I looked at him doubtfully.

  “This victim has his ID right on him, like the killer is taunting us. Liang Fengzhi, male, thirty-seven. Our guys just checked and found out he’s a lawyer, worked for a lot of firms, some in Dragon City, some not. He was currently working at the Hengda law firm in Yuntai City. He’d been in Dragon City two weeks, gathering evidence for an economic dispute case. His hotel said he left yesterday after three p.m. and didn’t come back.”

  “How can we be sure it’s the same killer as Eleventh Finger?” I looked at the words above the morgue entrance, hesitated, then put on my gloves and ducked under the tape.

  “Disembowelment, slit throat,” Hu said. “This time they didn’t cut off the head, but the organs were taken out with the tongue scoop method. Probably poisoned again too. I keep wondering how we haven’t been able to track something as toxic and tightly regulated as tetramine. We should at least be able to figure out how it’s getting in and out of Dragon City, but still no leads. It’s like the killer has his own untraceable stash of the stuff, but how could that be?”

  “Well, this definitely links them,” said Big Bao, a dark object in his palm.

  It was a man’s tongue, black and stinking—not from decay, but formalin.

  “It’s probably Cheng Xiaoliang’s from August,” Big Bao said. “Wasn’t he missing a tongue?”

  “And so this body is missing what?”

  “He’s got no, uh, thingy.”

  I gritted my teeth. “What a sick bastard. And we can’t catch him.”

  Big Bao looked to the sky and screamed.

  The autopsy took four hours, two hours longer than standard. We looked the body over with the utmost care but still didn’t find any valuable clues. We already knew the murderer’s methods by heart: trick the victim into taking poison, let him die, cut the throat, and do a forensic disembowelment with the tongue scoop method, then dismember the body, steal a body part, bundle the corpse up with ropes, and leave it somewhere easy to find.

  We were dealing with an extremely disturbed person.

  The investigative work, for its part, took two days. Other than an outline of Liang Fengzhi’s last movements, detectives learned nothing. They looked into every last person connected to the unlucky man—relatives, friends, coworkers in Dragon City and the people he’d worked with on the lawsuit in Dragon City, even the doctor who found the body and the taxi-driving hospital guard—and each one was ruled out as a suspect. Another dead end.

  At the task force meeting, detectives reported that they couldn’t find a single connection between the last places the Eleventh Finger victims had been seen, or between the times they went missing.

  In sum, four totally unrelated people had been cut down by a sick killer for no reason.

  Morale was sinking lower and lower. Only one person was upbeat.

  “This tire mark is from the parking spot nearest to the morgue,” Lin Tao said. “Even though there were many overlapping traces, I worked out which was freshest, using different kinds of light. I’ve already ruled out the car that belongs to the doctor who called in the case, so this could be a very useful clue.”

  “But we’re not going to be able to check the millions of cars in the city,” I said. “Even if we told the traffic unit to look for this needle in a haystack, and they somehow found a similar tire tread, there’d still be thousands that match.”

  “If only we could find the right car, I could use the specific wear pattern to show it’s a match,” Lin Tao said. “We need to have hope! Lots of cases are solved with blind luck. This could be one of those. I’m going to tell the traffic unit to keep it in mind just in case.”

  Though the clue was of dubious value, we waited expectantly for two days for good news.

  We didn’t get any. We got another murder case.

  46

  On September 20, with Mid-Autumn Festival nearing, an urgent request for assistance came in from Cheng City. We didn’t even discuss it, just jumped in the car and rushed to the scene. We urgently needed a success to wash off the funk of the Eleventh Finger mess.

  Cheng City was a wealthy city with few murders. But this one, we learned, was quite extraordinary, and the man who’d called it in was scared out of his mind. It took tremendous effort for the officers to calm him down and get the basic info.

  When we arrived, Cheng City’s chief investigative instructor, Zhang Ping, who was also a senior forensic scientist, gave us the rundown.

