“Damn. If it’s a rape case, our chances of getting bio samples decrease.”

  “Why?” Lin Tao asked.

  “Semen is water soluble.”

  “Does that mean we can’t tell if it’s a rape case?” the detective asked.

  I shook my head. “Bodies can talk.”

  Blood had spread to every part of the floor, which made it impossible to reconstruct the crime scene using blood traces. Even the clothes on the bench by the door were wet. With this kind of scene, a forensic scientist has to start with some autopsy work and then coordinate with trace inspection to find clues.

  I sent Big Bao to check out the body in the corner while I examined the one by the door.

  “Who moved the body?” I shouted.

  “No one,” the officer responsible for site protection objected. “She was lying on her stomach like that when we got here. And look, the wounds on her head are in line with being knocked down from behind.”

  The back of the girl’s head did have several jagged wounds that seemed to be caused by blows from a blunt instrument. The skull was exposed through the broken skin, and the black-and-yellow tissue on the edges of the wound was a horrible sight. No blood surrounded it.

  “They just said the water only covered two-thirds of the bodies. If she was lying facedown, how did the blood get washed off the back of her head? There isn’t even blood on the hair around it,” I said. “And there’s livor mortis on the back of the body, which could only happen if the victim had been on her back for more than twenty-four hours.”

  “Yeah, it looks like this one was lying on her back for twenty-four hours, then flipped,” Big Bao responded, his voice echoing from the far corner.

  “But . . . but really, no one could have gotten in,” the officer insisted. “I’ve been on guard outside the whole time, didn’t even go to the bathroom.”

  “Don’t worry, buddy, I’m not accusing you of negligence. The victims died on the night of the twenty-seventh. Between the night of the twenty-eighth and when you all arrived, someone must have moved the bodies.”

  The officer blinked at me a few times.

  Big Bao’s voice came from the corner again. “Whoa, do you think maybe Liu Jie came two nights ago and killed them, then came back in the morning and moved the bodies for some reason before reporting the crime?”

  “Could be, could be. People call in their own crimes a lot,” the officer said quickly.

  “But why move them?” I asked. “He’d expose himself.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Lin Tao, who had been brushing the door for prints. “Big Bao may really be right.”

  “Oh?” I stood up and walked over to him. The sudden movement caused me to feel somewhat dizzy, and I struggled to keep my balance on the platform.

  “It’s like this.” Lin Tao saw my goofy posture and laughed. “There’s a lock outside, but it’s all rusted, hard to get fingerprints.”

  “If the murderer unlatched the door from the outside,” I said, “he would have touched the side of the door, because there’s no handle.”

  “Yup,” Lin Tao said with a nod. “But this door’s so crappy, I couldn’t get anything of value. I did, however, find an incomplete fingerprint on the latch.”

  I squinted at it.

  Lin Tao said to the technician behind him, “Did we get Liu Jie’s prints yet?”

  The tech nodded and took out a portable fingerprint card from his bag. Homicide police have the deep-rooted habit of collecting people’s fingerprints as soon as they meet them.

  Lin Tao compared it to the print he’d found.

  “Fingerprints are so great,” I said with admiration. “They don’t take hours like DNA, just a matter of minutes.”

  “It’s him.” Lin Tao’s confidence lit up the room.

  “Fucker,” the lead detective said. “I could tell that guy was bad news. Tried to fool us. He swore he didn’t touch the bathroom door. How’d he leave a fingerprint, then?”

  “Irrefutable evidence,” I agreed. “Go interrogate him. Figure out why he killed the girls and why he moved the bodies this morning.”

  The lead detective nodded and set out.

  “Well done, Lin Tao. Breaking a murder case with a simple fingerprint. Now that we’re done, maybe we should go to Big Bao’s grandma’s funeral with him?”

  “That’s okay,” Big Bao said. “Even if the case is solved, we still have to do autopsies.”

  “Thanks for the lesson,” I said with a laugh. “But the bodies are going to the morgue to dry off. We can’t start the autopsies while they’re wet.”

