Chapter 177: Corpse Manipulation (2/2)

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.

Previous ChapterNext Chapte