  That afternoon, maintenance man Zhang Chunhe had received a call. Tenants were complaining about a heavy stench in the lobby of a building at one of their residential complexes, a property called the Guilin.

  Zhang Chunhe had been with Fenghua Property Management for two and a half years, but he never went to the Guilin. It was a high-end complex, so it had good facilities and fewer problems.

  Before Zhang Chunhe headed out, he looked over the complex’s architectural drawings just in case. As a senior maintenance man, if he got there and didn’t know what to do, it would be very embarrassing.

  According to the drawings, behind the first-floor lobby were two fireproof doors that led to a stairwell. Underneath the stairwell was the entrance to the sewage well. Every building had a well to carry sewage away. There were also some electrical lines running through the well. Of course, electrical lines wouldn’t cause the well to stink. It was probably a blockage.

  But clogs would happen over a long period of time. Why hadn’t anyone noticed the stench and reported it earlier? Especially these days when relationships between property managers and tenants were so bad.

  Then Zhang Chunhe figured it out. The Guilin units were all two-family, two-elevator units. The first floor was an unoccupied storage room, and even people living on the second floor took the elevator. If no one went into the lobby or took the stairs, noticing the smell would be unlikely—especially with the barrier formed by the fire doors.

  Zhang Chunhe had worked as a plumber and done dredging before, but it wasn’t water he would be dealing with now but sewage. Even someone like him didn’t want his clothing to stink.

  Arriving at the building, Zhang Chunhe pulled on a waterproof jumpsuit and strained to open the sewage-well covering under the stairs. The well was black as night, and a truly nasty smell blew out from it. He was an old hand at dredge work, which he’d done for many years, but he’d never smelled anything that bad.

  “Did an animal die down there?” Zhang Chunhe said to the property management staffer who’d accompanied him. “It’s awful. If I’m really going in there, you gotta pay me extra.”

  The property management staffer retched and pinched his nose. He wiped tears from his eyes and nodded. “An extra two hundred.”

  Zhang Chunhe was a very adaptable person. At the mention of more money, he quickly got over the stench, put on a mask, and slowly lowered himself down the ladder.

  Only a little light came in through the wellhead as he worked his way down. Before his feet had touched the bottom, he felt something bump against his back.

  “What the heck?” Zhang Chunhe grasped the ladder with one hand and turned on his helmet lamp with the other. He craned his neck to look.

  The sight made every hair on his body stand up.

  Right behind him, a person was dangling, the head drooping down. Long hair covered the face.

  “A ghost!” Zhang Chunhe shouted, so scared he nearly fell in. Fortunately, his adrenaline kicked in, and he didn’t let go of the ladder. He quickly scrambled out of the well, ran outside, and collapsed trembling on the grass before taking out his cell phone and calling 110. The confused property management staffer was left by the well entrance, at a loss.

  “You seriously want to go in there?” Lin Tao said, looking pale as he grabbed my arm.

  “Yup,” I said, looking at the well.

  The sewage well had a vertical access tube leading to a square chamber—like a lowercase b—which made it impossible to see all the way inside the shaft.

  But the so-called ghost wasn’t hidden in a corner of the chamber; it was right in the access tube. I saw the shadow looming by the ladder.

  “Being a forensic scientist means not believing in ghosts.” I shone my flashlight inside, but I couldn’t see the body clearly. The smell told me it had been hidden there for some time.

  “The guy who called the case in said the ghost was floating,” the detective said with a shiver. “He swore it was floating in the air.”

  “Floating?” I said with a laugh. “Did it yell, ‘Boo’?”

  “I mean it,” the detective said, sensing my derision. “Zhang Chunhe said he was still a ways from the bottom, so the ghost couldn’t have been touching the ground. If it was a person, how could it float in the air?”

  And in fact, there wasn’t much sewage in the well, so how could it be halfway up? Or seem to float? It really was a little confusing. And because of that confusion, in the hour before I arrived, the officers hadn’t gone in to check it out.

