“Not only that,” I added.

  13

  “Carrying someone who might be unconscious on your back,” I prompted, “shows what?”

  “Shows this person isn’t weak,” Big Bao rushed to say.

  “Not bad, little man,” I said with a laugh. “Always so eager. Okay, so, the analysis showed that White Shadow is about five eight, and we know the individual must be quite strong. I’d say this White Shadow probably isn’t a long-haired woman, but a man.”

  “So what?” the detective asked.

  “If it’s a man, he probably doesn’t have that beautiful, long black hair we saw in the video,” I said. “Which means we have another clue.”

  “We can look into wig sales!” the detective said.

  “Also, now we know the perp acted alone. If there were two people, they could have carried her without having to throw her over their shoulders. In the surveillance video, Tao Zi didn’t look especially tiny.”

  “Yeah,” the detective agreed. “Commissioner Tao says she’s five six, one thirty.”

  “This mark was probably caused when the person carrying Tao Zi stopped to lean on the wall,” Lin Tao said. “If there were two people, they wouldn’t have needed to rest.”

  “All right.” I raised my wrist to look at my watch. It was already ten thirty. “Let’s go. We should head to the hotel and get some sleep. We’ll be able to do more in the morning.”

  “Let’s stay in the same room,” Lin Tao begged again.

  Maybe because of all the stray fingers that had been popping up recently, I dreamed that night of chopped pepper chicken feet. I was taking a bite when I realized it wasn’t a chicken foot, but a human hand. I felt my stomach churn. Mercifully, the hotel phone yanked me out of the nightmare.

  I sat up and glanced over at Lin Tao. The poor guy had his head buried under the covers. What a scaredy-cat, I thought.

  The clock said five something. Who could be calling this early? If they’d solved the case, did that mean I’d get to spend Sunday at home?

  I grabbed the phone. “Hello?”

  “Examiner Qin.” It was Liqiao City’s Forensic Scientist Wu. “I’m sorry to bother you so early, but there’s been a big development in the case.”

  Adrenaline rushed through my veins. “What happened?”

  “The search team found Tao Zi’s body in Liqiao River.”

  My heart sank.

  “Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Liqiao River flows east-west through the city. The local government had taken advantage of this unique natural resource and turned it into a beautiful scenic area. Willows and flowering bushes covered both banks. There were picturesque bridges and a charming pavilion over the water.

  The scene wasn’t so charming this morning, though. Dawn had just broken, and flashing police lights reflected off the river. A group of officers was gathered around a large suitcase.

  Director Qiang approached us with a look of frustration. “I knew Tao Zi’s prospects weren’t good. Around five, an old man doing his morning calisthenics saw something under the pavilion and called the police.”

  I looked at the water surface; it was crystal clear.

  “Emergency one-one-oh dispatched our search group to this location, where we found a large suitcase with Tao Zi’s body inside.”

  “How far are we from Lost Lanes?” I asked.

  “Not too close, several miles,” an officer said.

  I nodded, knelt down, and looked at the body.

  Tao Zi was completely naked, curled up in the suitcase, her clothes beside her.

  “It couldn’t be a mugging/rape case, right?” Qiang asked. “That’d be awful.”

  A technician photographed the suitcase, put on gloves, and along with Forensic Scientist Wu, lifted the body out of the luggage. Photographing a body before we start our work is critical. The technician photographed the face, neck, front, back, hands, head, and soles of the feet to record the body’s original state. Then, we forensic scientists began to inspect the corpse’s skin for damage, marks, and other clues.

  “Rigor mortis hasn’t fully set in.” I tried to stretch the body flat. “The corneas are getting cloudy; livor mortis is starting to fade. It’s been about thirty hours since the surveillance footage, so the timing’s about right.”

  “You mean Tao Zi died shortly after the camera caught her falling down?” Qiang asked.

  I looked at several abrasions on the face, which were consistent with how she fell, and nodded.

