As dawn broke on the morning of August 11, Mama Zhao was going about her usual business, strolling through the little streets by her home. She passed by the “junk rooms”—empty lots surrounded with bricks that had once been used for depositing trash. Because cleaning out the junk rooms took so much effort, under the new system for garbage disposal, people now just put trash cans outside their homes for the garbage truck to pick up; the old junk rooms were no longer used.

  It wasn’t that Mama Zhao needed the scavenging money so badly, but she liked the thrill of finding treasures in the trash cans.

  The weather that morning was dreary and damp, but there was no sign of rain. Mama Zhao was enjoying the solitude of the dawn hour when she suddenly glimpsed a bulging bag in one of the junk rooms, its top tied with a white scarf.

  Ooh, such a big bag. What could it be? she wondered.

  As Mama Zhao got closer, a heavy stench made her stagger.

  Crayfish shells, she thought.

  Crayfish was a local favorite in Yanggong. By the time night rolled around, the streets were lined with vendors and people drinking alcohol and singing. Several tons of crayfish were reportedly eaten in the city each day, which meant a lot of shells. Sometimes unscrupulous businesses tried to save money on garbage pickup by discarding bags of shells in residential areas.

  Buoyed by her strong sense of social responsibility, Mama Zhao held a cloth over her face and dragged the bag a few dozen yards to an abandoned pig farm.

  Won’t bother anyone here, Mama Zhao said to herself, clapping her hands in satisfaction. She watched as the scarf came loose and blew away.

  Two emaciated dogs ran up and dug into the bag.

  Eat up, Mama Zhao thought. Less stink that way.

  Just as she was about to turn to leave, the dogs pulled out one of those pink, flower-printed sheets everyone seemed to own in the seventies.

  Who would use a sheet to wrap crayfish shells? Mama Zhao wondered, suddenly suspicious.

  As the sheet fell open, Mama Zhao didn’t see the pile of crayfish shells she expected, but a human foot. The sight scared her so much, she had to sit down. After recovering from the shock, she felt her sense of social responsibility rise up again. She kicked the stones by her feet and managed to scare off the dogs. Then she pressed one hand to her rapidly rising and falling chest while unsteadily dialing 110 with the other.

  “Those clouds don’t look so good,” I said, leaning out the window. “I sure hope they’ve already done all the preliminary survey work, because it’s about to rain.”

  “I think you’re right,” Lin Tao fretted. “The evidence has already been damaged by time. If the rain god gets involved, it could be really hard to find good traces.”

  Soon the sky above the desolate highway began to darken, and beads of rain began beating on the windshield. Han Liang had to turn on his headlights and slow way down.

  “Shit,” I said, cringing as we passed the waterlogged remains of what must have been a dead dog on the side of the road. “I hope it’s not raining like this at our crime scene. Water changes the rate of decay.”

  “How’d the sky get so dark this fast?” Big Bao said, pushing up his glasses. “It’s not a solar eclipse, right?”

  “No, just heavy cloud cover,” Han Liang said. “We won’t be able to see a partial solar eclipse till 2020. And not a total solar eclipse till 2034.”

  Han Liang had grown up in a rich family. After retiring from the regular police force, he gave up the chance to manage tens of millions in assets to become a full-time police driver. Even though he wasn’t highly educated, he had a lot of experience and often surprised us with his wide-ranging knowledge.

  Big Bao started counting on his fingers, probably figuring out how old he’d be then.

  I reluctantly shook my head at the science student who was outrageously bad at math, then turned to look out the window. “Please don’t send us rain. I know you’re upset. That’s why I came, isn’t it?”

  Lin Tao grabbed the back of my seat and asked nervously, “Qin, who are you talking to? Did you see something? A ghost?”

  But we were lucky that day. When we got off the highway, the sky was completely clear. Yanggong hadn’t gotten any rain at all.

