Miss Forensics – Chapter 9

Part One

Autopsy

“The deceased, Ding Xue. First autopsy begins now.”

Jiangcheng City Funeral Home.

            

It was already past midnight, but two groups of people were still arguing relentlessly in the main lobby. The moment Song Yuhang stepped inside, she heard a woman’s shrill voice screaming profanities, punctuated by the screech of shoe soles scraping against the floor and the sound of tearing clothes.

Her heart tightened. Fearing that Lin Yan might have clashed with the family members over the autopsy, she rushed inside at a quick jog.

To her surprise, Lin Yan was standing against the wall completely unscathed, even covering her ears with her hands.

            

Fang Xin and Duan Cheng were trying to break up the fight, and the two groups of women, who had been tearing at each other, finally stopped.

One of them, who was slightly older, said, “I’m the child’s grandmother! The kid should be raised by me. Don’t you agree, young lady?!”

Fang Xin: “…Ah?”

            

“What nonsense are you talking?!” the other woman fired back. “My daughter’s body isn’t even cold yet, lying in there! Who knows how she died, or if your family had a hand in it! Yaya is my own granddaughter—she must come with me!”

“What do you mean we had a hand in it? Ever since she married into our family, when did we ever let her go hungry or lack clothes? She said she didn’t want to live with the elders, so the two of us old folks moved out immediately! She said she didn’t want a second child, so we didn’t push it! Have a conscience when you speak, will you?! Who knows what kind of lowlife thug your daughter provoked with her loose behavior out there to bring this death upon herself? Don’t go pinning this on us!”

Despite her advanced age, this old lady’s combat prowess was not to be underestimated as she pointed directly at the other’s nose, spitting curses.

            

What was more, she had a whole entourage of aunts and cousins behind her. They charged forward together, engaging in a fierce battle of words. Back and forth they went in a noisy spectacle. In the chaos, someone’s hair was pulled, sparking another round of physical violence as the battle escalated further.

Even Duan Cheng had received two scratch marks on his face, forcing him to retreat from the fray.

Meanwhile, the man at the very center of the storm sat alone on a long bench. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his head hung low in silence.

            

Clutched in his arms was a little girl of about three or four, who stared at the surrounding chaos with wide, bewildered eyes.

A mocking smirk played on Lin Yan’s lips. She watched the farce play out without the slightest intention of stepping in to mediate.

“Hey! After all this fighting, say something, son-in-law! How did my daughter actually die?!” The middle-aged woman finally broke free from the surrounding crowd. Her eyes were red and tears streamed down her face, looking utterly devastated.

            

“The daughter I raised for over twenty years… she can’t just die like this, so mysteriously! Your family must give me an explanation!”

“An explanation? What explanation do you want? It’s not like we killed her. Right, Officer?” the mother-in-law retorted.

Fang Xin stammered in vague agreement, terrified that if she said the wrong thing, a stray slap would land right on her face.

            

“I don’t care! Give me back my daughter! My Ding family only had this one daughter—our bloodline is cut off, completely cut off! Old Ding, I’ve failed your spirit in heaven! My daughter, my daughter, you died such an unjust death!”

The woman began to wail at the top of her lungs again, lunging forward to tear at the dazed man sitting on the bench.

Seeing her own son being beaten, the man’s mother became even more outraged. Some grabbed legs, others pulled hair, and every dirty word imaginable spewed from their mouths.

            

“Stop dragging our family into this! Your whole household is bad luck! Your husband died early, and I was against this marriage from the very beginning! But my son had to be blind enough to love her! She married in for years and couldn’t even produce a baby boy. A hen that doesn’t lay eggs¹! It’s good she’s dead, a clean riddance!”

Another wave of unbearable profanity ensued, accompanied by a flurry of punches and kicks.

Lin Yan was actually amused by the spectacle and let out a soft laugh.

            

Song Yuhang shook her head and prepared to step in to break them up.

The man suddenly bolted up from the bench, his fists clenched as he roared, “Stop fighting!!!”

The room fell silent for a brief moment. But once they snapped out of it, the deceased’s family wailed even more shrilly, lunging at him with renewed fury to tear and beat him. “You dare yell at me?! You dare yell at me! Pay for my daughter’s life! Pay with your life!”

            

In the scuffle, the little child sitting on the bench fell to the floor. Nobody spared her a glance. The little girl opened her mouth, watching blankly as her grandmother shoved her maternal grandmother, and her maternal grandmother slapped her father.

