Four days after discovering the headless female body, I saw a missing person notice posted at the entrance of my own community for the dismemberment case:
Female, 20-25 years old, 155-160cm tall, of medium build, wearing a dark blue long-sleeved coat.
No photo of the deceased's face.
A photo of the clothes was taken by a plastic model wearing the deceased's clothes, with the tear in the clothes photoshopped, and a photo of the solitary suitcase was attached at the end.
Four days passed and we still had no idea who she was.
Red signs were hung all over the streets and lanes. Our search for missing persons has expanded to ten days before and after the incident, and our investigation has also expanded from the local area to cities upstream of the river.
None of them matched.
For many days, every night at 11 o 'clock, the conference room was filled with smoke as detectives who had finished their investigations gathered for a meeting. There are only a few such heinous dismemberment cases in a year, and they keep scrutinizing the details with me over and over again.
As long as the case is not solved, such meetings cannot stop.
One time passing by the Changsha Fa in the corridor, I couldn't help but count. In such a small place, there were as many as six foreign detective men crammed together to catch up on sleep.
No one reported the case, and no one showed up.
The headless female corpse in the dissection room was still there, seemingly stubbornly waiting for her head and limbs, waiting for us to tell the truth.
After a long argument, we finally returned to the starting point, to the scene.
The bridge that intercepted the female body was a main road that connected several prefecture-level cities around it and was not exactly the same as where the river passed.
A voice of doubt began to take over: Could the black suitcase have been dropped from the bridge?
If it's a road dump, there are often similar cars involved. Under this train of thought, the place where the body is found may be far from the first crime scene. If that's the case, we'll have to expand the scope of our investigation, and the difficulty can be imagined.
Sometimes, casting a wide net is also part of the case-handling process, aiming to offer a glimmer of hope to these cases that are in a difficult situation.
But I don't see it that way.
"What do you think of the first scene?" One day, the captain suddenly called me to the office.
"I still think the murderer dumped the body by the river nearby."
My judgment was based on the girl's suitcase and clothes, which I had examined no less than six times and were very familiar with, and the materials and brands were cheap.
I suspect that both the victim and the murderer were less well-off migrant workers who had few large vehicles.
Other means of transport, whether motorcycles or bicycles, carrying a body out for a long time, no murderer would be so foolish as to do so.
I still insist that the focus of the investigation should be on a few migrant worker villages within two or three kilometers.
A wrong judgment will consume the already limited manpower and energy, and is more likely to be fruitless. Should the screening circle be enlarged or reduced? Now we are at this crossroads.
"How about two boxes to experiment with?" I asked the captain.
A week later, I came to the bridge with my colleagues from the technical team.
We had two suitcases in our hands. There were nearly 40 pounds of padding inside, as heavy as the body of the headless female corpse.
The riverbank was grey in winter, and there was not a single person in sight on the several-hundred-meter embankment, with muddy waves rising in the water.
I looked at the bridge from the place where the female body was retrieved.
The phone rang.
This is the agreed signal: ready.
Suddenly, a square-shaped black shadow dropped rapidly from the bridge. "Bang --", a loud bang.
As if a small bomb had been detonated, the box burst open as soon as it touched the water, splashing water high, and the loud noise pierced through the noisy traffic and went straight into my ears.
By the time it was pulled out, all the zippers and seams of the box had been torn open. The force was strong.
We dropped another box. The result was the same.
This means that if the murderer had thrown the body from the bridge, the box would have been so severely damaged.
The suitcase containing the headless female body was intact. Even in a relatively sealed state when it was discovered, it only surfaced after the body had decomposed later.
It is certain that the dumping site was not on the bridge but probably on the upstream riverbank, which should not have been far away either.
The train of thought I insisted on became the direction for solving the case.
The rental houses in several neighboring villages have become the focus of the investigation, where many migrant workers live.
If the first scene of the crime is a rental property, the murderer is likely to clear out and vacate immediately. With the New Year just around the corner, no one would suspect anything if the murderer quit his job and went back to his hometown or never came back. Then we'll be looking for a needle in a haystack.
The real culprit is still at large, and the girl remains nameless. Then the case would have sunk forever.
I don't have much time left.
On impulse, I went with my colleagues to investigate the rental houses in the nearby villages.
One by one, there was no blue fluorescence in sight - the typical reaction of luminol reagent to bloodstains.
I put down the spray bottle in my hand and stood up.
The low blood pressure caused by prolonged squatting made me dizzy, and the room was pitch-dark except for the flashing lights of the body camera.
"Turn on the light."
The colleague beside him helplessly put down the camera and turned on the lights in the rental rooms. "How many?"
"Twenty-two." I looked back at the record book, which contained all the rental houses we had inspected over the past month.
"Could it not be these villages? Lost by car? You think, if the head and limbs are not found, what if it really drifted from a faraway place?" Colleagues have long lost faith in this seemingly aimless search.
The New Year is just a week away, and more and more rental houses have become available, but the first scene still hasn't been found.
I'm not an investigator, nor an intelligence officer. I can't see the video surveillance, nor can I analyze the data. There are other bodies waiting to be examined every day. It seems that all I can do for this headless girl has come to an end.
I didn't know at the time that it was the closest I had ever been to the murderer.
Could it be the next one?
Above my head, the light from the rental room shone on my face, cold and pale, reminding me of the girl on the dissection table.
The cold light shone on the dissection table, and the headless female corpse was as quiet as ever.
I continued imagining her face, continued dissecting her torso, and continued piecing together possible scenarios of the incident.
I made a little effort to break through the sides of her chest. Bulging lungs were exposed.
Gently twirling the edges of the lobes, tiny bubbles spread out, and there is some dark bruising between the lobes. This suggests that I have severe emphysema in my lungs.
Is it asphyxiation?
I cut open the pericardium, and the surface of the left ventricle was also dotted with several pinpoint-like bleeding spots.
Under the mask, my tightly pursed lips loosened. Whether there is a bleeding point in the heart is a crucial step in determining if there is suffocation.
A scene flashed through my mind