The page filled up with nasty comments about police officers.

  My explanation was no use. As so often seemed to happen, traveling to another city to review a petition gave me no sense of accomplishment. Why was I even in Yuntai?

  “Man, your groveling like that after he said he’d go to Beijing was really annoying,” I told Huang.

  “We should grovel for the people. We’re servants, the people’s servants,” Huang said with a laugh. “I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. These neighbor fights where one then dies from disease have been happening a lot, and all of them are petitioning. Families compete over who gets the most money.”

  “This isn’t good. Society’s not in harmony. There’s going to be another murder case soon,” I said, smiling.

  Huang was the one who’d originally nicknamed me “Jinx,” so I liked to use “jinxes” like that to mess with him.

  “Hey, hey!” Huang shouted. “I’ve got more petitions than I can handle right now. If there’s a murder case too, I’m gonna lose it. I’m seriously afraid of you, Jinx. Yuntai never has murder cases, and then you arrive here and start making prophecies.”

  As we walked into the Yuntai police station, everyone was bustling about.

  “What’s going on?” Huang asked Forensic Scientist Gao.

  “Captain, you guys were busy in the meeting, but command says they found a body—could be a murder,” Gao said. “We’re getting ready to go to the scene now, sir. Forensic Scientist Chen will call you with a report.”

  “I really got myself a jinx,” Huang said, his face full of frustration.

  I felt a strange excitement. “I’ll go to the scene too.”

  I found myself uncomfortably close to the same part of Yuntai where I’d broken the case with the serial rapist and killer. Being back made me shiver. Somehow, it felt like that case would always follow me.

  As soon as we arrived, the villagers started talking hurriedly to one another. Some said the village was cursed and the girl’s ghost was making trouble; others said the village’s feng shui was off and would consume someone every year; others said they were going to move away.

  The crime scene was a well in a field outside the village. A group of detectives surrounded the person who’d called in the case. His name was Jie Liwen, a skinny sixty-year-old man with strikingly black hair. He was squatting outside the police tape, silently smoking.

  “Talk to us,” a detective said. “This is a human life here. If you don’t help us out, how are we going to catch the guy?”

  Jie Liwen glared at the officer and said, “Really fucking unlucky lately, finding this thing. Who the fuck would kill someone and throw the body in my family’s well? I hope they die with no children!”

  As dawn was breaking, Jie Liwen had been getting ready to work in the fields as usual. He put a bucket into the well to get water, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t get the bucket to fill up with water. That had never happened before, so in the faint light, he tried to see inside and made out an indistinct mass.

  What the heck did some dumb kid throw in my well? he wondered.

  There was nothing he could do, so he gave up fetching water and went to work. When the sun rose higher, he thought of the well problem again.

  Squinting down again, he saw the well was full of straw.

  “Fuck their ancestors,” Jie Liwen cursed. He tried to puzzle out which mischievous village child would have put straw in the well.

  It wasn’t a very deep well, just five feet down to the water line. And it was narrow too—just barely the width of a man’s shoulders. Scooping the junk out wouldn’t be easy. He labored for hours with a shovel and bucket until the straw was just about all cleaned out.

  Jie Liwen sat down heavily next to the well, panting and sucking on a cigarette, silently cursing the culprit’s family for eighteen generations back. Then he wondered if he had offended anyone recently.

  He stood up and grabbed the bucket, ready to finally get water, but when he looked down, he was shocked.

  What the hell else is in there? he wondered. That doesn’t look like straw.

  He picked up a long branch and, hands trembling, lowered it into the well. There was something dark bobbing beneath the water’s surface, and an oily substance bubbled up.

  A dead dog? Jie Liwen thought to comfort himself. Deep down, he knew a dog wouldn’t be that big.

  He pushed down harder with the branch, and the thing sank and then floated back up and peeked out above the water.

  It was the soles of two human feet.

  “When was the last time you used the well?” a detective asked.

  “I don’t remember,” Jie Liwen said. “Maybe two or three days ago.”

  “So you didn’t use it yesterday or see anything abnormal then?”

  “No, nothing.”

  The detective thought for a moment but couldn’t come up with a follow-up question, so he turned and asked me, “Examiner Qin, should we secure the surrounding area?”

  “Of course,” I said, nodding.

  “We looked all around,” a technician said. “The footprints all appear to belong to Mr. Jie and the police. It doesn’t seem like we’ll be able to find any trace evidence.”

  I shook my head. “We still have to secure the area. There’s still that area over there, especially that straw heap. Lin Tao will help you in a minute.”

  After getting my shoe covers on, I lay down by the well and looked inside. The corpse must have sunk to the bottom again, because there was no sign of it. Under the bright sun, I couldn’t see anything down there.

  “How’d Jie Liwen see anything in there?” I said. “I can’t.”

  “Um . . . the body hasn’t been pulled out yet?” Big Bao asked. “If we don’t have the body, how do we know it’s a murder case? Couldn’t someone have jumped in there to kill themselves? Or gotten drunk and fallen in?”

  “Come on,” I said. “Would a suicide or an accident get covered in straw?”

