Although the lights were on, the factory remained dimly lit. The large cement partitions, each about 2 meters long, 3 meters wide, and 40 centimeters high, resembled oversized tofu grids. The bodies, referred to as "salted fish," lay in these large compartments alongside a pile of ice, resembling the fish on a supermarket's fresh seafood display.
Some corpses are highly decomposed, emitting a unique foul odor, with flies buzzing around them.
In the corner of the factory, a large ice-making machine is making a rumbling noise.
Here it is like a large warehouse, with the corpses floating quietly in a mixture of ice water, slowly decaying and gradually emitting a foul odor, until someone comes to take them away.
The duty officer held a long-handled fork, touching the corpse in the compartment. The large ice blocks, half-floating in the water, were stirred and collided silently with the body.
In the dark environment, the stench of decaying corpses, and the rumbling sound of the ice machine made King Mas, who had already endured several hours of travel to get here, feel an unbearable wave of nausea. This old detective did not want to stay for another minute.
Mas Wang and his colleague exchanged a glance. There was only one person on the other side. Although Mas Wang wasn't particularly strong, the two of them were enough to handle this man in his fifties.
The two of them tacitly quickened their pace. One colleague tripped the man, and Wang Mas quickly stepped forward. Together, they managed to pin the uncle down and twisted his hands behind his back.
"What are you doing? What are you doing?" The uncle on duty immediately shouted loudly. He obviously did not expect such a situation to happen. His colleague immediately took out handcuffs and handcuffed the man, dragging him towards the guard room.
The other two colleagues also wanted to come to help, but they just looked from a distance at the door of the workshop and immediately retreated.
Where did the corpses in the whole workshop come from? Where did they flow to? King Mas did not dare to think about it, and his scalp was numb.
The interrogation of the uncle guard went smoothly. In his words, except for the stench, his work was no different from that of an ordinary guard.
It turned out that this was the estuary of several large rivers. Every summer, floating corpses from upstream would float here. Most of them were suicides. The bodies were stranded on the beach. It was not surprising to find three or four bodies a day. In one summer, dozens or even hundreds of bodies were pulled out of the water, but few people came to claim them. Many of the bodies had already decayed, and the freezers in the local funeral homes simply could not store such a large number of bodies, nor could they leave the bodies outside the freezers to stink.
There was no place to collect the dead, and the funeral home had contacted relevant units many times, but could not solve this contradiction.
At this time, a local gangster named He discovered a "business opportunity".
The local elderly believe in returning to their roots and resting in peace, and most of them hope to have a grand funeral after death. However, with the promotion of cremation across the country, the city's regulations on cremation of corpses have become increasingly strict, and corpses must be cremated before relevant death certificates can be issued.
Those locals who want to bury the dead began to have crooked ideas.
They secretly put the unknown corpses on the beach into coffins and sent them to the funeral home, saying that they were their relatives in order to obtain cremation certificates. Before that, they had already buried their real relatives.
Boss He gradually turned this "folk custom" into a business. He bribed the staff of the local Civil Affairs Bureau, negotiated a price with the funeral home, and took on the work of collecting and storing all the unknown floating corpses and homeless corpses, and then sold them specifically to those who needed corpses to pretend to be relatives in exchange for cremation certificates.
With the way, you still need people to do the work. He took a fancy to several workers who were originally engaged in corpse recovery work, among whom was the security guard Uncle Wang. Uncle Wang had worked in the local area more than 20 years ago. He was brave and not afraid of dirt. He had worked as a corpse recoverer before. Once he met Boss He by chance, and Boss He offered a high salary, so he volunteered to guard the morgue. Uncle Wang said that at first they were afraid of suspicion, so they pretended to send some corpses to cremation when the funeral home was relatively free. But gradually, they found that even if they did not send corpses to the funeral home, no one would ask. As a result, an almost semi-public "corpse black market" was formed in the local area. In this industrial chain, there are corpses floating in the water or lying dead on the roadside. They may have been the most beloved people of a person or a family when they were alive. After death, they were sent to the "corpse black market" along the river or by twists and turns, waiting to be bought to meet the various needs of buyers.
