Chapter 55.1: Asking Big Sis to Take the Blame
Chen Yongyi initially thought it might be because Changning City had handled a similar case before, and Jiang Xia had happened to witness it.
But he immediately dismissed the idea.
A case of this nature was far too serious. It would definitely have been reported to the provincial department. If Changning City had really had a case like this, there was no way he wouldn’t have heard about it.
And yet, Jiang Xia’s tone had been so certain. She really did sound like she’d seen bones like this many times before.
So what kind of experience would lead to that?
“Actually, I’ve boiled corpses several times myself, too. Mostly pubis, though. Boiling them makes it easier to determine the deceased’s age by examining the pubic symphysis.”
As she spoke, Forensic Doctor Hu squeezed the small tibia in her hand again. She frowned slightly.
“But as for the condition of the bone after boiling… I really never paid close attention to it. And it’s somewhat similar to the condition of a skeleton after decomposition, while age also affects it, so it never occurred to me that it might have been boiled.”
Forensic Doctor Hu wasn’t making excuses.
Forensic pathology was an enormous field of knowledge. Even osteology, merely one of its branches, was extensive enough to warrant a specialized field of study of its own.
And in medicine, children who were still growing were practically a different species compared with adults. Otherwise, pediatrics wouldn’t have to exist as a separate specialty.
Yet forensic doctors primarily dealt with adults. The remains of children were comparatively rare. Without much experience to use as a reference, the fact that Forensic Doctor Hu could vaguely sense that something was wrong, remember it, and seize the opportunity to ask questions showed that both her skill and sense of responsibility were quite impressive.
“But, Comrade Jiang…”
As they continued talking, Forensic Doctor Hu finally looked up at Jiang Xia, curiosity written across her face.
“How were you so sure that this bone looked like it had been boiled?”
In those days, everything was purchased with ration coupons. Human bones were hard enough to come across, and animal bones were even rarer. After all, each person only had a limited meat ration every month. You had to use every bit of it on meat—and preferably fatty meat at that.
Nobody would waste their ration on ribs or soup bones, which had so little meat and so much bone.
So where had Jiang Xia gotten enough experience to be this certain?
‘Good question.’
When she said that, Chen Yongyi also turned to Jiang Xia, waiting for her answer.
With both of them staring at her, Jiang Xia remained remarkably calm.
She had known from the start that they would have questions, so she’d already prepared an answer in advance.
‘Sorry, Big Sis. You’ll have to take the blame for me this time. I’ll bring you some local specialties when I get back!’
“Ahem.”
Facing the two of them, Jiang Xia gave an awkward little smile.
“My older sister is a really good cook. She’s the head chef at a textile factory, and she often brings home pork bones after all the meat has been cut off to make soup. Some of the smaller bone fragments are hard to throw away, and after sitting around for a while, they look very similar to this.”
Ohhh.
Understanding immediately dawned on Chen Yongyi and Forensic Doctor Hu.
So there was a professional cook in the family.
That explained it.
As the saying went, ‘even in a famine, cooks don’t starve’. With so many ingredients passing through a kitchen, it was practically child’s play for a head chef to quietly set some aside and bring it home. It would be incredibly difficult to investigate, too. Who knew how many ways they had of smuggling food out?
Tsk. Having a big sister who was a head chef really was a blessing.
Since this wasn’t the cook at her own workplace, Forensic Doctor Hu didn’t dwell on it. She simply continued:
“That’s pretty good, actually. Even bones that have been stripped clean still contain fat, so they’re quite nutritious. And there’s bone marrow, too—”
She hadn’t even finished when she suddenly remembered what Jiang Xia had said earlier.
Her voice stopped.
She instinctively glanced at the tibia in her hand, then abruptly looked back at Jiang Xia, her expression barely holding together.
No wonder Jiang Xia had been so familiar with the process earlier.
So it was because she regularly ate pork bones.
It was just that…
Wasn’t this experience a little too hellish when applied to this situation?
