ebookland Chapter 1163 The Corpse in the Grave
Chapter 1163 The Corpse in the Grave
Xiao Sun found half a cigarette butt at the base of the tombstone. The lip print on the filter was blurry, but the degree of burning of the tobacco indicated that it had been extinguished: "Yuxi brand, cigarette butt length 3.1 cm, moderate smoking level, saliva stains on the filter are being extracted."
Xiao Wang's inquiry shifted to the cemetery's management. "Is there surveillance usually?" Li Baoguo suddenly pointed to the camera at the entrance as his pen traced an arc on the paper. "It was just installed last month, but it's turned off at night. Old Zhang, the cemetery keeper, lives in a small hut at the foot of the mountain. Last night, when I came to deliver a lamp, I saw a man in a black jacket wandering around the cemetery. When I asked him who he was looking for, he stammered and couldn't answer." He gestured to indicate his height, "About your height, a little hunched over, and his left hand is always in his pocket."
Xiao Yang's surveying light stopped on the fresh soil of the grave mound. The soil was clearly disturbed, and the edges still bore the teeth marks of a shovel. "The digging tool should have been a flat-headed shovel, with a blade width of 20 centimeters," he observed with a magnifying glass. "The clods of soil are uniform in size, and the digger's movements are skilled, unlike a novice. There is a depression on the west side of the grave mound, which was made when a heavy object was placed there. It is about 0.3 square meters in area, which matches the shoulder width of an adult male." Xiao Sun found several black fibers in the depression, 5-8 centimeters long, which initially matched the material of the black jacket described by Li Baoguo.
"Is the cemetery locked at night?" Xiao Wang flipped through the cemetery's management regulations. Li Baoguo shook his head: "There's a small path on the back hill that leads in. Grave robbers have been eyeing the old graves before." He suddenly remembered something, "When I came last week, I saw that the cypress tree in front of Zhou Guiying's grave had been broken. I even had an argument with Old Zhang, saying he wasn't taking good care of it." Xiao Wang looked in the direction he was pointing. There were fresh saw marks on the broken cypress branch, and the cut was stained with dark red—as if it had been contaminated with blood.
Xiao Sun made a discovery under a cypress tree five meters from the grave: a silver button half-buried in the soil, with four round holes and worn patterns on the surface. "There was a gray fiber wrapped around the buttonhole," he carefully put it away in an evidence bag. "It wasn't cotton; it looked like some kind of synthetic blend fabric, commonly seen in work clothes or jackets." Xiao Yang found several scratches on the back of the tombstone, as if carved with a sharp tool, but the writing was blurry and illegible; only the character "债" (debt) could be made out.
As technicians began securing the scene, Li Ming's gaze fell on the dark red bloodstain. "The pattern of the bloodstain indicates a struggle," he told the officer beside him. "Check the list of people who have visited the cemetery in the last three months, focusing on men who are 175-180 cm tall, slightly hunched, and have a disability or injury to their left hand." Suddenly, the morning bell rang in the distance, startling sparrows from the cypress trees. The flock swept across the gray sky, as if mourning the desecrated grave.
As Xiao Wang closed the notebook, Li Baoguo was still muttering about the exposed hand. "There was mud under the fingernails," the old man's voice trembled, "There seemed to be a watch on his wrist, the metal strap flashed in the dirt... Now that I think about it, the posture looked like he was grabbing something." Suddenly, Xiao Sun found a lighter at the base of a cypress tree, with the words "Integrity" engraved on the windshield—seemingly having some hidden connection with the word "Debt" on the back of the tombstone.
On the mountain road outside the cordon, the police car's engine was still idling. Li Ming looked at the disturbed grave and suddenly said to the officer beside him, "Investigate Zhou Guiying's family relationships, especially those with debt disputes." The morning mist gradually dissipated, and sunlight pierced through the clouds, shining on the blood-stained grave. Those concealed secrets seemed to seep into the morning dew of Dongshan Cemetery little by little along the damp soil.