  “I’m not afraid of death, but I am afraid of ghosts,” the young deputy director known as “Bold Boy” Zhao confessed.

  “Forensic scientists are specialists, not coolies. Do you think it’s our job to go fishing bodies out of wells?” To be honest, I was feeling a little timid myself.

  I turned and observed Big Bao’s and Lin Tao’s pale faces. And when I looked at the detectives again, they avoided my gaze.

  Before we got there, waiting for the province-level forensic experts was a valid excuse. But now, there was no reason not to go into the well to see what the situation was. If word got around that forensic scientists were afraid of ghosts, we’d become a laughingstock. It goes without saying we work to serve the needs of the people. Now their need was for us to go see what this supposed ghost looked like, so that was what we had to do.

  I worked up my courage, put on my headlamp, and started down the sewer-well ladder.

  My experience was just like Zhang Chunhe’s. A few rungs down, I felt something bump into my calf. I still had eight feet to go before the bottom of the well, so there really shouldn’t have been anything there, but there it was.

  My hair stood on end. If I screamed, the people above would be scared silly. I tried to fight back the fear. Looking down, I could see a person suspended halfway down the well. The hair over the face and the body swaying as if it were floating made me think of horror movies like The Ring and A Wicked Ghost.

  An average person would, without a doubt, look at this and see a floating female ghost.

  But reason told me it was a body, not a ghost. My years of forensic work gave me strength, and I kept climbing down until I could see the whole corpse. I sighed with relief, then quickly went back to holding my breath; the stink of decay assaulted my nostrils.

  It appeared to be a middle-aged woman, messy hair obscuring her face. She was hanging by her armpits from the sewage well’s intricate wires. The wires were hard to make out in the darkness, which was why the body seemed to be floating.

  Laughing in embarrassment, I turned to shine the headlamp on the ladder and saw a bloody impact mark on one of the rungs.

  I climbed out of the well.

  “The killer probably threw the body in from up above,” I said, trying to comfort Lin Tao. “The body ricocheted off the ladder and then got stuck on all the wires in the middle of the well.”

  “So the killer threw the body in, heard it hit the ladder, and thought it landed,” Big Bao said.

  “How could it just happen to get caught on the wires like that?” Lin Tao said. “It’s gotta be a curse!”

  We were helpless in the face of Lin Tao’s superstitions.

  47

  The victim was a woman in her thirties. She was a little on the heavy side, which, coupled with decomposition, made her look bloated. Her clothing was pulled up over her chest, revealing a black bra with dried blood above it.

  It was nearing the end of September, and the weather had been warm up until two days before when temperatures plunged, which made it a lot more difficult for us to determine time of death. The body was only moderately decomposed, but still far enough gone to emit a very strong odor.

  The abdomen was turning a color we called “corpse-green.” We could only roughly judge time of death: in that weather, with the corpse-green appearing, it had probably been four or five days.

  Unless a victim dies in his own house or someone who knows him is present or he has ID on him, forensic scientists face a nameless corpse. And identifying a corpse quickly is a very important step in any murder case.

  “I’ll tell you a joke.” Big Bao had been in a good mood lately, always telling jokes. We believed that when a young forensic scientist started joking around, it meant he’d done the mental work of getting comfortable with death.

  “When I was working in Qingxiang, I had a coworker,” Big Bao said, “who was always claiming to be best at forensic anthropology, so guys in our bureau made fun of him, saying only dogs were as happy as he was to find a body. So he finds a clothed skeleton at a scene, and the detectives are desperate for an ID. He makes a big show of taking the bones back to the autopsy room and studying them. He’s at it the whole afternoon, and his conclusion is that the victim was male and fifty years old. As soon as he says it, a trace guy who’s been there with him the whole time reaches into the victim’s pants pocket and pulls out an ID card. Female, name and address all there. The boss got mad and transferred the scientist to work as a prison doctor.”

