Liang Ge and Wu Sheng, detectives from the Major Case Unit, also wore gauze masks and covered their noses as they entered the room.
"Is there any material?" (What clues?) "Brother Liang glanced at the corpse and quickly turned his head away.
Standing beside Liang was his apprentice Wu Sheng, who was also in a bad situation, frowning.
Wu Sheng noticed that I was looking at him and forced a smile. After a few seconds, he couldn't help swallowing and holding his breath again. I felt he was about to throw up.
We gave a brief account of the situation. Both victims were bound before their deaths. The woman's wounds were dense and the man's were more scattered.
Yan showed them the scabbard on the female victim's bed. Judging from the shape of the wounds of the two victims, they were both stabbed to death by this long-bladed knife. The deceased was wearing a coat for daily activities, and the male was even wearing sports shoes on his feet. It suggests that the two were likely killed while tied up on the bed.
Liang asked if the door at the scene had been unlocked. Are you here to steal something?
The photographer shrugged his shoulders and said he didn't see any obvious lock-picking marks, but a habitual thief who knows how to pick locks can just break in and steal. Is it necessary to tie someone up and kill them?
Liang didn't get a definite reply and, not giving up, wanted to ask for more analysis: "Is that all?"
"What else do you want?" Rock turned his head and asked me to continue the autopsy.
I looked at Yan with his new gloves on, not understanding why he didn't talk about the "quilt".
I clearly remember that just a few minutes ago, when he presented the scene, he emphasized the way the blanket was used - "This act of covering the deceased, especially the head and face, is clearly an act of shame. The murderer may have been familiar with the male victim."
Until the end of the day, he didn't say much more to Liang, but instead wrote an analysis that, in my opinion, was very "conservative." One part of it truthfully stated that the victim's mobile phone and cash were taken away, and the motive for the crime was to make money.
I followed Yan for two months, always taking him as the benchmark, but this time I don't agree with him.
In my opinion, this is definitely a revenge massacre.
After I escaped from the pyramid scheme den that year, I often felt pain in my breathing. The school doctor said I had intercostal neuralgia and prescribed some medicine but it didn't work.
Later I learned that it was a "somatization symptom" caused by emotional disorder after a person has suffered a huge emotional shock.
Ever since I got involved in this murder case before me, I can't help but wonder, on the day I was tricked into the pyramid scheme, if I had a knife in my hand, would I have hurt that girl out of anger? Would I have killed the manager who sent people to follow and prevent me from leaving?
The anger from being illegally detained and the desperation after being deceived could trigger a revenge massacre.
Just before the end of the workday, I was packing up to go to Yangji Village to see Lili when Brother Yan threw in: I have to work overtime tomorrow.
The appointment had to be cancelled.
Just as I was wondering if the weekend was a good time to go out, Rock gave me another cut: "Don't go out during the Qingming Festival either. There might be a live event." In Guangdong, cemeteries are all on the mountains, and large crowds flock into the barren mountains to pay their respects, easily bumping into hidden bodies.
I sent a message to Lili and she simply replied: Oh, I see.
I quickly sent two more messages to explain. Lili said, "As long as you're not lying to me, I've thought about this situation since we started dating. It's just a bit sad just now, but your work is important." I assured her, "I'm definitely not going to deceive you, and I'm afraid of being deceived."
During those two days of working overtime, there were no corpses on the barren mountain. Instead, a murder case in a street-front shop caught my attention.
The female victim was stabbed several times and sent to the ICU of the hospital, along with her deceased boyfriend.
The man was lying in the middle of a pool of blood, showing typical signs of poisoning and holding a bottle of dimethoate (an organophosphorus pesticide) in his hand. When I lived with my grandma as a child, she would spread diluted dimethoate on the bottom of her summer MATS so that fleas and ants wouldn't climb onto them.
After watching the scene, Yan Ge judged that it was the man who picked up the kitchen knife at the scene and slashed the woman, then drank pesticide and committed suicide.
Although Yan and I analyzed it in a very logical way, when it came to reporting, he habitually hid something. He said it was most likely a man who killed and then committed suicide, without mentioning the specific details of the analysis. He said he would wait until the female victim was rescued to ask about the process.
On Monday at work, we didn't receive any news of the female victim waking up. She died.
After dissecting the bodies of the man and the woman, I returned to the office in a rather depressed mood, not understanding why a person is so indifferent to life and why a home is gone like this. I stood alone by the office window and looked out. The red kapok trees that had been in full bloom during the day looked particularly dim in the light.