“Yes. You can also crack them open and eat the marrow.”
As she spoke, Jiang Xia immediately covered half her face with her hand, looking like she was barely holding it together herself.
She sighed, then added, “When I was looking at the scratches just now, they reminded me a lot of the marks I’d leave when biting into pork bones. They were practically… exactly the same.”
The moment she said that, everyone fell silent.
This kind of experience…
Really wasn’t doing much for their appetites.
Chen Yongyi had no idea how to respond for a moment. Forensic Doctor Hu, however, took it in stride. She glanced at Jiang Xia, saw that she didn’t look too badly affected, and took the initiative to reassure her.
“Ah, it’s fine. They’re all large mammals, so the experience naturally overlaps. Speaking of which, when I used to boil body parts, they smelled just like cooked meat. The more I smelled it, the hungrier I got, while also feeling nauseous. It was absolutely maddening.”
Jiang Xia fell completely silent.
Good grief.
As expected, forensic doctors really were on another level. They could casually say the most shocking things!
Even Lu Yixing, who had been listening this whole time, couldn’t keep a straight face anymore.
Forensic Doctor Hu, that statement is way too far removed from anything a normal person would say!
“Um, Forensic Doctor Hu.”
Lu Yixing stepped in to stop her.
“Let’s not talk about this anymore.”
“Yes, we’ve gotten a little off track.”
Chen Yongyi quickly pulled the conversation back on topic as well.
“Let’s focus on the victim first.”
He raised the issue.
“Based on what we know so far, Jiang Xia suspects that the lower leg and tibia were probably consumed. In other words, the killer may have engaged in cannibalism.”
“Cannibalism? Forensic Doctor Hu, what are you talking to people about?”
The moment he finished speaking, Xu Changsong pushed open the half-closed door and walked in. His expression was somewhat serious. When he saw Chen Yongyi and Jiang Xia inside, he paused before greeting them.
“Expert Chen, Comrade Jiang. So you two were here.”
As he spoke, he glanced around the room. His eyes stopped briefly on the fragments of bone on the table, and understanding dawned on him.
“These look like the human bones that were dug up at Xiao Wang Village, don’t they? Have you discovered something new, Expert Chen?”
“We think they may have been consumed.”
Chen Yongyi briefly explained Jiang Xia’s assessment and his own suspicions.
“Hiss—”
After hearing the basic analysis, Xu Changsong, unusually, failed to maintain his composure. He drew a sharp breath.
“That’s absolutely horrifying!”
“Yes.”
Chen Yongyi sighed as well.
“We don’t have any other leads at the moment, so all we can do for now is consider what kind of mentality would drive someone to do this and see if we can make a preliminary profile.”
“But something like this is far too rare.”
Xu Changsong furrowed his brow. “How are we supposed to figure out what was going through the killer’s mind?”
“Cannibalism is rare, but it’s never completely disappeared throughout history.”
Chen Yongyi analyzed the situation. “Generally speaking, there are two reasons: hunger and hatred. The history books contain plenty of records of people eating human flesh during years of severe famine. But nowadays, no one’s starving badly enough to resort to cannibalism. So it’s mostly about revenge. Killing someone isn’t enough to vent their hatred—they have to cut out their enemy’s heart or liver and eat it. And this kind of behavior has also been influenced by works of fiction.”
“I once heard about two cannibalism cases. In one, the husband was a big fan of Water Margin, and he was already quite violent by nature. Later, his wife cheated on him. Enraged, he killed both his wife and her lover, then dug out their hearts, boiled them, and ate them. He even considered himself a hero like Wu Song.”
“Another involved two families who had been locked in a feud for decades. The killer’s family had always been on the losing end. Eventually, he couldn’t take it anymore, grabbed a knife, killed the victim, then cut off some of his flesh and ate it to vent his anger.”
“Come to think of it, I remember hearing about a similar case when I went to the provincial department before.”