The morning mist at Dongshan Cemetery began to dissipate at 8:07 AM. Sunlight filtered through the gaps in the cypress leaves, casting 3-5 centimeter-diameter spots of light on the ground, which moved slowly with the breeze. As Li Ming gave instructions into his shoulder-mounted walkie-talkie, the movement of his Adam's apple cast a noticeable shadow in the morning light: "Expand the survey radius to 100 meters, focus on marking the 230-250 meter contour line area behind the mountain and the blind spots in the monitoring system, and use the laser rangefinder to calibrate the footprint coordinates." Xiao Yang, who was sealing bloodstain samples from the grave into EDTA anticoagulant tubes, immediately adjusted the survey route upon hearing the instructions. The 1000-lumen beam of the survey light traced a 30-degree fan-shaped trajectory on the grass with a relative humidity of 75%, and the edges of the light spots showed a pale purple halo due to the refraction of water vapor.
小孙踩着新铺设的30x60cm勘查踏板往墓园深处移动，足迹灯的450nm蓝光在dew水盈盈的小径上形成强烈反射。“师兄，北纬36°42&39;18&39;&39;，东经117°25&39;32&39;&39;处发现成趟新鲜鞋印，”他蹲下身将不锈钢标尺卡在鞋印前掌最宽处，“43码，前掌压力面外侧比内侧深3±0.2mm，步长71±0.5cm，步宽14.5±0.3cm，步角5°外撇，与墓碑周围的鞋印特征吻合度92%。”他用200目石膏粉以45度角均匀撒在鞋印周围，粉末在露水的浸润下通过毛细作用渐渐固定形态，“鞋印边缘的红土颗粒粒径0.5-2mm，密度达18粒/cm?0?5，比之前发现的高6粒/cm?0?5，说明嫌疑人从后山过来时负重增加，结合步频变化推算携带工具重量约3-5kg。”
The two followed the footprints in an "S" shaped path towards the back of the mountain. Suddenly, Xiao Yang stopped before a steep slope of 25°. The grassy plants on the slope showed obvious signs of being knocked down, and the cellulose at the broken stems shone with a silvery-white luster and a refractive index of 1.57 under the sunlight. "There are signs of slippage here," he said, using tweezers to pick up a broken blade of grass with a forked root. "The stems are torn at a 30° acute angle, all tensile fractures from bottom to top, consistent with the force characteristics of slipping downhill when a person's center of gravity shifts backward. The sliding distance is about 1.2 meters." At the bottom of the slope, in a pile of rubble, Xiao Sun used a metal probe to pick up a 0.8 x 1.2 cm silver metal piece with serrated edges spaced 0.3 cm apart: "Made of No. 45 steel, the chrome plating has a 30% wear rate. It's a fragment of the anti-slip texture from a flat-headed shovel. The dark red soil attached to it has a pH of 6.2, perfectly matching the cation exchange capacity of the grave mound soil."
The mixed forest on the back hill was filled with the humic acid smell of decaying leaves. Xiao Yang's survey light detected something unusual under a Chinese cypress tree that was about 50 years old. There were signs that the leaf litter at the base of the tree had been disturbed, revealing the clayey black soil underneath. “There are fresh excavation marks here,” he said, brushing aside a 2.5cm layer of fallen leaves. The pit was irregularly circular, with a diameter of 30±2cm. “The excavation tools are the same as those used on the grave mound, all with arc-shaped shovel marks formed by flat-headed iron shovels. The shovel is 20cm wide and has a 35° blade angle. The cedar wood chips remaining at the bottom of the pit are 0.3-0.5mm in diameter. Based on preliminary judgment, it was a temporary pit used to hide tools.” Xiao Sun used a handheld metal detector to scan the area around the pit 360°. When the probe was 5cm from the ground, the instrument suddenly emitted a rapid “beep” sound of 85 decibels. He used an archaeological shovel to peel away the soil layer by layer and dug out half of a 23cm long 40 iron chain. The chain link was 8mm in diameter, and the fresh scratches at the lock were 0.12mm deep, consistent with the characteristics of being forcibly opened recently.