National Forensic Doctor
Chapter 632 - 576: Red, Yellow, Blue

Chapter 632: Chapter 576: Red, Yellow, Blue

Tang Xiaobo had been waiting until noon and hadn’t seen Jiang Yuan. He continued to wait patiently until the evening, and then until eight o’clock at night, at which point the canteen lady had had enough.

The canteen lady, who was about the same age as Tang Xiaobo, tugged at her apron and said, "My husband is waiting for me to watch the TV drama at home. If you guys want to cook, do it yourself tonight. Leave the dishes, and I’ll wash them tomorrow morning."

Helpless, Tang Xiaobo stood up and apologized, "I’m sorry; it’s a special situation that has delayed your closing time today."

"It’s no big deal. You officials also have it tough. But I can’t wait any longer." The lady waved her hand and rode off on her electric bike without a hint of politeness.

Tang Xiaobo had no choice but to call his wife, Wang Xiuyun, to come to the rescue.

In a short while, Wang Xiuyun arrived, scolded Tang Xiaobo as usual, and then said, "You call me over to cook, but it’d be better to invite people over to our house for dinner. Didn’t you often invite colleagues over in the past? It’s even more intimate that way."

Surrounded by trusted colleagues, Tang Xiaobo just sighed and said, "It wouldn’t be good to appear too close."

"Then why did you call me here to cook?"

"And it wouldn’t be good to seem too cold either," Tang Xiaobo sighed again.

Wang Xiuyun looked at her husband and shook her head, "Being a station chief is even more difficult than raising pigs. You’re worried if the pigs eat too much they’ll get diarrhea, and if they eat too little they’ll lose weight..."

Thinking of Chai Tong and Huang Qiangmin, Tang Xiaobo felt like crying at his wife’s words.

Wang Xiuyun went into the kitchen and familiarized herself with the pots and pans. The office worker, a man in his thirties, half-heartedly entered the kitchen to help in some not so useful ways.

A few people eagerly waited until 10 p.m., when they finally saw car lights shining into the courtyard.

The office worker hurried along with Tang Xiaobo to greet Jiang Yuan, coaxing him inside with sweet talk.

"You must be tired from the trip. We were saying we’d wait for you to have dinner together..." As Tang Xiaobo re-entered the dining hall, he loudly called everyone over.

"Ah... it’s good to eat together. I’ve prepared hot pot," Mu Zhiyang said as he approached with two large bags, their red exteriors signaling they were from Haidilao.

Wang Chuanxing and Mu Zhiyang brought out the pots, bowls, chopsticks, the packaged hot pot base, and the vegetables, spreading them out across the table, then went back to the car to bring more.

Tang Xiaobo was startled and hurried forward to help, asking, "Why did you buy Haidilao? Where did you get it from?"

"It was sent from the city," Jiang Yuan explained, referring to Qinghe City. "Since we spent a lot of time looking at plants, I thought of doing something I could prepare myself in the evening."

The takeout hot pot stoves came prepared, and they just needed to be plugged in to start cooking. Compared with the far-traveled stir-fried dishes, hot pot was naturally fresher and more appetizing.

Seeing this, Tang Xiaobo decided to call over his wife to set up the hot pot together.

They poured the two-colored hot pot broth into the takeout yin-yang pot, one side red and the other white, reflecting on Tang Xiaobo’s face, which looked uncertain.

"Captain Jiang, how did the investigation go today?" Tang Xiaobo asked.

"We just checked the mountainous areas near the roads in the township. The more distant mountains were inaccessible." Jiang Yuan paused before adding, "Compared to satellite images, there are some differences, especially with many vine plants and herbaceous plants thriving under tall trees. From above, it’s not very clear what you’re looking at."

"What’s the purpose of doing this?" Tang Xiaobo was puzzled.

"To lay a foundation for legal botany," Jiang Yuan replied, both clearly and ambiguously.

Tang Xiaobo was completely at a loss. When he had joined the police force, there wasn’t even a shadow of DNA evidence. After working in the police station, he was practically disconnected from cutting-edge technology.

And it wasn’t just him; even the detectives from the provincial criminal police squad didn’t usually come into contact with much of legal botany.

Jiang Yuan didn’t elaborate and simply said, "It’s just a safety net. If we can solve the case with other techniques, I’ll use those first. If we really need to use legal botany, having taken a look in advance gives us a sense of expectation and a budget. "

Legal botany is not widely used, partly because it’s expensive.

Especially since it demands a high cost of human labor. Hence, even in Europe and America, legal botany isn’t commonly used.

A person who works 40 hours a week has limited capacity to contribute to legal botany.

Located in Ningtai County, the Litang Township Police Station operates on Ningtai County’s budget, which naturally mustn’t be squandered. Relying solely on legal botany would mean operating in a microtrace evidence+ mode for the entire case. Even if all the cases in Litang Township were solved, it would just cause pains for those in the station.

However, establishing a foundation in legal botany is essential. The exceptional aspect of this skill is that it can reveal the relationship between people or things and places, which is difficult for other forensic skills to achieve.

Tang Xiaobo might not fully understand, but he knew that Jiang Yuan was gearing up for a big job.

"Ah, fine then," Tang Xiaobo sighed, not wishing to be the Iwo Jima of Sulfur Island, but since he had come this far, he could only slice off a piece of pork belly and roll it vigorously through the sesame sauce.

