Chapter 3 – Nameless Corpses (2/2)
She walked to the first corpse without hurrying. She crouched for a closer examination. The corpse before her had signs of heat ruptures1; the face had already swollen up. She continued to examine it for a moment before opening her mouth and whispering, “Deeply sunken eyes with no shape; low and flat zygomatic bones; the frontal bone is wide, and the lower jaw is narrow.”
Immediately after, she took out a pair of white gloves. Deftly pulling them on, she lightly pressed on the corpse’s face and skull so she could have a rough idea of the cranial dimensions.
Then, she turned around and returned to the table. She opened her sandalwood box and took out a brush and her paint. Finally, she started to paint a human shape on the paper.
Once the portrait was completed, a person immediately rushed out from the crowd in tears, yelling out to heaven and earth as she ran toward the first corpse. “This is my husband. Aaah! Husband! How could you just leave me like this? How can I live in this world now that you left me…”
Ji Yunshu methodically proceeded with her work, examining the second corpse. ‘The occipital bone is fractured. That person must have been smashed by a wooden beam. The sphenoid bone is protruding, and the mandible is a little slanted.’
The portrait of the second person was soon complete.
A man and a woman rushed out before hesitantly crying out “Mother.”
The scene was indeed tear-jerking!
……….
Ji Yunshu spent an hour and 30 minutes to create the portraits of all 17 burnt corpses. Among the 17 corpses, only 12 were claimed, leaving behind five unknown and nameless corpses.
The county magistrate allowed his subordinates to take the portraits and inquire about the identities of those five corpses. Unfortunately, no one in the village recognized the people in the portraits.
Nameless corpses?
Jinjiang city’s East suburbs wasn’t that big to begin with, so why would there be five nameless corpses? Could those people be… outsiders?
If they were outsiders, why would they appear in an east suburbs’ residence?
1. What are heat ruptures? They are split of the soft parts (soft tissues, muscles…) of the body under great heat. It looks like a laceration or incised wounds. For more information, I put the link to a forensic reference, that contains laymen terms (WARNING: don’t scroll up or down if you don’t want visual of other things)