shuhaige
Chapter 203
Chapter 203
Chapter 203 A Carefully Planned Murder
After moving her belongings to the spacious flat, Imogen went to Norway, leaving the rest of her luggage untouched.
Now that Imogen had decided to settle here long–term, she began organizing her things, including her late father’s belongings.
As Christmas had passed, another year had gone by since her father’s departure.
The truck driver who had been incarcerated was now living comfortably with extra money to travel abroad.
Meanwhile, her father lay peacefully in his eternal rest.
These thoughts weighed heavily on Imogen’s heart.
She opened her father’s notebook and slowly flipped through each page, the yellowed footers and familiar handwriting comforting her.
As she went through it, a photo slipped out from between the pages.
It was a photo seemingly related to the previous kidnapping case.
Imogen picked it up, took a look, and inserted it inside the notebook.
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Suddenly, something flashed through her mind, and she immediately took out the photo and looked at it carefully.
The angle of the photo was peculiar as if it was taken surreptitiously from behind a pillar, obscuring part of the foreground.
In the photo, there are two individuals, one with a side profile and the other with approximately at 45–degree side profile.
Due to the distance, their facial features weren’t clear, but Imogen had a strong sense of familiarity with the person at the forty–five–degree angle. It felt like she had seen him somewhere before!
When she had previously looked at this photo, she hadn’t felt this way.
Where could she have seen it before?!
In a sudden epiphany, Imogen recalled seeing a man of similar age accompanying the truck driver at the Sacia City Airport!
At the time, she felt that the man looked familiar and assumed he was a relative of the truck
driver.
Now, Imogen closed her eyes and recollected carefully. Although they had only briefly crossed paths, in her mind, the face of the man at the airport overlapped perfectly with the half–profile face in the photo!
Her memory had never been so vivid before!
No wonder she had found the man familiar at the airport. She had seen him in the photo! Trembling, Imogen held the photo in her hand, her whole body filled with excitement. This photo was related to
the kidnapping case, a stolen snapshot, which meant that the two people inside were undoubtedly the kidnappers!
In other words, one of the kidnappers knew the truck driver who ran over her father. Imogen firmly believed that this was no coincidence!
Her father’s death was not an accident but a carefully planned murder!
At that time, her father had gained quite a reputation from the food additive case, and other righteous reports he had been involved in had also been unearthed, greatly enhancing his credibility among the public.
It was likely that the kidnappers noticed him while he was taking the photo and had to take action to protect themselves, leading to her father’s untimely demise.
It must have been so!
As Imogen realized this, tears welled up in her eyes, and she tightly gripped the photo, her fingertips pale.
She was determined to avenge her father!
Sitting on the floor, Imogen wiped away her tears.
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and forced herself to calm down and think.
She recalled a kidnapping case. The hostage in that case was the daughter of a celebrity. The media, disregarding the desperate pleas of the celebrity’s mother, reported and even live–streamed the rescue process, leading to the gruesome death of the hostage at the hands of the kidnappers.
Imogen had inadvertently come across this case, and it had left a deep impression on her. The victim in that case was only seventeen years old, a young girl in her prime, still in high school, and the celebrity’s mother’s only child!
The most infuriating were the profit–seeking media, who were complicit in the kidnappers‘ actions. Their evil was no less than that of the kidnappers themselves.
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After this case, in similar cases in the country, no related news would leak until the hostage was rescued.
There would be no reporters at the scene of the crime or during the rescue process.
So, how did her father manage to capture a photo of the kidnapper?
Did her father receive a tip–off and risked danger to secretly take photos at the scene?
This was indeed something her father would do. In the previous case involving food additives, her father had personally gone undercover at the factory to obtain evidence.
It was possible that her father was discovered while taking the photos, which incurred the kidnapper’s wrath.
At that time, her father was already in the midst of writing the news article, which meant that either the hostage had been rescued or had already died by the time her father passed away.
From the unfinished drafts in her father’s notebook, Imogen deduced that the kidnapping occurred on April 12th of that year, and her father’s death anniversary was on April 18th.
This meant that the kidnapper had not been apprehended on the spot and was still on the run at the time of her father’s death. Otherwise, the truck driver’s act would be meaningless.
As for the fate of the hostage and whether the kidnapper was eventually caught, Imogen had not paid attention to it back then.
She had never connected her father’s death with this case.
Even if she had briefly suspected foul play in her father’s death, she had assumed it was due to his previous just reports that had offended someone.
Imogen took a deep breath, cleared her mind for a few seconds, and took out her father’s notebook and the photo.
Her father’s case had long been classified as a traffic accident, and the truck driver had already served his sentence. Based on her own speculation, it would be difficult to convince the police to reinvestigate.
She could only privately investigate this matter on her own.
Her father’s death had garnered a lot of attention in society, and the police would surely investigate the case thoroughly under public scrutiny. However, they had failed to establish a connection between the truck driver and the kidnappers, indicating the kidnappers‘ deep concealment.
Perhaps there was a large criminal organization behind them.
Imogen poured herself a glass of water, took a sip to calm her nerves, took out her own laptop, and began searching for reports about the kidnapping case from that year.
However, to her surprise, Imogen found nothing about the April 12th kidnapping when she searched on the Internet.
The search results were all unrelated.
Even when she tried different keywords, the results remained unrelated to web pages.
It was as if the incident never happened. Upstodatee from Novel(D)ra/m/a.O(r)g
Why was it like this?
Imogen’s palms began to sweat.
She had never realized how peculiar this situation was until she started searching.
If it weren’t for the draft her father had written and the existence of this photo, Imogen would have doubted her own memory.
Could it be that besides her father, no other media outlets reported on this case?
That seemed highly unlikely.
Those sensationalist journalists would do anything for profit. They would have reported regardless of the outcome of the kidnapping.
So, Imogen decided to keep on searching.
After two hours of searching, when Imogen’s eyes were beginning to blur, she finally found relevant reports on an obscure website: [Breaking News: A kidnapping took place in New York City on April 12th. The hostage has been safely rescued, and the suspect is currently being pursued.] These few brief lines of words made Imogen as excited as if she had found a lifeline.
It proved that it wasn’t her memory playing tricks on her but rather a problem with the Internet.
Imogen refused to believe that there were no media organizations that reported this incident back then. Someone must have erased all traces of this case.
It was most likely the doing of the kidnappers and their organization.
These kidnappers were not ordinary. They could evade the eyes of society.
They were terrifying.
Imogen found it hard to believe how skilled they were, and for a moment, she even suspected that there were insiders involved.
Chapter 203 A Carefully Planned Murder
Suddenly, someone knocked on the door.
Just as Imogen was deep in thought, the sound of someone knocking on the door suddenly startled her, making her tremble all over.
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Chapter 204 Then I Will