Unable to bear it any longer, she burst into loud, sobbing tears.

“Daddy, Daddy… I want Mommy, I want to go home…” She stumbled to her feet, trying to reach out and hug her father’s leg.

            

But the man was shoved by someone in the crowd. He stumbled, his foot about to come down right on the little girl’s hand, when Song Yuhang scooped her up in one swift motion.

“Keep arguing and you can all go to the Public Security Bureau to do it! Administrative detention for every single one of you, none of you will escape!”

The victim’s mother wanted to say more, but after looking at the two bars on Song Yuhang’s uniform epaulets and considering the child wailing in her arms, she finally held herself back.

            

Only then did she begin to weep silently.

After that, things proceeded according to standard procedure.

The family members went in one by one to see the deceased for the last time. When the mother came out, she was practically limp and had to be supported by several police officers scrambling to support her.

            

Considering the health of the elderly family members, after gathering a basic overview of the situation, Song Yuhang had someone escort them home, leaving only the deceased’s husband to go to the bureau to make a statement.

“According to Article 131 of the 《Criminal Procedure Law》, we’ve decided to perform a forensic autopsy on your wife’s remains. Please sign here.”

A 《Autopsy Notification Form》 was slid slowly across the table.

            

Lin Yan sat opposite, her back straight as she observed the short, somewhat taciturn man.

“You want to find out the truth, don’t you? You don’t want your wife to die without any explanation, right? Sign it quickly. The sooner we perform the autopsy, the closer we’ll be to the truth.”

As time passed, certain features on the body would gradually fade, which was precisely why she was so impatient to perform the autopsy.

            

Because the man’s child wouldn’t stop crying and no one could soothe her, she had come along with her father to the Public Security Bureau. Song Yuhang had just managed to coax the girl to sleep and walked out of the adjacent duty room, pushing the door open to enter. Hearing Lin Yan’s words, she cast a disapproving look in her direction.

Lin Yan parted her lips, mouthing silently: Am I wrong?

Song Yuhang shot back a look: You could be a little more tactful.

            

Duan Cheng nudged Zheng Chengrui. “Hey, what’re they saying?”

The IT tech guy looked up from his computer. “Who? Who’s talking?”

Duan Cheng: “…”

            

No one was talking; it was entirely a silent conversation of glances.

Song Yuhang cleared her throat. “It’s like this. We’ll record the entire autopsy on audio and video. According to the regulations, you may also be present…”

What?

            

Lin Yan shot her a sharp glare. She had no habit of letting unrelated people spectate her autopsies.

Hearing this, the man finally moved his lips. His voice was hoarse, his face a picture of exhaustion. “No… no…”

Having uttered those few words, his eyes grew red again. “Officers, I’m begging you.”

            

He pulled the notification sheet toward himself, uncapped his pen, and wrote down his name stroke by stroke, wiping away tears as he wrote.

Lin Yan stretched and got to her feet. Taking the signed form, she headed off to change and prepare for the autopsy.

The forensic autopsy room was brightly lit, and the ventilation fan had begun to hum.

            

Clad in a white protective suit and armed from head to toe, Lin Yan expressionlessly lifted a scalpel from the tray.

Duan Cheng didn’t get many opportunities at the autopsy table and was eager to try. He also picked up a scalpel, holding it in his hand. “Let me assist you, Jie. Leave the small stuff like cutting skin and bone to me.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” The moment he was about to make the cut, Lin Yan grabbed his hand, her tone slightly cold.

            

“No one touches my autopsy table. Go stand to the side and hold the video camera.”

“Oh…” Reluctantly putting down his scalpel, Duan Cheng walked to the side and silently picked up the camera.

“Lin—”

            

He was about to speak when he saw her raise the scalpel vertically before her chest and slightly bow her head in a moment of silent tribute.

“The deceased, Ding Xue. May 17, 2008, 12:45 AM. The first autopsy begins now.”

It was the first time he had ever seen an expression resembling devout solemnity on Forensic Examiner Lin’s face.

            

Unlike a surgical operation, work at the autopsy table was far more bloody and sweeping.

With a single, long incision from top to bottom, she sliced open the chest and abdomen. Lin Yan’s hand was very steady. After using gauze to wipe away the seeping blood, without even looking, she snatched a pair of curved tissue scissors from the tray to dissect the muscle, slicing clean and sharp parallel to the ribs.

