Chapter 227: A Murder Performance (2/2)

One week later, a loud commotion suddenly broke the calm of the night. The local police had been alerted by the sight of flames from a distance and contacted the fire brigade. When they arrived, they found a car ablaze in the middle of nowhere and quickly got to work. But after the fire was extinguished, what appeared to be human remains were found in the car so they immediately called in the criminal investigation department from the city.

By the time Xiaotao contacted me, it was past 4 in the morning. Dali and I arrived at the scene which was a no man’s land sandwiched between two roads. From a distance, a team of officers could be seen collecting evidence around the scorched car in the middle.”Where’s the body?” I asked.

An ugly expression swept across Xiaotao’s face. ”How should I put this?” she said. “The body has fused into the car. See for yourself!”

Dali was about to tag along and take a look at the body, but I stopped him. This time, I was expecting a grisly picture. As I had imagined, the body had indeed melted and integrated with the car. Incomplete internal organs and pulverized flesh were strewn all over the interior of the car, a spectacle almost too horrendous to endure. An officer even ran to the side to vomit for fear of damaging the crime scene.

I felt the impulse to curse at the murderer’s use of explosives to destroy the corpse. It made me, a Traditional Coroner, completely useless!

”Do you think it’s the same murderer?” I asked Xiaotao.

”It certainly looks like it!” She held up an evidence bag with a scorched pinhole camera inside.

The car was surrounded with debris but no evidence had been found. I decided to examine it myself so I swept the surrounding area with the Autopsy Umbrella and got Xiaotao to turn on the ultraviolet light. Unsurprisingly, I found a pair of footprints in the grass heading to and from the car. The footsteps were slightly heavier going to the car, indicating that the perpetrator was carrying the victim’s body. After he dropped it off, his footsteps were obviously lighter without such a heavy burden on him.

Judging from the size of the footprints and stride length, that person was about 1.8 meters tall with a sturdy and muscular body. How did I come to that conclusion? When the suspect was walking to the car, his footprints were slightly heavier on the left, suggesting that he carried the victim’s body over his left shoulder. That alone required certain strength.

Xiaotao immediately assigned an officer to photograph the evidence while I continued walking with my Autopsy Umbrella to track the direction of the footprints. They eventually disappeared on the gravel by the road. There were many tire tracks on the road, but the footprints I was tracing had been destroyed due to traffic.

”The trail has gone cold again...” Xiaotao sighed in disappointment.

I told her she could turn off the ultraviolet light. ”The explosion has two perpetrators,” I said, carefully observing the ground. “One of whom was the boss or the superior who has Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. When his subordinate carried the dead body, he stood by the side giving orders. There might have been a dispute between the two as suggested by the push the subordinate gave his boss.”

”How could you tell?” asked Xiaotao, stupefied.

It was already spring and weeds had begun to sprout. Pointing to the ones by the road, I explained that a patch of the tender leaves that grew at the top had been neatly pinched off which led me to believe that a man was standing here at the time. The weeds that grew at different heights triggered his obsessive-compulsive nature so he subconsciously nipped them with his fingers.

Since there were no footprints on the road, they had most likely driven here. Not forgetting the car that had exploded, there were two cars altogether so there must have been two people.

Generally speaking, two people would usually cooperate in carrying the body. Yet only one set of footprints were found walking back and forth the road to the crime scene while the other person remained standing here, illustrating the relationship between the two.

From one of the footprints that was deeper at the back of the heel, I observed that the person standing in the grass had leaned backwards. Did he slip? The possibility of that was very low. It hadn’t rained in the past few days and the grass was rough enough to provide ample friction. If he hadn’t slipped, then perhaps the person carrying the body gave him a push as he passed by to show his dissatisfaction.

The fact that he wasn’t afraid to push his boss hinted that they might not be superior and subordinate in a true sense, but perhaps senior and junior.

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