back in ’14, this stretch of road only had streetlights near the villages. Between two villages like this, the road had no lights."

Inside the car, Ding Junbao pointed at the streetlights on both sides of the road.

They had received the accident report yesterday, and this morning, the team was revisiting the scene.

Shen Xin, along with Liu Jie, peered out to survey the area.

This section was between two villages. Although the road had been repaved and widened, the streetlights were still few and far between.

It followed that surveillance cameras were also extremely rare back then.

Ding Junbao continued to flip through the accident report. "At 11:42 PM, a passing truck driver discovered Yang Maocai lying on the ground after being hit and called the police."

"Twenty minutes later, the traffic police and an ambulance arrived successively, but Yang Maocai was already dead. In other words, he was already dead when the driver found him."

"The traffic police team investigated the accident scene. They found no obvious skid marks on the ground. Yang Maocai and his e-bike were sent flying over ten meters. He suffered multiple fractures all over his body and died at the scene."

"Yang Maocai tested positive for alcohol, but the point of impact was on the shoulder of the road. This means that although Yang Maocai had been drinking, he was keeping to the side."

"Then the hit-and-run vehicle hugged the shoulder, didn’t swerve, and hit Yang Maocai from behind, sending him flying."

If you knew there was more to this accident, that kind of behavior would immediately make you suspect it was a premeditated and deliberate homicide.

But obviously, the traffic police team didn’t know that at the time.

Ding Junbao said, "The traffic police team believed the driver might have been fatigued or drunk, causing them to veer out of their lane, and that they fled after the collision."

"At the time, there was a speed camera about six hundred meters ahead. The traffic police team pulled the footage. In the half-hour before the police were called, a total of 8 vehicles passed by."

"But not a single one had damage to its front."

"Four hundred meters back, near She Dou Village, there was another speed camera. At 11:31 PM, it captured Yang Maocai riding his e-bike."

"Then, comparing the vehicles entering and exiting between the two cameras, they found one van that entered but never exited."

"At 11:32 PM, the camera before the crash site captured this van. In other words, the crash happened just a few minutes after that, and the vehicle likely fled the scene from this location."

Ding Junbao pointed to a side road across from them.

It connected to Zhangqing Road and led toward Guangfu Village, northeast of She Dou Village.

"So the traffic police concluded this van was the vehicle responsible. They found gray bumper fragments among the debris at the scene that matched the van’s color."

"It was a Wuling van, and its license plate had been deliberately obscured. After it fled, the lack of surveillance cameras meant the traffic police were ultimately unable to track it down."

The car stopped on the side of the road.

Liu Jie looked toward the road the van had used to escape.

It used to be a concrete country lane, but it had since been paved with asphalt.

He signaled for them to drive down it.

Inside, the road system was a complex web connecting several nearby villages, with farmland in between.

In a place like this, especially late at night, there would be few surveillance cameras.

Even if there were cameras, they wouldn’t have captured a clear image.

But it’s not easy for a car to vanish completely.

Liu Jie pressed, "Didn’t they check repair shops and scrapyards?"

"They did."

"This was a fatality case, after all, which changes things," Ding Junbao said. "The Nanlin Traffic Police Team canvassed repair shops and scrapyards and even issued an assistance bulletin, but they never found the van."

Liu Jie thought for a moment and said, "Did they send one to our jurisdiction?"

This was a provincial border. You could be in the next province in no time.

Sometimes, when information isn’t shared between provinces, it creates loopholes for suspects to exploit.

"They sent one," Ding Junbao said. "They investigated for over a month, but with no results, the case went cold."

Liu Jie nodded.

The resources and intensity of an investigation led by a traffic police team are different from one run by criminal investigators.

The key was that they hadn’t suspected premeditated murder at the time.

After a moment’s thought, Liu Jie said, "The van is still the key. Don’t we have a photo of it? Focus on Zhou Hui and investigate this van."

"Zhou Hui’s factory was already up and running by the end of ’13, thanks to his father-in-law."

"Then in ’14, he opened a flagship store in Lishui. For shipping and delivering goods, wouldn’t he need a van? Look into it. Maybe he used his own."