  The classic novel The Dream of the Red Chamber has a character named Wang Xifeng who can hear others before she sees them. A forensic scientist with a good nose can smell a corpse before he sees it. Long before we saw the crowd of onlookers, Big Bao said, “Yup, almost there.”

  The scene was at the end of a long, winding alley. A bag sat on the edge of an abandoned pig farm surrounded by countless flies.

  The distance between the junk room where Mama Zhao found the bag and the abandoned pig farm was about sixty-five yards. The police had already set up caution tape, but since it was a dense residential area, officers were also standing guard to keep the locals from trying to get a closer look.

  “Examiner Qin,” Yanggong’s Forensic Scientist Jiang said, walking over to me as he took his gloves off and shook my hand. “So good of you to come.”

  Jiang was one of the few county-level forensic scientists in the province to obtain the title of Deputy Senior Chairman of Forensic Science. He was around forty years old, capable-looking, and humble.

  “Still haven’t looked at the body,” he told me. “We just finished combing the area around the junk room, but too many residents had already passed through, so there aren’t any worthwhile traces left. The only thing we found was this, in a crevice between stones.”

  Jiang held up an evidence bag containing a cheap smartphone with a cracked screen.

  “The phone still works,” Jiang said. “We got in touch with some of the contacts and learned that it belongs to an eleven-year-old boy, Bao Guangmin. The boy went missing five days ago, on August ninth. So our first thought was that he might be the victim.”

  Lin Tao put gloves on and took hold of the evidence bag. He took a multiband flashlight from his survey kit and shone it on the phone.

  “No traces,” Jiang said. “When we found the phone, it was soaking wet and turned off. The local trace evidence team checked for fingerprints.”

  “Soaking wet? And it still turned on?” I said. “What brand is that?”

  “Knockoff phones are the bomb,” said Big Bao.

  “So, did someone find the white scarf the person who called the police mentioned?”

  Objects used in the disposal of a body are incredibly important. Sometimes it’s the key that allows us to break a case.

  Jiang regretfully shook his head. “The Yang River flows past the pig farm. Once the scarf flew off, there was no getting it back.”

  “There really aren’t any traces here,” Lin Tao said, looking up. “What about call records?”

  “We looked, nothing unusual.”

  “No scene, no predeath movements . . . Looks like we’ll have to let the body do the talking.” I rubbed my nose, put on gloves, and headed toward it.

  A couple yards away, the stench hit my olfactory nerves and made my eyes water.

  Before me was a very common, beat-up, patterned plastic bag. It was so worn down, the words and logo were all but invisible. The bag was soaking wet, which I knew was the result of the body’s decomposition. The corner of a sheet stuck out of it. Once pink, the sheet was now turning green from body fluids.

  Judging by the size and shape of the bag, it contained the entire corpse of a child. The opening was already covered with flies. I picked up an unworn jumpsuit to use as a fan and shooed them away, exposing a snow-white human foot.

  Big Bao was scratching his head as he said, “How odd. The kid’s been missing so many days, and with the state of the bag, it should be either all bones or badly bloated. How can that foot be so clean?”

  36

  Slowly, we opened the sopping wet bag. It felt slippery, almost soapy to the touch. The stench surging from inside made me dizzy. I unconsciously raised an arm and covered my nose.

  “Why don’t we go look at the body at the morgue?” I quickly closed the bag tight.

  “Why?” Big Bao said. “Is there gold in there or something?”

  I looked at the crowd and said, “The victim’s family is probably here already, and they don’t need an audience for this. The body’s in bad shape; it’d be too awful.”

  Big Bao gave a nod. “Okay. Just looking at the foot, I didn’t think it had decayed at all.”

  “If it hasn’t decayed, why’s it smell so bad?” Lin Tao complained.

  I waved over the morgue staff waiting outside the caution tape. “Put the whole thing right in the body bag if you can. It’s a child’s body—we want to be sensitive.”

  When we took off our gloves and got ready to go, a husband and wife pushed their way through the crowd. The woman cried, “Is that my son? Is it? Please tell me.”

