Qing District was a subsidiary of Qingxiang City, relatively undeveloped. The scene was in one of its eastern suburbs. At least thirty police vehicles were blocking the road leading into the small village, so we had to get out and walk. Based on the level of police force presence, I knew it was a serious situation.

  After we entered the village, there seemed to be an officer standing guard every few feet, nearly filling the narrow roads. The houses on either side of the road had all their glass windows blown out.

  “Okay, then, this was not a small explosion,” Big Bao said, looking around. “I’ve never surveyed a blast site before. I’m a little scared.”

  “Me too,” Lin Tao said. “Do you think surveying a blast site like this puts our lives in danger?”

  “‘Seekers of fame and fortune, go your own way; those afraid of death, do not enter,’” I said. “That’s a motto of the Republic of China Military Academy. The same applies to us.”

  “There was an accident twenty years ago,” Han Liang said. “A forensic scientist was surveying a bomb site and absentmindedly stepped on an unexploded mine. He died bravely.”

  “Yeah, I remember that,” I said. “We had the same teacher.”

  The whole way down the road, small groups of local villagers were being questioned by police.

  “I’m tellin’ you, you weren’t there, I’ve never been so scared!” said a villager. “It was, like, four in the morning, we were sleeping. Then there was a bang. Didn’t sound like firecrackers, more like a bomb dropped from an airplane. Then our house started to shake and buzz, and all the glass broke. I thought I’d gone deaf. I saw my wife’s mouth moving but couldn’t hear her. I thought it was an earthquake, so I grabbed my wife and started running. We ran downstairs and saw Old Fan’s house was smoking and realized it had exploded, so I called the police.”

  “I’m so damn unlucky,” grumbled a villager with gauze wrapped around his head. “When it happened, I was taking a piss and heard the bang, and a piece of glass hit my head. Now I need stitches? Every house got damaged. The government has to take care of us, right?”

  “Old Fan’s family always said their house had really good feng shui,” another villager said, “but it’s all the way on the edge of the village. And the windows didn’t have any protection, so how is that good feng shui? Plus, it blew up, so where’s your feng shui now?”

  The man’s full name was Fan Jincheng. Since Old Fan’s house was easternmost in the village, all of its windows, apart from the front, looked out on the wilderness with unobstructed views. The view from inside really was pretty nice.

  Qing District’s police officers were using a neighbor’s living room as a temporary task force room, its tiny coffee table surrounded by cops. When the three of us entered, some of the younger officers got up to let us sit.

  “Gentlemen,” Qing District Director Zhou Qiming said seriously, “thank you for coming. Things have been so quiet recently. I never thought we’d have such a big case—I mean incident—after Mid-Autumn Festival.”

  Officials liked to call criminal events “cases,” but suicides and accidents they called “incidents.”

  “Do we know what happened?” I asked.

  Zhou shook his head. “The site is sealed. Technical personnel are awaiting your arrival before they get started, so we don’t know the specifics yet. I’m guessing it was an accident.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Fill us in.”

  Zhou cleared his throat. “The scene is Fan Jincheng’s home. He and his wife lived there alone, but when the dispatch officer arrived, he confirmed there were four victims.”

  “Did they have hired help?” I asked.

  Zhou shook his head. “No, it’s family. We’ve already identified the four victims as Fan Jincheng; his wife, Ren Sufen; their grandson, fifteen-year-old Fan Cheng; and their granddaughter, seven-year-old Zhao Liqian.”

  “Two kids.” I hated to see children die prematurely.

  “Yes,” Zhou said sadly. “According to neighbors, grandchildren often spend weekends at Fan’s house. Today’s Monday, and their parents were going to pick them up to take them to school. I can’t imagine what they’re feeling.”

  “Why do you think it was an accident?” I asked, trying to shake off the horror of losing children.

