Murder in Dragon City Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Qin Ming

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Alex Woodend

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as (The Eleventh Finger) by Qin Ming in China in 2014. Translated from Chinese by Alex Woodend. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503939592

  ISBN-10: 1503939596

  Cover design by David Drummond

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

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  64

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  1

  A dozen blue-and-white police cars sat in front of an abandoned factory, their flashing sirens and bright headlights making the secluded lot look like a busy nighttime market.

  Inside, about ten people had their heads on the fetid ground, and as many heavily armed cops stood nearby. Flies swarmed around, and sewage ran openly.

  The police captain walked to a rusty iron drum and banged his baton against its side.

  Peng-peng.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Wrinkling his brow, the captain peered into the drum and retched twice at the smell. “You let people eat this? It isn’t fit for pigs!”

  “It’s just been used a little by restaurants. It’d never find its way into your mouth if you didn’t go out to dinner so often,” a skinny man blurted out from his position on the floor.

  “What’s that?” The captain glared at him. “How would I know if the cafeteria at work uses gutter oil?”

  Just the day before, the provincial capital, Dragon City, had launched a campaign with a punchy name: “Fight the Four Wrongs; Right the Four Rights.” The police had already uncovered this black market operation that was recycling used cooking oil into disgusting, poisonous slop. Now they were here to put a stop to this evil.

  The captain picked up a ladle and scooped up the swill, lifted it away from the barrel, then poured it slowly back in. “Look at this! Edible? The only word for this is ‘horrific.’”

  A yellow film clung to the bottom of the spoon. The captain examined it with growing dread. Then he turned around and asked the environmental protection officer next to him, “Have you ever seen a chicken toe this big?”

  I was already a well-regarded forensic scientist when, in order to improve my investigation skills, I was sent for a year of training with the North Central District Squadron. Police life was interesting sometimes, but it could also get tedious—especially because it meant I barely got to see my new wife, Ling Dang. The squadron spent most of the year mediating civil disputes, arresting car-battery thieves, and chasing purse snatchers.

  We couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry at some of the stuff we ran into. Like one time, a woman and her husband were fighting, and he hit her. In a rage, she came to report it, but we told her it wasn’t under our jurisdiction. She said, “If domestic violence isn’t your jurisdiction, whose is it? My book club’s?” Another time, a man said his wife had been abducted. After several days of hard work, we realized that the so-called wife had long been married to another man.

  My real passion was using my talent for forensic science to help solve murders. The county usually had only a few such cases each year, and most were solved quickly. I was lucky enough that, as soon as I was done with the training assignment, North Central got a sensational murder case that shook up the whole Ministry of Public Security, the federal agency that oversees China’s police forces, before it was eventually, and thankfully, solved.

  The night that case broke, I’d only just returned to my old department, and I was feeling both happy and out of place. Happy because I could again focus on the forensics of difficult cases without getting caught up in trivialities. And out of place because I’d gotten used to the camaraderie and adrenaline rush of police work, to pulling all-nighters, and chasing criminals. My body wasn’t used to normal life anymore.

  As I tossed and turned in bed, the phone rang. Ling Dang, sat up, startled, and said, “Who could be calling at this hour? I’m not used to the phone ringing in the middle of the night anymore!”

  I grabbed for the receiver, my heart racing with excitement. “Hello? . . . Yes, Boss. No, no problem at all. I was awake anyway. I’ll be right there!”

  “What’s going on? What’s the rush?” I asked as I climbed into the car.

  Chen, head of the forensic department and my boss, looked me over and laughed. “I want to know why you’re still up at this hour. You and your little lady still in the honeymoon phase?”

  I stared at him for a second, then changed the subject. “How many dead?”

  “Well,” he said solemnly, “it seems the public security bureau found a chicken toe.”

  “A chicken toe?” I was confused.

  “That’s right,” Chen said. “Deep-fried.”

  No matter how many questions I asked, Chen just smiled and kept quiet. The car bounced along, and we soon arrived at the factory, way out on the edge of the city.

  “Quite a display,” I said.

  On TV, they always show a whole fleet of police cars roaring to the scene, sirens wailing. But that’s really just the director’s imagination. If the police announced their arrival with that much commotion, the criminals would always flee the scene and no one would ever be arrested. Our general rule was to not cause a disturbance, so we’d always sneak in and out. Large-scale arrests like this were pretty rare.

  We grabbed our kits and jumped out. Suddenly, a guy with little glasses popped up, TV station microphone in hand. “Are you with forensics? Cracking down on gutter oil needs a whole forensic team now?”

  I backed up, startled by the questions and the microphone shoved in my face.