  “Oh.” Big Bao hugged himself. “Um . . . maybe the victim fell, and then a kid just happened to put straw in?”

  “Not impossible, but definitely not likely.” I was still trying to see down into the well but couldn’t make out anything.

  “I’m trying to look on the bright side too, Big Bao,” Captain Huang said, “but with Jinx here, it’s gotta be murder.”

  I glared at Huang for a second, then picked up Jie Liwen’s stick and stuck it in the well. I felt an object but still couldn’t see anything.

  “Fishing time.” I threw down the branch and clapped my hands.

  Huang had his men get to work.

  “Wait, are they using an old-fashioned bamboo crane?”

  “No matter what, we have to make sure not to damage this well,” Huang said. All the petition cases really had gotten to him.

  The officers started shouting, “Hey, hey, hey, left, left, left, careful, careful, okay, okay, okay, get it on, fasten it, fasten it.”

  After a frustrating half hour, they finally started to pull the rope up.

  I got up from my spot on the grass to watch.

  As the police officers called to one another, the rope came up little by little until a body emerged from the well. They laid it on a plastic sheet.

  “It’s not bloated or waxy, yay!” Big Bao said.

  26

  It was a man’s body, tall and chubby. He wore pajama bottoms, and a long-sleeved shirt was tied around his neck with a rope. The abdomen had not yet turned green.

  Because the groundwater here was cold, I couldn’t use body temperature to determine time of death.

  “Rigor mortis has eased, and livor mortis isn’t fading when pressed. Today’s the eighteenth, right? He probably died between twenty-four and forty-eight hours ago.” I looked around and said, “Open ground. Transporting a body would be risky, so it probably happened at night. The victim was probably killed during the night of the sixteenth or early on the seventeenth and discarded in the well before sunup.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Big Bao said, pushing up his glasses and carefully pulling back the shirt covering the body’s chest. “How do you know for certain someone killed him? This shirt is suspicious, but it could be that he was insane and was just wearing it that way.”

  I shook my head. “Come on, Bao. You gotta pay closer attention. Look at his shoulders.”

  There were large, pale yellow wounds on the victim’s shoulders and upper arms, exposing large areas of adipose tissue—likely the source of the oil on the water. With a little experience, it’s not tough to discern whether a wound was inflicted before or after death. Injuries to a living body turn red from blood. Injuries that occur after the heart has stopped pumping appear yellow.

  “They were probably inflicted when the killer dumped the body,” I said.

  Big Bao opened his mouth to speak, but he didn’t.

  I knew he was thinking the wounds could have been caused by us pulling the corpse out. But the abrasions had loose flaps of skin attached that indicated a direction of the force from shoulder to hand, which corresponded to the body’s arms scraping the walls of the well as it went in headfirst. If they’d been caused by our pulling the body out, which was done feet first, then the force would have been in the direction of hand to shoulder, and the flaps would open in the opposite direction.

  “When we get to the autopsy room, I’ll teach you about the differences between actually drowning and being thrown in water after you’re dead,” I added.

  The detective brought Jie Liwen to the body, pointed, and said, “Do you recognize him?”

  Jie Liwen looked at the body, turned away to gag, then said, “I do. That’s Old Jun.”

  The two of them were from the same village, same generation. But figuring out how they were related would require a degree in genealogy.

  “Where did Old Jun live?” I asked, excited to have the corpse ID’d already.

  “I can take you there.”

  The body was bagged and carted off to the autopsy room. I asked the officers to secure the scene and wait for the site survey staff to arrive before continuing their work.

  We followed Jie Liwen along a path for ten or fifteen minutes before arriving at a dilapidated brick house.

  “Well, here it is,” Jie Liwen said.

  Officers immediately spread out caution tape in front. We put on shoe covers, hoods, masks, and gloves before opening the unlatched door.

  The inside was destitute, filthy. There wasn’t one item of value. A wooden bed sat in the corner with some bedding and clothes piled on top.

  The blanket was pulled back, and there was a pair of slippers at the foot of the bed. Cigarette butts lay strewn across the dirt floor. Opposite the bed was a square table with a chair on either side and a Chinese chessboard on top.

  “Based on the positioning of the slippers and blanket, the victim was likely killed in his sleep,” I said. “We’d better collect the cigarette butts for DNA testing.”

  Big Bao always knew a little bit about everything, especially anything having to do with leisure. “The people playing chess weren’t any good. Red could easily finish black.”

  Given the dirt floor, there wasn’t much chance of a good shoe trace, but I spotted broad streaks leading from the bed to the doorway.

  “Someone dragged the corpse.” I took out a tape measure and then pointed at the faint traces out farther on either side. “And those are from the victim’s hands.”

  “Yes, I see,” a detective said, taking pictures.

  “Means one killer. Two could have lifted it.”

  Captain Huang grinned at me. “Already figured out how many suspects, great!”

  The traces disappeared at the threshold.

  I looked around a bit more, but nothing caught my eye, so I told the lead detective, “I’m going to go examine the body. Keep working and meet me at the task force in three hours.”

  The body weighed two hundred pounds. Big Bao, Forensic Scientist Gao, and I nearly broke our backs getting it onto the autopsy table.

