Chapter 383: A Case Shrouded in Fog

A perfectly normal, confused expression.

What are the common tells in human body language?

For example, looking up and to the left when recalling a memory.

There are actually many. These kinds of microexpressions are quite universal, not due to personal habits, but because of human physiology.

According to theories like neurolinguistic programming, different regions of the brain are responsible for different functions.

It’s generally believed that the left brain is mainly associated with logical thinking and language processing, while the right brain is more involved in visual thinking, emotional perception, and memory.

Therefore, when a person starts to recall something, they might activate the areas of the brain related to visual memory, and this activation can cause their eyes to move upward and to the left.

By the same token, there are generally fixed physical responses for expressing confusion, shock, guilt, or telling a lie.

For instance, looking up and to the right or looking down while being questioned often indicates guilt or the beginning of a lie.

Looking down or away is a kind of psychological ‘escape’ maneuver.

The shop owner showed no such tells.

Xu Huo’s nose couldn’t pick up any particular scent, either.

So…

The man had no leads.

“Does the braised meat shop have security cameras?”

He sighed internally but asked with a sliver of hope.

“Nah, that stuff’s crazy expensive. Who’d install one for no reason?”

The braised meat shop owner grew even more bewildered. The confusion in his eyes deepened, and he started to feel uneasy.

“So, Officer, what’s this all about?”

Zhao Shui saw the look in Xu Huo’s eyes, came over, and led the man away to conduct a routine questioning on the side.

Li Jianye looked at the thick snow in front of him, clicked his tongue softly, and then turned to the person beside him.

“Well?”

Just as Xu Huo was about to speak…

A voice suddenly called out.

“Chief, we found it!”

‘He… he found it!?’

The two of them turned around.

Following the voice, they saw a Police Officer holding a shovel, with the two children standing beside him.

The Police Officer had a colleague lead the two children away, then tossed the shovel aside. He looked at Li Jianye and Xu Huo, gesturing toward a mound of ice in front of him.

Before him was a pile formed from accumulated snow.

The road was covered in snow. Someone had cleared it, sweeping the snow from the center to the sides, and in one particular spot…

A faint, coppery stench now hung in the air.

Xu Huo paused, took two steps forward, crouched down, and reached out his hand.

SHHH… SHHH… SHHH…

His gloved hand brushed away the top layer of fresh snow that hadn’t yet turned to ice.

When he dug down to the center…

A flash of crimson appeared before them all.

It was…

A pile of internal organs!

“Dig it out!”

Li Jianye ordered in a grim voice.

Then, he went and borrowed some small tools himself, joining the others in the excavation.

The snow was thick, having fallen just before the Spring Festival, so no one had bothered to clear it.

But with the police at work, what lay buried was soon revealed.

A pile of viscera.

A pile of viscera, dripping with fresh blood, covered in crimson ice crystals, and jumbled together like a heap of vomit!

Small intestine, stomach, gastric juices, lungs, gallbladder…

All of it was mixed together!

Xu Huo paused. He pulled his hand back and followed the trail of intestines to its source.

It led to another snowdrift, this one leaning against a utility pole.

But this one was a snowman.

He reached out and brushed his hand over it.

Icy snowflakes fell away, revealing a human face.

The face’s eyeballs were gone. Its cheeks were covered in blood, and the eye sockets were empty, hollow voids.

That wasn’t the most critical part. The most critical part was…

When the snow was brushed off the body.

A completely naked body appeared before the police.

He wasn’t wearing any clothes… well, on his upper body. His torso was bare, and in the center of his abdomen…

Was a gash.

The man’s stomach had been cut open.

His organs had spilled out smoothly from the opening, like the contents of a cracked egg, with only the untorn intestines still connecting them to the corpse.

The body was leaning against the utility pole, covered by the wind and snow. It had been here for about two days.

The snow and the northern weather had turned the world into a natural freezer. No passerby had noticed the corpse hidden inside the snowman by the utility pole.

Li Jianye stood off to the side, smoking a cigarette, his gaze slightly unfocused.

“Time for overtime.”

…

…

The officers of Jiangsan City began their overtime.

During the Spring Festival, they were now working nights as usual.

But it wasn’t a big deal. When they received the notification, they felt no ripple of emotion, as if they were already used to it.

But being used to it didn’t mean the case was minor.

The medical examiner quickly conducted an examination of the physical wounds on the body’s surface and produced a report.

“The deceased is a forty-two-year-old male, standing one meter eighty-one tall barefoot. The autopsy shows no signs of significant underlying disease.”

“The fatal wound is a stab wound to the front of the neck. Judging from the depth and shape of the wound, the preliminary guess is a weapon similar to a fruit knife—a sharp object, thrust downward from above.”

“The abdominal wound was inflicted post-mortem.”

“The killer cut a large, ‘1’-shaped hole in his body. The wound shows signs of both tearing and incision marks from a sharp instrument, suggesting the killer made a small cut and then forcibly tore it open by hand.”

“The wounds on the internal organs are jagged. The preliminary hypothesis is that this was caused by the killer forcibly tearing the organs out by hand.”

“The eyeballs are missing from the corpse’s sockets. The method was violent and crude; they were most likely gouged out by hand.”

“The eyeballs have not been found. They may still be at the crime scene, or they may have been taken by the killer.”

“…”

Back at the crime scene, as the medical examiner’s report was delivered, Xu Huo and the others fell into deep thought.

The crime scene had already been partially cleared; the body and the intestines were gone.