when the moon whispers

Chapter 425: Accomplice - Confession (Part )

Six accomplices in the case
Seventy-eight Confessions (Part 1)
There is almost no nightlife to speak of in the business district near Shifu Road. Near the late night hours, there are only two barbecue stalls with pushcarts on the roadside of the block. The business, which is sometimes good and sometimes bad, depends entirely on the mass-market KTV in the middle of the long street with a 24-character core value hanging high on the wall of the lobby. See how many private rooms have been booked out for non-stop singing that night.

The street, which usually only had street lights and scattered neon signs in the middle of the night, was now brightly lit by the flashing lights of seven or eight police cars.

Jiang Mo parked the car diagonally beside a stone pier that blocked motor vehicles in front of the pedestrian street, rolled down the passenger window and slapped the center of the steering wheel, calling out to Xiao Letian, who was waiting at the barbecue stall with greedy eyes, to clear his eyes that were about to pierce the plate of grilled eggplants in tin foil, and hurried towards Nanyang Road.

Xiao Letian looked at the grilled eggplant reluctantly, and without even raising his head, he pushed and shoved the barbecue stall owner who was trying to pack the plate of vegetable and meat skewers that was about to be served and stuff it into his hands. He turned around and jumped into the car in two steps, slid out five meters away holding the seat belt, then turned back with a pout and looked towards the pedestrian street, taking a deep puff of the fragrant, spicy charcoal smoke.

"The case is over. Come here for a midnight snack, Senior Sister. Let Master pay for it."

Xiao Letian's stomach was beating with greed and hunger. He waved vigorously at his classmates who were fighting against prostitution through the car window, "...This KTV is really bold. They dared to organize a stage on the street of Shifu Road... Senior sister, you didn't go in to see it. Do you know where the boss of this shop hid all the people when the anti-prostitution campaign came to catch them in the act for half a month? Under the big 'Twenty-Four Characters' sign in their lobby, there is an invisible door that is at most one person tall and one person wide - that should be a partition of the storage room, and more than ten or twenty people were crammed in it. The boss is still talking nonsense there. If the door had been opened five minutes later, one and a half people inside would have suffocated to death."

"The crackdown on prostitution was quite big today? You were just in time to catch someone when you came here?" Jiang Mo wiped the steering wheel, raised his eyes as he turned the roundabout, and glanced at the red and blue lights flashing at the end of the pedestrian street in the rearview mirror. "Is the Internet cafe with the IP address that Xiaomi Lu mentioned the one above the KTV?"

"It's more than a small scene. I heard that a family member who works on this street during the day reported it internally under his real name, and it happened to be a day of anti-prostitution crackdown to boost sales... The guy who was reported seemed to be soft-hearted and his wife sent him a message to inform him. He wanted to run away early, but he was held down by my classmate when he left the house. His porcelain teeth were broken, and he was arguing in the car that he wanted to report it. I guess he was planning to call someone to help."

Xiao Letian curled his lips and shrugged, then took out his phone and pulled out a screenshot of a video, half holding it up on the center console. "...The IP address that anonymously posted about Song Zhiwen's plagiarism was not from the Internet cafe upstairs, but from the one opened by the KTV itself. Go in from the lobby and take the stairs. Aren't there private rooms on the second and third floors? This Internet cafe is on the second and a half floors... It's called an Internet cafe, but it's actually a bit like a black Internet cafe or a video hall, and it's not very serious. Pushing the door and entering, the scene made me sick after five minutes."

Xiao Letian raised his eyebrows awkwardly, as if he briefly recalled the rows of dark, dank and humid cubicles in the KTV's own black Internet cafe. He curled his face in disgust and said, "This is the surveillance footage from the front desk of the black Internet cafe. Although the angle is so low that you can hardly see the face, Senior Sister - do this outfit and the hat on your head look familiar?"

Jiang Mo first glanced at the dark spot in the dim light on Xiao Letian's phone screen, thought silently for a while, and then glanced at the black silhouette coat in front of the counter with a familiar look. She was driving with two minds, so her mind was a little slow. She took a breath and suddenly realized something. She looked up at the red light above her head and stepped on the brake. She twisted half of her body to the screen: "Isn't this... the figure who was photographed following Tu Siyao on the night Chai Qing was murdered-"

"From the surveillance footage alone, even the height and width of the figures are exactly the same."