  “Whoa, he died from mechanical asphyxia,” Big Bao said.

  The victim’s eyelids showed dense clusters of broken blood vessels; his fingernails and toenails were a dark gray-blue; the mucous membranes on the inside of the lips showed signs of damage. Big Bao was right—the victim was likely killed by suffocation resulting from pressure on the mouth and nose.

  Even though we had a preliminary judgment, we had to continue with the rest of the autopsy. First, we had to look for further evidence of mechanical asphyxia; second, we had to rule out all the other possible causes of death. If we failed to rule out other possibilities, we would have to conclude there was a joint cause. For example, someone being hit on the head could die from a brain injury and simultaneously from massive blood loss. If two injuries were caused by two different people, both would bear responsibility for the crime.

  In this particular case, we had to determine whether the victim had drowned, because drowning and suffocation present similar signs.

  As Big Bao continued the exam, I focused my attention on the rope wrapped twice around the victim’s neck. There was a knot on the front.

  “Big Bao, what do you think the point of this rope is?” I asked.

  “Rope? The rope was definitely tied to something,” Big Bao said.

  “Yes, ropes do tie things,” I said. “I’m saying, what is this rope doing on this body?”

  Big Bao thought it over. “Could it be an attempt at strangulation?”

  I cut the rope away from the knot and removed it along with the shirt. “Look, the skin underneath the rope has a clear indentation, but the indentation doesn’t show a vital reaction.”

  Big Bao nodded. “It was tied after death. So maybe the killer was trying to dress the body?”

  “No. Dressing the victim at that time would be very easy. When old people die, their families hurry to change their clothes before rigor mortis sets in. So why in the world would the killer haphazardly cover the victim’s chest like that—and tie it with a rope? What kind of outfit is that? Could it be a regional custom?” I asked, still obsessed with such customs after our recent experiences.

  “Never heard of that one,” Big Bao replied.

  I put the rope and the shirt back the way they were. “The front of the shirt is hanging loose from the rope, but the back is tied up tight. That isn’t normal. It’s not a simple matter of tying the shirt around the victim’s neck.”

  Big Bao looked them over for a second and said, “I’ve got it! The killer used the shirt as a blindfold. When Jie Liwen poked around in the water or maybe when we were hauling it up, one side of the shirt got loose.”

  “Very good, Bao, I think you might be right for once! But this rope wasn’t only used to make the shirt into a blindfold.”

  I got a blank stare in response.

  I used my steel tape measure to determine the length of the rope. “The circumference of the loop is about an inch longer than the neck circumference. If it were just for tying the shirt, it’d be a little long.”

  “That’s normal,” Big Bao insisted. “The victim’s already dead, so the killer doesn’t have to be so exact. And, since one side of the shirt fell out, it means it wasn’t that tight.”

  “If it wasn’t tight, why is there such a deep indentation on his neck?”

  “Right. Um . . . ,” Big Bao said, rolling up his eyes in thought.

  “My analysis is that there were two reasons for the killer to tie a rope around the victim’s neck. One, like you said, to blindfold the victim with his own shirt. And two, to tie a heavy object to one end to hold the body underwater. But the rope the killer used wasn’t strong enough, so it broke.”

  I pointed to the broken end of the rope. “The break marks are rough, which means it was pulled instead of cut.”

  “Which means there’s still something in the well,” Big Bao said.

  I nodded.

  Big Bao laughed. “Okay, Jinx, can’t wait to see Huang’s face when he hears you want to dig up the poor guy’s well after all.”

  The autopsy found internal bleeding, apical bleeding, and bleeding around the petrous portion of the temporal bone. But there was no liquid in the stomach as there would be with drowning, and the lungs didn’t show changes from aqueous emphysema. This, along with the damage on his lips, allowed us to conclude that the victim did indeed die of mechanical asphyxia.

  The victim’s stomach was nearly empty. Along with the status of the rigor and livor mortis, we determined the victim died about six hours after dinner on July 16. The victim’s back and shoulders had many crisscrossing scratches from being dragged after death. Some went from waist to neck, likely from when the murderer pulled him by his feet. Others went from neck to waist, likely from going into the well headfirst.

  “Usually, when someone is smothered to death, there are more obvious constraint and resistance injuries,” I said as I cut open the joints of the victim’s limbs. “But this victim has neither.”

  Big Bao shook his head. “No, he does.”

  He cut the skin at the anterior superior iliac spine, revealing subcutaneous hemorrhages on either side of the pelvic bone.

  “The killer probably straddled the victim while he pressed on his face. The victim was unable to move his limbs, which suggests the killer was stronger than the victim.”

  I looked at the tall, burly body and shook my head.

  After finishing, we hurried over to the task force.

  When we got there, the initial briefing was just starting. Captain Huang asked the forensic team to speak first.

  I said, “The victim was likely sleeping when the killer straddled him and covered his nose and mouth, causing death by mechanical asphyxia. Time of death was likely six hours after dinner on July sixteenth. The killer then wrapped the victim’s shirt around the victim’s head and tied it there with a rope. This could be an indication of acquaintance crime. Sometimes people cover a victim’s face after killing him—out of fear.”