Chapter 137: Murder by Botox (1/2)

“How was she poisoned?” I asked.

Bingxin pointed to the victim’s leg and replied, “There is a puncture wound here. The poison was probably injected there with a needle. Could it be suicide?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t rush to that conclusion,” I warned her. “The worst thing to do in an autopsy is to make up your mind before seeing all of the evidence first.”

Bingxin stared at me and laughed. I asked her what was so funny, and she answered, “You’ve changed, Song Yang-gege. You sound so mature now! Not that I’m surprised though. I knew you’d turn out to be an amazing person in the future when I heard how passionate you were when you told me all the stories about your ancestor Song Ci.”

“You’re overpraising me,” I said. “I just happened to learn more things in the past few years.”

“What should we do now?” asked Bingxin. “Just wait for the police to arrive?”

That would be the normal procedure for most coroners, but there was much more that I could still do here.

“Now it’s your chance to witness the Song family’s peerless ingenuity!”

I pulled out my Echolocation Rod and began to check the victim’s internal organs. Surprisingly, the organs were in their normal state. Then I put the victim’s head on the Yin Yang Pillow and checked the inside of her skull.

I couldn’t believe what I found at first, so I repeated the process again and again to confirm the results.

“Her internal organs aren’t damaged,” I said. “But her skull is filled with liquid.”

“Ew!” shouted Dali. “Did her brain melt?”

I glared at him, and he quickly lowered his head in shame.

“You know all that just from using that little wooden rod?” asked Bingxin.

“I’ll explain it to you later,” I said. “Anyway, it seems that she was poisoned by a neurotoxin that dissolved her brain.”

“So both her brain and her muscles were dissolved?” Bingxin muttered, lost in thoughts.

Even I was at a loss as to what this poison was. I thought of a poison recorded in the The Chronicles of Grand Magistrates that was able to turn someone’s body stiff like a wax figure. But then the conditions of this victim’s body didn’t look too much like what was described in the book.

I tried to approach the puzzle from another perspective. The victim was found almost naked except a pair of underwear. Yet there was no sign of sexual or physical assault. Because there wasn’t much sunlight, I couldn’t use the Autopsy Umbrella, so I sprinkled seaweed ash on the victim’s body instead and gently blew it off. Sure enough, only the victim’s own fingerprints were found.

I went into the tiny room and found that her clothes were strewn on the narrow bed. From there, I found two identification documents—a student ID and a cafeteria pass. The victim’s name was Xiaoli, and she was indeed the hardworking girl the cook talked about earlier.

I scanned the room with my Cave Vision and something under the bed caught my eye. I knelt down and stretched out my hand to pick it up. There was an empty injection vial with no descriptions on it. Next to it was an empty syringe.

I went out and showed them to Bingxin, and she asked me, “Are you going to take it back and test it?”

“I’ll need to know what to test it for first,” I replied. “We should probably investigate more for now.”

“From the position and angle of the needle wound,” remarked Bingxin, “it looks like the victim injected the poison herself. Maybe it is suicide after all?”

“If that’s the case,” I argued, “then she’s chosen a very painful death indeed. Why not choose a poison that kills her faster? If you look at the victim’s posture, you can clearly see that she was struggling to open the door but collapsed to the ground before she could do it. Also, if you look at the buttons on her shirt, they’ve clearly been torn off even though it looks like she took off the clothes herself. Why was she so anxious to take off her clothes?”

“Perhaps she had a high fever?” Bingxin suggested.

I picked up the clothes and smelled them. Some poisons would indeed cause high fever, and if that was the case, the victim would sweat. But there were no signs of sweat on the clothes at all.

“No,” I told Bingxin. “We can rule that out.”

“Show me the vial,” said Bingxin.