“Empty? What does that mean?” Xiaotao asked.

I couldn’t help but smile. “Are you saying you don’t know what the word ‘empty’ means? Or are you asking me why it’s empty?”

“You idiot!” Xiaotao stepped on my toe and glared at me.

“Okay, okay, I’ll explain it!” I pleaded with both hands in the air. “There is absolutely no food residue in the victim’s stomach. It’s completely empty.”

“It’s probably because she was locked up by the murderer for a few days,” Xiaotao’s face suddenly turned pale.

“But there’s no fecal matter in her intestines either.”

“Wha-What did you say?”

I then did something that made everyone in the room shudder. I pried open the victim’s legs and inserted my fingers into her anus. I went in so deep that my whole finger was almost completely gone. Xiaotao watched me with her mouth agape and her eyes almost bulged out of their sockets.

“What’s so surprising?” I asked. “It’s just like when a doctor checks a patient’s prostate!”

“This is nothing like that!” Xiaotao exclaimed. “You’re just so… forget it! I don’t want to say it out loud!”

The only reason I did it was out of pure necessity, of course. In ancient times when there were no rectal thermometers, the coroner would insert their fingers directly into the fecal matter to measure the temperature of the intestine, so I counted myself lucky that I was born after the invention of thermometers.

But I wasn’t measuring the temperature of the intestine here. After inserting my finger all the way in, I pulled it out and found that it was covered in a layer of oil. In fact, where there should have been feces, it turned out to be very clean.

I sniffed my finger. Several policemen were appalled when I did that and they covered their mouths with their hands in disgust.

“The victim’s rectum is covered in vegetable oil!” I announced.

“Vegetable oil?” asked Xiaotao.

I nodded. “Give me a pair of forceps.”

An officer handed me a pair of forceps while giving me a strange look. To be honest, I could have done what I was about to do with my fingers, but I decided against it because it might further disturb everyone.

I held the victim’s rectum open with the forceps and let a police officer shine the flashlight into it. I then examined the interior of the victim’s intestines for a while, then put the forceps down and took off the gloves.

“How is it?” Xiaotao anxiously asked in a tone that one would use to ask the doctor how one’s family member was doing.

“There is some damage to the rectal tissue,” I explained. “The murderer must’ve put a hose into the intestines of the victim and filled it with oil. And the victim must’ve been force-fed oil too.”

“What’s the purpose of that?”

“In order to empty the victim’s entire digestive tract,” I replied.

When I was examining the dead body, I found that there was a certain degree of atrophy in the victim’s liver. The liver could be compared to a battery of the human body. When a person was starved, the glycogen stored in the liver would be consumed to supply the energy needed by the whole body.

This meant that the victim had been starved for at least a week before death. Apart from that, oil was forced down her throat and through her rectum to empty her intestines.

Judging from that, it could be inferred that the time of her disappearance was about twenty-seven days ago.

The key point to remember was that the food residue and feces in the intestines of a human body contained a lot of toxins. When the body was starved, the intestines would start to ‘reabsorb’ the nutrients from the fecal matter. Naturally, the toxins would be absorbed into the blood circulation too and would gradually accumulate in the muscle tissue.

The murderer apparently knew this and used this horrible method to ‘purge’ the victim’s body!

Another point was that when an animal died in extreme panic, its body would secrete some toxins into the blood, making the muscles stiff. This was probably why the murderer used laughing gas to relax the victim’s muscles while the pieces of flesh on her body were slowly cut off one by one before she died.

The murderer painstakingly went through all this, not to torture victim, but to ensure that the meat obtained from the victim’s body was at its most delicious state!

After listening to me, two policemen were so disgusted that they rushed out of the room with their mouths covered. Xiaotao had regained a bit of color in her cheeks, but she was still visibly disturbed.

“You mean to say that the meat filling in the buns was not a means for the murderer to get rid of a human body that he killed, but in fact the victim had been kidnapped precisely because the murderer wanted to get her meat to be consumed as food?”

“Yes,” I replied plainly. “I think the murderer didn’t actually set out to kill people, it’s just that human beings are no different from pigs in his eyes. He’s just the most twisted and depraved foodie that’s ever existed! By the way, I did say that there were three possible reasons why the corpse isn’t bloated. The third reason was that the germs living inside the victim’s body had been starved, and the rest was probably attacked by the immune system. That’s why the body wasn’t as decomposed as it should be.”

