I prized open the victim’s mouth and observed. According to The Chronicles of Grand Magistrates, if the victim was burned to death, there would be a lot of dust and ashes collected in the nose, mouth, and trachea. But the mouths of these two victims were completely clean.

So what was going on?

One more thing that bugged me was the victims’ body posture. Whether someone was burned to death or burned after death, the body’s proteins would be coagulated by the intense heat. The body would tense up into a boxer’s stance—it meant that the arms were lifted and the fists were clenched.

But that didn’t happen to the two bodies at all. So were they burned?

I asked Xiaozhou for a scalpel and cut a small piece of skin to check it. I found that the skin was very brittle and the blood inside the blood vessels had congealed, which was clearly a common feature of burning.

I could only say that these bodies were full of contradictions from beginning to end!

The difference between bodies that were burned to death and bodies that were burned after death was a major puzzle for both Traditional Coroners and modern forensic science. My ancestor, Song Ci, who wrote the Collected Cases of Injustices Rectified, used to burn live pigs and dead pigs to test the differences.

However, these two bodies in front of me fit neither the characteristics of bodies that were burned to death nor bodies that were burned after death. This puzzled me, and at the same time, it excited me.

I would describe it as the excitement of a math whiz encountering a mathematical conundrum that was hard to solve!

I sniffed the bodies, and detected a slight pungent smell. But it was unlike common combustion fuel like gasoline, kerosene, or alcohol. I was not sure what it was, and I handed the small piece of skin that I had just cut to Xiaozhou. I told him to conduct two tests.

Firstly, I needed to know the combustion fuel involved. The other was the level of carboxyhemoglobin in the victims’ blood.

Carboxyhemoglobin was a product formed by the combination of hemoglobin and carbon monoxide in an extremely hypoxic environment, i.e. an oxygen-deprived environment. If the level of carboxyhemoglobin exceeded a certain amount, it would be fatal. This was an important indicator to judge whether the victims had burned to death or if their bodies were burned postmortem.

In fact, this could be judged by the naked eye alone. When the body contained too much carboxyhemoglobin, the corpse would be bright red or cherry red, but neither of these bodies were like that.

I had Xiaozhou do the test anyway just in case. After all, this was turning out to be a mysterious case indeed!

I also cut a small piece of clothing and asked him to check if the fabric and the body surface had the same flammable components.

Xiaozhou put the sample into a plastic test tube and remarked with a smile, “Have you forgotten something, Detective Song?”

“What?”

“DNA, of course! Why didn’t you tell me to test for such an important thing?”

I laughed. “But the identity of the victims have not been determined yet. It is meaningless to test DNA. Save the effort. You should instead take a trip to the dental hospital in Nanjiang City tomorrow.”

I then pried open the older victim’s mouth and asked Xiaozhou to observe the two molars inside. He shone a flashlight into the mouth and exclaimed, “He’s a rich man! He’s got golden teeth!”

“It’s palladium porcelain teeth,” I corrected him.

Xiaozhou reexamined them carefully and relented, “You’re right. They’re not gold.”

Palladium porcelain teeth were a kind of high-grade dentures, and the value even exceeded that of gold teeth. I assumed there wouldn’t be no more than five hospitals in Nanjiang City that could produce such fake teeth, so if Xiaozhou could reference these teeth and ask around, he’d be able to identify the victims in a short period of time.

As for the other person, the police could just investigate further! If you knew the identity of one of them, you could find out the identity of the other person by using DNA analysis.

Xiaozhou looked at me strangely. I jokingly asked him, “What’s wrong?” Did he fall in love with me?

Xiaozhou answered, “Song Yang, you are both a master Traditional Coroner and you have great knowledge of modern forensic science. I feel that if you go through the exams, you could definitely get a coroner’s certificate in minutes. You’d be better than most of the professors!”

I smiled, “Why do I need the qualifications? Am I not already investigating crimes? You should go quickly.”

“Nothing else for me to test?” asked Xiaozhou.

“No, I’ll take care of the fingerprints and hair samples. Leave the UV lamp for me. You and the rest of the forensics team can go back now.”

They soon left. Xiaotao looked at me and smiled.

“You’re good at giving orders now!” she commented. “Maybe I should hand over my position as the task force captain to you!”

“No, no, I don’t want that. I’m more comfortable working under the Empress.”

