Murder in Dragon City Read online

  I looked up, realized the boss was staring at me, and shook my head dumbly.

  Chen gestured to a book on the shelf behind him and said, “Time to educate yourself, man. In every part of the human body, the muscle fibers’ thickness and direction are different. We have to figure out which body parts this tissue belongs to.”

  I had a sudden realization but wasn’t confident, so I started skimming through the book.

  Earlier, my sense of smell had been paralyzed by the sheer heinousness of the factory. Now it came back, keen as ever, as the stench of the twenty-one “babies” filled the small lab. The visual and olfactory stimuli were enough to make even this not-so-rookie forensic scientist’s stomach turn.

  “Coarse muscle fiber, directed obliquely, each layer drawn tight.” I looked back and forth between the tissue samples and the book. “These parts without bones all come from the buttocks.”

  “Not bad. You figured it out fast,” the boss said, pleased. “And the ones with bones are either fingers or toes.” He paused and sighed. “Unfortunately, I didn’t find any distinguishing features.”

  At six o’clock that morning, a call came in. The boss told me he’d been summoned to a national coordination meeting about a series of robberies and murders. He’d be gone for a while, so he was entrusting me with the case.

  “Not even a case this awful can keep you here?” I said.

  He chuckled. “The case they called me in on is even worse.”

  “Are you sure I can handle all this on my own?” I asked.

  “Go to the airport right now,” he said. “Someone is coming to help you, and you need to pick them up.”

  “The airport?”

  “I gotta go. Remember the flight number CZ9876. When you get there, you’ll know.”

  How strange, I thought. Why keep me in suspense? I called Lin Tao. We hurried to put on our uniforms, then headed out to pick up our mystery helper.

  It was still early, so there weren’t many people waiting at the airport. Lin Tao and I stood around, feeling foolish in our starched uniforms as we expectantly watched everyone who came out. We got a lot of looks ourselves—well, mostly Lin Tao. I’ve long since gotten used to standing next to a better-looking guy.

  “So, who do you think it could be?” I asked.

  Lin Tao suddenly stiffened.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you.” I poked him with my elbow. Lin Tao still didn’t answer, so I followed his gaze.

  In the distance was a beautiful woman, waist-length hair, gold sunglasses, black silk shirt, graceful figure, pushing a wheelchair in which sat a white-haired elderly man. They were coming right toward us.

  “You getting soft in your old age? I don’t remember you paying attention to pretty girls before,” I teased. “So there are girls who can get your attention.”

  “She’s so hot.” Lin Tao sighed.

  “Ha, finally found your type? Want me to help you get her number?”

  A short but very muscular, flat-headed man suddenly pushed Lin Tao. “What do you think you’re looking at?”

  Lin Tao’s eyes widened in anger. “Get your hands off me!”

  A tall, skinny guy helped me push the two men apart before things could escalate. I got a good look at the flat-headed guy’s face and was suddenly overjoyed. “It’s you!”

  His rage dissipated, and I gave him a hug.

  His name was Hua Long, and the tall guy with him was Bao Zhan. The beautiful woman was Su Mei, and that was Professor Liang in the wheelchair. The four were federal Ministry of Public Security special investigators, famous for cracking brutal, high-profile murder cases. I’d had the honor of working with them once during my year with North Central.

  “Qin, a pleasure. Your boss is afraid this case might be a bit much for you to manage alone,” Professor Liang said, smiling. “It sounds pretty vile.”

  “I’m so happy to see you all again.” I shook their hands exuberantly.

  “Yeah, man, you too,” Hua Long said, then pointed at Lin Tao. “Just make sure this guy doesn’t try anything with Su Mei.”

  I laughed, shepherded everyone to the van, and drove us back to the station for a task force meeting.

  “All twenty-one tissue samples were human, female, and from the same person,” Lab Director Zheng reported.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Little Qin,” Professor Liang said, “remember in North Central when I had you arrange all those parts into a body?”

  “I remember. But it won’t work here. These pieces are too deformed to be spliced together.”