The night passed without incident.

On the third day in Litang Township, Jiang Yuan finally took his place in the meeting room, ready to properly start the day’s case work.

Like in other cities and counties, Jiang Yuan sat in the middle of the long conference table, assisted by Wang Chuanxing and Mu Zhiyang helping out. Wu Junhao, responsible for operations, sat and watched from the side, with Xiao Wang from the station who had come to assist.

"The first current case." Mu Zhiyang handed over a case file that had been organized the day before yesterday to Jiang Yuan.

The cases that were still at the police station were minor ones, but minor cases were still cases and required various evidence, photos, interrogation records, and so on for cooperation.

In the past two days, Jiang Yuan had been leading his team to sort out mainly the completeness of the evidence, the quality of the photos taken, and whether the interrogation records were proper.

If these were not well done, it would take time to redo them, and it might be impossible to complete a single case in one day.

On the contrary, if the police at the station had already spent the day doing the preparatory work, Jiang Yuan actually didn’t care what kind of case it was.

Most cases, in fact, were cracked by ordinary police officers after some investigation. The ones that were not solved were mainly theft cases—do not underestimate theft as a minor property offense; most of them involve quite sophisticated opportunistic crime.

The rural areas had little surveillance infrastructure and few checkpoints, so to this day, theft cases remained frequent. The total amount involved was often not large, with many people not even reporting a stolen phone or being unable to file a report, which is why the total number of cases was not that big.

The first case Jiang Yuan took on had its own unique characteristics: a farmer’s vegetable garden had over a dozen steel pipes used for repairing greenhouses stolen, so they called the police.

Naturally, there was no surveillance in the vegetable garden, but footprints and tire tracks were left at the scene.

Jiang Yuan looked at the footprints and then at the tire tracks, feeling that starting from the footprints, it was going to be a bit troublesome.

The tire tracks varied in depth, indicating that the steel pipes were stolen by loading them onto a vehicle. The thief was very likely not a local, making it somewhat difficult to search for a person based on the footprints.

It was impossible to conduct a search for such a minor case.

Even if it were possible to draw up a rough list of names through eyewitnesses or by canvassing, it would probably take an estimated thirty to fifty labor days.

Therefore, Jiang Yuan turned his attention to the tire tracks.

The tire tracks on the dirt road next to the farmland were very clear.

Jiang Yuan had a Level 3 Vehicle Trace Identification skill, but since he had mostly been dealing with major and cold cases, this skill had not been particularly useful.

This time, looking at the tire tracks from the current case, he could gather much more information.

The police officers at the scene had also measured the length and width of the tire tracks, but lacking experience in trace identification themselves, they were somewhat uncertain about some details.

As for sending it for trace identification... it was probably submitted, but the only trace identification experts in Ningtai County were Yan and Wang Zhong. If feedback was to be expected, it would take several days anyway.

Using a bit of knowledge of vehicle traces, Jiang Yuan quickly wrote down the notation 175/70R14 and handed it to Wang Chuanxing, saying, "Check to see what kind of vehicles use this tire model."

"All right." Wang Chuanxing immediately began searching on the internal network.

Jiang Yuan, meanwhile, opened a map and began studying the route of the highway.

Soon, Wang Chuanxing reported, "For original models, there’s Nissan Livina, Kia K2 produced by Dongfeng Yueda Kia... Palio, Wuling Rongguang, Wuling Hongguang... Honda Fit..."

"Most likely it’s Wuling. Other cars wouldn’t be able to fit such long steel pipes," Jiang Yuan wrote down the names of two county roads on paper and handed it to Wang Chuanxing. "Pass this to the guys in the video office and tell them to track the time and look for the vehicle. See if a Wuling Hongguang or Rongguang passed through these checkpoints that night."

The surveillance system in Ningtai County was something Jiang Yuan had participated in setting up, with funding from Changyang City, matched contributions from the provincial department, and secured by Huang Qiangmin.

Not only did Ningtai County have comprehensive surveillance, but important nodes on each of the national, provincial, and county roads were also installed with vehicle checkpoints.

Driving on highways, national and provincial roads, the elongated cameras that flash as you pass are the vehicle checkpoints. Their mode of operation isn’t to capture images of traffic violations, but to photograph the front of each passing vehicle.

When the police need to trace a particular vehicle at a particular time, they can do so using the photographs from the vehicle checkpoints.

To get out of Litang Township, there were just a few intersecting roads, and very few cars passed through at night. If looking for a specified vehicle model, it should be relatively easy to find.

Jiang Yuan, having proceeded to this point, placed the case file in a bamboo basket hanging with a yellow ribbon to the side.

The yellow basket meant the case had moved into the investigation phase. Next to it, the blue was prepared for completed cases, and the red for difficult cases.

Jiang Yuan had planned well, and execution had not encountered any bottlenecks.

In the following hit-and-run case, a match was made with fingerprints, and in the blue basket, there was now one more file.

Then another one.

And then another...

By lunchtime, there were three file folders in the yellow basket and four in the blue basket.

So much so that when Jiang Yuan came to get his meal, the chatter inside the canteen abruptly stopped.

In Tang Xiaobo’s mind, for some reason, a phrase emerged: able to hush a child’s cry...