The other assisting forensic doctors watched her, their expressions turning genuinely serious.

            

“Bone cutters.”

Both of her hands were occupied, so she called out for the instrument.

One of the forensic doctors hurriedly handed them over.

            

Cutting through the deceased’s ribs required some force. Lin Yan stood slightly on her tiptoes, and several sharp cracks resounded.

She placed the blood-stained instrument on the sterile cloth.

“Now, help me extract the bones.”

            

One by one, the ribs were taken out of the thoracic cavity and placed on a scale to be weighed.

The camera flash strobed continuously as Duan Cheng took photos. Lin Yan called out the measurements, and the recording officer wrote them down on the whiteboard.

Within the opened chest cavity, both lungs were visibly over-inflated. When Lin Yan pressed down lightly with her fingertips, they left distinct indentations. Swapping to a pair of straight tissue scissors, she began to carefully dissect them.

            

The swollen lungs were finally extracted successfully, weighing nearly double that of a healthy set of lungs.

Even with the air conditioning set low in the airtight room, wearing the protective suit, which weighed dozens of catties, had left them drenched in sweat. Furthermore, the intense stench of postmortem decay grew exponentially stronger the moment the organs were fully exposed.

Even a mixture of rotten eggs, decaying meat, stinky tofu, and a cesspit fermented for half a month could not match this level of revulsion.

            

It wasn’t just disgusting; it stung the eyes.

As the pungent odor rushed into Duan Cheng’s eyes, he felt a sharp sting. He couldn’t help but rub his eyes with a clean spot above his shoulder, wiping them until they were completely red.

Coupled with having to stand extremely close to the corpse to take photos, the combination of visual and sensory stimulation proved too much. Duan Cheng let out a dry heave.

            

Without even looking up, Lin Yan sliced off a section of the lung tissue with an organ knife. “Get the fuck out if you’re going to throw up. Don’t contaminate the environment.”

A large amount of bloody, frothy fluid seeped from the incised lung tissue. Unable to take it any longer, Duan Cheng tossed the camera aside and bolted out to retch.

Lin Yan announced the findings with a perfectly calm face: “watery emphysema².”

            

She watched the recording officer write it down on the whiteboard. When her gaze drifted back to the deceased’s face, her brow knitted slightly.

Watery emphysema was a vital reaction. In other words, the victim had drowned while still alive, rather than being dumped into the water postmortem.

Could she really have committed suicide by pulling a plastic bag over her head, just as that police officer had suggested?

            

She shook her head slightly, dismissing the thought.

Meanwhile, Song Yuhang’s questioning was halfway through.

The man was Sun Xiangming, thirty-two years old, an employee at a local bank. He had been married to the deceased, Ding Xue, for seven years, and they had a daughter.

            

The deceased was thirty years old, a regular teacher at Jiangcheng No. 1 High School. Sun Xiangming pulled up a photo on his phone and slid it before her, his eyes filled with tears.

“This… is my wife.” The woman in the photo was of ordinary appearance, wearing a simple plaid sweater. She looked gentle, warm, and intellectual.

“We were married for nearly ten years, and we rarely argued. I’ve never even heard her raise her voice at anyone, and we had no bad blood with relatives or friends. I just don’t understand… who would want to hurt her…”

            

Song Yuhang bypassed this topic. “Tell me about the day your wife went missing.”

Sun Xiangming thought for a moment, recalling the events of that day.

“There was nothing out of the ordinary. She made breakfast in the morning. After eating, I took Yaya to kindergarten, and she got ready for work.”

            

“Who usually takes the child?”

“Me. It’s always been me. She taught the senior graduating class, so she was quite busy.”

Song Yuhang gestured to the recording officer to note this down.

            

“Do you remember what you had for breakfast?”

Sun Xiangming furrowed his brows and pondered. “I think it was millet porridge, baozi, and steamed buns, that sort of thing…”

“When did you realize she was missing?”

            

“That night. That night.” Speaking of his wife’s disappearance, he became visibly agitated.

Song Yuhang’s gaze seemed warm and calm, yet it was locked onto him, refusing to let even the slightest micro-expression or small gesture slip past.

“Tell me the specific details.”

            

“After dinner that night, I was washing the dishes when she said she was heading out.”

Song Yuhang interrupted, “Around what time?”

“I don’t remember exactly. Probably around eight or nine o’clock.”

            

“Why was she going out so late?”