  “First, our dispatch officer found the door locked and had to force it open. According to our investigation, the four of them got along wonderfully, so it couldn’t have been suicide or anything. Second, the worst damage was in the kitchen area at the east end of the house. The village gets its energy from a gas pipeline, and the officer found that the segment connected to Fan’s house was ruptured and still hissing gas, so he called to have the main valve shut off. That would indicate it was a gas leak that reached an explosive concentration in the air and was ignited by a flame or an electrical spark.”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “Since four people died, including two children,” Zhou said flatly, “the city and district are watching very closely, requesting that we find the source of the explosion quickly and handle it. First order of business is to definitively determine the cause of the explosion. The fire department was here earlier, but they didn’t come to a firm conclusion. They extracted some samples for testing, but the results will take two days to come back.”

  I took a map of the village the detective had sketched and studied it carefully.

  “What do you guys need to do?” Zhou asked.

  “First we want to go in and see the scene,” I said. “Then I’d appreciate it if you’d send morgue workers over to collect the bodies—I’d like to get them out of here. My team will collect residue and debris from the site and the surrounding area, then go from there.”

  “Sounds good,” Zhou said. “You all go ahead and get started. I’ll wait for your results. The investigative division will keep gathering information.”

  We left the meeting room and put on our survey gear.

  Lin Tao said, “I’m a little confused. Why would four people, including two children, be near the kitchen at four in the morning? If they weren’t in the kitchen, there would have been a wall blocking them and they wouldn’t have died, right? They couldn’t have been up that early to eat, I don’t think. Kids don’t usually start school till eight. Is there any reason to get up that early?”

  “Shit, Lin Tao, you’re right,” I said, more alert now. “The timing really is a problem.”

  “This is a tough one. Four people dead, but we have no way to cross-check the facts with them. Who do we ask?” Big Bao said.

  “Ask the scene; ask the bodies.”

  56

  Through the main gate was a medium-sized courtyard and, behind it, the two-story main house. To the east were two one-story buildings with a kitchen and a bathroom. To the west was a row of one-story sheds filled with junk.

  All of the glass in the windows was completely blown out. The kitchen roof was caved in, destroyed, which meant it was the blast’s point of origin.

  In the center of the courtyard lay two children’s bodies. The girl’s head was covered in blood, and there were bricks near it. The clothing on the boy’s upper body was torn, and he had a large bloodstain on his chest that made it hard to locate the wound.

  At the door to the kitchen lay the body of an old woman whose shirt was shredded and whose head, face, neck, chest, and abdomen were burned black.

  After we did a brief examination of the three bodies and photographed them, we called in the morgue workers. As they carried the body bags out the gate, we heard the voices of the crowd outside rise.

  Next we had to look at the primary scene, so we walked into the kitchen. The brick walls were cracked, windows blown out, the roof had collapsed, and rubble was covering a corpse from the chest down. The stove, water tank, sink, and cabinets had all collapsed, and fragments of pots and pans were scattered on the ground. The exposed end of the gas pipeline was wrapped up with a rag. Walking in, I was struck by a strong burning smell mixed with gunpowder.

  The body buried in bricks was hard to even identify as human because its skin was charred. Ashes had stuck to it, so we couldn’t distinguish its features either.

  “I didn’t see any burn marks in the courtyard,” Lin Tao said. “All the damage is concentrated in the kitchen. It was clearly the site of the blast.”

  “It’s not enough to just get the approximate location,” I said. “We have to pinpoint the blast within one and a half feet.”

  As Big Bao watched Lin Tao take pictures, I walked out of the kitchen and into the main house. On the first floor were a bedroom and a living room. The floor inside was so clean, I assumed the first responders hadn’t bothered going in. The bedroom was colorful and decorated with indecipherable “drawings” on the walls, so I figured it was a child’s room. Two untucked quilts were strewn on top of the bed, and on the ground were two small red slippers that appeared to belong to a girl.

  Running around barefoot? I thought with a frown. Maybe Lin Tao was right that there really was something strange going on here.

