Chapter 228: The Missing Tongue (2/2)

Judging from the shape of the palm and the fingers, the victim was a woman. There was an obvious ligature mark on her ring finger, most likely left behind from wearing a ring all year round!

My current concern was to determine whether the victim was alive or dead at the time of the explosion. A coroner usually did so by looking for evidence of vital reactions in the corpse. If a person were injured while alive, the body would produce a response to the trauma that theoretically would not appear when the traumatic agent exerted action after death. One example of a vital reaction was an increase in platelet count. However, explosions were an exception. An explosion would rip the body apart instantly so there wouldn’t be a response even if the victim had been alive at the time. The murderer must have taken this into account when choosing this method of destroying the body.

I slowly felt along the severed limb and found the flesh soft–a sign of subcutaneous congestion–indicating that the victim had been dead for more than 10 hours.

I moved on to look for the other body parts and before I knew it, dawn had arrived.

”Bingxin is here! Do you need her help?” shouted Xiaotao.

”Get her to spread a sheet of tarpaulin outside. Let’s try to piece together the corpse.”

It was impossible to restore the corpse but I wanted to check which organs were missing and determine the cause of death.

I started moving the corpse fragments I had found outside, some of which had turned into minced flesh that could only be scraped off with the wooden board. But I could still see which part they belonged to and I believed Bingxin could do the same.

The entire process took about two hours, and when I finally got out of the car, my back ached. The ground was covered with a sheet of tarpaulin with body parts scattered all over it. In truth, it was a pile of plastic bags and couldn’t be considered a corpse.

”Well done, Song Yang-gege,” said Bingxin. “You’ve found all the body parts.”

After I opened and examined each plastic bag, I exclaimed, ”We’re missing something!”

”I don’t think we can recover all the broken bones but the internal organs are all here,” replied Bingxin.

I shook my head. ”Are you sure about that? If you take a closer look, you’ll find that we’re missing an important organ!”

Even after another thorough examination of the body parts, Bingxin was still clueless.

”The tongue!” I prompted.

A human tongue was about four to seven centimeters long, but that was only the anterior part. The whole tongue itself was huge which was discernible when a person committed suicide by hanging from a rope tied around their Adam’s apple. Because the whole tongue would be pushed out by the pressure, it could even reach the chest.

How could such a large part have disappeared? Since the tongue extended into the throat, the victim’s tongue was unlikely to have been blown into smithereens even if the head had exploded from the impact. I was certain there was more to this abnormality than meets the eye.

Xiaotao immediately called for a sweep of the entire area, and after searching for about 15 minutes, someone shouted, ”I found it!”

An officer walked back with a black plastic bag containing the tongue. When I examined it, I noticed that apart from being burnt, the shape of the tongue wasn’t damaged due to the organ’s toughness. When I asked where he found it, the officer pointed to the front and said it was about ten meters away in the woods.

It was clearly a huge exaggeration to say that the blast had propelled the tongue more than 10 meters away.

I carefully examined the surface of the tongue and found parallel slits of several centimeters long and a puncture wound containing some old blood at the apex of the tongue. The wound could not have been left by the explosion. A light bulb suddenly went off in my head and I quickly handed the tongue to Bingxin so I could examine the victim’s hands and feet.

When I turned around again, everyone had crowded around me, waiting for my conclusion. I confidently announced, ”I know how the victim died!”

Previous ChapterNext Chapte