On the way back, everyone in the van was silent, thinking. The range of suspects had been narrowed greatly. And Lin Tao’s tire marks were a big breakthrough.

  At the same time, though, how could we take the next step and identify a suspect from this dense residential area?

  Something in the backseat vibrated, breaking the silence.

  Big Bao pulled up an evidence bag with a cell phone inside. It was Bao Guangmin’s phone that had been found at the scene.

  “What’s this phone still doing here?” he asked.

  “Oh,” Jiang said, not bothering to look. “We didn’t find any traces on it, so it’s still in the van—didn’t get a chance to put it in storage.”

  “Um, that’s odd. The phone doesn’t have a network signal, but it just got a WeChat message.” Big Bao sounded excited as he warmed up to one of his favorite subjects. “You need a connection for WeChat.”

  None of us reacted. The kids all have smartphones these days, mess around with Weibo, WeChat, all those messaging apps.

  Big Bao suddenly shouted. “Make a U-turn! Quick! Go back! Go back!”

  Confused, but given Big Bao’s breathlessness, Han Liang turned around and headed back the way we’d come.

  Suddenly, Big Bao bounced up from his seat, banging his head against the roof.

  “Holy shit! It got on Wi-Fi right here!”

  Big Bao put on gloves, took the phone out, and started pressing keys. “Ha-ha! This is a private network that needs a password!”

  “So what’s that mean?” Forensic Scientist Jiang was getting dizzy from all of Big Bao’s tech talk.

  “It means the victim used his phone to get on a password-protected Wi-Fi network nearby, so when we go by, it automatically connects,” Big Bao said excitedly. “Simply put, the victim was inside someone’s house right near here, and they gave him a password to get online.”

  A stagnant pond. A Wi-Fi password. More and more, this was shaping up to be the bloodstained scene of the crime.

  Big Bao and I took the phone and walked along the side of the road until we got to the point where the signal was strongest. We were standing in front of a small two-story building. Downstairs was a Changhe-brand van.

  “All this searching—whoo—wasn’t a waste—whoo!” Lin Tao sang to himself as he matched the tire-mark images to the Changhe van.

  39

  And just like that, thanks to the Internet, the case was solved.

  The killer turned out to be a sixteen-year-old boy named Gu Feng.

  Gu Feng wasn’t gay, but he was extremely curious about sex. He was painfully shy, always blushing at school when a girl so much as passed by.

  His single mother ran a clothing shop, which left her with little time to take care of him. He got good grades, but home alone after school, he would obsessively watch his hidden stash of porn DVDs.

  Eventually, masturbation wasn’t enough. But picking up a woman was out of the question.

  It wouldn’t be so bad to practice on a boy if I could get one to come over, he thought.

  On the afternoon of August 9, Gu Feng was on his balcony, watching women on the street, when he saw Bao Guangmin.

  That skinny boy almost looks like a girl, Gu Feng thought, and he threw a clothes hanger off the balcony.

  “Hey, bro, can you help me get that?” Gu Feng shouted. “My ankle’s sprained, hard to get down.”

  Bao Guangmin’s parents and teachers had always taught him to help others, so he picked up the hanger without hesitation and walked up the stairs on the side of the small building.

  “Thanks, bro. Come inside and hang out a while. I’ll buy you a new mobile game.”

  Seeing Gu Feng’s kind face, Bao Guangmin cheerfully followed him to the living room, got on the Wi-Fi, and started downloading the game.

  Meanwhile, Gu Feng started playing porn on the TV screen. “Little bro, ever wondered about this stuff? You want to try it?”

  The eleven-year-old knew nothing about sex, but he was afraid to admit that to Gu Feng. When he felt the pain, he started to scream.

  Afraid the neighbors would hear and find out, Gu Feng covered Bao Guangmin’s mouth and pressed him hard into the couch until he stopped fighting.

  Realizing the boy was dead, Gu Feng panicked. He went online and searched for ways to dispose of a body, but nothing worked. So he waited till it got dark and threw the body into the digester on the old pig farm down the street.

  The next morning, Gu Feng’s mother saw police in the neighborhood looking for a missing boy nearby. When she saw her trembling son, she knew something was terribly wrong.

  After getting the story out of him, she decided that leaving the body uncovered so close to their home was just asking to be caught. Being a protective mother, she went out in the middle of the night to pull the stinking corpse out of the digester, wrapped it up, and used her van to transport it far away from home. She was about as good at cleanup as her son was at corpse disposal, though. Lin Tao found DNA matching Bao Guangmin’s in both the apartment and the van.

  Gu Feng was charged with molestation and homicide, but since he wasn’t eighteen, they wouldn’t seek the death penalty. His mother was charged as an accessory.

  “It’s amazing how sex can be such a positive and negative thing,” I said. “We all came from it. But it can also ruin your life.”

  “Yeah, just look at Lin Tao,” Big Bao teased.

  “Like you would know,” Lin Tao shot back.

  40

  It had really been a wild year. Tough cases kept popping up. The forensic team got called in to help other cities so much, our department always looked closed and our families were forgetting what we looked like. People even complained to the Discipline Commission that our injury assessment work, which was used in nonviolent crime trials, was taking too long.