  Chen cut him off. “Hey, buddy, what are you trying to do? Stuff that thing down his throat?”

  The reporter faltered in embarrassment, and we took advantage of the opportunity to slip under the caution tape.

  Inside the factory, the spec
ial police team was already preparing the suspects to be driven to the station for booking. Two civil officers seemed to be in charge. They squatted with their heads together over a bowl on the ground, talking intently. Their uniforms indicated that one was a first-class superintendent, the other a second-class inspector.

  “Could be a fingerprint, huh?” the superintendent said.

  “Yeah.” The inspector nodded. “This really white part may be a mark left by a fingernail coming off.”

  “So maybe it’s just a chicken toe?” the superintendent said.

  “Probably from a lou mei restaurant,” the inspector said. “But, then again, it just seems a little too wide.”

  Suddenly, the two men spotted Chen and me standing right behind them, and they nearly fell over. “Jesus Christ, are you guys part cat or something? What the hell do you want?”

  The boss gave a slight smile and looked them straight in the eye.

  The two policemen scrambled to their feet and saluted. “Hello, Director Chen. Heard so much about you. An honor to finally meet you, sir.”

  “This is Medical Examiner Qin,” Chen said, gesturing to me. “And the man headed over is Lin Tao from trace detection.”

  We all shook hands.

  “Okay, so bring us up to speed,” the boss said.

  “Oh, our unit just broke up a gutter-oil gang.” The first-class superintendent pointed to the second-class inspector next to him and said, “But then our captain spotted something strange in the slop bucket.”

  Chen pulled his pant legs up a little and crouched next to the bowl with an oily yellow thing in it. “This little guy here?”

  “Yessir. We’re trying to figure out if it’s a human finger or a chicken toe,” the first-class superintendent said with a shy smile.

  “Well, maybe the professionals should take a look, huh?” I muttered.

  “Damn right,” the boss said. “If just anyone could figure it out, why even have forensic scientists?”

  I crouched down and squinted at the thing in the bowl.

  It was a yellow cylinder, and I stuck out my finger for comparison. The thing was somewhat smaller. Even though it showed clear signs of being fried, I could still make out a faint grain. And there were two distinct bends that did look like joints.

  “Huh, hard to say. It seems too thin and short to be a finger, but too thick to be a chicken toe.”

  Chen said, “If someone were to fry a woman’s body, her finger could very well contract to this size.”

  I felt my scalp tighten. “Fry . . . fry a body?”

  Boss took no notice of my frightened expression. “So tell me, Qin, how can we determine whether this is a human finger?”

  I froze for a moment. Only when Chen turned and stared at me did I recover. “Huh? Oh, a DNA test, right?”

  “Oh!” the two policemen exclaimed.

  “Oh what?” Chen said, glaring at them a second. He turned back to me and said, “DNA? Is that really the best you can manage?”

  My cheeks flushed with embarrassment. In school, I’d focused on forensic pathology—and neglected less exciting areas like forensic anthropology.

  I quickly ran through my limited knowledge of species determination but didn’t come up with anything. I shyly shook my head.

  The boss grunted with disappointment. “Read up a little more in your spare time. Maybe you think that fundamentals aren’t important, but when the critical moment comes, you need all your tools.”

  Chen put on gloves, opened his kit, and took out two pairs of hemostatic forceps. He gave me one, then took out a surgical knife handle and fitted on the blade.

  He deftly sliced into the object, revealing muscle and ligaments. Separating the soft tissue required a lot of finesse, patience, and skill with the knife, and it took him, with all his experience, a full half hour to extract the bone.

  “Whew . . .” The boss took a deep breath, wiping sweat from his brow. “Well, your ‘Fight the Four Wrongs; Right the Four Rights’ campaign seems to have uncovered a brutal murder!”

  “You mean . . . ,” the police captain said, trying not to gag. “It’s a finger?”

  Chen nodded. “The phalanges are some of the more distinctly shaped human bones. When humans were evolving, their shafts grew shorter, but the articular surface stayed relatively large so the hand could be more flexible. This is definitely a standard human finger.”

  I used forceps to clasp the soft tissue he’d removed—it was very hard.

  “I see now,” I said. “The soft-tissue water loss was extreme, which caused severe contracture, making it much smaller than a normal finger.”

  The boss and I exchanged a somber look. Frying a corpse was a rare, extraordinarily inhumane form of mutilation. The horrifying case would surely make headlines in all the papers and cause a public uproar. We had to solve it as fast as possible.

  Ten minutes later, all the suspects had been escorted out, but dozens more police were arriving on-site.

