It was close to eight o’clock in the evening, yet Bingxin still hadn’t arrived. “I’d better go check on her,” I told Xiaotao.

She stopped me, then told me to bring some food for her. I laughed and said, “So you do care about her!”

“Of course I do!” she replied. “We’re the only women in the team! Who would take care of her if I don’t?”

“Oh, but must the master detective deliver the food himself?” Director Feng interjected. “Surely any other officer can do it!”

“I’d better do it myself,” I said. “Her dad did ask us to take good care of her, after all.”

“Oh, that’s right,” added Xiaotao, “her father is Sun Tiger, by the way.”

Director Feng’s cup slipped through his fingers. He shot up to his feet and cried, “You should’ve told me earlier! I’m terribly sorry!”

He then insisted on going with me. Yuanchao came along too. We headed towards the morgue in the police station and found Bingxin carefully studying the broken bone fragments. Officer Chen was right beside her.

Director Feng hurried to Bingxin and said, “Miss Sun, I’ve been remiss as a host! Please forgive me! You should take a rest and have some food!”

Bingxin stared confusedly at us, probably wondering why Director Feng’s attitude changed so suddenly.

I echoed Director Feng and told Bingxin to take a rest and have dinner, but she refused. She said she was really puzzled by the bones, and it would drive her crazy if she didn’t make sense out of it.

There were more than six hundred bone fragments. Apart from being dismembered by the killer, the victim’s body had also been gnawed at by the stray dogs at the construction site. In fact, the body was discovered when someone noticed the dogs fighting over a human limb. When the police got to the scene, the body parts were so scattered that they could barely identify it as a human corpse.

I asked Bingxin what she’d discovered so far, and she replied, “Judging by the bone size, the victim was most likely a male in his thirties. His bone joints are thick, so he must’ve been engaged in manual labor during his life. I just can’t identify what type of bones they are! All the things I learned in the textbooks are useless!”

“How about this?” I suggested. “I’ll show you how to do it tomorrow. I promise you that I’ll be able to identify them within an hour!”

Bingxin’s eyes lit up with excitement. “Just do it now, Song Yang-gege! I want to see it now!”

“No,” I shook my head. “I need time to make some preparations.”

I wrote down a list of Chinese herbs and handed it to Officer Chen, asking him to buy them for me.

Bingxin then began to eat right inside the morgue. She had changed so much since we were young. She used to be scared of cockroaches, but now, she could sit down and have a meal right next to a pile of bones without batting an eye.

In order to make up for his indifference to her earlier, Director Feng started to ask Bingxin all sorts of questions. He even planned to let a female officer accompany her and assist her while she was here. Bingxin didn’t know how to respond to his barrage of questions, so she just replied with a pursed smile.

“Right,” I interjected, “since we’re already here, could you show us the body from the other case?”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Detective Song,” Director Feng answered. “The corpse was cremated. The victim’s family demanded it. People here are very religious, sometimes they make it difficult for us to do our job…”

After a while, Officer Chen returned with the materials that I needed, so we went back to the hotel.

There still wasn’t much to do on the first day. Some police officers were playing cards in their room. I shared a room with Yuanchao. The minute we came back, he hopped onto the bed and lay there drinking from his silver flask the whole night, not saying a single word to me. I was used to that by now, so I spent the time surfing the Internet. At around midnight, the sound of firecrackers outside broke the silence in the room. It was going to be the new year soon, and I suddenly felt a little homesick.

The sound of shattering glass downstairs broke my train of thoughts. It was quickly followed by the deafening noise of a car alarm. Yuanchao jumped out of bed and looked out the window.

“Someone’s smashing a car window!” he said.

“Let’s go downstairs now!”

We quickly put on our coats and ran out. As we passed by Xiaotao’s room, I heard her voice shouting through the door, “Yuanchao! Whose car got broken into?”

“It was too dark to tell,” he answered.

Xiaotao slid her car key through the crack of the door and yelled, “The bastards! They even dared to smash a police officer’s car! Move my car to a safer spot with a surveillance camera, will you?”

“Do you need to ask Uncle Wang to do that?” I asked. “Why don’t you do it yourself?”

“I’m not wearing clothes!” answered Xiaotao. I heard the sound of Bingxin giggling behind Xiaotao. It turned out that they had just taken a shower and were having a chat.

Yuanchao and I went downstairs and found that all of the cars from Nanjiang City had been damaged one way or another. Even the windshield of Xiaotao’s car had been smashed into. I looked around and saw no one there.

“This is ridiculous!” I spat.

We went back up and told Xiaotao what we saw, and she yelled, “Son of a bitch! How dare they! I’ll get their fingerprints tomorrow and catch the damn rascals!”

“Who do you think would do this, Uncle Wang?” I asked.

“The local gangsters, perhaps,” he replied.

I’d heard that people in small towns tend to be very xenophobic and distrusting of outsiders. There were even cases when the police went into a village to arrest a suspect, and all the villagers would run out to protect them. They would even push police cars into a ditch to discourage officers from outside of town to ‘meddle’ in their affairs.

The truth is, people in small towns usually form tight-knit communities. Everyone is either a friend or a relative, hence they would obviously protect each other from outsiders, even if the outsiders are the police.

Director Feng welcomed us with great fanfare when we arrived. This meant that the whole town must’ve known that we were here.

I couldn’t go to sleep that night. Early the next morning, Xiaotao reported the incident to Director Feng. He promised that they would pay for the damages and vowed to capture the hooligans who did it.

I asked for an empty room and began concocting a solution. It took me three hours to prepare it. The composition of this solution wasn’t important, only its density was. I then asked Officer Chen if there was a pit or a pond nearby. He responded that there was an abandoned limestone quarry near the construction site, where there was a limestone pit. I told him to take me there.

Xiaotao, Yuanchao, and Bingxin came with me too. Bingxin brought along the victim’s bone fragments. We stopped at the edge of the pit. I told the police officers to pour water into the pit. Once it was a quarter full, I told them to stop and add the solution that I’d prepared earlier. Then I told the officers to add more water until the pit was half full, then I added the solution again. This step was repeated until the limestone pit was completely full.

Bingxin watched on with great interest. “What kind of magic trick are you doing here, Song Yang-gege?” she asked.

“I’m preparing the Bone Density Fluid,” I explained. “As the name suggests, it’s a liquid that has the same density as human bone. Look!”

I picked up one of the bone fragments and threw it into the liquid. The bone sank to the bottom.

“Nothing happened, Song Yang-gege!” cried Bingxin, blinking. I heard some officers sniggering in the background.

“Patience,” I said. “I’ll throw more bone fragments in there. Look!”

This time the bone fragments were suspended in the middle of the liquid. This startled everyone. “Throw it all in!” I ordered.

Two police officers poured the contents of the bag containing the victim’s bones into the ad hoc pool. After a while, the broken bones floated to the top. I pointed and explained, “See, the top layer is the skull, below it are the bones of the hands and feet. Then beneath that are the bones of the arms, the legs, and the pelvis. Then the vertebrae are at the bottom of the pit.”

Bingxin clapped her hands excitedly. “Oh my god, that’s awesome, Song Yang-gege! This method would save half—no, more than half—three quarters of the time!”

I used a net to pick the bones up, then with Bingxin’s help we managed to piece the bones together into a complete human skeleton in less than an hour. Although it might sound wrong, I must admit that when the task was complete, I felt quite proud of myself.

Then, I examined the bones closely, and learned that the human skeleton was not complete—it was missing two phalanges[1] on the right hand!

1. Bones of the fingers.