In the desk drawer of the security uncle, there is a hardcover notebook that records the transaction records of the "corpse black market". It clearly states the date and month of a corpse received from where, and some of the words have a crossed-out horizontal line.
Each horizontal line represents a corpse that was sold.
As for whether the one sold was the marked one, no one knows.
In the "corpse black market", King Mas only saw a dozen corpses, but there were clues to hundreds of corpses in the thin notebook. In other words, they have sold nearly a hundred corpses this year alone, and there is no way to find out where the corpses sold earlier went.
No one cares about their past and present lives, and whether their families are still looking for them.
According to Wang Chengfu's confession, he just wanted to escape from debt. As for insurance, it would be best if he could compensate his wife and children, but if he couldn't, it would be fine. He hinted to his wife that he would run away.
No wonder his wife was always unwilling to identify the vehicle and the corpse.
A year ago, Wang Chengfu heard about a "corpse black market" in S City at a drinking party. Seeing that his debts were about to mature, he, who had been influenced by Hong Kong dramas for many years, came up with a plan: fake his death to escape.
"Isn't that how it's played out in the movies? A fire burns it, and no one can recognize it. The car was mortgaged a long time ago, and I can't drive it for a few days." It seems that if the body is thrown into the car and burned, the police will be helpless and the case will be closed. Wang Chengfu got the phone number of Mr. He, the boss of the "corpse black market". He emphasized on the phone that he wanted a male corpse, but he didn't dare to say that he bought it to fake the death scene. When Mr. He gave the doorman a brief explanation, he wanted a male corpse, but for the doorman, the corpse was burned into ash, and the gender was not so important. He pulled out a short-haired corpse and put it into the body bag without even checking whether it was a man or a woman. As for Wang Chengfu, who drove hundreds of kilometers to retrieve the body, the smell in the trunk alone made him uneasy all the way. He didn't have the courage to "inspect the goods". He quickly found a suitable section of the road to fake a car crash, poured gasoline and set it on fire and fled. He didn't even open the zipper of the body bag, and didn't know whether it was a man or a woman.
And the charred female corpse was sent to this cold and dirty "corpse black market" because of this blunder, and was sold again. Finally, it was on a detective's dissection table that he was able to "tell" who she was.
The subsequent investigation went smoothly. Wang Chengfu was brought to court on suspicion of insurance fraud and insulting and destroying corpses. Boss He and Uncle Wang, who bought and sold corpses, were also arrested. The people related to the Civil Affairs Bureau and the funeral home who provided convenience were investigated and punished.
After catching the people, the police went to the city where the girl Yang Xiaomei was located and retrieved the video footage along the way. In the video, we determined that the girl walked to the river alone, and also found her last words on her QQ space.
The diatom experiment is a key indicator to determine whether the deceased drowned. If the deceased entered the water before death, diatoms can enter the blood circulation through the lungs and spread throughout the body. In other words, diatoms can be detected in the internal organs of the drowned person, especially a large number of diatoms in the lung tissue is one of the important indicators of drowning before death. We sent the internal organs of the body for inspection and did a diatom experiment, and the girl's cause of death was finally determined to be drowning.
Her charred body was finally cremated into ashes, and her parents took it back to their hometown and buried it in the cemetery.
After hearing what my senior brother Ma Si Wang said, I was curious about how the girl's parents reacted.
"They were a quiet pair of parents. Like the usual family members of the deceased, they accepted the news of their loved one's death in grief but calmly." I still remember Ma Si Wang's answer.
They didn't even show any special resentment towards Boss He who bought and sold the corpse, and Wang Chengfu who burned the corpse.
"If it weren't for them, it might not have been so easy to find the body. It's just a trouble for you."
Ma Si Wang has heard this sentence many times, but none of them was more shocking than this time.
For the parents, the girl's death was a fact. Only when her body was found could they rest in peace and go home.
But what about the remaining bodies in the "corpse black market"?
They were in such a corner that no one noticed, being treated as goods for sale. Once they were bought, they could never be found again, and their relatives and friends would never have the possibility of finding them again.