  Liang said, “That’s okay. I just need to know which parts of the person they came from.”

  Great minds really do think alike.

  “The boss and I worked on that yesterday,” I exclaimed. “They’re all from the buttocks, fingers, and toes.”

  “Good. And next I need to know where the frying oil came from,” Liang said, rubbing the stubble on his chin.

  The special team had clearly done its homework on the plane.

  Our investigators were a little nervous when they first saw the famous foursome. The detective in charge cleared his throat and said, “Hello, gentlemen and, uh, lady. According to our colleagues at the sheriff’s department, all the oil in those barrels came from twenty-eight restaurants on Northeastern Street in the Tiancang neighborhood. I have men checking out each one as we speak.”

  Liang shook his head and picked up some photos from the table. They were detailed shots I’d taken of the specimens.

  “Little Qin,” he said, “can you tell me what this black substance adhering to these specimens is?”

  I frowned and looked. “Oh, I noticed that too and checked it out with a microscope. It’s silt.”

  “And how do you imagine the tissue would get stained with mud?” Liang quizzed me.

  The detective cut in. “Dirty kitchens, right?”

  Liang shook his head. “If dirt got in there through negligence, its appearance would be random. But it’s on seven or eight of the samples. It wasn’t by chance but by default.”

  The detective looked puzzled.

  I closed my eyes tightly for a moment, then said, “I know what you’re getting at.”

  Liang looked at me with interest. “Oh yeah? Out with it, then.”

  “Gutter oil, apart from coming from restaurants . . . Well, some particularly unscrupulous criminals might also skim grease off the upper layer of residential sewage and mix it with the rest of the slop.”

  Liang nodded slightly. “Not bad, Qin. These body parts came from the sewer.”

  “The sewer? How disgusting,” the detective said with a frown. “These gutter-oil people should hang.”

  “We all know what we have to do next, right?” Liang said. “Get the suspects to tell us which part of the sewer they skimmed the oil from. That’s where we’ll find more body parts.”

  “Right,” I said. “So far we haven’t found any distinguishing characteristics. No clues as to where the corpse came from.”

  “But,” the detective interjected, “how are our officers going to find such tiny body parts in the sewers?”

  Liang smiled and said, “That’s why I asked Little Qin which parts of the body these came from. I think we’ll find some useful clues rather quickly.”

  3

  In a flash, I understood. “Right, this tissue was all cut off the buttocks.”

  The detective looked confused. “So?”

  Bao Zhan jumped in. “In our last case, not a single part of the pelvis was damaged.”

  I nodded in agreement. “The pelvis consists of the sacrum and both parts of the ilium—really dense bones. Breaking it up is virtually impossible.”

  Professor Liang went on. “And the pelvis is one of the most important anatomical structures for forensics. Right, Little Qin?”

  I nodded. “As soon as we hear back from the interrogators, we can start searching the sewers.”

  The police are always searching sewers on TV, but
I’d never done it myself. The claustrophobic space and echoing voices seemed like they’d be pretty exciting.

  But the interrogations were a letdown. None of the suspects was able to tell us exactly where they got the sewer oil.

  With all of us feeling helpless, Su Mei said, “Someone get me a map of all the underground pipelines in the vicinity of the factory where these crooks operated. I can put together a computer simulation of all the currents to find the most likely location of the body.”

  Lin Tao jumped up and said, “I’m on it.”

  Half an hour later, Su Mei had a strange diagram on her computer screen with a red dot the size of a soybean flashing in the center.

  “Right here,” she said. “Give it a shot.”

  Once again, Lin Tao was the first to jump up. “I’ll go get the equipment.”

  At the mouth of an apartment complex’s sewer line, I suddenly wasn’t feeling so adventurous. I shone my flashlight down into the hole. “It’s too dark. Maybe we should come back in the morning?”

  “It’s just as dark down there during the day,” Liang said, seeing right through me. “I’ll give you men two hours.”