  We laid the corpse flat—height and weight confirmed it was Tao Zi, as did the clothing and effects in the suitcase.

  There was a lot of blood on the body. I waved a technician over to take a photograph, then found a roll of gauze in my survey kit, cut a piece off, and slowly wiped blood from the chest and abdomen.

  Wu wrestled apart the body’s legs, took a look, and sighed with relief. “Director Qiang, fortunately, there was no rape. The perineum’s clean and the hymen’s intact.”

  I had wiped most of the blood off, revealing many vertical and horizontal wounds on both shoulders.

  Lin Tao’s voice was shaky. “Wh-wh-what kind of wound is this? So dense and messy. Are they bites?”

  “C’mon, you’re the trace guy,” I said. “These are clearly not bite marks.”

  “Hey, I only know human bite marks,” Lin Tao said uneasily. “I’ve never seen ghost bites.”

  A nearby policewoman sniggered.

  I gave Lin Tao an embarrassed look, then probed one of the little wounds with a hemostat. “Animal bites can be messy like this, but they tear. These wounds have neat edges, so they were definitely made with a sharp instrument. And the bones underneath are damaged, probably from repeated slashes.”

  “Slashes? Why?” Big Bao asked.

  “The skin around the wound is crimped,” I explained, “and the broken soft tissue doesn’t show a clear vital reaction. The damage was done postmortem. It looks like someone wanted to dismember Tao Zi but lacked the anatomical knowledge to do so. Then the killer gave up on that idea, put her in the suitcase, and threw it in the river.”

  “Lacking anatomical knowledge? Dismemberment?” Big Bao said with surprise. He picked up Tao Zi’s hands and examined them carefully.

  “You’ve got the Eleventh Finger case on the brain too, huh, Big Bao?”

  “Hold on, hold on,” Lin Tao said, curious as always about forensic work. “We know they’re slash marks, but why did they necessarily happen postmortem? Why couldn’t they have been inflicted when the victim was alive? Look at all the blood in the suitcase and on the body. Don’t dead people’s wounds keep bleeding?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Wounds bleed when you’re alive because the heart continues to pump. After death, there’s no pump pushing blood, so a broken vessel will bleed, just not as much. Do you know what signs a corpse will show if it bled to death?”

  “Pale livor mortis,” Big Bao said.

  I nodded. “Right. Because of blood loss, there won’t be enough red blood cells to pool in part of the body and cause livor mortis. The livor mortis in Tao Zi’s body is very significant and even shows some purple, so she definitely didn’t bleed to death. But we can determine she was put in the suitcase and left here within twelve hours of death.”

  “I know why!” Lin Tao exclaimed. “Within twelve hours, livor mortis doesn’t infiltrate the soft tissue, so when the position of the body changes, it shifts like sand in an hourglass to new parts. And Tao Zi’s livor mortis is all on her lower left side, which is in line with the suitcase’s position.”

  “So how’d Tao Zi die, then?” Qiang asked impatiently.

  I looked at the body’s eyelids and lips. There were no signs of mechanical asphyxia. No sign of force on the lips or neck either. “I need to examine the body further.”

  Dragging the cold scalpel along the body exposed the yellow fat below the skin. We went through all our procedures, but the young body offered up no secrets.

  “Why can’t we figure out the cause of death?” Lin Tao said.

  “Who says we can’t?” Big Bao seized the opportunity to show me what he knew. “Death typically falls into one of four categories. The first is mechanical injury—the rupture of blood vessels or organs, massive blood loss or head injury, damage of vital centers. This category also includes lightning strikes and skin corrosion. The second category is mechanical asphyxia caused by smothering, strangling, and drowning. The third is poisoning, and the fourth is sudden death due to things like organ failure.”

  He took a deep breath and went on. “So far, we’ve ruled out injury and suffocation. From the look of the corpse, it wasn’t poisoning either. But we haven’t ruled out sudden death syndrome!”

  A detective laughed. “That reminds me of that Guo Degang stand-up bit about the dismemberment-suicide case. Ha!”

