Chapter 67: Unwilling to Let Go

The speedboat chugged laboriously across the Taihe River.

Two criminal investigators, safety ropes fastened around their waists, gripped the boat and scanned the river surface with their eyes as best they could.

The stormy weather reduced visibility to barely twenty meters, making the search both dangerous and inefficient.

But since they had seen a corpse—half a corpse—they had to search the entire Taihe River, no matter how difficult or grueling it was.

The worse the weather, the more the criminal investigation team dared not slack off; if the corpse was damaged—or lost entirely—once the winds and waves calmed tomorrow, what then?

As long as this immediate homicide remained unsolved, the entire team’s annual performance or political achievements would be meaningless.

Huang Qiangmin stood on the shore himself, a useless pair of binoculars dangling around his neck, straining his eyes to scan the river.

He knew the probability of success now was very low, but solving cases was exactly like this: you did many things with low success rates, and it was the accumulation of these efforts that eventually brought success.

For a homicide, Huang Qiangmin could do nothing but seize every opportunity and invest further.

Crack!

A bolt of lightning slashed across the horizon, illuminating the turbulent river water, then darkness deepened again instantly.

……

The mortuary.

Jiang Yuan put on his gas mask before entering the autopsy room.

Senior forensic examiner Wu Jun didn’t have such high standards—he still wore only a mask and got straight to work.

On the stainless-steel autopsy table lay the sole remaining half of the corpse, a grayish-white color, like milk diluted with water.

The skin was wrinkled; the severed portion at the waist was a Can white, and the exposed flesh emitted a peculiar sheen.

Seeing Jiang Yuan enter, Wu Jun looked up and said, “A while back, weren’t you studying forensic anthropology? Now’s your chance to apply it.”

Jiang Yuan had previously acquired the Forensic Anthropology (LV3) skill; though he hadn’t used it yet, he had indeed read many books because of it.

Compared to his forensic pathology abilities, Jiang Yuan already had some confidence in forensic anthropology—he stepped opposite Wu Jun and said, “Shall I do the dissection?”

“I’ll go first. This half-corpse is still quite challenging.” Wu Jun himself looked at the half-corpse before him and felt uneasy—he naturally didn’t trust Jiang Yuan to operate directly.

Unlike ordinary corpse autopsies, which use forensic pathology to answer “how did they die?”

Forensic anthropology’s first task is to identify “who is this?”

To be honest, the problems forensic anthropology solves are inherently more difficult than those of forensic pathology.

To put it simply, forensic pathology is like answering multiple-choice questions, while forensic anthropology requires long-form, open-ended answers.

The forensic examiner must painstakingly analyze the corpse’s information to answer these basic questions:

Is this a human?

Male or female?

What race or ethnicity?

What age?

What height, weight, and physical appearance?

What distinctive features?

Who is he (she)?

If this were a living person, many of these wouldn’t even be questions—there are countless ways to find answers.

But with a corpse, it’s far from simple.

Wu Jun carefully cleaned the corpse’s surface, took detailed notes, then wheeled over a portable X-ray machine and took X-rays of the lower half.

“Looks like a relatively young male,” Wu Jun inserted the X-ray film into the lightbox, pointed to the pelvis, sighed, and casually asked Jiang Yuan, “If you were given only this pelvic X-ray, how would you determine gender?”

“The male pelvis is narrower and taller; the female pelvis is wider and shorter. The male pelvic inlet is heart-shaped, while the female’s is circular or oval. Also, the pubic arch angle is smaller in males—around 70 degrees—while in females it’s 90 to 100 degrees…” Jiang Yuan spoke quickly and with certainty.

The pelvis is the easiest structure to determine gender from, with many clear indicators—easier and more accurate than using the skull, technically called cranial analysis. Of course, this is true for forensic examiners.

Wu Jun was quite satisfied with Jiang Yuan’s answer and continued, “Next, let’s determine age using bone age. Do you know how to do that?”

“We only have the lower half, so we’ll use the pelvic bones, supplemented by long bones.” Jiang Yuan had LV3 Forensic Anthropology, but to determine age from a corpse, he needed either X-rays or to strip all flesh off the bones for direct observation.

Currently, the former method was less destructive and more practical.

The only complication was that the corpse was missing its upper half, while the best bones for age estimation were the carpal and metacarpal bones, followed by the clavicle and sternum, then the pelvis, and finally the long bones of the limbs.

The current unidentified corpse had only the pelvis and lower limbs, so they could only estimate age by applying formulas based on medullary cavity differences.

“23 to 25?” Jiang Yuan pressed his calculator and gave the result immediately.

“Hmm…” Wu Jun paused, silent, then quietly did his own calculations.

After a long while, Wu Jun looked up but didn’t state his result—he said instead, “Now calculate the height.”

Jiang Yuan pressed his calculator: “The total length of the femoral trochanter is 43, multiplied by the coefficient 2.36 gives 1015, plus 680 equals exactly 169 centimeters—about 1.7 meters.”

Estimating height from long bones is accurate and straightforward.

At this point, combined with the weight of the half-corpse, the main deductions were complete: male, 23 to 25 years old, 170 cm tall, 130 catties…

But none of this was enough to answer the ultimate question: Who is he (she)?

Still, it was enough to make Wu Jun look at Jiang Yuan with new respect.

“Young people learn fast,” Wu Jun sighed deeply.

Jiang Yuan smiled modestly: “I’ve just borrowed… various resources.”

“Ah, when I was young and wanted to learn, I couldn’t even find a book—I could only follow my master around, dissecting corpses. Back then, we called it learning through practice…” As Wu Jun spoke, he handed the scalpel to Jiang Yuan: “You do the dissection.”

His initial hesitation had clearly vanished.