Winter came again in November of the following year.
Throughout the year, new cases keep emerging and new cases keep being solved, but the file folder of this case has been lying in my closet, covered with a layer of dust.
At the end of work on November 5th, I received a wechat message. As soon as my eyes touched the short line of text on the screen, I suddenly put down my cup.
"Bang."
The others in the office were startled. "It's okay, it's okay." I chuckled sheepishly.
"What good news?" Everyone looked at me with confusion.
"I'll treat you to dinner later! That dismemberment case before last year, there's a person involved!"
The father of the fetus has been found.
According to the information collected, the suspect was active in the nearby working village.
That was exactly where I had focused on investigating rental housing.
I was very close to him.
But for a year I didn't give up tracking, he gave up hiding.
The man got into a fight with his fellow worker and was called to the police. The police registered the information of several people involved in the case and took his blood sample, which led to the current comparison results.
It's time to sort out that dusty file folder.
At around 11 p.m., I received a call from the captain. The suspect had been arrested and had given a preliminary account of the murder. Identify the scene early tomorrow morning.
I hung up the phone and sat quietly in the dark for a long time. After countless futile flaps, I finally managed to hold the sinking girl's hand.
The first scene was on the ground floor of a rental building, a room of less than 10 square meters. The bedroom is connected to the toilet, and there is only one bed and one low cabinet in the room.
This kind of structure and arrangement is all too familiar to me. During the month I took the initiative to inspect rental houses, I saw no less than 20 such rooms.
Only unexpectedly, because the landlord refused to return the deposit and the man was unwilling to lose the few hundred dollars, he actually stayed at the crime scene for another two months after the murder, just avoiding our round of inspection of the vacated rental house.
Recently, I was initially separated from the murderer by just a 5-meter alley.
I found him.
A year of waiting and suffering has made sense.
The room has been rented by two more people after the murderer, and the site has been cleaned many times, even the bed board has been changed once. Repeated searches have yielded no trace of the case.
There are surveillance cameras at the entrance of the rental house, but after more than a year, there is no valuable information left.
"How did you kill her?" I took off my gloves and asked the thin young man in his early twenties.
He lowered his head and glanced at me from time to time. On that young face, I could see nothing but the weariness of sleep.
"Strangle it, I don't want to either. It was a momentary lapse!" The thin man timidly lowered his head, avoiding my gaze.
The girl was living with him in this small room at that time.
The girl never had a stable job and would ask the man for money from time to time. The two often quarreled over trivial matters.
One day, a girl was caught chatting with another man by a man. They had an argument. The girl slammed the door and left. She was gone for two weeks. When she came back, she told him she was pregnant and asked him to take responsibility, but he didn't believe her.
The pregnancy persisted for two months.
On the night of the incident, the girl brought up her pregnancy again, asked the man to pay and go to the hospital for a check-up, and they quarreled once more. It escalated into a fight. In a fit of rage, the man accidentally strangled his girlfriend to death.
When he said the word "pregnant", I felt it was harsh.
I opened my mouth several times to tell the man in front of me that the girl was really pregnant and the child was yours! But the moment I said it, it turned into an emotionless question: "What about after strangling?"
He ran to the Internet cafe and spent the night there. At noon the next day, when he pushed the door open, his girlfriend's body was still lying there.
The man knew there was surveillance at the door and he couldn't deal with the body directly. He had to use a kitchen knife to cut his girlfriend into several pieces. The next day, while it was dark, he threw the suitcase containing the body into the river.
The girl's limbs and head were still missing.
The man led us to a small river two hundred meters away and signaled us that this was where the body was dumped.
The river was about seven or eight meters wide and no more than two meters deep in the center. It was connected to the big river where the body was found. When the tide goes out and the sluice gates are opened, the current becomes swift, and the suitcase is likely to have drifted into the river along with the current when the gates are opened.
I touched the icy water and said, "Get it from here first!"
The police called two experienced security guards who had been to the pond and borrowed two sets of one-piece rubber suits.
If the remaining parts of the body cannot be found here, the three kilometers of river from where the body was dumped to where the torso was found will have to rely on Marine police and professional divers.
One of the team members put his foot into the water, which gradually rose to his chest.
As soon as he reached the suspect's designated spot, the team member raised his hand to signal something unusual, "Stepped on something!"
What was salvaged was a skull, all white. I quickly put on my gloves and carefully took it.
