Chapter 373

The sun was high in the sky.

The wind blowing in was warm, but the emotions of those at the corpse site varied widely.

Jiang Yuan and Mei Fang picked up the bones covered in decaying flesh and placed them into a plastic bucket; the remaining decaying flesh in the snake-skin bag, mixed with corpse fluid, soil, and insect eggs, oozed a nauseating broth.

The bottom of the snake-skin bag had already torn open—no one knew whether it had been punctured or chewed through by insects.

Jiang Yuan did his best to suppress his emotions; at this moment, there was no room for cheering, no need for sighs or complaints, and even speculating about the case was meaningless.

There were plenty of brilliant officers already thinking and analyzing the scene, and even more seasoned detectives who understood this case better than Jiang Yuan understood lamb meat. They were all waiting for Jiang Yuan to provide more clues so they could combine them with their existing knowledge to make judgments.

Even Liu Jinghui would not rashly make a decisive judgment at this moment.

"The victim is female, approximately thirty years old." After retrieving all the bones, Jiang Yuan stood up, stretched his waist and legs, and gave everyone a basic piece of information.

Mei Fang then measured the length of the right femur on-site and, after consulting with Jiang Yuan, settled on a height and weight range: Jiang Yuan stated, "Height 168 cm, weight 110 kg."

Technicians are like this—no matter how independently capable you are, when working together, there must always be someone who makes the final call.

Especially in forensic medicine, where regression equations are everywhere, everyone has different opinions on which ones to use and which to discard.

Mei Fang, for instance, had compiled a set of commonly used regression equations that were slightly more accurate than the generic ones. As for Jiang Yuan, he first determined the victim's place of origin—more precisely, the regional ethnicity—and then selected the appropriate regression equation based on regional differences.

This judgment was based on distinctions among other bones. For example, even with the same length of long bones, the length of the foot bones varies by region—take southern women versus northern women: southern women are shorter but have larger feet.

Measuring foot bone length still fell within Mei Fang's usual scope of work, though he rarely went into such detail; he'd need to look up the exact regression equations later, but he could generally recognize the pattern.

But at Jiang Yuan's level, the proportions and lengths of the tarsals, metatarsals, and phalanges were all distinct to him. The width and height of a person's foot were also clearly controlled by genetics.

A clear example: Northern Europeans tend to have longer feet with less subcutaneous fat—slimmer and more slender feet. Asians generally have higher arches and wider feet, while South Americans have narrow, elongated feet. That's why, when shopping for Adidas or Nike shoes, people often feel the sizes run small—actually, the width and height are insufficient.

Beyond that, for ordinary people, the differences among toes may be more obvious. Based on toe length, feet are typically classified as Egyptian, Roman, or Greek, sometimes with a fourth category: square feet.

The Greek foot is called the "beautiful foot," with the second toe being the longest. People with Greek feet usually have long limbs and slender feet. Many ancient Greek and Roman sculptures chose the Greek foot.

In China, there was once a folk saying about the Greek foot: "If your second toe is longer, you won't support your father or mother."

Similarly, when choosing shoes, some people always feel uncomfortable in pointed-toe leather shoes or high heels—uncomfortable is exactly right, because pointed shoes are designed for Greek feet.

Conversely, the popular Japanese five-toe socks are very unfriendly to Greek feet; the elongated second toe easily tears through the sock, proving that the proportion of Greek feet in Japan is very low. In fact, most Asians have Egyptian feet, where toe length decreases progressively from the big toe downward, forming a diagonal line.

Even foot shape alone ties into footprint analysis, and every bone, when examined closely, relates to genetics. For example, the "Asian squat"—easy for a forensic expert to explain—is due to differences in the ratio of thigh to shin bones: in Asians, the femur and tibia are roughly the same length, allowing them to perform the Asian squat.

As

In countries like the United States, a nation of immigrants, research into the relationship between ethnicity and physical traits is more extensive. China's population is relatively homogeneous, and regional differences are less pronounced, so such research is limited.

Yet for forensic experts, subtle differences are often the key to breakthroughs.

"Stop using shovels. Call two more people—use your hands to dig out the remaining remains." Jiang Yuan gathered the larger bone fragments; seeing the rest of the body had already merged into the soil, he simply called for people to dig by hand.

Under the watchful eyes of several superiors, several young officers joined in and dug up another plastic basin full of decaying flesh, soil, and insect corpses.

"Is it done?" One officer wiped sweat from his brow—then smelled the stench and turned green with nausea.

"Go far away to vomit—no vomiting within fifteen meters." Jiang Yuan shooed him off, then added: "Call a few more people—take all the soil within a ten-meter radius of the body bag back with us."

Carrion insects don't just feed, sleep, and breed on the corpse—they spread out around it, and their numbers within ten meters are extremely high.

Jiang Yuan himself didn't understand forensic entomology, but the province had experts in the field—he could consult them later. For a case as massive as 805, you couldn't treat it like a minor case, taking the cheapest, quickest route, solving it, and leaving.

The correct approach was to pursue multiple avenues simultaneously—if multiple paths proved viable, pursue them all; it would benefit the case during trial.

Within the corpse's vicinity, the forensic expert's word was final.

Mei Fang quickly called for more personnel and began shoveling soil into sack after sack.

When a large pit had been dug around the body and Xu Taining's pre-arranged pickup truck was fully loaded in the back, Jiang Yuan pulled off his gloves and said to Liu Jinghui: "I'm going back to perform the autopsy. You all keep working."

"Alright," Liu Jinghui replied, then added: "Keep me updated."

Jiang Yuan loaded the remains and equipment onto another vehicle. When he turned to speak to Xu Taining again, the latter had already picked up the phone.

By the time Xu Taining hung up, Jiang Yuan had already guessed the result. "Another body found," Xu Taining sighed heavily.

One body wasn't just one person's tragedy—it was a family's grief.

From Xu Taining's experience, discovering bodies so rapidly at the very start of Phase One search operations was definitely not a good sign.

"I'm going there now. Send someone to drive the remains from here." Jiang Yuan handed his keys to someone nearby.