usatvline Chapter 378 Birthmark Tracking
Chapter 378 Birthmark Tracking
After receiving Pei Luonan's instructions, tracking the woman with the birthmark on her waist became the focus of Lu Chenzhou's work.
The autumn nights in the south are filled with sticky humidity, and the dripping sound of the air conditioner outdoor unit hits the iron awning rhythmically.
Lu Chenzhou wiped the sweat from his forehead and pressed the pause button on his computer for the umpteenth time.
The blue light of the screen reflected his red eyes. A woman in a fisherman's hat was stepping into the Zuixian Bar. The moment her beige skirt was lifted up, the dark red birthmark on her lower back looked like a drop of solidified blood.
This was his fifth day of continuous investigation. He had watched a total of 37 surveillance videos over a hundred times and even remembered clearly whether the woman took the left or right foot first when she walked.
"The second one isn't it!" Assistant Xiao Tang kicked open the safe house's iron door. Sweat stained the back of his T-shirt, and the soles of his sneakers were stained with oil from nowhere. He slammed the sealed bag on the table. Inside, a photo of the birthmark on the beauty salon receptionist's face glowed an eerie bluish-white.
"It's oval, with smooth edges. It's not even remotely like a flame."
Lu Chenzhou opened the folder labeled "002" and twenty-three candid photos fell out.
In order to take these pictures, he squatted in different places for a full 96 hours, surrounded by mosquitoes, his neck was sunburned, and he even heard the boss's wife scolding the employees.
Once he was almost mistaken for a thief, but fortunately he had a sudden inspiration and held up the takeaway box and lied that he was delivering milk tea.
That incident in the supermarket almost made him think he had found the real murderer.
In the surveillance video, a young mother pushing a stroller bent down to pick up the bottle. The red mark on her lower back looked exactly like the target.
Lu Chenzhou stayed in the dairy products area for three consecutive days, pretending to pick milk powder, but actually taking secret photos with a miniature camera hidden in the frame of his sunglasses.
He even found out the brand of milk powder the other party bought, the color of the phone case he used to pay, and the off-key nursery rhymes he hummed to comfort his children.
One day, the child suddenly started crying and the young mother was in a panic. He almost couldn't help but go up to help, but he held back for fear of exposing his identity.
The results of the lab test showed that it was just a temporary tattoo made with fluorescent pigment, which showed a spiderweb-like grid pattern under the ultraviolet light. At that moment, he stared at the test report and felt like a fool.
After searching for clues again and again, Lu Chenzhou set his eyes on the pair of high heels with wavy patterns.
Wearing a baseball cap and carrying a self-made work ID, he went to 27 high-end shoe stores across the city.
At the "Rosa Custom Workshop," he tinkered on the floor for three hours before fixing the owner's leaky coffee machine. He listened to her complain about her son's rebellious period, from truancy to premature love, while trying to figure out how to get the order records.
Finally, I got the chance to look through the files. In the yellowed order book, there was only a flamboyantly written word "Night" in the customer's signature column.
He spent another four hours rummaging through the trash can, piecing together half a receipt with "Rose Freight" written on it from the pile of shredded paper. His fingers were cut all over by the paper, and blood seeped out, staining the paper red.
The night I was waiting at the Rose Freight Company, the rain was pouring down like someone was pouring buckets over my head.
Lu Chenzhou hid behind the transformer box. The telescope was blurred by the rain and he could only keep wiping it with the corner of his clothes.
Suddenly, a silver earring fell out from the gap in the container and rolled twice on the ground.
He rushed out without thinking too much, and the mud and water splashed all over his pants, leaving black spots.
As his fingertips touched the earrings, a white light exploded in the warehouse. When he came to his senses, the documents on the floor were burned to the point that only the corners were left, and he could barely recognize a few words.
He used his coat to put out the fire, and a series of blisters formed on the back of his hand, which was burning painful. In the end, he could only grab half of a burnt delivery note, the date of which was exactly the day before the woman appeared in the surveillance video of Zuixian Bar.
Xiao Tang later made fun of him, saying that he was like a cat with its tail burned by fire.