  Hua Long patted my shoulder, changed into tall rubber boots, and took the lead down the ladder. I glanced at the site survey team. “Let’s get started, then.”

  As it turned out, the sewers weren’t as terrifying as I’d feared. Under the light of several officers’ headlamps, it was practically like daytime. The worst part was that the ceilings were so low that we had to squat down and half crawl along. A suffocating stench blew in our faces.

  “Good Lord,” I said. “I’m a forensic scientist, and even I can’t stand the smell down here. Must be even worse for you guys, huh?”

  The survey staff nodded, stone-faced.

  Bao Zhan sniffed in several directions and pointed behind us. “That way.”

  I beamed. “Everyone says your nose is better than a police dog’s! Can you really pick out the smell of a rotting body in this place?”

  Bao Zhan just pushed me and said, “Screw you. You’re the police dog.”

  We struggled forward for half an hour, and my legs got so stiff, they felt like lead.

  Finally, Bao Zhan stopped and said, “Should be right around here. Time to dig.”

  The staff pulled small shovels from their packs and set to work, their pouring sweat adding to the sewer’s stench.

  After another half hour, Lin Tao shouted, “Never doubt Brother Bao’s nose! We hit something.”

  Lin Tao handed me his find, and I used a glove to wipe the sludge from the surface. It was a femur. I held it to the side of my pants for comparison. “This woman . . . has some seriously long legs.”

  Bao Zhan turned and kept excavating. “We have to find more bones, especially the pelvis.”

  Another hour of work and we did find a female pelvis, plus over a dozen more bones.

  “Okay, I’m calling it,” Bao Zhan declared. “If we keep digging, this hole is going to be our grave too. Time to head back and regroup.”

  The incomplete skeleton lay on the dissection bed.

  I folded my arms across my medical jumpsuit and squinted at the assembled bones. “This is the only way they can be put together, so why do I keep feeling something isn’t quite right?”

  “Each body is different, of course,” Professor Liang replied. “Can you explain what seems wrong to you?”

  I frowned and said, “Besides the two leg bones’ being too long and too thick, some of the ribs don’t quite line up.”

  The phone rang, and Lin Tao took the call.

  “Investigators checked the local resident records for someone matching the age and height that you determined from the bones,” he reported. “And there just aren’t any twenty-five-year-old women around here who are five foot nine.”

  “Could she be a migrant worker?” Professor Liang said.

  “Hang on—there is a twenty-five-year-old housewife in the neighborhood named Lian Qianqian,” Lin Tao continued. “She usually sits outside with the old ladies, eating sunflower seeds, but no one has seen her for a couple weeks.”

  “Is she tall?” I asked.

  “Under five three,” Lin Tao said.

  “That’s kind of a big discrepancy,” I said, frowning.

  “A housewife?” Liang asked. “What’s her husband do?”

  “He’s a restaurant manager.”

  “Restaurant?” Liang’s eyes lit up. “Fried corpse, restaurant boss . . .”

  “And there’s more,” Lin Tao continued. “The husband resigned two weeks ago, and he’s missing too.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Liang said, excited. “Get a search warrant. Go check the house!”

  I said, “But what about the height problem?”

  Liang called Su Mei, asking her to come push his wheelchair, and said to me, “Well, we don’t have complete bones, right? Maybe what we’ve got is misleading somehow.”

  Baffled, I stared at the bones, pulled out the tape measure, and checked one more time. “They may be incomplete, but there’s no way this person was five foot three.”

  After the skeleton was transferred to the DNA testing room, Lin Tao and I tagged along to Lian Qianqian’s doorstep with Hua Long and a group of detectives.

  Bao Zhan sniffed. “Nice work, guys. I’m picking up some blood already.”

  “Really?” Just as I leaned up against the iron door to see if I could smell anything, Hua Long kicked it open with a loud bang.

  “What are you waiting for?” he said, stepping into the residence, gun drawn.

  Seeing the shock on my face, Lin Tao said quietly, “This guy’s a piece of work.”