Xu Changsong pondered for a moment before recalling the details.
“It was a headless corpse case. The killer was preparing to make a name for himself in the underworld, so he wanted to establish his reputation. He picked someone who was well-known in those circles and killed him, then cut off his head, liver, and kidneys and took them home. He intended to use the liver and kidneys as drinking snacks, but ultimately didn’t dare eat them and threw them all away.”
“At the time, the Wuwei City police kept assuming it was an act of revenge by an enemy and repeatedly investigated possible suspects, but they couldn’t find anything. In the end, the killer got drunk and started bragging about it to someone else. That person reported him, and that’s how he was arrested.”
Good grief. People actually kill someone just to establish their reputation?
Expert Chen’s cases were genuinely terrifying. Director Xu’s case was horrifying too, but somehow, after the initial shock, there was something oddly satisfying about how it ended.
Jiang Xia rubbed her chin.
If she remembered correctly, things like this would become even more common more than a decade later. It was mainly teenage boys who wanted to enter the underworld and make a name for themselves. They would go after notorious gangsters specifically to build their reputation, and quite a few “big-name” figures ended up disappearing that way.
It was truly regrettable—or rather, a cause for celebration.
“Going down the wrong path makes it easy to meet an untimely end.”
Forensic Doctor Hu passed judgment on the case Director Xu had mentioned, then analyzed the situation further.
“But judging from the victim’s age, this doesn’t really fit the characteristics of a revenge killing. And nobody nowadays is starving badly enough to eat people. Considering the killer’s behavior, I think it’s more likely that they’re simply psychologically disturbed and actually wanted to eat human flesh.”
“That does seem like the more likely possibility.”
Xu Changsong fell into thought, but he still felt that something didn’t quite add up.
“But if the killer really had a cannibalistic fixation, they probably wouldn’t have done it only once. So why was there only a single piece of lower-leg bone left in the wasteland beside Xiao Wang Village? That’s far too little to bury.”
Jiang Xia nodded slightly as well.
Anyone who regularly dealt with corpses knew that digging graves was hard physical labor. It was exhausting.
And a child’s skeleton had more than two hundred bones. There were plenty of them. This was disposing of the remains, not burying scraps for a dog to eat. If the killer buried only this little at a time, they’d have to dig dozens of separate holes all over the place.
Did the killer want to work themselves to death?
Well… a cannibal might not have a perfectly normal mind, but that kind of prolonged abnormal behavior would be very difficult to conceal. Someone would have noticed sooner or later, and they’d have been caught already.
“I agree. This doesn’t really fit the usual pattern of behavior.”
Chen Yongyi agreed as well.
“If you’re simply disposing of a body, you could scatter the remains in pieces like this. But burying them takes too much time and effort. Even if the killer was… eating the remains while looking for places to bury them, the process would have been far too easy for someone to notice.”
Forensic Doctor Hu thought for a moment before proposing another possibility.
“Could it be that this was the first time the killer had buried remains, so they had no experience and only buried this little? Maybe they buried everything together afterward?”
Xu Changsong pursed his lips and thought for a moment before agreeing.
“That possibility does seem fairly likely.”
“Throwing the remains far away but burying them nearby… There probably aren’t that many places around Xiao Wang Village suitable for burying a body, right?”
After listening until now, Lu Yixing finally spoke up.
“The remains the killer buried weren’t particularly deep. If we bring in police dogs to search the area, perhaps they could find the victim’s other bones?”
“There aren’t many places. Other than that wasteland, everywhere else is farmland. If someone buried something there, they’d be discovered immediately.”
Hearing Lu Yixing’s question, Xu Changsong frowned slightly and shook his head.
“At the time, we actually brought in police dogs to search the surrounding area, but we didn’t find any other bones at all.”
“The killer probably took the rest somewhere farther away to dispose of them.”
Forensic Doctor Hu was troubled as well. She grabbed at her hair helplessly.
“Either way, we can’t find them now.”
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