Chapter 397: The Pond

Just using 3 body parts, Mo Li had determined the height, weight, and age of the victim, this was a miracle! Qin Xuan also realized that a good coroner not only required a solid theoretical foundation but also be good at putting theories into practice. One had to be flexible to deal with seemingly unrelated clues.

The victim’s husband was soon detained. During the questioning, the man insisted that his wife was out working. The man was highly suspicious. For one, he didn’t report his wife’s disappearance and for two, the man was a butcher.

“What happened to your pinkie?” Xiao Rui noticed this during the interrogation. The man’s pinkie was wrapped in gauze. Mo Li didn’t waste time and wanted to take a sample. After she undid the gauze, she noticed the man’s pinkie had been chopped off. The cut side was very neat. The man said this was an accident when he was butchering.

…

“What does a broken finger has to do with this case?” Qin Xuan asked.

Mo Li narrowed her eyes. “For one, I notice that he is not left-handed, if there was a work accident, it should be his right hand that is sheared off and not his left. Plus, there is stitching on the injury. The stitching has obscured many things, we need to do an X-ray.”

Qin Xuan nodded. They soon got the X-ray. The man’s pinkie was broken from the proximal phalanx, and there were even slight serrated marks on the broken surface.

“He said he sawed off his finger using the butchering knife.” Mo Li could confirm that it was a lie.

“My guess is someone has bitten his finger off!” Qin Xuan shared his thought. Mo Li agreed. “Yes, that’s my guess too.”

The suspicion on the man grew exponentially. Xiao Rui decided to search the man’s home. If Kang Jing was dismembered at home, then there should be plenty of evidence. Xiao Rui hoped they could find some and the man wasn’t that good of a cleaner.

The man and Kang Jing had a small villa. They opened the door to the living room. There were more rooms on the sides. The front yard had some untouched soil and the back yard had a large pond. After some inspection, everyone looked like a deflated balloon. The place was too large. Looking for evidence was no different from looking for a needle in a haystack. They also didn’t find any blood traces.

Then they came to man’s abattoir. The place was covered in blood and tissue, how were they going to find Zhang Jing’s blood and tissue?

Mo Li saw how dispirited everyone was. She turned to Qin Xuan. “This is probably the place of dismemberment. I really have no idea how to go through this quickly. We should get some samples to bring back for analysis.”

Following her orders, Qin Xuan sampled the blood and tissue and placed them inside the evidence bag.

“The man is allowed free entry to this place? Why?” Xiao Rui looked at the manager.

“He is an old employee here and he is very efficient at his job. Plus the price of pork has increased recently so…”

Xiao Rui didn’t say much after that. Three hours passed just like that. Qin Xuan and Mo Li had collected so many samples that Qin Xuan felt like dying staring at the samples they had. It would take years to go through all of them…

“Boss! We did some door-to-door interviews and a neighbor said that Kang Jing’s family only renovated the pond before she left on her business trip.”

“Really?” Mo Li was intrigued. The internal organs could be brought to the abattoir and they would be confused as pig parts but definitely not the human head or skeleton. That would have been too obvious!

“Xiao Rui!” Mo Li called. Hearing that, Xiao Rui also had the same idea in his mind. He looked at Kang Zhi. “Send someone to look through their pond immediately.”

“You think the bones are inside the pond?”

“That’s right. If the whole body is dropped into the pond, the body would decompose and become bloated. It would float to the surface. But if it were bones and individual chopped-up pieces of the body, they would sink and be swallowed by the mud. It’s the reason behind the dismemberment.”