Chapter 087: Frightened to Death Alive

After Li Tianque came out, he immediately asked Ma Baoguo where his other belongings had gone, especially the black sphere he used to imprison the eater-bug.

Ma Baoguo would not let him use his phone, but said he could take the rest of his things.

Yet when Li Tianque arrived at the place where the items were kept, he could not help but frown.

The motorcycle was still there, and so was the backpack, but the black sphere inside it was gone.

Before being locked in the interrogation room, Li Tianque had specifically told them to keep a close watch on that sphere.

At the time, Ma Baoguo had already concluded that Li Tianque was the murderer, and of course he would not take every word from a suspect at face value.

Still, though Ma Baoguo looked carefree and rough around the edges, he was in fact very cautious.

Anything so carefully guarded by a criminal suspect was naturally suspicious, so Ma Baoguo had ordered it placed inside a blastproof barrel and locked it up.

Seeing the surprise on Li Tianque’s face, Ma Baoguo smiled and said, “Don’t worry. Your black sphere has been locked inside the blastproof barrel. Xiao Liu, who has the key, has been worn out these past few days and gone back to the dormitory to sleep. Once he wakes, he’ll take it out for you.”

“Fine. Once he wakes up, we can go take a look. It’s safe enough kept here anyway,” Li Tianque nodded. After all, if he wanted to investigate the case, carrying it around would not be convenient.

“All right, then let’s go look at the body first,” Ma Baoguo said.

Thus, Li Tianque followed Ma Baoguo out of the police station and headed to a refrigerated warehouse in the township.

Wurkeluo Township had no coroner, and the victim’s body had not yet been autopsied. They would have to wait for personnel to come from the county to perform the examination and take the remains away.

Until then, the body had been temporarily placed in a room rented inside the refrigerated warehouse.

This was not the first time the place had been used as a morgue. The warehouse had originally been built to store frozen meat, but later, as the township’s population dwindled and people moved away, the high cost of operation left it abandoned.

Later, when some herders died and needed somewhere to keep the bodies, someone thought of this place.

After the herders discussed it with the owner, the owner figured that unused space was still space, so he simply rented it out to them; in fact, it brought in better returns than storage ever had.

And so, little by little, it had become an improvised mortuary.

On the way, Ma Baoguo briefly told Li Tianque about the victim.

The deceased was named Lin Ya, female, twenty-seven years old, a graduate student at the National Forest University and a member of the research team. She was an expert in the study of wingless insects, and had come to the township with Professor Lu Zuzhi’s team for a research project on the black silk wingless insect.

Lin Ya was lively and cheerful, usually rather informal, and her colleagues all said she got along well with people.

When the team heard that Lin Ya had died, several who were close to her burst into tears on the spot, unable to believe it.

Li Tianque listened patiently while thinking through the suspicious points in the case.

Before he knew it, the two had already reached the refrigerated warehouse.

They pushed open the outermost iron gate, wrapped in thick felt cloth, and entered the cold, dim warehouse.

The roar of the refrigeration unit filled the space. The air was thick with a nauseating fishy stench, and the lamp shades were caked with black mud and dust, making the light faint and murky.

Ma Baoguo opened the innermost room and flipped the switch on the wall.

The ceiling light crackled and flickered. In the alternating bands of brightness and shadow, the two men saw an extremely horrifying sight:

The iron bed in the morgue was creaking and groaning, and beside it stood a woman in white with long hair hanging loose, posed in a grotesque and unnatural stance.

Her figure was hunched, her movements eerie, and her skin ghastly pale, making her look rather terrifying.

Even more frightening was that with every flicker of the light, the woman seemed to draw nearer, inch by inch, until she was closer and closer to the two of them.

“Holy—”

Ma Baoguo could not help shouting and nearly slammed the door shut.

But when the flickering shadows ended and the room’s lights came on again, Ma Baoguo finally saw clearly that the long-haired woman was wearing protective clothing and a mask. One hand held a flashlight, the other a dissection saw.

Seeing Ma Baoguo and Li Tianque enter, the other person also seemed somewhat surprised.

“You two are...”

“Aha, so it’s Dr. Xia. Long time no see... and you don’t even switch on a light. That really does scare people...” Ma Baoguo said.

As the light grew steady, Li Tianque also made out the girl’s appearance.

She had fair skin, though a little rough; small eyes, high cheekbones, and thin lips. Her features were plain but proper enough, not beautiful, though fairly delicate. She was wearing a white lab coat, but while working her hair had not been tied up and now hung down.