  So it was no surprise when Binyuan City called. They’d found a body in the middle of nowhere, cause of death unknown, motive unknown, victim’s identity unknown, investigative angle unknown.

  Over the hot summer, we’d had a string of badly decayed bodies. Forensic scientists aren’t afraid of disgusting things, but they are afraid of losing valuable clues and evidence to rot. Luckily, it was September now. Temperatures usually dropped.

  Whenever a new case came in, adrenaline levels spiked. In ten minutes, we’d gotten leadership approval, called a car, readied our survey kits, packed our toiletries and clothes for several days of work, and were waiting by the front door for Han Liang to pick us up.

  “There’s an announcement,” Big Bao said, squinting.

  A poster on the bulletin board at the main entrance usually meant something important.

  “Yeah? What’s up?” I asked, setting up an out-of-office message on my email.

  “Some kind of raise,” he added calmly.

  “What? A raise?” I shouted, putting my phone away. During all my years on the force, I’d gotten used to the pathetically constant salary.

  The notice read:

  Renewed Enforcement of Official Dress Code. Without exception, all personnel are required to wear their role-specific uniforms whenever on official business. Furthermore, all uniforms must be in new or like-new condition. Each officer will receive a few hundred yuan for new clothing items as needed.

  “A raise? More like a straitjacket! They haven’t been strict about dress code in years!” During college, I’d dreamed of wearing the forensics uniform, but after a while, the novelty had worn off.

  “Clothes cost a lot. If you don’t have to pay your own money for work clothes, that’s basically a raise,” Big Bao said, pleased. Big Bao actually liked to wear the uniform, because he was terrified of malls and learning to dress himself.

  Hopes dashed after a moment of euphoria, I bitterly got into the car driven by Han Liang, who was already wearing his uniform.

  Binyuan City was located in the north of my province, an area with flat plains and abundant resources. Despite its large population, it was a safe, stable place—murders and difficult cases were few and far between. I think being a forensic scientist in a city like that has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is you don’t work yourself half to death like some of us. The disadvantage is, with less experience, your professional competence advances at a snail’s pace. That’s why, when they came upon a difficult case, they called us in to be safe.

  The crime scene was located in a small village near the western end of Binyuan, on a broad plain.

  When we were still a couple miles out, I saw a reed marsh in the distance swaying with the wind. Blue caution tape was wrapped around the reeds. Since it was an undeveloped area, there weren’t many onlookers.

  Getting out of the car on the side of the road, we were met by officers.

  “They put up caution tape this far from the scene?” Big Bao said, squinting at the police lights in the distance.

  “Don’t whine. If the tape’s this far out, there’s a reason,” I said, putting on my shoe covers and equipment. Our team hiked in the direction of the police cars. We pushed reeds aside with our hands as we walked through deep mud until we finally arrived at the small pond.

  The pond was in the center of a graveyard, though not so much an active one as an abandoned wasteland. An officer told us that rumor had it the pond water was running, fed by a brook that ran through the city. Reeds grew around the edges, as tall as a person. They went on in all directions over some miles of uninhabited land. Due to the graveyard’s location, few people ever came by. Some local residents buried their relatives there according to custom, but it wasn’t organized or crowded. On the long walk from the car, we’d see a burial mound every few hundred yards, some with stones, some without.

  The scene was on the edge of the pond.

  Binyuan City’s Forensic Scientist Tao shook my hand, then started to bring me up to speed.

  The case had been called in by a pair of high school kids. The night before, they’d gone to a karaoke bar in the city. When they were done at two in the morning, their school dorms were already locked, so they decided to spend the rest of the night walking around together.

  While they were doing karaoke, it rained in Binyuan City. Even though the weather cleared up after midnight, the marsh ground was muddy. The girl was afraid her new sneakers would get dirty, so she proposed sitting on high ground near the road.

  As they sat there talking and kissing, the couple heard a rustling sound in the reeds and saw the outline of a person in the moonlight. According to the kids, the silhouette was very, very tall and headless. It walked slowly toward them, but suddenly stopped, about a quarter mile away. Both parties froze and, before long, the figure, which they took for a ghost, retreated into the reeds. Frightened, they ran all the way to a small hotel where they talked for a while before calling 110 at five a.m.

  When they got the call, two dispatch officers hurried to the scene. Seeing the size of the marsh, they called in a backup squad and technical team for support. The technicians soon found footprints, which led to a man on his back in the pond.

  The man’s head was lying on the shore, face stained with blood, chest submerged in the cold water. The technicians were preparing to remove the body when one felt warmth through his gloves. When he pressed the man’s carotid artery, there was a weak heartbeat.

  “Did the guy die?” Big Bao asked. “If not, why are we here?”

  That made Forensic Scientist Tao laugh. “Lemme finish, will you? Our officers called for an ambulance and started driving in the direction of the hospital. The paramedics met them halfway, resuscitated him, and transferred him to the ambulance.

  “Once they got him to the hospital, they found a wound on his forehead and immediately did a CT scan. They determined that an injury had knocked him unconscious. His skull was crushed by a depressed fracture, which caused a corresponding brain contusion and intracranial hemorrhage.”

