“One, two, three, four, five needle marks here. Any way you look at it, it doesn’t seem like a murder case,” Big Bao said. He lifted the skin around the forehead wound with a hemostat.

  “The wound could have been caused by a blunt or star-shaped object.”

  Saying this, I shone my flashlight on the inside of the wound and saw the tissue bridging from one side to the other. Because forehead skin is very thin, I caught a glimpse of the skull. It appeared intact with no protrusions that could have caused a rupture.

  “This was probably caused by a blunt object,” I said. “A stone would work.”

  Tao nodded. “I agree with that assessment, but don’t you think an officer kicking the stone into the water is too big a coincidence?”

  I didn’t say anything, took off a layer of gloves, and picked up the victim’s CT scan from the counter. Ever since handling the melted body that made my hands stink for days, I wore two pairs of gloves during autopsies. They kept the stink out, and once I got used to them, I found the extra layer didn’t interfere with my work.

  On all the bone-layer pictures on the CT scan, not one was normal. Looking through them, I determined that the victim’s forehead had suffered a comminuted fracture. Since the periosteum hadn’t broken, and it was just a common fracture, the likelihood that it was caused by a blunt object increased.

  Meanwhile, the CT scan also showed me that the victim’s head injuries were formed by deceleration. That means his head was moving quickly before coming into contact with a blunt object and stopping, resulting in the skull fracture and contrecoup brain injury. With that degree of brain injury, immediate treatment can usually prevent loss of life, but because the victim was out in the pond alone, the brain continued to hemorrhage. By the time he reached the hospital, there was no saving him.

  “So he really did die from a fall,” Big Bao said, looking at the scans in the light coming through the window.

  I put my gloves back on and examined the victim’s arm. “There are fingernail marks on both of the victim’s arms. This wouldn’t be easy for him to do himself, would it?”

  I touched my own arms to experiment.

  “It would be awkward,” Tao said, “but it’s hard to connect the marks to his death. Maybe he had a fight with someone, walked to the marsh, and fell down.”

  “Possible,” I said. “An ID would sure help.”

  “I think we’ll get it,” Tao said. “Come on, gimme a hand.”

  Though a tough job, turning a body over without knocking off blood or dirt is elementary forensics. Tao and I carefully moved the body to one side of the autopsy table, then shifted it into a prone position. The body was stiff from rigor mortis, which made the process much easier.

  “This looks symbolic,” Tao said, pointing at a tattoo on the lower back. It was a crab with a centipede in its claws.

  “I’ve seen centipede tattoos, but not crabs,” Big Bao said, confused.

  “His surname is probably Xia.” Tao chuckled, playing on xie, the word for crab.

  “Excellent! A tattoo like this definitely gets people’s attention, so it should be easy to ID the body,” I said confidently.

  I picked up a surgical knife handle and got a blade from the disposable-supplies tray.

  “Qin, what are you doing?” Tao asked.

  “Doing? An autopsy.” I couldn’t make sense of his question.

  “We can’t do an autopsy,” he said.

  “What? Why not?”

  “We don’t have the ID yet. The bosses want us to get that first, then let the family decide whether we should do an autopsy.”

  “Huh? The Code of Criminal Procedure is clear, right? If cause of death is unknown, law enforcement has the right to perform an autopsy. What if a victim’s family doesn’t consent, so we don’t do it, but the killer is a family member?”

  “But the Code of Criminal Procedure also says we have to notify the victim’s family so they have the option to be present,” Tao argued.

  “If we aren’t able to notify the family or they refuse to come, we can just say so in the transcript!”

  Tao thought this over a second. “That only applies to criminal cases, but we haven’t found evidence of a crime here.”

  “But, Tao, we need to know the cause of death to determine whether it’s a criminal case,” I said, exasperated.

  “Neither the preliminary examination nor the scene survey turned up anything suspicious,” Tao said. “So, in order to protect themselves, the bosses want us to wait, or at least not rush. We don’t know what might come up at the task force meeting tonight. Once we get a better grasp of the situation, we can make a final decision, what do you say?”