  With all the curtains drawn, the three-bedroom apartment was as dark as the underworld, and the smell of blood was unmistakable, even to me. What had been a new, tastefully decorated home now looked like a horrible crime scene. The front hall and main room were covered with drop-shaped bloodstains.

  After searching, Hua Long holstered his gun. “Nobody.”

  Lin Tao began photographing the scene. I walked around, studying the blood patterns. After a few minutes, I said, “The drops seem to have fallen after the blood was diluted. They came from the bathroom, then went through the living room, through the corridor, and on to the kitchen.”

  “Diluted blood?” Hua Long asked, squatting next to me.

  I nodded and said, “It didn’t come directly from the veins. It mixed with water on the skin; then, as the body moved, it dripped off.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  I led Hua Long to the bathroom. “Look—the walls of the bathtub have these streamlike bloodstains. My hypothesis is that the murderer dismembered the body in the tub, then carried the parts to the kitchen.”

  “To fry them?” Hua Long’s brow wrinkled for a second.

  I nodded and went into the cramped kitchen. The wok on the stove was half-filled with a liquid the color of soy sauce, a white crust starting to form on the surface. The smell was ghastly.

  I picked up a spoon and stirred the wok a little. The liquid felt very viscous and became clearer closer to the bottom where there was some solid matter—probably muscle fibers.

  I raised my elbow and used my sleeve to rub my stinging nose. “This is where the corpse was fried.”

  “So some of the body parts got fried, others didn’t, but then they all got thrown into the sewer,” Big Bao said.

  I nodded and asked Lin Tao, “Find any fingerprints?”

  Lin Tao shook his head. “I looked in some key places, but there are only clear markings like from gloves.”

  “What’s that mean?” Hua Long asked.

  Lin Tao glared at Hua Long for a second and said sharply, “It means the murderer was wearing gloves for the duration of the homicide, dismemberment, and frying.”

  “So what?” Hua Long said. “Typical wife-killing and dismemberment case! Let’s get an arrest warrant for this guy.”

  “Maybe,” I said, frowning,
“but if you’re killing your own wife in your own house, do you wear gloves?”

  Lin Tao nodded in agreement.

  “Oh,” Hua Long replied, “I see what you mean.”

  Big Bao, Lin Tao, and I carefully extracted every possible sample from the oil and prepared them to be taken for DNA testing, hoping for a surprise discovery.

  There was a knock on the door. It was the director of the local police station. At our request, he wore a hat, gloves, and shoe covers into the scene. The stench nearly made him retch. Steadying himself, he said, “Gentlemen, the preliminary investigation into Lian Qianqian is taking shape.”

  We all stopped what we were doing and gathered around to listen.

  Lian Qianqian, he told us, had moved to the city from a far-off village to work as a pedicurist. Xia Hong, the restaurant manager, took an interest in the pretty young woman. They’d dated for two years and gotten married six months ago—much like my wife and me, I reflected.

  Xia Hong had grown up an orphan, but he’d used his smarts, charm, and people skills to become a middle manager in the competitive hospitality industry in less than three years. But Xia Hong’s boss thought him timid, so he had trouble advancing.

  The couple didn’t have any family or close friends in the city. The cops had questioned the neighbors, but they all said there were no unusual signs before the pair’s disappearance.

  “Nothing unusual?” I said. “How about Xia quitting two weeks ago? Based on the blood degradation, I’d estimate the victim also died about two weeks ago. Maybe this Xia Hong is our man.”

  “Didn’t you just say if you’re killing someone in your own house, there’s no need to wear gloves?” Hua Long asked.

  I ignored him and gestured for the station director to finish his story.

  “Apparently, another hotel conglomerate was trying to poach Xia Hong. He’d just accepted the offer and given his old company three weeks’ notice. He finished up there two weeks ago and was preparing for the new position.”

  I nodded. “So a number of factors suggest Xia Hong might not be the murderer, but what kind of murderer would calmly fry a corpse in Xia’s house, and where the hell did Xia go?”