Chapter 32: If You Lose, Eat the Whole Ashtray! (1/2)
“Did you hear that, everyone?” Xiaozhou announced to the room loudly. “The great detective Song just said that if he can’t find any traces of evidence on the dead body, he will eat the whole ashtray! The ashtray is made of glass, by the way.”
The police officers who were busy working in the crime scene all turned their attention to Xiaozhou and started to murmur among themselves.
“That was bold, dude,” said Dali, getting nervous for me. “What if you really lose?”
“And if I lose the bet,” continued Xiaozhou, “then I’ll eat the entire contents of the ashtray!”
The crowd roared. But it was obvious that most of them were supporting Xiaozhou, not least because he was the leader of their team.
I was confident with my grasp of autopsy techniques, but I still hated being provoked and challenged like this all the time. Just wait, I thought, you’re in for a good show soon!
“Good!” I said. “I’ll take a look at the dead body for now. I’ll tell you when I’m going to start the inspection.”
“Okay,” said Xiaozhou. “But don’t you try to count your own fingerprints!”
“Don’t worry, I’m not so stupid or so shameless that I would do anything just to win…”
Xiaozhou didn’t miss the mockery in my reply.
“Fine,” he said with an undercurrent of anger in his voice, “I’m looking forward to the show you’re about to put on.”
After he left, Huang Xiaotao sighed and said, “Song Yang, it’s all my fault.”
“Why? What’s going on?” I asked.
Huang Xiaotao said Xiaozhou was a police officer who had studied abroad, and he was a little proud and arrogant because of that. He had just examined the dead body and reported the results to Huang Xiaotao. After reading the report, without thinking, she said, “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll just wait for Song Yang to examine the dead body too. He’ll figure something out.”
She didn’t mean to belittle Xiaozhou’s capabilities with that comment, but judging from his behavior, it was obvious that he took Huang Xiaotao’s words to heart.
Xiaozhou pestered her about the methods I used to examine dead bodies and where I learned them from, so Huang Xiaotao replied that I came from a family of Traditional Coroners. Xiaozhou felt insulted that he was compared to someone like me, and he set his mind up to show me what a real professional was like the moment he met me.
“It’s all because I was a bad team leader,” said Huang Xiaotao, putting her hands up in the air. “I should’ve read the room and thought before I said anything.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I think it has more to do with his personality.”
“Xiaotao-jiejie,” said Dali, “who has the higher rank between you and this guy?”
“Our ranks are equal,” she said. “But I climbed up to this rank from the very bottom, while he obtained the rank of Superintendent the first day he entered the police force, which wasn’t that long ago.”
“But why? That’s unfair!” cried Dali.
“Because his credentials were much better than mine,” said Huang Xiaotao self-deprecatingly. “He graduated from a renowned American university with a specialized degree while I was just a police academy graduate. How could I even compare?”
“Geez,” said Dali, “I never knew you need an academic degree to become a police officer. But he said he was Henry C. Lee’s disciple, didn’t he? I have to admit that’s pretty impressive.”
“You heard wrong, Dali,” I said, “he merely said that he was in a class taught by Henry C. Lee. If he really was his disciple, we probably wouldn’t hear the end of it!”
I myself had read the books and journal papers that Henry C. Lee wrote. In fact, I’d pored over all of the books about forensic science in the library during my college years. They complemented the knowledge that I learned from Collected Cases of Injustices Rectified, and thus I accumulated quite a bit of knowledge over the years.
As the saying went, knowing oneself and knowing the enemy guaranteed a hundred victories in a hundred battles!
“Song Yang,” said Huang Xiaotao, “I just heard Xiaozhou tell another member of the forensics team that there was something strange about the dead body. Perhaps the murderer did something to remove fingerprints. That’s why he was so confident in betting against you. If you’re not sure about this, I can sneak you out of here.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Unless if the murderer really was a ghost, some clues must have been left behind!”
I then pulled out a black wooden rod that was about as long as the palm of my hand out of my backpack. Dali asked me what it was for.
“It’s called an echolocation rod. It’s made of cypress wood, and it’s used for Organ Echolocation. This type of wood is dense, so it carries sound very well. I forgot to bring it with me last time. That’s why you saw me putting my ear directly on the dead body.”
I then double-checked that I had everything ready, then placed one end of the echolocation rod onto the victim’s chest, abdomen, and back and listened from the other end while I tapped at the victim’s skin. I discovered that the time of death was about seven days ago. I was glad that I didn’t forget the rod this time because without it, I’d be placing my ears directly on a seven-day-old corpse.
I paused my thoughts. Seven days?
That would coincide with common folk belief that the soul would return to the family on the seventh day after death. Didn’t the couple who discover the body say that the bed rocked, which led them to look under the bed in the first place? Could it be due to this reason?