  The death of a child can destroy a person.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. We still need to do DNA testing to identify the victim.”

  “I don’t need testing. I can tell just by looking. I can recognize him.” Her gaze fixed on the morgue staff.

  “Ma’am, don’t panic,” offered Big Bao. “Even if you go look, you won’t be able to be sure. It’s better to let us do our work.”

  “How could I not recognize my own son?” the woman shrieked, her face covered in tears. “He’s my own flesh and blood. He’s only eleven years old. Eleven. We never let him do what he wanted. Just pushed him to study. I regret it. I’ll regret it till the day I die.”

  The words made the man next to her howl.

  “I’ll look,” he sobbed. “He’s only got one descended testicle; it’ll be easy to tell.”

  “I can’t let you do that, sir.” I waved frantically to the morgue staff, signaling to hurry and take the body away.

  “Lord! What horrible son of a bitch could hate me enough to hurt my child?” the man roared at the sky, and the workers carried away the body.

  “Whoa,” Lin Tao said, frightened by the body as we pulled it out of the bag.

  “How can it already be so far gone?” Forensic Scientist Jiang asked, wrinkling his brows.

  The level of decay for just five days surpassed everyone’s expectations. Because Bao Guangmin had a frail body, the rotting subcutaneous tissue was already partially gone, revealing the bones beneath. Half of the face bones were visible, and the right ribs were also exposed. Internal organs were visible through the gaps. The arms and legs were beginning to turn dark green, and the skin on the hands and the right foot was almost all gone.

  But the writhing maggots were the worst part. From far away, the body seemed to be moving, or made up of stampeding horses viewed from the air.

  “That’s so strange,” Big Bao said. “Why is only the left foot not decayed?”

  Starting from about two inches above the left foot, there was a marked difference in the level of decay. Above that two-inch band, the decay was advanced, similar to the level of the rest of the body; below that two-inch band, the foot was fresh. The difference was separated by a clear boundary as if marked by an ankle sock.

  “Could it be because there just isn’t much tissue under the foot skin?” Jiang said, then changed his mind. “No, his right foot is really bad, so that can’t be it.”

  “Maybe he was wearing a sock?” Big Bao said.

  I shook my head. “Even if he was, it wouldn’t make a big difference.”

  “Right,” Lin Tao chimed in. “When different parts of the body decay at different rates, there is usually a gradual change, but this body is unusual because there’s a clear dividing line. Why?”

  I thought a moment, then said, “I think it has something to do with why there are so many maggots.”

  “Ugh,” Big Bao said, “I’ve never seen a body left outside have so many maggots.”

  “It’s not just a matter of inside or outside,” I said. “The body was wrapped in a sheet, then in a plastic bag, which was tied with a scarf. With so much wrapping, how did the flies get in? If the flies couldn’t easily get in, they couldn’t lay a lot of eggs, so there shouldn’t be so many maggots.”

  “Yeah,” Big Bao said. “It’s got to be a group hallucination.”

  I elbowed him. “Be serious, okay? This is a dead kid. Didn’t you see how the parents were crying? We have to catch the killer.”

  “So what’s the relationship between the different decay levels and the maggots?” Lin Tao asked.

  “I haven’t quite figured that out yet. I’ll let you know when I do.”

  “Gentlemen,” Jiang said with an awkward swallow, “could we maybe do this autopsy outside? My bosses don’t hire people to clean the autopsy room, so when we’re done, we have to clean it ourselves. And if we get maggots all over the table . . .”

  “How would that work?” Big Bao said. “There’s no water outside.”

  “Let’s step out and talk about it,” I said. “The ventilation in here is no good. We’re all dizzy.”

  The four of us stood around outside for five mindless minutes without coming up with a way to get the maggots off the body so we could do a proper autopsy. In the end, Han Liang solved the problem by offering us a simple spoon and bowl.

  “Where’d you get this?” I said. “Sometimes it seems you can find things anywhere, even in a morgue.”