  “Did someone hit him?” I asked.

  Tao shook his head. “No. There was a frontal fracture and a contralateral-occipital-lobe brain contusion and bleeding.”

  “Ah,” Big Bao said. “No need to overthink here. Such a clear contrecoup injury must have been caused by a fall. Doesn’t that solve it? Someone went to the marsh to fool around, got startled by the two kids, ran, and fell into the water. Scene reconstruction finished! Why’d you even call us?”

  I stared at Big Bao a second, then said to Tao, “Is he dead now?”

  Tao nodded. “The hospital was preparing to perform a craniotomy, but before they could start, his breathing stopped.”

  “So what issues are you having now?” I asked.

  “First, we’re still not sure of the victim’s identity,” Forensic Scientist Tao said. “Second, we looked over the corpse in the hospital. There’s a star-shaped wound on his head we can’t figure out. The leadership currently believes the cause of death is accident or suicide, but from a forensic perspective, the wound on the forehead is hard to understand.”

  “Why?”

  “The skin underneath the wound has a cystoid,” Tao said. “Like you see when the forehead hits a hard surface that causes angular displacement, which is to say, there’s a certain amount of shift the instant the forehead hits the ground. The shift causes the skin and bones to become staggered, tears the skin from the subcutaneous bone tissue, and forms a cyst.”

  “Cysts are really common in falls,” I said.

  “But that kind of rubbing displacement would have left mud on the face or at least in the wound, right?” Tao said. “And I think the star-shaped wound would have been unlikely to form on the muddy ground.”

  “There might not be mud because the doctors washed his face,” Big Bao said. “And the shape could be explained by his hitting a hard object near the pond, like a rock.”

  “The doctors did wash the face, but they didn’t do debridement and suture, so there should still be mud in the wound,” Tao said. “And there are rocks near the pond, but we didn’t find any blood on them.”

  “Either there really wasn’t any or you just haven’t found it yet,” I said.

  “Right,” Tao said, “but we’re afraid there could be a lot of controversy once this case develops, so we decided to ask you to come right away. I’m eager to learn from you and to get new insights into the case.”

  I smiled, clapped Tao on the shoulder, and said, “Thanks for the vote of confidence, brother. We’ll do our best!”

  Big Bao, Lin Tao, and I followed Tao through the marsh. The ground was soft mud. There were evidence markers all along our path, little signs with numbers on them.

  “We found a few hundred footprints,” Tao explained. “They’ve all been recorded. Some of them were ruined by the first officers on the scene; others are pretty clear. Right now we’re expanding the scope of the search to find more intact prints.”

  “Have you done any comparisons?” Lin Tao said.

  Tao shook his head. “We only have a few people in trace detection, so we just find them, record them, and go back and study them together.”

  “The victim was lying here,” Tao said, pointing to a head-shaped depression in the mud by the pond. “According to the dispatch officers, there was quite a bit of blood on the victim’s face, but by the time we saw it, as I mentioned, the doctors had washed it off. Still, we did a preliminary test of the recess around the victim’s head and found no blood present.”

  I looked around. The marks in the mud were a mess, as if the police had been in a panic. On the other hand, the area around the pond had a lot of stones, a number of which could have made a star-shaped wound. And some were relatively clean and smooth, which might explain the lack of mud inside the wound. However, there were no blood marks on any of them.

  “Maybe, when the police came to the rescue, they kicked the stone into the pond?” I said on a whim.

  Tao frowned. “We really can’t rule out that possibility!”

  “Regardless, this doesn’t seem like a murder case,” Lin Tao said. “After all, he wasn’t even dead when he was found.”

  41

  The scene was simple, so Big Bao, Forensic Scientist Tao, and I decided to leave Lin Tao to finish up while we drove to the morgue.

  When we arrived, morgue workers were just bringing it in. Tao approached with an enthusiastic hello and offered them cigarettes.

  Given how much they see each other, forensic scientists and morgue workers are often friendly. The morgue workers envy the excitement of forensic work, while forensic scientists envy morgue workers’ high salaries.

  The body belonged to a small middle-aged man, who now lay peacefully on the autopsy table. Tao said the hospital doctors had washed his face, but there still was some dried blood there. The body’s chest had tape from ECG monitor electrodes, as well as damage caused after death by a pacemaker and several small needle holes on the wrist.

  “I’ve been wondering, since this body is neither tall nor headless, why did the students describe it that way?” Big Bao said.

  “Not surprising,” Tao said. “It’s normal to see things wrong in the dark like that.”

  “Did your guys interview the doctors about how many needle holes they made? And if they put in a pacemaker?” I said.

  Needle marks are critical for a forensic scientist. Injections are a very sneaky method of killing and favored by the smartest criminals. It’s really not difficult to find needle marks, especially those made ante mortem. But if a victim is treated at a hospital, it complicates things. We can’t differentiate between needle wounds made by criminals and ones made by medical staff unless we do complicated research like comparing the sizes of the needles.

  “Five needle holes. They did try to put in a pacemaker,” Tao said. “Our officers know how to preserve evidence; they’ve got that down.”