The chow chow suddenly stood up, shook his fluffy hair, stuck out his dripping purple tongue, and barked, scaring Lin Tao half to death.

  “You’re afraid of dogs?” I asked Lin Tao, who was hiding behind me.

  “No! I’m afraid of that slobber getting on my shoes. I just bought them and they’re—”

  “Expensive,” I said. I knew him too well.

  “That dog’s not so little. Chubbier than normal for a chow,” the detective said.

  “Is not,” the woman retorted with a huff, bending down to smooth the dog’s fur. “He’s just a little fluffy.”

  It was July 4, and the Eleventh Finger case was still on the minds of all the cops in Dragon City. The search for the body belonging to the eleventh finger was ongoing, so as soon as anyone spotted bones at a crime scene, forensic scientists were called in. When Chief Hu got the 110 call, he took Forensic Scientist Han to a northwest suburb. A man had called the police, saying his neighbor’s dog had found a bone. The man used to be a butcher and didn’t think the big bone belonged to a pig, so he called the city police, who’d called us.

  The chow chow was highly displeased to have his treat taken away.

  “The shape of this bone clearly tells me it’s a human leg bone,” Hu said. “Humeral head, nodule, trochlea, coronoid fossa, deltoid tuberosity.”

  “It could be from the Eleventh Finger body,” Big Bao gushed. “Where was the bone found?”

  Everyone was quiet.

  “Bao, who are you talking to?” I said.

  “Oh right,” Big Bao said, blinking. “A dog found it.”

  “Uh, ma’am? Any idea where your dog might have wandered off to?” a detective asked, suppressing a giggle.

  “Never goes far.”

  “The killer wanted us to find Zuo Fangjiang’s body,” I said. “So if this case is related, the body parts must be right around here.”

  “I doubt that,” Hu said. “The eleventh finger’s owner was killed before Zuo Fangjiang, remember? So it’s been two weeks at least. In this hot weather, the smell would definitely be noticeable. Someone would have found it.”

  “Then they’re not related.” I pouted.

  “Don’t give up. Let’s focus on this body, then go from there. There could still be a connection.” Hu had been my teacher. He patted me on the shoulder and said encouragingly, “We’ve got thirty-some officers searching, mostly in the farmland and abandoned factories nearby. Why don’t we go help them?”

  Under the scorching sun, the search teams dripped with sweat. Even the police dogs seemed off their game—maybe the heat was wearing them out too. It wasn’t until evening that an excited voice came over our walkie-talkies.

  “We’ve got a body. A mile and a quarter northwest of the neighborhood, right by the side of the road.” The walkie-talkie crackled. “Squads three and five are at the scene, setting up a protected area right now. Send forensic support.”

  The gravel road was barely wide enough for our van. I sat inside, thinking that if the body was missing a finger, we’d have a lot more clues and a better chance of solving the case. At the very least, it’d ease a month’s worth of anxiety.

  The crime scene was in the tall grass by the side of the gravel road. Investigators were already marking it with tape. A dozen or so local villagers came out to watch.

  “This road leads to a cemetery,” the station director told us. “It’s pretty small. Some years ago, the city wanted to relocate it, but a villager nearly lit himself on fire in protest, so they abandoned the idea. Other than Tomb-Sweeping Day and people paying their respects during Dongzhi Festival, no one comes out here.”

  An officer pointed to the grass and said, “The body’s almost completely rotted away. Digu found it.”

  Digu, a police dog, sat next to his officer, tongue waggling triumphantly.

  The weeds on the side of the road were waist high. If not for the dog, no one would have found the rotting flesh. It had almost all worn away. Around the pile of bones were maggot shells and dead flies.

  “Seems that the flies and their offspring tried to have a picnic, but their feast was toxic.” I looked at Lin Tao.

  “It’s probably been here over a month, almost a skeleton,” he said.

  “Dismembered!” I poked with a branch and found several of the long bones had been cut in half. There were many complex, overlapping hack marks, just like in the Eleventh Finger case.