The slender cheekbones, flat brow bones, small mastoid nodules behind the ears, and the overall relatively small skull - all these features suggest to me that this is a female skull.
It was her.
The moment the skull was salvaged, the weak chain of evidence was complete.
If it weren't for the man's brawl, this scene might have been delayed for many years.
I put the skull aside, and the man, in shackles and with his hands bound by a police rope, slowly crouched down beside the skull.
After a year, this impulsive and violent man finally brought himself, along with the truth, before me.
He slumped to one side as if his bones had been removed, and the two detectives beside him held up his legs with difficulty. That terrifying night from a year ago is now perhaps replaying in his mind.
Then, in the same spot, two lower limbs and one upper limb were found, with the human tissue completely saponified, like a large mass of dark black sludge covering the white bones.
Not a family member, not a boyfriend, but me, the first time I saw her a year later.
We finally met.
Three days later in the afternoon, I carried a kraft paper bag to the second floor to look for Mr. Sheng from the external investigation department. The bag contained the forensic report and the on-site files of the girl's dismemberment case.
He was leaning against the wall of the corridor smoking, and I handed him the file bag to sign. After holding back a few times, I still asked the question that had been weighing on my mind for over a year, "Does this girl have no family here?"
"Yes, I work in the neighboring city, my parents are here, and I have an elder brother." "Sheng Ge took the pen and signed his name carelessly, and replied without looking up.
Through the suspect's confession, Shengge obtained the name of the deceased and, based on the identity information, found the girl's home.
She was not, as we might think, working away from home alone. She not only had parents and elder brothers, but also lived close to the crime scene. The family has been working in the local area for nearly a decade and their financial situation is not bad. They have a small second-hand house and have settled down.
It was a girl from such a family that her parents and brother did not hear any news about her for a year, but there was not the slightest suspicion at all.
It was not until Shengge went over that they learned the girl had been killed for over a year.
When they asked the family about the girl's situation, they said they had only heard that she worked in the town, but they didn't know exactly where she worked or where she lived. They knew she had a boyfriend, but they didn't know his name, let alone his phone number.
The biological daughter seems to be a non-existent, invisible person.
I don't know how many secrets lie behind this family.
Shengge told me that when he told the family that the body needed to be taken back for their own disposal, what they were most worried about was whether they would have to pay the funeral home for storage. If they do, they won't come to deal with the body.
"They still want the murderer to pay for it," said Shengge, looking gloomy as he blew a smoke ring.
He pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket. "Here, you sign this."
It was the girl's death certificate.
When you speak up for the deceased, what the closest people by blood care about is whether they can make a fortune in the end.
I really wanted to swear a few words, but it was just a sigh on the tip of my tongue. Behind every corpse, there is at least a cold and ironic world. Another similar girl's body remains in the funeral home, without a word.
Shengge leaned against the wall, his gloomy expression veiled by a curling cigarette.
I had many chances to see what the girl looked like, as long as I entered her information into the police system.
But I knew that what she needed was the truth, not sympathy.
Taking the girl's death certificate, I neatly wrote five words in the cause of death column - mechanical asphyxia. I had to sign hundreds of copies of this paper a year, but this time I sincerely hoped that the name of the next one would belong to another silent corpse.
A beam of winter sunlight hit the glass of a building not far away and then reflected back. I squinted my eyes and looked out through the glass, and all I saw was golden.
To this day, I still don't know what the girl looks like.
After finishing this case, Liu Wenjie sighed to me, "Only after becoming a forensic doctor did I realize that a corpse is not terrifying; it's the living that is."
This kind of incident happened more than once in his forensic career.
He even summed up the experience that work-related injuries are easy to handle, traffic accidents are easy to handle as long as there is compensation. But if you come across a dead person who has no compensation, the family may not even show up and just let you handle it as you please. "But if you really dare to deal with it, they'll come knocking."
The profession of a forensic doctor is burdened with pressures that are invisible to ordinary people.
In the past, when technology was not advanced, Liu Wenjie dealt with 100 corpses and could only give an account to 90 victims in the end. The remaining 10 unsolved cases are the price forensic experts have to bear.
The longer one has been working and the more cases they have on hand, the more they can't get over this hurdle.
Many times, when Liu Wenjie faced these nameless corpses, a sentence would pop up in his mind: "If I stop now, no one will blame me, will they?"
But he didn't. Every sleepless night, he would click on the folder of the deceased. Because he knew: "If I don't take care of it, no one will take care of it."
(End of this article)