The next day, still depressed, I received relief from Brother Yan: "It's not strange to make any choice when living alone in despair."
The moment I heard this, I really wanted to call home, or rather, I wanted to call my father.
He is in despair.
That year, my father's small workshop owed his fellow villagers 225,000 yuan in debt due to market changes, and he was unable to repay it. It was I who signed the IOU for him, and it was I who came to Guangdong and dissected a corpse with all my might. It cost 30 yuan to examine the body surface and 60 yuan to operate, and then sent the money back home.
He and his mother felt sorry for me. To pay off my debts, I had to go without food or drink and deal with 3,000 corpses.
I was on the phone with my father two days ago.
In that call, he told me that our Red Flag car was broken and it was too difficult to fix, so he decided to sell it.
When the family started their business, he bought a Jialing motorcycle as soon as he made his first profit. Grandma scolded him for a month, but he didn't care. He let her ride the motorcycle and go for a ride together with a cheeky grin. My grandma scolded, "What's there to sit on? It's very bumpy."
Later, when I was in junior high school, he bought his first car and then changed it to a Santana. And when I went to college, it became a Hongqi. He was obsessed with cars.
I asked my father what to do when he went out to do business, and he told me, "It's very convenient to call a car. Just make a call and they'll beep in."
I asked again when I would buy a new car.
He remained silent for a long time and said, "We'll forget about the car for now until the business is settled."
It was only after a long time that I realized that the mental loss and physical exhaustion had once driven my father to the brink.
Those days he found himself unable to stand straight, feeling old and unable to afford the money. He asked his mother if he could drink a bottle of dimethoate (pesticide) so that he wouldn't be so tired and, after his death, wouldn't be a burden to his only son - me.
Yan's words reminded me of my father, and I wanted to tell him not to despair. I have saved more than three thousand yuan in these three months.
I still haven't made the call.
Because I think it's a bit ridiculous that I talked to him on the phone just two days ago, and now it's too "tiresome".
All I thought about was that I was a thousand miles away and all I could do was to practice well, do more autopsies and let my parents worry less.
On Monday after working overtime, Yan asked me to prepare the tools. He was going to take me to the pyramid scheme site again, for no reason, just to investigate once more.
Although he refused to give the investigators a definite number, the effort that should be made was no less.
It was still the same alley, a damp and dark back alley, but the only difference was that the few occupants of the entire building had moved out. They could sleep soundly in the stench of corpses on the most decaying days, but when the murder occurred here, they all fled in panic.
The stench was no longer detectable at the entrance of the corridor, but pushing open the door, the uncleaned putrid blood still filled the air with a faint stench of corpses, and on the two mattresses there were human stains that had seeped in.
The focus of the re-examination is not to extract trace evidence, but to look for new clues. According to the investigation, this might be a pyramid scheme den, so we have to look for more evidence to support it or deny it.
Perhaps because of the dampness, even when wearing shoe covers and stepping on the plastic mat in the living room, there would always be a slight squeezing sound of the plastic.
Yan Ge pulled out a small white blackboard from under the TV cabinet. There were faint traces of writing on it, but it was obviously not easy to make out what was written.
The photographer rummaged through the closet in the master bedroom and found a plastic bag containing copies of the ID cards of more than a dozen people, including four male ID cards from different provinces. Only the names on them did not match the information registered by the homeowner, and they did not look like the identity cards of the deceased.
While Yan was busy taking pictures of the photocopies, I was eyeing the two storage boxes against the wall.
It was a white plastic container, with the fasteners at both ends loose and no dust on the lid. When I lifted the lid, I saw four large cardboard boxes.
They were all unsealed, and the covers of the boxes were beautifully printed, with gilded fonts that were out of place in the shabby rental house. Judging from the product labels, these exquisitely packaged boxes were filled with health supplements, including spirulina and vitamin tablets. I guessed at once that this was the "product" of the pyramid scheme den.
A few or a dozen people gathered in the small rental room, brainwashing over and over again every day, and gradually began to believe in the value of this "product". They ate and sang together, and listened to their superiors' presentations, which were not focused on the product but on all kinds of deceptive rhetoric and the yearning for financial freedom.
The clicking of the camera shutter and the blinding flash interrupted my jumbled thoughts.
Yan Ge rummaged through a contact list in the bedside table. Half a palm, black cover, filled with hundreds of phone numbers densely written inside, some crossed out and some marked with five-pointed stars.
On the very night he returned his ID card and contact list, the public security system immediately identified a key number, the victim of the pyramid scheme: Duan Jiang.