  I went up to the second floor and found a hallway with three rooms coming off it. Two of them were piled high with junk. The third had a bed with two quilts, untucked.

  Big Bao was waiting for me in the courtyard.

  “How’s it going?” I asked. “Did you dig the body out?”

  Big Bao frowned and shook his head. “No need, just had to pull. Only half left.”

  “That serious?” I hurried over to the kitchen and saw the carnage.

  The body had been severed around the navel, the stump’s soft tissue charred, with black and green intestines softly hanging out. Some of the bowels had been blown off, leaving yellow feces scattered nearby. The broken end of the dark red liver was exposed and emitted a powerful odor. Because of the enormous power of the explosion, the victim would have died quickly and without much bleeding. The little blood that did spill was burned away by the high temperatures.

  Now that the body was exposed, the whole kitchen filled with the stench of human abdominal cavity, which masked the original burning smell.

  I rubbed my nose and put on a second pair of gloves.

  “Do we really have to sort through all this rubble?” Lin Tao asked.

  I nodded. “We have to increase our chances of finding body parts. First, out of respect for the dead. Second, their distribution will help determine the direction of the blast.”

  “Then I’m afraid we’ll have to check a lot more than just the rubble,” Lin Tao said, looking at the collapsed roof and empty windows.

  “Right,” I said. “Based on the looks of the kitchen now, there aren’t many more body parts here. They were probably thrown from the room by the force of the blast.”

  “It’s not just body parts we’re looking for,” Lin Tao said. “How ’bout we divide the labor. You take the forensic team to look for the rest of this guy, and I’ll have the technicians help me look for trace evidence of explosives.”

  I nodded in agreement as I set about rummaging through the rubble.

  Big Bao came in, holding construction helmets. “Put these on. This place could come down on our heads.”

  The dozen or so pieces we found in the kitchen were really tiny, but I was eventually able to determine where they came from.

  “Look, this soft tissue with skin, pores, and lots of rough black hair must be from the lower leg.” I collected the tissue and spread it on a plastic sheet, sorted by category. “These bones are long but thin, which means they’re from the tibia and fibula, also the lower leg. These are nail beds, and you can make out some foot bones, and this is soft tissue from the foot.”

  “This person’s lower leg and feet were basically blown to smithereens,” Big Bao said. “I can’t believe how destroyed this all is.”

  Lin Tao said, “I was a little skeptical of those anti-Japanese TV shows where a bomb blows off a whole limb. But now I think I’m beginning to get the picture.”

  I nodded. “There are lots of different kinds of injuries at a bomb site. I’ll tell you more during the autopsy if you want.”

  “We’ve gone through all this debris, so should we go look outside now?” Big Bao said as he picked up a basket.

  I nodded. “Let’s go together. Remember, every time we find a body part, we have to record about how far away it is from the kitchen.”

  There were a lot of body parts in the fields around the house. They were mostly larger pieces, and based on their morphology, probably from the thigh and calf.

  “The most important thing is to find fragments of the pelvis, patella, and genitals,” I said. “That’ll help us determine the blast center.”

  Before we had walked far, we found a bone covered in bloody goo. It was semispherical, with a smooth front and back.

  “Patella,” I called. “About fifteen feet from the window.”

  As seven or eight forensic scientists combed the area, they found many soft tissue parts, along with a few fragments of the pelvis ten or so yards away.

  “Are we done?” Big Bao said. “I’d rather not die of sunstroke. Mid-Autumn Festival’s already passed; how is it this hot?”

  I walked up to a scarecrow, took its hat, and said, “Your work is done, my friend. I’ll keep looking. Oh wow, check it out!”

  On the scarecrow’s shoulder was a burned piece of human tissue. Based on the curly hair at its base, it was clearly a male reproductive organ.

  “Are”—Big Bao looked at the straw hat in my hand—“you sure there’s no soft tissue on that hat?”

  Another hour of searching turned up a few more pieces of tissue. The farthest piece appeared to have come from the body’s thigh and was thrown over a hundred yards away.