  Han Liang smiled. “Bowls are used to pay tribute to family members who have recently died. How could a morgue not sell them?”

  Not seeing a way around it, I started spooning maggots into the bowl. Every time the bowl was full, I emptied it into an incinerator.

  I tried to project calm, but it took tremendous effort to keep from vomiting. I forced a smile. “I’ve never done so much killing before.”

  Big Bao, who watched me go back and forth from the incinerator, said faintly, “I swear, I’m never eating rice again.”

  Looking at the bowl of maggots in my hand was really sickening. “Me neither.”

  The maggots finally vanquished, we took a closer look at the body. The outer layer of skin was gone, and the tissue underneath was very slippery. Wearing rubber gloves made it nearly impossible to get a firm grasp of the corpse’s limbs, which made our work a lot harder.

  First we checked his genitals.

  “Only had one ball drop,” Big Bao said. “Guess it must be Bao Guangmin.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “His phone was at the site, the body’s the same age, and with that abnormality, we can be pretty sure of the ID. Lin Tao, call over to local headquarters and let them know, please.”

  “Seeing a naked kid’s body makes it impossible not to worry about sexual abuse,” Big Bao said, gagging.

  “I agree, but there’s no damage to the genitals.”

  “He’s a boy!” Lin Tao objected.

  I ignored Lin Tao and turned the skinny body over.

  Big Bao and I took out hemostats and lifted the skin around the anus. This was the flies’ favorite area, so there wasn’t much tissue left. There was only a thin layer of skin forming the baggy shape of an anus.

  I used the hemostat to open the fold around the anus. “Sodomy usually creates a funnel shape caused by relaxation of the anal sphincter, but that’s already decayed on this body.”

  “Oh,” Lin Tao said. “That’s what you’re talking about.”

  “Look!” Big Bao pointed his hemostat at two spots around the anus that seemed to show some signs of damage, and the color was somewhat deeper.

  I asked Lin Tao to take a flashlight and shine it near that part of the skin. It was indeed a hemorrhage.

  When soft tissue ruptures, blood enters. Even though the body was decayed and turning dark green, we could still use different angles of light to identify darker parts where external force was used.

  This bleeding tissue told us the body had been violated, and violated while the child was alive.

  “This is a molestation and murder case,” I said.

  The Chinese penal code still reserves the term “rape” for women, so we couldn’t say he was raped, only molested.

  “That’s a really important discovery,” Lin Tao said. “They’re still looking into anyone the parents had problems with. Since it was molestation, it wasn’t revenge. Should I call again and let them know?”

  I shook my head. “No rush. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  Examining the body did not go smoothly. We kept finding unexpected wounds.

  “The victim’s calves have lots of slashes, and they don’t show a vital reaction. Someone cut him after he was dead,” Big Bao said. “The cuts go all the way through to the tibia, the strongest bone in the lower leg. Was the killer just letting out anger?”

  It made me think of the three outstanding murders in the Eleventh Finger case. Those victims also had slash marks on their tibias. It wouldn’t be about venting anger. You could slash the face to do that.

  “I think it’s probably about wanting to dismember the body, but not knowing how,” I said. “Like Eleventh Finger.”

  “Yup,” Forensic Scientist Jiang said. “Look at this.”

  A few of the ribs on the right side were exposed. We’d thought it was the result of decay, but Jiang pointed out that the skin around the exposed ribs showed noticeable signs of charring and crimping.

  “Since we know that the killer tried to burn the body,” Jiang said, “those slash marks must be the result of attempted dismemberment.”

  “But the killer’s skills aren’t up to snuff. Neither attempt worked,” I added.

  Now that we knew what to look for, we found additional traces of burning on the inner thighs.

  “I’ve seen a lot of burned bodies, but usually they’re doused with gasoline or some other combustible. In this case, it looks like the killer held a lighter or a candle directly against the victim’s body. How could that work? Stupid.”

  “Stupid,” Lin Tao said with a sly smile. “You’ve got the suspect profile nailed.”