  There was still some soft tissue on the bones. I asked Han Liang to turn on the searchlight on top of the van to transform the place into a temporary autopsy room. With four or five forensic scientists working together, the examination progressed quickly.

  “The victim’s pelvis and femur are connected, but the femur is split. The lumbar region was also hacked apart,” Big Bao said. “It’s totally like the Eleventh Finger dismemberment!”

  “Whoa, you guys,” Han called. “This body has exactly the same grooves cut into the pelvis and thigh as the Eleventh Finger body.”

  “The victim’s torso and head haven’t been separated. They’re in the prone position, so the soft tissue on the neck against the ground didn’t get eaten,” Hu said. “I’m looking for blood vessels in the neck.”

  “There aren’t any clothes around here,” Lin Tao observed.

  “About five feet from the body, the weeds are pressed down,” said Forensic Scientist Wang, who had just arrived to provide support. “There’s some matter there that’s decayed as much as the body. It appears to be organs, and there are a lot of dead flies around.”

  I quickly put on rubber gloves and helped Wang pull out pieces of the muddy pile of maggot-ridden, rotten meat to have a look. Each time we touched it, more stench was released.

  “The liver, spleen, lungs, kidneys, and intestines are all here,” Wang said. “The trachea and tongue should be on top.”

  “No marks where the organs were cut apart,” I said. “Again, just like the Eleventh Finger case. All the victim’s organs were removed using forensic methods!”

  “I think it’s more than reasonable to connect these crimes,” Hu said, raising his eyebrows. “They were almost certainly committed by the same person. This case is starting to make me nervous.”

  “The long bones of the limbs and the main torso bones all seem to be here,” Big Bao said, gathering them up. “Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four! Oh my God! The left hand is short three phalanges!”

  The human hand has twenty-seven bones. Eight of them are carpal bones, fourteen are phalanges, and five are metacarpal. If Big Bao found three missing phalanges, the person’s left hand was missing a finger.

  “Ha-ha, even before DNA testing, we can be sure this is the owner of the eleventh finger!” Han crowed.

  My skin began to crawl, and I suddenly had the sense that the perverted killer, disembowler, and dismemberer was nearby, watching us. What could he want? Why pick a fight with the police? And why the forensic methods? I squinted at the crowd of rubberneckers, wondering if the killer really could be there and wondering if I could somehow recognize him.

  “Slow down,” Big Bao said. “Why was Zuo Fangjiang’s body left in a trash can on a busy street while this body is out in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Well,” I said, grinding my teeth, “it may not be a busy area, but the body is right by the side of the road. Maybe the killer didn’t know people don’t usually walk here. It could just mean he wasn’t familiar with the area.”

  Then I noticed Chief Hu was squatting down, silently looking at the skull.

  “Find something?”

  “Before, there were slight vital reactions around the wounds, so you all suspected the killer might’ve disemboweled the victim alive,” Chief Hu said.

  “No, I said a postmortem cell reaction probably caused that vital reaction,” I said. “Big Bao’s theory that Zuo Fangjiang was disemboweled alive is unfounded.”

  “Unfounded? Pale livor mortis, visceral shrinkage, bleeding to death—what are you talking about, unfounded?” Big Bao took off his gloves, fished out his cell phone, and showed me a photo.

  “You put autopsy photos on your phone? What the hell?”

  Big Bao blushed. “It’s such a hard case, I thought looking at the pictures might help me notice something.”

  It seemed Eleventh Finger had gotten under Big Bao’s skin too.

  “Here’s the thing,” Hu said. “Zuo Fangjiang’s body was decapitated, but this one has its head. So I looked closely at the neck. There’s a large wound, the carotid artery is completely severed, and there’s an obvious vital reaction. He bled to death.”

  “Drug, cut the throat, disembowel, dismember,” Han said. “Probably in that order. The guy’s throat was cut while the victim was alive. Maybe just as the dose of tetramine poisoning became lethal. I think Zuo Fangjiang may have died this way too, but with the head off, we can’t tell if his throat has a similar wound.”