  “That should be enough,” I said. “Let’s go do the autopsy.”

  “Start with the straightforward one,” I said as the guys lifted the little girl onto the autopsy table.

  The child was Zhao Liqian. Her forehead was completely caved in, her hair covered with blood. We could see the huge laceration on her forehead.

  “What a cute kid,” Big Bao said with a sigh. “I wish I didn’t have to see this. Dead kids are the worst part of the job.”

  Based on the tissue bridging one end of the wound to the other and the contusion around the edge, a blunt object had caused her laceration and depressed skull fracture. We used a hemostat to pull out several yellow and red bits of brick.

  “The victim’s body position did not change after death,” I said. “Combined with the debris extracted from the wound and the broken bricks around her at the scene, we can be sure the forehead wound was caused by bricks thrown by the explosion.”

  We found no other wounds on the small body. The frontal fracture pattern was not interrupted but was fully pressed inward, meaning the victim had died immediately after being struck in the head. That kind of wound would cause a large subdural hematoma and a subarachnoid hemorrhage, resulting in the formation of a small herniation and brain stem compression, which would lead to respiratory and circulatory failure and death.

  The victim’s stomach was empty, and we estimated the time of death was the same as the time of the explosion.

  After examining the girl’s body, we moved on to Fan Cheng.

  Like his little sister, the boy showed no obvious signs of injury, only a small wound on the chest. When we moved the body, blood was still puttering out.

  Fan Cheng’s chest cavity was full of blood. We found a tear in his aortic arch and, in his thoracic cavity, the shard of glass that killed him.

  “What crappy luck,” Big Bao said, shaking his head. “If the glass hadn’t hit him right there, he wouldn’t have died.”

  “One is a large, blunt injury; one is a cut from fast-flying glass,” I said. “These are both things people can’t do. So the explosion caused their deaths.”

  “Are you saying you’re sure it was an accident?” Lin Tao asked.

  “No. The explosion was the cause of death, but it wasn’t necessarily an accident.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little funny? I think if the timing is suspicious, the case is suspicious.”

  “It’s not just that.” I told them about the shoes I found in the downstairs bedroom.

  “A real shame,” Big Bao said. “If only this boy had dodged that glass, he could tell us what happened himself.”

  “Dodge?” Lin Tao said. “Dodge how? Flying glass is no slower than a bullet. You think this is The Matrix?”

  “Remember, even though these two injuries were caused by a blunt and sharp object respectively, the principle’s the same,” I said. “They’re both caused by ejecta from the explosion.”

  “Right, you said there are a lot of different kinds of explosion injuries,” Lin Tao said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Well,” I said with a sly smile, “if we let the body tell you, you’ll remember better.”

  57

  The third body belonged to Ren Sufen, who was found near the entrance of the kitchen. Her wounds were mostly on her front. There didn’t appear to be any surface damage besides burning on the chest and abdomen.

  “The victim’s skin shows second-degree burns. The rest appears to be undamaged,” Big Bao said. “We’ll have to open her up to find the cause of death.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “Did you notice the white lines following the victim’s skin pattern along the nose bridge, eyebrows, and corner of the eyes? That’s from when light came out of the explosion and she reflexively closed her eyes. The wrinkled-up skin didn’t burn, but the skin around it did, which made those lines. This tells us two things: First, she was alive when the explosion happened. Second, she was facing it.”

  Big Bao nodded.

  The autopsy went very slowly because Ren Sufen’s internal organs were so badly damaged. Her heart and lungs had significant contusions from hitting the chest wall. Her liver and spleen were ruptured but hadn’t bled much because she’d died so quickly. In addition, her brain tissue showed signs of an extensive petechial hemorrhage.

  “Tell me—I can understand all this damage to the internal organs, but how did the brain injury form?” Big Bao said. “Her skull was protecting it. You can’t get a brain injury from a blast of air, can you?”