"There's still a problem!" Xiao Tang pushed the thermal imaging video onto the table. In the video, as the woman walked out of the bar, she was surrounded by a blue-white halo, like a will-o'-the-wisp. "Her body temperature is several degrees lower than normal. How can an ordinary birthmark glow?"
Lu Chenzhou suddenly remembered the first suspect - the cleaner who always took out the trash in the early morning.
After reviewing the previously taken video frame by frame, it was discovered that every time she passed the camera, she would deliberately pull the strap of her backpack down, exposing the birthmark at an angle that was as precise as if it had been measured, but the final comparison result still did not match.
The three days at the antique auction house were a torture.
Lu Chenzhou specially rented a suit that didn't fit him well. It made his shoulders uncomfortable and his tie hurt his neck. He also practiced the glass-raising posture in front of the mirror hundreds of times.
When the woman in cheongsam raised her hand to bid, the dark red scar on her lower back looked very similar to the one in the photo.
He pretended to drop his jade earrings, and when he bent down, he caught a glimpse of the dark red mark on the slit of his cheongsam. His heart nearly jumped out of his throat. But the DNA test results poured cold water on his feelings—it was body paint made with cinnabar mixed with pigeon blood, which would fade to a pale pink when exposed to heat.
He looked at the test report again and again, and suddenly realized that everything he had done these days was in vain.
The chase at the used book market nearly cost him his life.
When he reached the seventh bookshelf, he was tripped by the pile of books. His knee hit the iron shelf and became swollen. The pain was so severe that he saw stars in front of his eyes.
A copy of "Blood Rose" fell open and a memory card fell out.
When the computer was plugged in, a live broadcast screen popped up: in the safe house, Xiao Tang was pinned down on the table by several people. The screen was densely packed with information on more than twenty "suspects", and each name was marked with an "x".
Then the screen went black and there was no movement.
The hand holding the mouse began to tremble, and his mind was full of Xiao Tang's usual talkative appearance. He was worried that something would happen to this brother who had been through thick and thin with him.
Holding the note stuffed by the deaf-mute girl in the convenience store, Lu Chenzhou's nails almost dug into his palm.
The day he followed the note to the abandoned clinic, the stench almost made him vomit.
When the flashlight swept to the corner, a video was playing on the computer: the woman in the fisherman's hat turned around, and the mask on her face was patterned with vines full of flowers, like a winding little snake crawling all over her face. She grinned, revealing two gold teeth.
"Are you having fun?" the woman said indifferently, "Those seven women with birthmarks are just scripts prepared for you." A secret compartment suddenly popped up on the wall of the clinic, filled with file bags. Each photo was taken of a different woman's birthmark on her lower back, and the labels read strange words like "fluorescent model for positioning use".
Only then did Lu Chenzhou realize that every "suspect" he had found in the past few days was a bait deliberately left by the other party.
Those carefully designed coincidences and those seemingly crucial clues were all meant to lure him into the trap and then play the cat-and-mouse game.
But what he couldn't understand was, wasn't the information leaked to the media a fake case? How could Nightingale have known his intentions, taken precautions in advance, and dug a big trap for him to jump into?
When Lu Chenzhou was thinking hard, a woman suddenly rushed out and stabbed a syringe into his arm with lightning speed.
Lu Chenzhou felt weak all over, but he gritted his teeth and rushed to the computer desk, pressing the save button before his consciousness blurred.
After watching the data being saved bit by bit, he fainted.
When he woke up in the ruins, his memory card had turned to black mud, and his phone was filled with missed calls from Xiao Tang. The last message was at 20:17: "The warehouse exploded... The people were taken away by ambulance..."
Lu Chenzhou stood up with the help of the wall, and suddenly felt a burning pain in his lower back.
He looked down at the blood on his hand, and vaguely felt that a dark red mark was spreading under his skin.
In the distance, crows flew by, cawing. The unfinished blood bird painting on the clinic wall, with the paint on its tail mixed with rainwater, dragged a long red mark on the ground, like a road that could never be walked out.
He knew that the battle with "Nightingale" was still going on.