  I stood up, stretched, and found the crowd of onlookers had increased rather than decreased.

  “What are they even looking at?” I said.

  “Can’t see anything with all this grass,” Lin Tao agreed.

  “Now we have to ID the corpse,” Hu said, opening the corpse’s pubic symphysis. “No need for the pressure cooker this time.”

  “Looks like another thirtysomething male,” I said. “We’ll get the height after we get back to the lab.”

  “Shouldn’t be tough to ID the corpse with these remains,” Han said.

  Suddenly, the crowd began to stir. Some hightailed it back toward town while others just clamored noisily.

  “What’s going on over there?” I asked.

  “It’s haunted! There’s a ghost!” someone shouted. More of the crowd started running off.

  Our driver, Han Liang, had been a beat cop and knew a thing or two about riot control. He immediately shone the van’s searchlight on the road back to the village to keep the people from stampeding.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “Th-they said there was a . . . ghost.” Lin Tao stepped closer to me. Without the searchlight, the grass around us was suddenly dark in the dim moonlight.

  “A ghost?” I said with a laugh. “Can it fly? Come on, let’s go look.”

  We couldn’t work without the light, so we climbed under the tape to see what was going on. The villagers were basically all gone. There was only one left, an old man who needed help walking.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “A lady ghost came out of the cemetery!”

  22

  With more than ten policemen around him, the villager mustered his courage. “I just came here to watch you work, that’s all. I was gonna have a piss in the graveyard, but then I saw a ghost.”

  “What did the ghost look like? Where was she?” I asked, trying not to laugh.

  “By the fork. Walk in a few steps and you can see her. Leaning against a tombstone, legs crossed, long hair blowing in the wind. Scared me to death.”

  Looking at the villager’s expression, I could tell this was no joke.

  “Let’s go have a look,” I said.

  The man trembled as he slowly led us to the fork in the road. He pointed and said, “If you go in a little from here, you’ll see her. Also, can you have someone escort me?”

  Several officers shone their flashlights on the cemetery grass, illuminating the haphazard graves. And there she was.

  In the distance was a rich family’s tomb. A figure leaned against it, motionless, skin extremely pale. It seemed to be sitting with its upper body against the stone, head hanging, with its legs high in the air like someone doing exercises.

  A normal person would have trouble holding that position, but the figure didn’t move.

  “Hey there, what are you doing?” the officer called.

  Still the figure didn’t move, but a sinister wind blew through its hair.

  “Dear God!” Lin Tao said, trembling.

  It reminded me of a story I’d heard when I was little. A man was walking through a field in the middle of the night when he saw an elegant woman in white with beautiful black hair blowing in the breeze. He whistled, and the woman turned around, but she had no face or head, just hair.

  That story had stayed with me, and I’d always been a little skittish around long-haired women. The thought made me shiver.

  The lady ghost kept her feet above the tombstone, still as could be. Her long hair swung in the wind, but no matter how it moved, we couldn’t get a look at her face, even though we were only ten yards away.

  “Who’ll go with me to have a look?” I had to live up to my reputation for bravery.

  A few of the officers and I put on shoe covers and started walking toward her.

  It was a naked female body.

  Leaning against the tombstone, its head bowed, long hair covering its face.

  I’d been startled by people playing dead before, so I prodded it gently with a stick. Nothing. Gathering my courage, I used the stick to part the corpse’s hair and uncover its face.

  “Nope, no ghost here,” I said. “Dead girl.”

  And unlike a ghost, a dead body is nothing to be afraid of.

  One of the officers shifted his feet, and something whooshed down from a small tree nearby and fell on him. He jumped a foot, batting at his shoulders.

  “It’s okay; it’s okay,” I yelled. “It’s just a rope.”

  The rope wrapped around the upper body and fastened it to the tombstone, deforming the breasts. Another rope kept the girl’s hands behind her back. Two more tied each ankle to a nearby tree—or had, until the officer bumped into the little tree and knocked them down.

  Though nothing was holding the corpse’s feet anymore, they stayed where they were, high in the air and spread apart.

