While I was rescuing the victim, the suspect Chen Da was subdued by Xiaotao and the guards and they tried to interrogate him. I walked towards them and heard a guard explaining nervously, “I just kicked him a little… I didn’t even use that much strength, I swear!”
“Kicked him a little my ass!” cursed Xiaotao. “You’re going to the police station with me later!”
I asked her what happened exactly. It turned out that after subduing Chen Da, they couldn’t get him to say a single word. One of the guards lost their temper and kicked Chen Da in the stomach, which caused him to fall to the ground. When they checked, they found that he’d already stopped breathing.
I touched Chen Da’s carotid artery and confirmed that he was indeed dead. But the feel of his skin unnerved me. it felt dry and stiff, just like a corpse. I put my ears against his chest and listened. I was taken aback. I checked it again and again, then tried moving his joints.
At last, I sighed and announced, “This is a dead man!”
“Yeah,” said Xiaotao. “We know.”
“No, I mean…”
I looked around at the guards and paused. This would be another bizarre case. It would be better if I kept the details secret for now.
When the police arrived, Mr. Huang walked towards me holding a cane. He had just witnessed my actions in the chaos. He looked me up and down and asked in a strange voice, “What kind of family do you belong to, boy?”
It was the first time Xiaotao’s father ever spoke to me, so I naturally behaved as politely as I could.
“We’re just normal working people,” I answered.
Mr. Huang nodded and said, “You kept your calm very well in times of distress. You seem to be a capable young man.”
He then called Xiaotao to his side and said something to her. I didn’t hear what he said, but Xiaotao kept yelling back at him saying things like, “You have no right to intervene!” and “I will never marry him!”
A police officer went to Xiaotao to report something and she coldly declared, “We’ll talk later, Father. I have work to do.”
The police took the body away and we got into a police car. Xiaotao said, “Guess what my father just said to me? He told me to break up with you for the sake of the family business and marry that idiot.”
“Perhaps in the eyes of a businessman, financial benefits always outweigh love and affection…” I lamented.
“I’ve always hated being born into this family,” Xiaotao confessed. “I wish I was born in an ordinary family. By the way, what were you trying to say back then?”
“Right, it’s about the dead suspect. He seemed to have been dead for a week.”
“What?” Xiaotao exclaimed with alarm. “But how is that possible? He clearly died in front of me back then!”
“Yet his body and internal organs show the signs of rot that indicates he’s been dead for a week.”
“So he’s a walking corpse?” Xiaotao was dumbfounded.
“Have Chen Da and the head of Ronghua Pharmaceuticals ever been in conflict with each other before?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” Xiaotao shook her head. “One had a delivery company, and the other sells drugs and medicine. They’re obviously not competitors. Besides, people with a public profile like Chen Da wouldn’t get his hands dirty and attack his enemy himself, much less in public!”
I called Dali and asked him to bring my tools to the police station.
“You’re gonna bother me even during the holidays?” he complained.
“Sorry,” I replied, “I’ll buy you a nice meal later.”
After arriving at the police station, Xiaotao told me to give her a minute because she’d like to change back into her normal clothes. I took off the watch that she gave me and said, “The act is over now, so take this back. I’m not used to wearing something so expensive.”
“Don’t be silly,” she laughed. “I told you it’s a gift! It’s yours now!”
I relented and put the watch in my pocket. Xiaotao was gone for a while and returned in her usual uniform.
“I can finally move freely again!” she remarked.
A few minutes after that, Dali arrived.
“Don’t these criminals take any days off at all?” he whined when he saw me. “You know, I think a law should be passed to make criminals who commit crimes on holidays receive double the punishment!”
“Stop acting like a big baby,” said Xiaotao. “The holidays have always been the busiest time for us police officers. I’m used to it now.”
We then headed to the morgue. Dali cowered behind me as we walked into the room, fearing that he’d might be assaulted by the sight of a gruesome-looking corpse again.
“It’s okay,” I assured him, “the dead body doesn’t look too bad this time.”
I might have said so, but I knew that this time the autopsy wouldn’t be so straightforward.
From the deceased’s pocket, I found a bunch of keys, a half-pack of cigarettes, a lighter from a hotel, and an Apple iPhone. I handed these over to Xiaotao. I sniffed at the clothes and the hair carefully, and detected the slight smell of rot and decay. I then collected some skin samples and cut some hair to keep as evidence.
After that, I used the seaweed ash to extract fingerprints on the dead body. There were about four or five sets of fingerprints, and they were most probably left by the guards. Still, I used transparent cellophane tape to collect each of these fingerprints so the forensics team could compare them to their database later.
Then, I cut off the deceased’s clothes to expose his chest and abdomen. There was a clear mark of the shoeprint on his stomach. Cells would lose their healing and repairing functions once they were dead, so anything that was done to a dead body would always leave traces that wouldn’t fade.
I noticed signs of nail scratches on the deceased’s neck. This was probably left by the guards in the scuffle. I asked Xiaotao to come over and see. The scratch was quite deep but it didn’t bleed, and the skin at the wound rolled up instead of contracting. Xiaotao had seen a lot of corpses in her days, so she knew at first glance that this injury was post-mortem.
“So he really was dead!” she gasped.
“You don’t say, Xiaotao-jiejie,” mocked Dali.
“Shut up, idiot!” she snapped. Then she asked me, “Is it really possible to manipulate dead bodies like a puppet, Song Yang?”
“By conventional knowledge, no.”
“What about by unconventional knowledge?”
I listed a few that I could think of—Xiangxi zombies, voodoo magic, and the Thai ghost pets.
Xiangxi zombies had always been a mysterious legend that circulated in the Xiangxi area. According to legends, two men wearing white turbans were often seen walking in the mountains, and in between them was a jumping ‘zombie’ which was supposedly a corpse that had a spell stuck on its forehead.
It was not until the 1950s when the PLA soldiers happened to meet such ‘zombies’ that the mystery was solved. It turned out that the two men were undertakers and they carried the corpse through the winding roads of the mountains in bamboo baskets. Because bamboo poles were flexible, it created an illusion that the corpse was ‘jumping.’
Voodoo magic was first discovered in South America, and it pertained to the legend of Haitian zombies, which inspired the world-famous game Resident Evil. There were foreign tourists who stayed with a Haitian tribe and they happened to see a group of people with stiff limbs plowing the field late at night. After dawn, they automatically returned to their graves and lay there. They looked no different from dead bodies. Later, scientists discovered that these people were poisoned by a type of potent neurotoxin that put their bodies in a state that mimicked death.
The last one was the Thai pet ghosts, of which a complex ritual and methods were used to mummify child corpses. However, this ritual was supposed to control the child’s soul, not their corpses, so it had nothing to do with dead body manipulation after all.
My ancestors had recorded similar cases too, yet they were all proven to be either faked or living people disguised as dead bodies in the end. When Chen Da died, he was in full view of close to a hundred people, so the possibility that his death was faked was close to zero.
In short, I was stumped.
“There’s another possibility, though!” Dali interjected. “It could be done using supernatural tools!”
“Did you get that idea from that trash novel again?” I frowned.
“But it could be real, dude!” he argued. “After all, we’ve solved so many bizarre cases before.”
“I don’t deny that,” I said, “but we must not commit an intellectual leapfrog and disregard all possible natural explanations yet at the moment.”
I then rolled up my sleeves and added, “I need your help to get me some things, Dali. I need the cups used in cupping therapy, a bottle of high alcohol content rice wine, some towels, some salt, and a pound of unripe persimmon!”
1. People’s Liberation Army
2. A form of medicine.