Xiaotao lowered her head and did not speak for about ten seconds. I thought she was distraught by the harrowing ordeal the victim had to go through, but I was wrong. Officer Huang Xiaotao was not the type to cry so easily.

She clenched her fist in disgust and declared, “That scum must be captured as soon as possible! He deserves to be put to death by a thousand knives! We cannot let another person fall victim to this animal!”

I agreed with her wholeheartedly, but I couldn’t help but be pessimistic. The victim had gone missing twenty days ago. There might have already been a second or third victim.

“We’ll do our best,” I comforted Xiaotao. “Even if we don’t sleep for the next two days, we must catch him no matter what!”

“You’re right!” nodded Xiaotao.

Now that the autopsy was over, I took out some joss paper and burned it in the name of the victim as usual. I also chanted the Reincarnation Mantra, then covered her body with a white sheet.

We were leaving the morgue when we bumped into Xiaozhou, who informed us that the test results were ready.

“You were right, Song Yang,” he excitedly exclaimed. “The victim did inhale nitrous oxide!”

“What about the composition of the rope?” I asked.

“It’s polypropylene mixed with cotton textiles,” Xiaozhou quickly replied.

“Thank you!” I nodded. It was just as I expected.

“Looks like we should focus on these two clues right now—the rope and the laughing gas,” said Xiaotao. “We should widen our scope and increase the number of officers mobilized for the search. We must solve this case as soon as possible.”

“How come I don’t see Wang Yuanchao at all lately?” I asked her.

“He happened to be on duty near the abattoir that afternoon,” explained Xiaotao. “So I told him to track down Ma Jinhuo. That’s why he didn’t come to the meeting.”

“Did you place some officers on stakeout near the bun shop?”

“I wouldn’t forget such an important task!” replied Xiaotao. “I’ve placed four officers to be on the lookout there.”

It was then that I realized it was already bright outside. I had been examining the body for two hours. Xiaotao said we should go out and grab some food before we were swamped with work again, so we ended up at a nearby western-style restaurant. We had a simple pizza there.

“You didn’t get a good sleep last night,” said Xiaotao. “You should go back to your dorm and rest. I’ll call you if there’s any progress.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“I still have some investigating to do,” replied Xiaotao with a forced smile.

“I’ll go with you, then,” I suggested. “I won’t be able to sleep even if I go back to my dorm anyway.”

Xiaotao laughed. “Okay!”

We went back to the police station. Xiaotao made a few phone calls, one of which was to Wang Yuanchao. After she hung up, she told me, “Wang Yuanchao found out that Ma Jinhuo resigned from his job at the abattoir three months ago. The abattoir said the pork that was sent afterwards had nothing to do with them. In fact, the staff there said that Ma Jinhuo often exhibited a peculiar demeanor.”

Everything was just as I expected. But this also meant that we had hit another dead end.

After that, two police officers handed Xiaotao a thick file which according to them contained a list of missing persons in Nanjiang City for the past three months. The information on the missing persons was also included in the file.

“Oh my god!” Xiaotao exclaimed. “How could so many people go missing in the past three months? Has Nanjiang City been visited by UFOs?”

“Not all of them are missing,” one of the police officers explained. “Some of them just lost contact with their relatives who reported. After all, Nanjiang City has a large population with people coming in and going out of the city every day. Many of these people are also running away from their debt collectors.”

“Okay, thanks a lot,” I said. “I’ll look through them slowly.”

After they left, Xiaotao smiled at the file on the table and joked, “Song Yang, it’s time to use those eyes of yours to help me!”

I picked it up and flipped through it. It was indeed a very long list of people, and if we were to ask the police officers to investigate each and every one of them, we would definitely lose a lot of valuable time. An idea suddenly popped up in my head. It was an odd idea, but I had a feeling it would work, and it would surely save a lot of manpower and time. After all, with each passing second, the chances of the murderer attacking the next victim increased, so we had to act swiftly.

“Let’s put ourselves in the murderer’s shoes!” I proposed.

“How?”

“Well, first of all, let’s look at things from his point of view.” I pointed at the list of missing persons. “Among these people, who looks like they would taste the best?”