  Several forensic personnel wearing colored goggles searched for trace evidence. Uniformed officers rummaged through boxes in a corner. The boss stood in the middle of the room, looking around in all directions, hands on hips. “We’ve got our work cut out for us, men.”

  His sonorous voice reverberated through the building. Everyone stopped what they were doing.

  Chen swallowed hard and said, “It’s not going to be easy. Now we have to take these dozen slop barrels and filter out all the dregs.”

  The officers looked pained. Working in this space that stank to high heaven was hard enough without having to sift all the revolting scum from the stinking swill buckets. It would probably be the most disgusting thing they’d ever done.

  Just then, Big Bao, my forensic intern, bolted in, a huge bundle in his arms.

  “Boss, I got the stuff you wanted,” Big Bao said to Chen, panting. “It took me quite a while kicking the door to wake up that medical supply store owner.”

  The boss unwrapped the bundle. Inside were several dozen white coats. He picked one up and took the lead by putting it on. He laughed and said, “A little present so your wives don’t make you sleep outside when you get home.”

  2

  And so the repulsive work began. We assigned each barrel a number, then divided ourselves into teams of three. The first person scooped out the slop, the second held a sieve, and the third scanned for possible human remains. The boss moved among the various groups, offering forensic guidance as needed.

  With the slop stirred up, the stench became even more intense. It passed through the lab coats and adhered firmly to our clothes. Some of the men couldn’t take it, and vomited again and again. But they pressed on.

  Before we knew it, three hours had passed and all the sludge had been sifted. Only three teams had found tissue samples. There were twenty-one chunks, together making a pile roughly the size of a cell phone. Some had bones and were clearly identifiable as human. Others were just fat and muscle deformed by frying. Only DNA testing could confirm them as human.

  I took off my white coat and sniffed my body. My sense of smell was deadened by then, but I was pretty sure the stink went right through me.

  One detective moaned, “Oh man, we’re going to have to burn these clothes. Even then, our families aren’t going to let us into the house!”

  “No one is headed home just yet, I’m afraid,” the boss said. “All the tissue of interest was found in barrels one and thirteen, which means the body parts must have been discarded together. Forensics’ next task is to create DNA profiles, and the detectives’ task is to get the suspects to tell them where those two barrels came from.”

  The detective looked pained. “Tracking the origin of a particular barrel of rancid oil? That sounds impossible.”

  The boss smiled a little and said, “Depends how good a detective you are.”

  I just shook my head in horror. “Frying a corpse, how evil do you have to be?”

  Chen thought a moment. “Maybe not that evil. M
utilation is most common in crimes committed by acquaintances—enemies. But lots of mutilation cases aren’t necessarily that simple.”

  “Not that simple? It’s simple to meet someone on the street, dismember them, and then methodically fry the body? What kind of mind-set is that?”

  Chen waved me off, saying, “An abnormal one, sure. But let’s not speculate too much at this point. We have to focus on using the remains to identify the victims. Only then can we hope to take a step toward breaking this case.”

  I nodded.

  The boss turned to the exhausted team. “The hard work isn’t done, brothers. When this case hits the papers in a few hours, it’ll cause an uproar. So let’s push through now to get a better grasp of the facts before reporters start getting in the way. We need all hands on deck.”

  We were carrying twenty-one evidence bags into the station when the DNA lab director, Ms. Zheng Hongzheng, walked in.

  “What’s so urgent?” she asked.

  “We caught a real doozy of a case, Zheng,” Chen said, feigning calm. “All the evidence is deep-fried. Can you sequence it?”

  Zheng froze for a moment. “Deep-fried?”

  The boss nodded.

  Zheng lit up, suddenly wide-awake despite the early hour. “I remember reading something about a case like that—I’ll find it. Leave it to me. I’ll have the results for you by tomorrow morning. But what’s that god-awful smell?” She waved her hand in front of her nose.

  “Boss, can we go home to shower and sleep while we wait for the results?” I sniffed my pungent sleeve again.

  “You wish!” Chen shouted before turning to Zheng again. “These samples are precious babies, so I can’t hand them over just yet. I’ll give you an hour to scan the literature, research some methods, do some prep. Then I’ll give them to you.”

  “Precious babies?” Zheng asked, both of us looking at him in confusion.

  “Don’t worry about it—just do as I say.”

  Chen grabbed me, and we walked to the forensic pathology lab. He threw a sterile drop cloth over the lab bench, then lined up the tissue pieces on top of it and passed me a scalpel.

  “Okay, Qin. First, we’re going to strip fried tissue off the surface and try to separate it from the unaffected epidermal or dermal tissue. My hunch is that there are still some distinguishing features in there. Second, do you know what else these babies can still show us?”