  As he laughed, Big Bao stuck a hand in the victim’s pants pocket. “Holy crap, good thing I checked. Here’s her ID!”

  “Li Yilian,” a young detective reported, “was thirty-four. She worked in the state tax bureau, lived on the eleventh floor of the Guilin. Husband runs a large building-materials operation in Yuntai City, hasn’t been home for a long time.”

  “Did her husband come back home about a week ago, by chance?” Big Bao asked.

  The detective shook his head. “They don’t get along well. The husband comes through only every two or three months. Colleagues in Yuntai are tracking his movements over the last few days but haven’t found anything suspicious.”

  “A search of the sewer well didn’t turn up any of the victim’s personal items,” I said. “But her formal clothing suggests she was probably on her way to or from work, so she should have had personal belongings with her.”

  I lifted the victim’s right hand. “And look, there’s a depression at the base of her ring finger, caused by wearing a ring for a long time.”

  I gestured to the victim’s ears. “Her ears are pierced, which means she may have worn earrings. But we haven’t been able to find her ring or earrings, so this could be a robbery.”

  “Robbery?” the detective asked. “In a sewer well? Her clothes were messed up. Couldn’t it be rape or something that led to the murder?”

  “Well, she wasn’t killed at home,” Lin Tao said. “I just broke into her apartment and had a look. Nothing abnormal there at all.”

  I smoothed out the victim’s clothing. The bloodstained part had dried and gotten stiff. I told the detective, “I’ll start with cause of death. The victim died of bleeding from multiple stab wounds to the chest.”

  “Obviously,” the detective said. “I don’t need you to tell me that.”

  “When we smooth out the clothing, we can see a lot of cuts in it,” I said. “Now we want to see if they match the chest wounds, right?”

  I lined them up. “Okay, they match. All the holes in the clothing correspond to holes in the chest. So, when the victim was stabbed, her clothes weren’t pushed up, but hanging over her body normally, right?”

  The detective nodded to show agreement.

  I continued. “Now for your question about the sewer. No, the crime probably wasn’t committed there. The wellhead is too narrow, the chamber too low, and the victim’s pant legs show no signs of sewage, which means she never touched the bottom. Of course, the victim didn’t just end up there for no reason.”

  I paused to look at a wound on the victim’s forehead that showed no vital reaction. “The killer threw the body into the well. Due to initial acceleration, the body fell diagonally and the head hit the ladder, which caused it to ricochet and get stuck on the wires. The wires pulled her clothes up, which made it look like sexual assault.”

  “Then where’s the primary murder scene?” the detective said. “No one would kill someone outside a building, then hide them inside it, right?”

  “No problem,” Lin Tao told the kid. “I’ll find it.”

  “And I’ll examine the body,” I said.

  The victim had died from massive blood loss.

  Her chest had been stabbed seventeen times. Eleven had gone between ribs and into the chest cavity. They ruptured the victim’s heart, aorta, and lungs, which caused rapid blood loss and death.

  We carefully examined each wound on the body—shape, length, depth—which allowed us to determine that the injuries were caused by a blade about two inches wide and six inches long.

  Many people think that figuring out what weapon was used is useless unless it turns out to be something unique. In this case, we had a detailed description of the weapon, although every home would likely have a similar knife—a fruit knife or a steak knife, for example—or other instrument that fits the description. But figuring out what object was used isn’t primarily to limit the scope of the investigation. More important, it allows later stages of the investigation to obtain valuable evidence and clues. For example, if we later searched a suspect’s home and found several such knives, we would know to test them and possibly solve the case much faster.

  This was a simple stabbing murder case, so the autopsy probably wouldn’t turn up too many clues. We could only hope for a clear cause of death, time of death, weapon, and attack style.

  The victim’s stomach still had the remnants of corn. The food had not yet reached the duodenum, which meant she’d died within two hours of her last meal.