  “Yup, yup,” Lin Tao said. “We’d better wait. We need more evidence.”

  “No worries, your work is done. The rest is on us,” I said, patting Lin Tao’s shoulder.

  “Hey, hey!” Lin Tao said, pulling away. “This is an expensive shirt.”

  Big Bao and I carefully packed the wet bodies into bags to be transported to the morgue. Then the three of us rushed to the funeral home for Big Bao’s grandmother’s funeral.

  Northerners really do have a lot of different customs. Big Bao was berated by his parents for arriving late. With an indignant look, he wrapped a white linen cloth around his waist.

  The ceremony included firecrackers, wailing, worship, and offerings, which took more than an hour. Then the host threw the fruit offering into the crowd, and everyone swarmed to eat it.

  “Legend has it that eating the fruit offering to an old person can give longevity,” Big Bao whispered to me.

  I shook my head. “That’s not right. How can you take the fruit given to the deceased’s spirit and eat it yourself?”

  “That’s just the custom here,” Big Bao said. “In a minute, they’ll brush the urn with a willow branch; then it’ll be ready for burial.”

  Another hour or more passed.

  After the funeral, we drove back to the task force to await the results of the interrogation.

  “You guys look tired,” Big Bao said apologetically. “Qingxiang borders four provinces, so it’s influenced by a lot of different cultures. Every village used to have its own customs, but over time, in order not to piss off the gods, we combined them.”

  “Be careful how you talk about the gods,” Lin Tao warned. “You really don’t want to make them mad.”

  “Actually, I’m really interested in hearing more about local customs, Bao,” I said.

  “Oh, there’s all kinds of amazing stuff. For example, in the county north of here, if a child dies, they put the body at a fork in the road for three days. In the county south of here, they don’t let the dead see the sun, so they wrap white cloth around the corpse’s head. Other places put a coin in the deceased’s mouth. Oh, and another smears mud on the body’s face. Around here, the dead are wrapped in several layers of shrouds, and the types of cloth used are very important.”

  “Those aren’t customs. They’re superstitions, dances to the gods,” I said.

  “Careful, careful,” Lin Tao fretted.

  As we spoke, the car pulled up to Qingxiang’s municipal public security bureau.

  As soon as we entered the meeting room, we could sense the solemnity. All the officers were frowning, smoking, drinking tea, and staring at documents in a daze. But Captain Nie broke the silence, saying, “Liu Jie confessed.”

  “Yeah!” Big Bao said, and high-fived me.

  “Don’t celebrate just yet,” Captain Nie said. “He confessed to molesting the corpses, but not to killing anyone.”

  “And the polygraph results backed him up,” Director Zhang said.

  “But he can’t explain entering the scene and flipping the bodies, can he?” My head was spinning.

  “He did explain that,” Captain Nie said. “This morning, he heard the sound of the showers running, so he went to the bathroom to steal a look, but he noticed the door was unlatched. He went inside and his shock was soon replaced by lust. He molested the corpses, and then turned their front sides into the water to hide his prints.”

  “He molested some kids’ rotting bodies? Smelling like that?” Big Bao said with disgust.

  “Well, he was a bachelor,” a detective joked. Captain Nie glared at him, and he swallowed hard.

  “But was Liu Jie telling the truth?” Lin Tao said. “A polygraph can only be used as a reference, not to confirm or deny anything.”

  “You all determined the murders took place the night of June twenty-seventh,” Captain Nie said. “After arresting Liu Jie, we tracked down surveillance video corroborating Liu Jie’s story that he spent that whole night at an Internet café called Sky. Then, starting at noon on the twenty-eighth, Liu Jie was home sleeping. His neighbors and family are willing to testify. He didn’t have time to commit the crime.”

  “I’m just saying, there’s something off here,” Lin Tao said calmly.

  “He did more than defile the corpses! He undermined the crime scene! Obstruction of justice!” I sputtered, my face flushed with anger.