Seeing Ma Baoguo, the girl froze for a moment before reacting.

“Oh, you’re the township police chief, right? Yes, it really has been a long time...”

“Dr. Xia, how can you not even turn on the lights? You startled me,” Ma Baoguo said with a smile.

“Uh, I’m used to it. I need to use the test kits, and switching the lights on and off is too much trouble,” Dr. Xia said with a laugh.

“How are the results?” Ma Baoguo asked as he walked toward the female corpse.

Li Tianque followed behind him and also approached the body.

He had witnessed the woman’s death with his own eyes. It had already been horrific enough to describe as a pitiful, unbearable sight, and after Dr. Xia had dissected her, it was even more difficult to bear looking at.

Yet under the light, Li Tianque made a different discovery this time. He pointed to several round holes on the woman’s arm and asked, “Did you do this?”

“Of course not. These were left when the victim was tortured by the murderer. A freak with that kind of disturbed mind is really not common on the grassland. By the way, when I came here, I heard you had already caught the murderer. What does he look like?” Dr. Xia said with a smile.

“There. That is the murderer,” Ma Baoguo said, his gaze flicking toward Li Tianque beside him.

Dr. Xia froze at once. She swallowed and stepped back two paces, looking Li Tianque over from head to toe.

“This... what does that mean? You two...”

“Mm? You dare call me a freak? Looks like you’ve got a serious prejudice against me. To tell you the truth, I’ve already bought him over. I’m giving you a choice now: either cooperate with us, or go down with that woman,” Li Tianque said suddenly, his expression stern and his face dark.

“Huh?” Dr. Xia was instantly terrified out of her wits, gripping the dissection saw with both hands and retreating repeatedly.

“You... you two had better not mess around. I... I’m warning you...”

“Heh, just kidding. I’m the only witness at the scene, and now I’m cooperating with Director Zhang here to investigate this case,” Li Tianque said with a shrug and a smile.

Dr. Xia gave him a glare. If Li Tianque had not at least been rather handsome, she probably would have really wanted to saw the fellow in front of her in half.

“Well then, our Dr. Xia fears neither heaven nor earth, not even ghosts—so how come she’s suddenly afraid of the two of us?” Ma Baoguo said.

“Tch. I’m afraid because you’re ugly! The two of you are just abnormal freaks! Frightening little girls in a morgue, how shameless can you get?” Dr. Xia said irritably.

“Well, there’s nothing we can do. No matter how good-looking someone is, once they’re compared with our Dr. Xia, they turn into an ugly monster,” Ma Baoguo said, lifting an eyebrow.

Li Tianque, however, was no longer joking. He looked seriously at the female corpse and said, “Dr. Xia, tell us about the victim’s condition.”

Dr. Xia set down the dissection saw and said, “Based on the current examination, the deceased had widespread contusions and hemorrhaging in the soft tissue and muscles. My preliminary judgment is that the cause of death may have been hemorrhagic or traumatic shock. But because the victim’s myocardial fibers were torn and her heart had bled, it could also have been death caused by cardiac arrest.”

“Cardiac arrest? You mean... she might have been scared to death?” Ma Baoguo said.

“Yes, very possibly. Although there were many wounds on the body, the surfaces of the injuries were not large. The murderer should have used some kind of needle-like or awl-like object to stab the victim repeatedly, and also used pliers to pull out her teeth. But strangely, I also found some insect eggs inside the body, and there were traces of some kind of insect secretion on the victim’s skin,” Dr. Xia said, her expression puzzled.

“Before this woman died, a lot of caterpillars crawled out of her body. Those wounds on her face were left when the insects broke through the skin!” Li Tianque added.

“Ah! No wonder she was scared to death! I was just wondering why, from the wounds on her face, it looked as though the killer had stabbed outward from inside her face to make those holes. So it was because insects crawled out from inside her face. How terrifying...” Though Dr. Xia kept saying it was terrifying, her face looked strangely delighted, and she even licked her lips.

Ma Baoguo suddenly remembered something and said, “We did indeed find a lot of insects. Since the victim was an entomologist, we originally thought they were something she carried with her. Fortunately, Xiao Liu put all those insects into glass jars.

Oh, and there was also some white powder at the scene. After the insects crawled out of her body, they all gathered on top of that powder.”

“That should have been some kind of food. When the murderer struck, I discovered him, and in his panic he scattered that powder, which made all the insects inside the woman’s body crawl out,” Li Tianque recalled.

“That fellow really is cruel, beyond human,” Ma Baoguo said.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Li Tianque said lightly.