Xiao Letian rubbed the goose bumps on his arms and shuddered. He reached out to turn the video to the second half, and used his finger to circle the face of the person in the center of the paused screen twice. "This Internet cafe doesn't check IDs. You can go online by paying money. People who come here are generous, and the waiter at the front desk doesn't care about anything. Then she turned on the computer and went into the cubicle. Fortunately, this is a black Internet cafe. There is a special camera for hidden cameras hidden where the monitor label is, and I barely captured Xue Yilian's face." Jiang Mo frowned and pushed away Xiao Letian's fingertips that were blocking the corner of the screen. He lowered his eyes to check the time, turned his head, looked at the green light, stepped on the accelerator, and drove to the maximum speed limit in the city. "She stayed in the Internet cafe for so long? The time she left was about two minutes before the routine anti-pornography inspection?"

"I went to the cubicle where she was operating the machine and took a look. Her position was by the window. Although there was only a row of ventilation windows about as wide as an arm on the half-floor, she could just lean over and see the pedestrian street outside the building. I guess she probably noticed something downstairs. When she passed by the bar counter at the door, she mentioned to the waiter that she was going out to buy some barbecue. But when she went downstairs, she didn't go through the main entrance of the KTV. She quietly ran out of the KTV employee passage."

Xiao Letian bared his teeth and curled his lips when he said this, "If the big brother who was reported had not just sneaked away at that time, and the person squatting in the employee passage was tripped by the main entrance, he would not have been found until now... The crackdown on prostitution has attracted all the people who have time to watch the fun near this pedestrian street, and I don't even know where Xue Yilian got the taxi from."

Jiang Mo tilted his head to glance at the sign for Nanyang Road, then slowly stepped on the brakes, waiting for the sanitation tricycle that was crossing the road to slowly move away from the front of the car: "Didn't the guy at the barbecue stall just see Xue Yilian? He doesn't even know where she got on the car, how did he see her?"

"When I just got in the car, wasn't the barbecue stall cart facing the turntable of the small square?" Xiao Letian put down his phone, and gestured in front of him in a messy manner to indicate the direction of the pedestrian street and the small square. He bent his elbow to signal his senior sister to take a look at him: "When the barbecue stall boss was watching the bust, he heard a taxi with the window open playing disco music, so he turned around to take a look - what a coincidence, because the unlucky driver didn't close the window to keep himself awake in the middle of the night, the car speeded up and just happened to lift Xue Yilian's hat, and her big wavy hair flew up, and her face was just visible."

"That big brother is so funny. He said Xue Yilian is pretty, but he got punched by the big sister who brought back the skewers—" Xiao Letian interrupted halfway through his sentence. Before he could grin, Jiang Mo's phone, which he had casually thrown on the cup holder, started to vibrate non-stop. Xiao Letian looked down at the caller ID, picked up the phone to show his sister, and swiped to answer the call. He turned on the hands-free function and held it between their ears. He first reported his current location, then leaned close to the microphone and asked, "Master, have you found Xue Yilian's car? Should my sister and I go directly to Huabin Middle Road?"

"The driver detained it."

Gu Xing still had a cigarette in his mouth, but he was closely watched by Zhu Silai and Geng Zhi these two days, and his lighter was confiscated from half of his pocket. He probably just held the cigarette in his mouth to satisfy his craving. "The car just reported should be a black car. The operating company does not have a taxi with a license plate number ending in 158. I asked the neighbor to check the road surveillance. 158 drove a long circle in the city and just returned to Huabin Middle Road two minutes ago. However, it did not stop near the old three-story building. Instead, it drove a long circle to avoid Huang Xingjun and his men who were squatting, and finally stopped at Beixi Street."

Jiang Mo lowered his voice for a moment.

"Tu Siyao's home?"

Due to work and health reasons, I will be working on another day~
"How can a drunk or sleepy person know that I am myself? Even a scheming person would laugh at you for not being a fish."