“Wait a minute, Empress? Am I like Wu Zetian[1] to you?” she asked me angrily.

“But Wu Zetian was rumored to be a beautiful woman!” I quickly explained.

“Fine, I’ll accept that as a compliment,” she laughed.

I put my ear on the body and began to listen using the Organ Echolocation technique. I put a sheet of paper between my ear and the corpse for hygiene. Generally, there would be some changes in the internal organs of a burned victim, such as congestion of the lungs, blisters, swelling of the kidneys, etc.

But these two victims showed no such characteristics. Judging from the changes of the internal organs, I determined the time of death to be about ten days ago.

I asked Huang Xiaotao to hand me a pair of scissors. When I cut the clothes of one of the deceased, I made a shocking discovery. The victim’s underwear and burnt skin were completely adhered together, making it almost impossible to take off.

I came to a conclusion, “The victims were burned in their clothes!”

"But their clothes are not damaged at all!” Xiaotao cried in amazement. “Could this be a case of spontaneous human combustion?”[2]

Spontaneous human combustion was one of the world’s top ten unsolved mysteries. One example was when an old man was lying in bed and sleeping and his children caught the smell of flesh burning. When the blanket was pulled away, half of the old man’s body had burned to ashes, yet the blanket was intact.

There had been several reports of spontaneous combustion in this country too. The victims were out shopping. Suddenly, they just burst into flames. After the passers-by used water to extinguish the fire, the victims did not move. When their bodies were dissected, they found that the insides of the bodies had burned into gray mass.

There was also a woman who suddenly fell down when she was praying in the church. The people around her didn't find anything out of the ordinary at first. Later, they found that smoke was coming out of her nose and mouth, and to their surprise, she had been burned, and her internal organs were all burned to crisp. Yet, her skin was still intact.

When I thought of this point and compared it to the mysterious conditions of these two bodies, I sighed and exclaimed, “I’m not sure. It’s hard to say!”

Xiaotao smiled. “This is my first time seeing you so stumped. It’s quite a sight!”

“Stop with your schadenfreude! It’s not me who’ll be reprimanded if this case isn’t solved!”

“Okay, okay. Anyway, where’s your buddy?”

“I told him to go back to school and bring me...” I began to explain, but speaking of the devil, Dali appeared before I could finish my sentence. He rushed into the room and stopped to greet Xiaotao cordially when he saw her, then handed my bag to me.

I took out the Organ Echolocation rod and listened carefully to the body again. But I still found nothing new.

This time, I had fixed the Autopsy Umbrella, so I opened it up and got ready to check the body for any handprints or fingerprints. Dali held up the UV lamp for me.

The ultraviolet light shone through the red umbrella, and the body was flooded with rays of dim red light. I slowly turned the umbrella, but didn’t find any signs of handprints or fingerprints on the bodies. I turned the bodies over and checked for some fingerprints on the clothes, but none was left behind. I called for Xiaotao to take pictures anyway.

I shut my Autopsy Umbrella and grumbled, “When will I run into a murderer who leaves fingerprints on the body?”

“You say that,” Xiaotao remarked, “but deep down you’d feel bored if you encountered an ordinary case, wouldn’t you?”

I smiled and replied, “How do you know me so well?”

“Hmph! You’re so transparent I can see right through you!”

Dali stared at us and listened to our exchange with fascination. “Jeez, both of you! We’re at a crime scene! Stop teasing each other like that!”

Xiaotao’s almond-shaped eyes rounded and she yelled, “Shut up! Or I’ll put handcuffs on you, I swear to God!”

“Ah, forgive me Xiaotao-jiejie!” he pleaded.

I then went to another room and examined it. I found some fingerprints and hair strands near the two sleeping bags and immediately collected them.

I turned the red umbrella and kneeled onto to the ground. The footprints on the ground were very messy, but I could still identify them all. I told Xiaotao to take pictures of them so we could compare them later. There were two pairs of footprints, which should’ve been left by the shoes worn by the victims. The footprints painted a picture of the victims encountering something terrifying here which made them panic and run out to the other room. But before they could escape, they were both burned alive.

Just then, we heard a scream from downstairs!

1. The only officially recognized empress in her own right in China’s long history. Xiaotao took offence because she was rumored to be cruel and tyrannical.

2. When a living body burns without any external source of combustion.