  It was true that there were sometimes complaints about autopsies. Families accused police of stealing their loved one’s body, damaging it, not respecting human rights. That the local authorities wanted to delay the autopsy to avoid trouble was understandable. Also, after some time in the morgue freezers, hard-to-detect damage on the skin would be more visible, so delaying the autopsy now wasn’t the worst decision anyway.

  At seven o’clock that evening, my team arrived at the Binyuan task force meeting room. The investigative and trace team, led by Lin Tao, was there as well.

  Everyone seemed relaxed. Their work must have gone smoothly.

  The lead detective was eager to start. Speaking in the local dialect, he said, “Secretary Zhao, fellow colleagues, let me begin.”

  The man in charge, Zhao Guanqiang, nodded.

  The detective said, “At one o’clock in the afternoon, we determined the victim’s identity and went to his home to take DNA samples. The DNA department just got the results back, confirming that the victim is indeed local resident Xie Qingong.”

  “Xie Qingong,” Tao said with a laugh. “The crab that captured a centipede—fits with his tattoo.”

  The detective nodded and went on. “The victim, Xie Qingong, fifty-three years old, ran a small brick kiln and made decent profits—one hundred thousand a year, no problem. But he never married and had no kids. The locals think no one wanted to marry him because of his intermittent psychosis or mania.”

  “He was mentally ill?” I said. “Is that confirmed?”

  “Yes. Although he didn’t show up on any mental hospital records, we did find his medication records for mania treatment.

  “According to surveillance video, the victim went downtown yesterday afternoon to a pharmacy before going to his son’s home to eat.”

  “Son?” I broke in. “Didn’t you say he was single, no children?”

  “Oh, I forgot to say he adopted a boy named Xie Hao whom he called his godson. Everyone says he raised him all by himself like a real son. He manages the brick kilns now.”

  “What was the godson’s reaction to the news?” I asked.

  “Devastated,” the detective said. “Xie Hao said that, last night after dinner, Xie Qingong seemed a little confused. But since he said he was going back to his own house, Xie Hao didn’t worry much about it. Xie Qingong sometimes stayed over at his godson’s house and sometimes went home.”

  “He usually went home,” another detective corrected him, opening a map. “Xie Hao’s home is in an isolated spot not far from where the incident took place. Xie Qingong’s home is about a mile and a quarter north of Xie Hao’s, also isolated. There’s no surveillance in between them, so we have no way of knowing why Xie Qingong walked to the reed marsh west of his home.”

  “If he was manic, he certainly could have lost his sense of direction,” Lin Tao said. “Our findings support the theory that the victim was lost when he entered the reed marsh and, once inside, could not find his way out. Then, because of his mania, he hit himself with a stone or else just slipped and fell in the rain.”

  “If I’m hearing you right, whether it was an accident or suicide, we have sufficient evidence to be sure the victim was responsible for the injury that led to his death?” I asked.

  Lin Tao nodded. “Pretty sure. The victim didn’t die at the scene, which doesn’t fit the criteria of a murder, and based on our trace analysis, we were able to determine the victim’s prior movements. Right now, we have sufficient evidence to prove the victim caused his own head injury.”

  “We do?” I gasped.

  Lin Tao chuckled at my surprise. Then he cleared his throat and began to explain.

  42

  At first, the trace evidence team had taken a whole afternoon to sweep the reed marsh again. Since the reed marsh was very much untraveled, little could be extracted, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because it meant each finding was important.

  Excluding the area around where the victim was found, where traces had been destroyed by the rescue team, there were many fresh shoe prints elsewhere in the marsh. Since it had just rained at the time of the incident, the ground was very soft and the footprints had strong ID value.

  After doing an on-site comparison, Lin Tao came to the firm conclusion that all the footprints came from the same pair of shoes. That is to say, only one person had walked around the reed marsh. And they didn’t make one or two circles, but many. The prints went around the outer and inner rings of the marsh at least four times before disappearing where the victim died.