  His cavalier attitude offended me. “Have a little respect for the dead, man. That’s a kid’s body in front of you. Besides, suicide and murder are ways of dying, but dismemberment is something that happens to someone after death, got it?”

  The detective hung his head.

  “So,” Big Bao deduced, “in this case, maybe there was a sudden death that the kidnapper didn’t want to take responsibility for, so he tried to dispose of the corpse?”

  I didn’t say anything, just began taking out the internal organs and examining them one by one.

  Forensic Scientist Wu said, “Sudden death is typically caused by cardiovascular disease or cerebrovascular disease, but Tao Zi’s probably too young for that. Do you think it could be cardiac failure or status thymicolymphaticus?”

  I shook my head. “Cardiac inhibition usually occurs as a result of outside pressure that leads to cardiac arrest and death, so the skin around the chest would show corresponding damage. And a status thymicolymphaticus victim would show an enlarged thymus and development problems.”

  “Then what could it be?” Big Bao asked.

  I cut open the deceased’s heart. “These ventricles are very thick, and the size of the heart is strangely large. In most people, the heart is the size of their fist, and hers is about one and a half times that size.”

  The detective jumped up. “I’ll go look into Tao Zi’s family’s medical records to see if there’s a history of congenital heart problems.”

  “Good thinking,” I agreed. “Also, please transport the victim’s organs to the lab. I’ll call Forensic Scientist Fang Jun—he’s a pathology expert. Treating organ samples so they can be put under a microscope takes a long time, so we need him to get started right away.

  “As for us,” I said with a stretch, “let’s go take a nap.”

  14

  A bleary-eyed Lin Tao shook me. “Wake up! It’s already five o’clock. We need to check in on the investigation.”

  Just as I looked at the time on my phone, it rang. It was Fang Jun from the forensic pathology lab. “Examiner Qin, I looked at the organs you sent over today. Based on the deceased’s organ structure, we can diagnose pulmonary valve stenosis.”

  “Pulmonary stenosis?” I said. “Are you sure?”

  “I am,” Fang Jun said. “I can double-check using another section, but that will take some time.”

  “Looks like I guessed right,” I said to Lin Tao with a yawn. “The victim really did have a heart condition that could lead to sudden death. We should let the task force know.”

  “You go talk to them. I want to look around the scene again.”

  When I reached the station, I found the number of people on the task force had dropped by half. I figured it was because they’d already heard the victim might have died of disease, so they reduced manpower.

  “The victim had a congenital heart disorder, pulmonary valve stenosis,” I announced. “Judging by the autopsy results, this is likely the cause of death.”

  “We heard,” Director Qiang said. “So this is no longer a murder case, I suppose?”

  “I’m not of that opinion,” I said. “Who says sudden death can’t still be murder? Don’t forget the White Shadow video. Judging by the time of death, I believe the victim got frightened by that ‘ghost,’ which caused her condition to kill her. If it was just a prank, then it was negligence, but if White Shadow knew Tao Zi had a weak heart and wouldn’t be able to stand the shock, then it could be a tricky method of murder.”

  Director Qiang thought it over. “Using a method like that to kill someone is pretty risky, though, don’t you think?”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “We were able to see in that processed screen shot that White Shadow wore a wig to cover his face, which means if he failed at scaring the victim to death, she wouldn’t have been able to identify him. I think it’s rather clever.”

  “Oh come on, Qin,” the lead detective scoffed. “Life isn’t a detective novel. No way the situation is that complicated. According to our investigation, two of the guys Tao Zi was doing karaoke with left shortly after she did.”

  “Right,” another detective said. “And according to testimony from some of her friends, one of the two was always pursuing Tao Zi, but she always rejected him. Our theory is that the two boys wanted to punish her with a bad scare. It’s totally the kind of corny thing teenagers do.”

  “Hm,” I replied. I had no reason to argue with them, but something wasn’t right. We’d have to wait to see what came of questioning the two boys.