No one paid attention to these bodies before, but now King Mas felt that he was standing here, and this was his responsibility. No one cared, but he, the "detective", cared.
He re-examined, photographed, and dissected the bodies left in the black market, extracted DNA samples and stored them in the hope that their families would be able to claim them home one day in the future.
"But hundreds of bodies were gone before." King Mas finished the whole case, looked at the twilight in the distance, and sighed deeply.
I understand Maswang's feelings especially, because not long ago, I happened to see a post online about a boy who was looking for his ex-girlfriend for 8 years.
The girl had broken up with him before she disappeared, but one day she found him and gave him the bank card and password with 5,000 yuan in it, so that he could pass it on to her parents.
Although he was an ex-boyfriend, the transfer of the bank card was suspicious from beginning to end. Sure enough, within two days, he could no longer contact his ex-girlfriend.
He looked for the girl's current boyfriend, but only got a bunch of contradictory excuses.
He reported the case, but he could not find the person alive or dead.
For 8 years, a living person disappeared inexplicably. He and his girlfriend's parents went to Guangdong many times to look for the girl, but they never found her whereabouts.
In the end, the boy only had the obsession to find the girl.
He wrote in the post: "The ex-girlfriend's family has no energy and financial resources to toss around, so they can only watch a relative disappear like this."
I can feel his pain. Coincidentally, the city where the girl in the post lived was my neighboring city. I contacted local colleagues and conducted a DNA comparison on the blood samples of the girl's parents again. It was finally discovered that the girl had died accidentally 8 years ago and her body floated on the river.
Finally, they could only look at the girl's portrait at the local police station, but did not find the ashes. But he wrote in his last post: "Sincerely thank the good detective."
I never met this netizen from beginning to end, but in the reply to the message later, I found that a definite information about the girl's life and death gave the boy and girl's parents a chance to finally let it go.
In the past detective years, Mas Wang and I have dealt with countless floating corpses, skeletons, and unidentified corpses. We registered, inspected, extracted DNA from those corpses one by one, and then cremated them.
Perhaps most of these corpses will not be claimed for many years, and will only be buried collectively on the mountain next to the funeral home. But every year, I still insist on receiving reporters who are looking for the bodies of their relatives. I have seen with my own eyes that a corpse that has been left for more than ten years finally waited for his family.
The family members met with me, looked at the photos of their relatives, checked the DNA, determined the cause of death, and finally received a thin "death certificate". But it is that thin piece of paper that can untie the knot in a family's heart and allow those who are alive to continue their lives.
That is a heavy "explanation".
I don't know how many more separations and deaths I will witness, and how many bodies still cannot be found by their families, but I think that every time I do a little more, maybe I can help the deceased a little more, and maybe I can comfort one more living person.
We are detectives, we must speak for those innocent bodies involved in the case and find the real culprit. We must also do our best to find respect and a way home for those nameless and voiceless bodies.
I especially understand Mas Wang's feelings, because not long ago, I accidentally saw a post on the Internet that a boy was looking for his ex-girlfriend for 8 years.
The girl had broken up with him before she disappeared, but one day she deliberately found him and gave him the bank card and password with 5,000 yuan in it, so that he had the opportunity to pass it on to her parents.
Although it was an ex-boyfriend, the transfer of the bank card was strange from beginning to end. Sure enough, within two days, he could no longer contact his ex-girlfriend.
He looked for the girl's current boyfriend, but only got a bunch of contradictory excuses.
He reported the case, but he could not find the girl alive or dead.
For 8 years, a living person disappeared inexplicably. He and his girlfriend's parents went to Guangdong many times to look for the girl, but they could not find her whereabouts.
In the end, the boy was only obsessed with finding the girl.
He wrote in the post: "The ex-girlfriend's family has no energy and financial resources to toss, so they can only watch a relative disappear like this."
I can feel his pain. Coincidentally, the city where the girl in the post is located is my neighboring city. I contacted local colleagues and compared the blood samples of the girl's parents for DNA again. Finally, it was found that the girl died unexpectedly 8 years ago and her body floated on the river.