Chapter 193: Finding Order in Disorder

When dealing with homicide cases, the most feared thing is having no clues.

As long as there are clues, there is no shortage of manpower.

It's like when someone uses a gun to commit a mass murder and then runs up a mountain; the local area can organize a search team of thousands of people in minutes.

Many homicide task forces organize large-scale investigations, sometimes just to use up the human resources they have on hand as much as possible. Whether it's sufficient or necessary, at least it gives the task force members something to do.

Having nothing to do is a huge blow to the morale of the task force.

Jiang Yuan handed over the clues, and the 724 Qinghe Major Homicide Case Task Force sent people to start the investigation work overnight.

18 years old is the age of a high school senior or a college freshman. Learning ballet proves that the family conditions are good, so the deceased is very likely a student.

Pulling out the list of missing students in Qinghe and surrounding cities, plus the attribute of having learned ballet, even if traced back several years, the list was short, with only one person.

Zhang Xiaoyun.

From Jianjiang City, and a student at Jianjiang No. 1 High School.

Jianjiang City is adjacent to Qinghe City, and the economic level is not much different from Qinghe City. There is only one training institution in the whole city that teaches ballet, so it is very convenient to find.

But after the DNA comparison matched, the task force members still had some lingering fear.

It was purely because the condition of "ballet" was too narrow, so they could easily expand the search scope to several neighboring cities... and this proved one thing again:

The perpetrator was not killing people locally.

This was very inconsistent with modern trends.

The current commercial atmosphere and cultural atmosphere all emphasize localization and start talking about circles.

Even for blind dates, they start adding the first 6 digits of the ID number before the requirement of having a car and a house.

Killing people without looking at the ID number...

Of course, for a perpetrator, being a bit rebellious is also easy to understand.

But the task force members had to start self-reflecting:

The perpetrator doesn't care about localization when killing people, so how big is his scope?

This is not purely a joke.

The perpetrator's killing psychology changes according to the environment.

Some perpetrators become unscrupulous and fierce when they are in other places, but when they return home, they can still be submissive, eating and drinking as usual, being beaten by their wives, taking anger from leaders, without the slightest change.

Some perpetrators kill specifically in one place, and this is the mainstream. Especially those who like to dismember bodies; most dismemberment sites are in their own homes.

Reality often responds to this choice in a bizarre way.

A typical case is Jia Wenge from Nehe City. He and his team members killed 42 people locally, worked for more than three years, attracted a task force, and nothing happened.

To avoid the limelight, he ran away to Hangzhou, only committed a few scams, didn't dare to kill anyone, and was arrested. Three months later, he was executed.

The perpetrator of the 724 case, it stands to reason, is familiar with the reservoir and has been dumping bodies there for years, so he should also be a local.

But the only two sources of corpses are not local.

The deceased of No. 1 came from Wanxiang City, the westernmost part of Shannan Province. It is very likely she was on a business trip to Qinghe City and died in Qinghe City. But it is also possible she died outside Qinghe City, such as in Jianjiang City.

Now, the deceased of No. 5 is directly a student from Jianjiang City, with limited mobility, and it is very likely she died in Jianjiang City.

So, does the perpetrator live in Jianjiang City, adjacent to Qinghe City?

Dumping bodies specifically in a neighboring city is not strange. Anyone with a bit of counter-reconnaissance ability knows that this will increase the difficulty of detection. Even ancient bandits knew to choose the junction of three provinces.

And for the task force, the difficulty seems to have really increased.

For two consecutive days, in the conference room of the Qinghe Municipal Bureau, there were various sounds of arguing.

Fortunately, Jiang Yuan didn't have to go to meetings anymore.

He was holed up in the autopsy room, studying bones every day.

These corpses had been soaked in water for a long time, and most of the skin and flesh had rotted away. The exposed bones, soaked by a large amount of corpse water, had their color and texture changed to varying degrees.

This change is not a problem for some basic judgments.

Just like judging gender, the pelvis is the most useful, but it's not indispensable. The hip bone is also good, and the skull is no problem, and the mandible, sternum, and femur can all be used.

On this basis, even if the bones have been soaked for a long time and eaten by some microorganisms, there is no major impact.

But if one wants to make further judgments about the source of the corpse, it is obviously relatively difficult.

The remaining corpses of No. 2, 3, 4, and 6 each have their own complexities.

The 4 autopsy tables in the autopsy room just happen to display 4 skeletons.

Wang Chuan assigned a corpse to each of the several forensic doctors, bypassing only Jiang Yuan.

The first two corpses both relied on Jiang Yuan's judgment, so his knowledge of forensic anthropology was clearly sufficient for the work. It might even far exceed everyone else's.

Besides giving him full trust, Wang Chuan couldn't help much.

On the first day, Jiang Yuan cruised in front of the 4 skeletons.

Afterwards, Jiang Yuan devoted more and more energy to the skeleton of No. 3.

The skeleton of No. 3 was the one that had been hacked by an axe.

The lumbar vertebrae and leg bones of this skeleton were worn very severely. Jiang Yuan's initial judgment was that he was engaged in physical labor.

Of course, this judgment was not problematic, but the scope was too large, and wanting to find the person based on this was basically impossible.

Initially, Jiang Yuan was also prepared to study the traces of the axe.