“She said something had happened at school—a few kids got into a fight—and she had to rush over to handle it.”

“And then she never came back?”

            

“Yes.” Sun Xiangming licked his lips, his voice cracking as he hung his head slightly. An investigator nearby handed him a tissue.

“I waited until after ten, and when she still wasn’t back, I called her.”

“Did it go through?”

            

“No.”

Song Yuhang’s brows raised slightly.

“But after I hung up, she sent me a text message telling me not to worry and to go to sleep with Yaya first.”

            

“Where’s the text? Let us see it.”

Sun Xiangming quickly pulled out his phone and navigated to the message logs to show them.

Xiangming, I might be back a bit later. Go to sleep first, don’t wait up for me.

            

A perfectly ordinary instruction, which was likely the female teacher’s very last words to the world.

“My apologies. According to regulations, we need to temporarily keep your phone for a detailed inspection.”

The man gave a bitter smile, the successive blows leaving him looking utterly worn down. “I understand. I’ve probably been listed as a suspect now, haven’t I?”

            

Song Yuhang didn’t reply. It was indeed the case; the police wouldn’t overlook anyone with the potential to commit the crime, and immediate family members were almost always the primary targets of investigation.

“And after that? You didn’t call again to check?” another investigator spoke up.

At this, a wave of pain washed over the man’s face. “No… it’s… it’s my fault… If only I’d called her again, or gone out to look for her, maybe… maybe things wouldn’t have…”

            

“What were you doing at the time?”

Sun Xiangming clutched his hair, his face written with shame and regret. “I… I worked all day and was so tired… plus I had to look after our daughter… and my boss suddenly assigned some last-minute tasks… I was working overtime at home…”

The investigator stopped him before he could hurt himself. “Since things have come to this, please accept my condolences. We will definitely catch the killer.”

            

Sun Xiangming took a moment to compose himself before continuing. “It wasn’t until the school called the next morning saying she hadn’t come to work that I realized something might have happened. I immediately called the police…”

After that, she was filed as a missing person. They collected DNA samples from her close relatives, until her remains were discovered three days later in Lianchi Park.

“Now that she’s gone, how are the child and I supposed to live…” The man covered his face with his hands, barely managing to hold back his sobs in front of the officers.

            

Song Yuhang pulled out a tissue and handed it to him. “My condolences.”

“Thank you.” The man took it and wiped his tears. “Please, you must catch the killer. Give my wife justice.”

Song Yuhang nodded, extracting an evidence bag from her pocket. “Take a look at this. Is it your wife’s?”

            

It was the very ring she had dug out of the mud.

The moment the man saw it, his eyes lit up. “Yes… that’s my wife’s… It’s our wedding ring… She never took it off…”

He instinctively reached out to touch it, but Song Yuhang pulled it back. “I’m sorry, we can’t return it to you just yet. Once the case is closed, all of your wife’s personal effects will be returned to their rightful owner.”

            

She deliberately placed extra emphasis on the words “personal effects,” yet the man showed no unusual emotional reaction. He simply nodded with a vacant, hollow gaze, remaining highly cooperative with the police questioning.

She had seen too many people who had lost their loved ones overnight. Sun Xiangming’s behavior was completely normal.

At least, for the time being.

            

As dawn was about to break, the criminal investigators who had stayed up all night reviewing surveillance footage could no longer keep their eyes open. They slumped onto their desks to take brief naps.

Snoring filled the office.

Song Yuhang opened a cup of instant noodles and sat down facing the whiteboard, which displayed the clues she had just organized.

            

With the deceased Ding Xue at the center, several arrows radiated outward.

Crime of passion, murder for money, or revenge?

Crime of passion: So far, Sun Xiangming had behaved entirely normally, but he couldn’t be ruled out as a suspect. Further investigation was required.

            

Murder for financial gain: This remained the most likely scenario. A killer who stole valuables would highly likely try to pawn them off in second-hand or thrift markets. This also required further digging.

Revenge: Most perpetrators seeking deliberate retribution used fairly brutal methods. Ding Xue’s case was an exception; not only did her body show no signs of physical trauma, but there were also no traces of sexual assault.

This line of inquiry remained doubtful, but they would still need to conduct door-to-door interviews regarding the deceased’s social circle.

            

Right, the autopsy. Perhaps Lin Yan would have new clues on her end.

Song Yuhang wolfed down the rest of her instant noodles in a few bites, planning to head over to the Technical Investigation Division to check on things.

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