  “Okay, okay,” Lin Tao said. “It won’t be nighttime for a few hours. Why don’t we go to the morgue? You guys wait a minute while I get some work clothes. Gotta change this shirt.”

  18

  “Careless.” In the car headed to the morgue, I scolded myself for thinking the evidence against Liu Jie was conclusive. But evidence isn’t just a fingerprint or a DNA profile; it’s the thought and interpretation we apply. The victims’ wounds would reveal more.

  In the autopsy room, the two corpses lay peacefully on gurneys, the blood on them dry. We began with the black-haired girl who had been lying in the corner. Investigators said her name was Huang Rong.

  “Guo Jing would be very sad,” Lin Tao quipped, referring to the famous book character whose wife was also named Huang Rong. He solemnly took the camera and started snapping photos.

  Shaving razor in hand, Big Bao squatted at the end of the table, singing “The Lion Gets a Haircut.”

  “Can you two please be serious?” I started examining the body’s head, neck, chest, abdomen, and limbs according to standard procedure. It’s especially important to look closely at the head and face: eyelids, lips, mucus membranes.

  “There are a lot of wounds on the head,” Big Bao said. “Hard to shave.”

  Forensic scientists have to be good barbers too, but we only know one style. Some do it with a straight razor; others buy professional trimmers. People think it’s disrespectful to the dead, but in order to keep the hair from covering up injuries, we have no choice but to shave it all off.

  If there are multiple wounds on the scalp, extra care has to be taken. It requires real skill to shave the skin around the wound.

  “Conjuctivas are pale, mouth and nose uninjured.” I continued my routine check.

  Lin Tao stood to the side, flipping through the photos he’d just taken. “Why does this girl’s nose look so black?”

  I grabbed the hemostat and used it to stretch open the deceased’s nostrils. “Whoa, way darker than usual.” A white swab went in and came out black.

  A test on the other victim, Xie Linmiao, had the same result.

  “What’s the deal?” Lin Tao asked. Big Bao leaned over.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “The bathroom was reasonably clean, so how did the nasal cavities get so stained?”

  “Maybe they got dirty in the mine?” Big Bao said. “Water washed away the stains on their faces, but not in the noses?”

  “A sixteen-year-old PR girl,” I said, “going into the mines over vacation? Seriously?”

  “Maybe if they were bored,” Big Bao said, lost in thought.

  “I really doubt it, especially for girls who were hired for their looks,” Lin Tao said.

  I lifted the victim’s hands. “There aren’t black stains anywhere else on the body. Even the fingernails are clean.”

  “But what caused the stains?” Lin Tao said.

  I nodded. “We’ll send a sample over to the city bureau right now. It’s getting late; we’d better keep going.”

  I cut off two fingernails for analysis and prepared a cotton swab for the mouth, genitals, and anus. Extracting those samples from a female victim was routine, especially for suspected rape cases.

  “Even if they were soaking in water for a long time, we still have to try to get biological samples—”

  “What’s up?” Big Bao asked. He stood to stretch his legs.

  “What’s this?” I held a magnifying glass in one hand and squeezed Huang Rong’s cheek with the other.

  Huang Rong’s rigor mortis had eased. The temporomandibular joint was loose, so when I squeezed her cheek, the inside of her mouth came into view.

  I looked through the magnifying glass at her lower dental arch. There was a hair there.

  “Why’s that so strange?” Big Bao said. “She had a lot of blunt head trauma, remember? So some hair broke off, fell over her face, and when the body got moved, a few strands came off in her mouth. It’s totally normal.”

  I touched the victim’s mouth. “But this is pubic hair.”

  Hair from various parts of the body has clear morphological differences. Pubic hair is dark, curly, and appears flat in cross section; head hair is soft in texture, less curly, and cylindrical; armpit hair is lighter, soft, crimped, and semicylindrical. Quickly identifying the different types is an important part of forensic anthropology and critical to efficient on-site evidence extraction.

  “Pubic hair’s normal too,” Big Bao said with a grin. “There’s plenty on the floor in my bathroom at home. So when the water level rose, it got in her mouth. No big deal!”