  I ran into Lin Tao on my way back to the hotel room.

  “What’s with the long face?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said weakly. “The task force’s initial determination is that Tao Zi’s death was the result of some high school mischief gone wrong. They’re looking into two male students who left right after her that night.”

  I shook my head, perplexed.

  Lin Tao opened his bag, took out a map of the area, and spread it out on the hotel room table. “Well, I have two pieces of evidence to refute that this was done by high school students.”

  “Let’s hear it,” I said, suddenly excited. “These local cops think the murder was childish and accidental, fitting for high school kids. I don’t think so at all. Frightening someone to death! Impressive, really.”

  Lin Tao nodded. “First of all, remember the mark we saw before? I looked again and confirmed that was from one person carrying Tao Zi and leaning against the wall to rest. There definitely weren’t two people involved in the incident, or else the second one would have helped carry the body.”

  I smacked myself on the forehead. “Of course, how’d I forget that?”

  “Second,” Lin Tao went on, “I was thinking about a problem during my nap, which is why I wanted to get back and look at the site. Look.”

  Lin Tao sketched a line on the map. “Here’s the route the killer took. Here’s where he rested. There aren’t any residences over that way, so he doesn’t live in Lost Lanes, and he could only have exited this way.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “But that’s right next to the highway,” Lin Tao said. “Even at midnight, how could someone dressed as a ghost and carrying a body go unnoticed?”

  I wrinkled my brow. “You’re saying he was confident he wouldn’t be seen.”

  “And why would he be confident of that?” Lin Tao raised his eyebrow provocatively, a look always popular with women.

  “I got it,” I said. “No one lives by that exit, so that’s not a problem, but the only way not to be seen by the highway traffic would be to have a car waiting.”

  “Right,” Lin Tao said with a smile. “A sixteen-year-old kid carries Tao Zi through complex alleys and down a path that cameras can’t see, then hops into a getaway car? Does that make any sense? Does it sound like something a high school student would do?”

  “Nope,” I exclaimed as I took out my phone. “Hello, Director Qiang? I need two detectives to go have a chat with Commissioner Tao right away and then come straight to my hotel.”

  “It’s really a shame about Tao Zi,” one of the detectives said when they arrived. “Poor kid was actually abandoned near Commissioner Tao’s house as a baby. They couldn’t have their own child, so they adopted her. But shortly afterward, they found she had a congenital heart defect, which may have been why her biological parents abandoned her.”

  “What I’m worried about now is how many people knew about her heart,” I said.

  The detective took a sip of water. “More than a few. Commissioner Tao’s neighbors and coworkers, as well as some doctors at the hospital. The question is, which of them would use that knowledge to murder a teenager?”

  “Right, right, right.”

  “When we started asking about all that, Commissioner Tao got squirrelly,” the detective said. “He kept stressing that he did what he did so he could get Tao Zi the treatment she needed.”

  “Treatment?” My head was muddled. “Did what?”

  The detective shook his head. “Something was off in his face, so I decided not to push it until we’d checked in with you.”

  “If he’s avoiding our questions,” I said, “then it’s nothing good.”

  “He’s the commissioner of inland revenue.” Lin Tao laughed. “We’ve got to be talking about corruption, right?”

  “That was our guess too,” the detective agreed.

  “I would venture to guess,” I said, looking at the ceiling, “that someone bribed Commissioner Tao, but didn’t get what they wanted, so they killed Tao Zi. Make sense?”

  “Makes a lot of sense,” Big Bao said.

  “And,” Lin Tao said, “this person would have to know Commissioner Tao well enough to know about his kid’s heart.”

  “Right,” I said. “Also, someone who would murder a child in such a cunning way must have one hell of a twisted mind.”

  “We have some other info,” Lin Tao added. “Our murderer has a car, and he’s five eight, slim, knows Lost Lanes and the surrounding area very well—I mean, he knew the locations of all the Lost Lane surveillance cameras!”