She nodded.
“Have you seen anything like this before?”
“Other mutilations, yes. But this coating? Never.” She stood still in deep concentration. Finally she shook her head and said, “Let’s work quickly before the others arrive.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want to take a closer look. Go around to the other side of the bed….”
“What about my footprints?”
“It’s a wood floor. There’s no blood. We may pick up microscopics later, but there’s nothing obvious that we’ll be corrupting. I think it’s fine. Don’t touch the bed.”
As though he’d want to….
He went right as Hulan went left.
“Start at her head,” Hulan directed. She leaned forward, putting her hands on her knees for balance. He did the same. “Tell me everything you see, no matter how insignificant.”
What could possibly be classified as insignificant here? he wondered.
He forced himself to focus on Lily’s head. Seeing how her blood-coated hair lay in a thick, rusty helmet against her skull, David felt a wave of nausea sweep through him. He tried to use the same clinical tone that Hulan had adopted and found it helpful.
“Her hair looks
like it’s been combed,” he said.
“I think so too. It’s like the blood was poured over her hair and combed through to get every hair exactly in place.” She added, “I’m assuming it’s blood. It smells like it.”
David’s nausea worsened. Then, as his eyes traveled down, his stomach rolled again. “Her nose—”
“Cut off. What would do that so cleanly?” Hulan leaned in even closer until she was just inches from Lily’s face. “No jagged edges, no ripping. Whatever was used was very sharp. And, David, what do you make of this on her forehead?”
At first he saw only blood, and the truth was he didn’t want to look much closer. But as he made himself focus on that few square inches, he did begin to see something.
“Is it a clot?”
“I don’t think so. The blood is spread so evenly everywhere else. Why make a mistake here on her face? No, it’s something under the blood. It looks like a pattern of some sort. The pathologist will need to be careful with that.”
Hulan fanned out her hand a few inches above the body and used it as a guide as she traveled down from the neck.
“She’s naked,” David observed.
“Is that because the killer wanted to paint blood over the entire corpse? Painted in some way, don’t you think, not dunked?”
“She wasn’t dunked. You can see the smearing. A cloth, a brush, maybe even hands.”
“Let’s hope it was hands. We might be able to pick up prints.”
They’d almost reached Lily’s ankles when they heard the footsteps of several people running down the hallway. The sound was a tremendous relief to David. Lily’s sawed off stumps were well out of his league.
Hulan swiftly moved to the door and let David out ahead of her. Then she pulled the door shut, stood with her back against it, and waited for the clerk and three other men—presumably from the local Public Security Bureau—to come to her. She introduced herself, speaking more slowly than usual and clipping her Beijing accent to account for any misinterpretations that might be caused by differences in dialect.
“I’m here on special assignment for Vice Minister Zai of the Ministry of Public Security. This is my husband, Attorney Stark. He is a foreigner, but he’s here on official business from the State Cultural Relics Bureau. You must pay him the highest respect, as though he were a black-haired person.” Her tone was authoritative and offered no room for argument. “I will be handling this case.”
She extended her hand. The eldest of the men shook it and responded in heavily accented English. “I am Captain Hom,” he said, a Magnificent Sound cigarette dangling from his lips. “These are my officers, Su Zhangqing and Ge Fei. We handle our own cases in Bashan, even those dealing with foreigners.”
Now Hulan switched to English. “Not this time. However, I welcome your advice.”