  At that spot by the edge of the pond, the prints were mixed up with many others. Still, after eliminating the prints of rescue workers and police, we determined that the remaining prints belonged to that same person who’d walked in circles. There was no evidence of a second set of shoe prints.

  I thought a moment. “But when we examined the body, it wasn’t wearing shoes.”

  “The problem is this,” Lin Tao said. “The victim was barefoot when the rescue team found him, but there were no barefoot prints at the scene, so we searched the mud near the pond. Sure enough, we found shoes with the same sole pattern and degree of wear as the ones that made the footprints nearby.”

  “I get it,” Big Bao said. “You’re saying when the victim fell, his shoes came off in the mud. And no one found them at first.”

  Lin Tao said, “So we can be sure only one pair of shoes walked through the reeds, and we have no evidence of another individual walking there. The victim went into the marsh alone. There’s nothing that indicates this isn’t a case of self-inflicted injury and death.”

  “Makes sense,” Secretary Zhao said, “and the investigative team hasn’t found any conflicting information.”

  “What’s his godson say?” I asked.

  The detective said, “Xie Hao is very sad and keeps asking when we can cremate the body.”

  Even though the trace evidence team had such clear findings, I still felt something wasn’t quite right. I took the detective’s laptop and opened the folder of photos and videos related to the case.

  As I looked through them, I said, “Everyone’s been overlooking something. The last surveillance video we have of Xie Qingong shows him buying medication from a pharmacy. That means he definitely took his meds that night. So why would he still have a psychotic episode? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Buying meds doesn’t mean he took them,” the detective said. “We asked Xie Hao, and he said he didn’t see his godfather take anything. He may have forgotten or waited to take the medication before bedtime as directed.”

  The explanation made sense. I paused, and my gaze fell on a record of inquiry.

  “According to this, the victim didn’t usually have psychotic episodes, because his medication prevented them, but when he did, they lasted less than thirty minutes. We could say the victim entered the reed marsh in that amount of time, but walking around in so many circles would have taken at least an hour or more, no? If he’d already regained his senses, he wouldn’t have gotten lost in the reeds. The reed marsh isn’t that big; getting out wouldn’t have been hard.”

  The conference room fell silent.

  Big Bao said, “We can’t rule out phantom disorientation.”

  Everyone started laughing.

  “Phantom disorientation?” The detective said, “What, like someone being out in the middle of nowhere and getting possessed by a ghost? Who ever heard of a superstitious forensic scientist?”

  The laughter annoyed Han Liang, who’d been quietly sitting off to the side. The elderly driver wasn’t supposed to participate in case discussions, but he couldn’t keep quiet. “Hey! You guys don’t get it. Let me explain for Big Bao.”

  Phantom disorientation, Han Liang patiently told the room while I continued to look through the files, is a state of confusion. It happens when someone is out alone at night or in the wilderness and suddenly loses all sense of direction. They don’t know where to go, so they keep walking in circles.

  Phantom disorientation can happen to anyone. An organism’s limbs have subtle differences—for example, each of a bird’s wings has a slightly different span and level of strength. Likewise, a person’s legs can vary in length and strength. If the stride length of a person’s left leg is shorter than the right and he gets confused, he’ll eventually walk in a big circle.

  When people are alert, they use visual cues to adjust for physical differences. Those cues are lost when someone is confused, especially in a place with many similar markers like the woods or a cemetery, which exacerbates the confused mental state and results in phantom disorientation.

  “Is this stuff reliable?” the detective said, no longer laughing.

  “Of course,” Han Liang said confidently. “I did an experiment once where I blindfolded my dog. She definitely ran in a big circle.”

  Everyone fell silent again.

  “If you don’t believe me, you can do an experiment yourself. Of course, phantom disorientation doesn’t occur very often and it hasn’t been proven yet, but that’s just because scientists don’t always study these things.”