  I used a hemostat to grab the hair and tugged a bit. “No way. It’s caught in her teeth!”

  The room fell silent as everyone imagined the evil that must have taken place.

  “Good thing there aren’t many female forensic scientists. Otherwise this would be really awkward,” Lin Tao said.

  “Oh! That’d be so weird!” Big Bao exclaimed.

  I ignored them, just clamped the hair and observed it carefully in the blinding autopsy room light. “Looks like there’s a follicle. Yes. An intact follicle!”

  This was crucial: a follicle meant we could get the owner’s DNA.

  The officer who’d just run the nasal swab over to the trace evidence lab came back panting. Seeing us all gathered around the hair, he shook his head and said, “Looks like I have to go right back, huh?”

  “If we solve the case, your hard work won’t have been for nothing,” I said with a smile.

  The two victims had strikingly similar wounds caused by dozens of blunt blows to the back of the head. Huang Rong’s knees showed some subcutaneous bleeding, but other than that, there were no signs of damage. Not from constraints, not from resistance.

  “Judging from the way the hymen and perineum are intact,” I said, “the victim probably had not engaged in sexual activity while alive.”

  “That hair shows sexual activity too,” Big Bao said.

  “Do you think maybe they had a homosexual relationship,” Lin Tao asked, “and then got into a fight and killed each other?”

  I shook my head and said, “Impossible. The damage to the back of their heads is severe—they couldn’t have done it themselves. Anyway, DNA analysis will tell us if that pubic hair belonged to someone with male or female chromosomes.”

  Opening Huang Rong’s scalp revealed the dense white skull. One could make out two areas with major bleeding. The first was under the scalp around the dozens of occipital lacerations. The other was marked by blood adhesion to the top of the head, caused by a subgaleal hemorrhage.

  “How can there be subgaleal bleeding?” I said to Big Bao, who was examining Xie Linmiao’s body.

  Big Bao nodded. “This one too.”

  Under the human scalp, there is a space between the skull periosteum and the scalp galea aponeurosis. This area ensures mobility between the scalp and skull. Sugaleal bleeding is generally caused by tearing of the hair. Hard to cause with an external blow.

  “Wow, maybe Lin Tao was right,” Big Bao said. “Women usually pull one another’s hair when they fight!”

  I didn’t reply. After taking a good photo of Huang Rong’s scalp wound and fracture morphology, I started sawing open the crown.

  The electric saw ran fast and at a high temperature. The bone chips gave off a horrific cooked smell as they flew in all directions. I paused to rub my nose on my sleeve.

  By the time I had Huang Rong’s head open, Big Bao had done the same with Xie Linmiao’s even though he started after me. He was dense sometimes, but the guy really knew his anatomy.

  Next, we each put our hands near the incisions and observed for a moment. Then we lifted up the scalp on the front of the head to have a look, set it down, and paused to think over what we’d seen.

  Both victims had contusions on the back of their heads along with massive bleeding. But they also had cerebral hemorrhages in the frontal lobe.

  Brain trauma like that should have corresponding damage on the scalp, but these didn’t. And there was only one explanation for that.

  Big Bao and I said it at the same time: “Contrecoup injury!”

  Lin Tao froze. “What’s gotten into you two? Possessed? You gonna keep it up?”

  Contrecoup injuries are a special kind of brain injury. One part of the scalp is damaged along with the brain tissue underneath. The force causes damage to the opposite side of the brain too, but from the inside, so there are no marks on the scalp. Contrecoup injuries usually happen during a fall or collision.

  “How could there be a contrecoup injury?” My mind was racing.

  “I got it!” Big Bao said. “The shower floor was so slippery that they both slipped and hit their heads!”

  “What are you talking about?” Lin Tao scoffed. “I’m not a forensic scientist, and even I know the scalp wounds were formed by repeated external force. They wrestled with someone for a long time before they fell and died.”

  “Oh right,” Big Bao said, scratching his head.

  “They did fall,” I said, “but they didn’t slip. Someone knocked them over.”