If the type of axe could be determined, even if the case couldn't be solved, some clues could be obtained. For example, the common fire axe used by people today, or the small axe used for chopping wood, etc., the number of people who bought them must be small.

Facts proved that Jiang Yuan still underestimated the inspection of tool traces. With his attainments in this area, he couldn't figure out the origin of the axe at all.

Judging the time of death... this path was naturally even more impossible.

The underwater world is a closed world. For corpses that have been there for so many years, to judge the time of death, one usually has to seek help from the outside world. For example, see how many generations the maggots have bred, how long the algae have grown...

Not to mention that the conditions are not very available, even if they were, the judgment of the time of death can only be estimated in years.

In fact, the judgment of the time of death is the most difficult and profound part of forensic medicine. In other words, it is the least accurate part.

When encountering a fresh corpse in a current case, one can still measure it by liver temperature and anal temperature. For old cases that are as old as the current level, there is no liver, no anus, and one doesn't even know if the microorganisms have been updated...

Finally, what Jiang Yuan could study was still the simplest traces on the bones.

Theoretically, skeletons can provide many traces of a corpse before death, not only life, but also work, disease, or environment.

An example suitable for modern people: if 20 people are killed in the subway, cooked and skinned, and only the bones are observed, what is the most common skeleton trace?

The incidence of excessive wear of the cervical vertebrae must be super high.

Jiang Yuan had already seen the wear of the lumbar vertebrae and leg bones of the third corpse. Further observation finally led to the judgment that the wear of his knees, tibiae, and even heels should come from daily life or occupation.

It's just that what kind of occupation would wear these positions made Jiang Yuan a bit confused.

He thought about it for the time it took to eat a bowl of instant noodles, didn't think it through, and called Liu Jinghui directly.

In Jiang Yuan's view, Liu Jinghui, who made a living by deduction, could probably be of some use at this time.

Liu Jinghui, a Fourth-Level Senior Police Officer of the Shannan Provincial Department, received the call and flew to the autopsy room.

Jiang Yuan found him a protective suit and said, "You actually don't have to come over. We can just talk on the phone."

Liu Jinghui shook his head. "Many things need to be seen in person to be clear."

"Fine." Jiang Yuan led him to the No. 3 autopsy table, handed him a tibia, and said, "Look for yourself."

The tibia is the calf bone, or to be more precise, it is the relatively larger medial bone of the calf.

Its hardness is very high, and it fits just right in one hand—the clever ancients discovered the characteristics of the tibia very early, so thousands of years ago, they ground the tibia into a dagger, and even opened a blood groove in the middle.

According to the shape of unearthed cultural relics, the tibia is still an excellent material for a dagger.

However, as evidence alone, Liu Jinghui looked at it back and forth for a long time and saw nothing.

"Can you explain it?" Liu Jinghui sighed.

Several forensic doctors also quietly gathered around, wanting to hear Jiang Yuan's on-site explanation.

"The wear is mainly here. The bone quality has become rough." Jiang Yuan held the tibia and showed the selected side to Liu Jinghui.

Liu Jinghui still didn't see it.

"That's why I said we could just talk on the phone," Jiang Yuan said.

"It's not far anyway." Liu Jinghui argued, then turned his attention back to the corpse and asked, "The wear you mentioned, what kind of action was it made by?"

"Maybe squatting down frequently or something like that." Jiang Yuan said and simulated it.

Liu Jinghui looked closely and nodded slightly: "Knees, tibiae, heels."

Jiang Yuan nodded: "It's a pity it's a male. If it were a female, it might be in the service industry."

"Oh my..." Liu Jinghui clicked his tongue twice, looking at Jiang Yuan: "You know a lot, worthy of being a Jiang villager, young and already..."

"I'm referring to service staff, such as shoe sales, or first-class flight attendants."

"Males can also do these jobs, do you have to be so rigid about gender?" Liu Jinghui joked first.

Jiang Yuan curled his lips: "Heavy physical labor."

"A first-class flight attendant who often carries luggage. Or, a shoe salesperson who works part-time at a courier point at night?"

"I'm just giving an example." Jiang Yuan shook his head and said, "Judging by the age of the deceased, the time he spends squatting daily is much longer than that of a profession like selling shoes."

"Welder?"

Jiang Yuan hesitated for a moment and nodded: "Possible."

"An athlete of some kind of sport, like skiing?"

"Also possible."

Liu Jinghui guessed a few more occupations, which basically meant he understood Jiang Yuan's judgment.

"This perpetrator kills people very casually." Liu Jinghui sighed.

Jiang Yuan said "En," put the tibia in place, looked at the other corpses, and asked Liu Jinghui, "How is the task force over there?"

"A mess," Liu Jinghui said in a deep voice.

"Isn't the Provincial Department sending you to advise and command?" Jiang Yuan looked at Liu Jinghui.

"My judgment is that this person is probably committing crimes randomly." Liu Jinghui also looked at Jiang Yuan: "Do you know how to solve this kind of case?"

Jiang Yuan shook his head. There is a reason why random crimes account for more than half of the cold homicide cases in various provinces.

"You have to accumulate known conditions. Finding order in disorder and listing known conditions is the most basic step," Liu Jinghui said: "I called two more teams of frogmen to see if there are any more corpses in the reservoir. If we can't find any, the existing corpses are all the content we know." ===== CHAPTER 194 =====