  A detective was looking it up on his phone. “Whoa. It actually says the same thing online.”

  “Thanks, Han Liang,” I said, acknowledging his lengthy but helpful explanation. “This is very interesting. Sounds like that could be what happened, but it’s still a bit of a stretch, right? Tomorrow I’m going ahead with the autopsy.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t,” Secretary Zhao said. “The son wants cremation right away.”

  “What if I had solid evidence this might be a murder case? Then we could insist.”

  Secretary Zhao’s gaze was firm. “Only if you can convince me.”

  “I think I can. First, the victim had fingernail marks on his forearms. They were fresh and occurred while he was alive. I tried different ways and found they’re hard to make on yourself.”

  Secretary Zhao took notes rapidly.

  “Second, if the victim hit his head and wounded himself at the scene, then there should be blood traces. The probability that the bloody object fell into the pond is very small.”

  Everyone looked at one another.

  A detective said, “But what about the contrecoup injury? Qin, don’t forget—the victim wasn’t even dead when we found him!”

  “I hear you. And without an autopsy, I don’t have a good explanation,” I said. “So I’ll get to my third point. Looking at the original pictures of the scene, when the officers found the victim, the front of his shirt didn’t have mud on it. If the victim fell forward into the mud and hit his forehead, that doesn’t make any sense. Since the upper half of the body wasn’t in the pond, there’s no way the water would have washed it off. So where’s the mud?”

  The officers all looked at one another meaningfully. Now I had ’em.

  But that wasn’t all I’d deduced. “Fourth, I just watched the video from the officers’ body cameras.”

  I hit “Play” on the computer, projecting the video onto the big screen. The scene discovery was pure chaos. Officers rushed to drag the victim out of the water. One pressed the carotid artery. He looked up and shouted, “Call one-two-oh—he still has a pulse!”

  Chaos again, everyone rushing around. Some officers put the victim on a stretcher. As the officer with the body camera approached, there was a close-up of the victim.

  I clicked “Pause.”

  “This image—what do you see?”

  Everyone stared at the screen in silence.

  “Please note the blood around the forehead wound.”

  “There’s lots of blood on the face and the forehead too,” Big Bao said. “Oh, I see now!”

  I gestured for him to go on.

  “The blood on the forehead definitely flowed from the wound to the hairline. Looks like it’s already dry.”

  “Exactly! Gentlemen, notice the direction of the blood flow. If the victim fell forward, the blood should have flowed toward the ground. If he fell and then stood or sat up, it would flow toward the nose. If he fell and stood up and then lay down on his back, blood would flow to either side.”

  “Yes, but the blood flowed to the hairline. So after he fell, he must have stayed inverted for some time,” Big Bao said.

  Everyone gaped at us.

  “Put us out of our misery, Examiner Qin,” Secretary Zhao said. “Why did the bloodstain form like that?”

  I shook my head. “I just saw the video a couple minutes ago, so I haven’t had enough time to think it through.”

  “But,” Lin Tao said, “why was there only one set of footprints at the scene?”

  “True,” I said. “Why was there only one set of footprints? Why is there a contrecoup injury? Why did someone dispose of a body before it was dead? I can’t explain any of it. But it’s suspicious as hell. And if there’s reasonable suspicion, law enforcement has the right to decide to do an autopsy on the body.”

  “But his godson is really stubborn and totally against an autopsy,” a detective said, looking daunted.

  “Enough,” Secretary Zhao said firmly. “I’ve decided. Tomorrow morning, we will autopsy Xie Qingong. Tell Xie Hao to attend. If he doesn’t, make a note of it.”

  43

  As I put on gloves and replaced the scalpel blade, I felt both calm and under pressure. Secretary Zhao’s giving me the green light was an important show of confidence in my abilities and my intuition. Even though I had evidence this was a murder case, Lin Tao had evidence it wasn’t. If we did the autopsy and didn’t find rock-solid evidence of murder, the angry godson would make trouble for the local police, and it would be my fault.