  “Wh-what?” the officer said. “How did she do that?”

  “Ever heard of a thing called rigor mortis?” I pushed on the knees, but they didn’t move. The muscles were hypertonic, the joints stiff, which can be caused by rigor mortis or poisoning.

  Seeing we weren’t being attacked by a ghost, the other officers came closer, and the crowd of onlookers began to trickle back.

  Lin Tao came over and saw it was just a corpse. No longer afraid, he raised his hand and said, “Stay back! I need to look for footprints! Out of the way!”

  We undertook emergency site protection measures, cut the ropes, and put them in a body bag with the corpse. (Knots can sometimes reveal someone’s skills or style, which could be an important clue.) The body went into the bag with its legs still stuck the way they’d been tied, which made for a strange sight from the outside.

  There were several messy footprints that Lin Tao photographed one by one. “Some of these are fresh. Not a lot of people come here, so they’re valuable. When we get back to the station, send me your footprints so I can eliminate them.”

  “This site has to be isolated,” I said. “Cut off all the entrances. Once it gets light out tomorrow, we’ll search the surroundings. I’d like to find the woman’s clothing, but I doubt the van’s searchlight will hold out that long.”

  Some of the young officers started to play rock-paper-scissors to decide who was going to do what job. No one relished the thought of staying overnight in the cemetery.

  “No problem,” Chief Hu told me. “I’ll call for backup, and I’ll tell them to bring flashlights. I’m worried it might rain, which would ruin the scene. So we’ll search through the night.”

  “Looks like an interesting case,” I said, momentarily forgetting the eleventh finger that had confounded me for weeks.

  “You guys take care of this cemetery woman, okay?” Hu said. “The skeleton on the side of the road didn’t reveal any good clues, so we just have to ID the corpse.”

  “Okay,” I assured him. “Tying this poor girl to a tombstone took some imagination. I want to make sure we catch this one.”

  “With the rope tied like that in this kind of place and the victim in that posture, it looks like BDSM gone wrong,” Big Bao said.

  “Let’s go to the morgue,” I said. “Examine the body and then get some rest.”

  The body lay on the autopsy table in its awkward pose. Once Lin Tao finished taking photos, we began to break down the body’s rigor mortis.

  “Wow, the body’s really stiff,” I said. “And we know that rigor mortis is stiffest around fifteen to seventeen hours after death.”

  Having the legs spread like that did make it much easier for us to take the rectal temperature, though. “Wow, good call. According to the temperature, she died seventeen hours ago,” Big Bao said.

  It was 8:02 p.m. That meant the victim had died on that day, July 4, at three a.m.

  “What would a woman be doing in a cemetery at three a.m.?” I said.

  “I think it’s a robbery case, you guys,” Lin Tao said as he stamped the victim’s fingerprints. “Look.”

  Her hands were pale, but there was an even lighter band on one finger of the right hand, where she’d apparently worn a ring.

  “I agree,” Big Bao said. “It’s not a rape case. Hymen’s intact.”

  “No signs of sexual abuse?” I was a little surprised. “Why was she naked, then? And in that position?”

  Big Bao opened his hands and shrugged. “No idea. But there’s no damage to the vulva.”

  “The perp must have intended to rape her,” I said, “but couldn’t for some reason. Or maybe the killer’s a woman too?”

  The victim’s body didn’t have any signs of constraint or resistance injuries, but there was mild peeling and bleeding where the ropes had chafed.

  “Clearly tied up while alive,” I said, “but she didn’t resist, even afterward.”

  “Maybe she was drugged?” Lin Tao said. “We can get a blood sample and check.”

  “Or she was doing BDSM with a woman?” Big Bao said.

  “I’m thinking,” I said. “Tying a woman to a gravestone might be some kind of ritual. Making her into a sacrifice—or she wanted to be a sacrifice?”

  Qingxiang City’s six–twenty-nine case, the one with the ink on the girls’ faces, had inspired me to start studying local customs. “Some ancient people practiced human sacrifice, but not tied to a tomb in a posture that suggested imminent rape.”