As one by one clues emerged, a chilling truth gradually surfaced. Lin Xiuran felt his heart shrink slowly; this killer was too heartless.
"Tardieu spot…" This time Duanwu recognized it. Tardieu spot was some dotted bleeding under the mucous membrane, it was one of the characteristics of death by suffocation. "So…the real cause of death is…suffocation?"
Lin Xiuran opened the mouth of the deceased and observed the teeth of the deceased. The neck of the teeth showed a pink color. This phenomenon had a romantic name. It was called rose teeth.
Seeing this, Lin Xiuran looked gloomy and concluded: "Yes, this victim was suffocated to death by the blanket." Then he straightened up and added. "When the deceased died, the poison had started working. So some of the characteristics of the body poisoning phenomenon, such as the corpse spots showing a bright red appeared, so those features of suffocation were ignored by you."
Because the victim was suffocating and at the end, was poisoned, it did not have some characteristics of mechanical suffocation. For example, a hyoid bone fracture. So this was easy to be confused with death by poisoning.
This was a very frightening result. The two victims, who died together at almost the same time, had a completely different cause of death. Perhaps something happened during the poisoning process, and the murderer couldn't even wait for Ma Anjing to die. But she had to be killed as soon as possible. The poisoning and suffocation were extremely painful. It was hard to imagine what the girl went through before she died.
"It's because I didn't look carefully." Duanwu faced up to his mistake at this moment. The reason he misjudged was that the signs of poisoning were too obvious. He came up with a subjective assumption that the cause of death must have been the poisoning and did not consider other possibilities. Now that Lin Xiuran pointed it out, Duanwu realized that he had almost made a big mistake, breaking out in a sweat as he asked: "Director Lin, does this cause of death have a big impact on the case?"
Lin Xiuran gave him a look: "Of course it's big. There is no sign of breaking into the dormitory. In this way, the murderer was trapped in the dormitory. This murderer is too cruel." As he spoke, he looked at the two open bodies lying on the autopsy table, the two girls' eyes were open, dead.
At the scene, Ma Aijing's body was tangled up with the quilt. At first, they thought that the victim was clutching the quilt because of the painful poisoning. But now that they thought about it, the quilt should have been the murder weapon. The murderer was afraid of her screaming when she was in a fit of pain, so the murderer sat directly on top of her, holding her down with both hands, and the quilt covered her head, suffocating her under the quilt, which caused her to hold on to the quilt until she died. It was this action when she was dying that helped Lin Xiuran determine the real cause of her death and further pinpointed the murderer, who was also in dorm 108.
At 5:30 a.m., the interrogation by the police continued. After seeing off Bai Xiaoxiao, the person in front of Song Wen and Lu Siyu was replaced by Deng Jia. It was this girl who found Guo Hua, who had fallen at the doorway and had suffered a seizure. Now her face was still pale, as if she was still immersed in that nightmare.
Deng Jia was one year older than Bai Xiaoxiao. At the beginning, she just shook her head, saying she didn't know and that she was unfamiliar with the dorm next door. Halfway through the conversation, Lu Siyu went out and poured her some hot water. Only then did Deng Jia gradually relax.
"There are a total of 30 students in their civil engineering class. Most of them are boys, only four of them are girls. Dong Fang is the richest and generous, Ma Aijing is the most beautiful and was chosen as the department flower..."
"So how does Dong Fang treat Ma Aijing, do you know?"
"It's not good. I saw once, Dong Fang said in a joking tone that Ma Aijing is an ass-kisser, a little follower, picking up her unwanted things. But I think Ma Aijing should have heard it, she has a bit of a grudge."
"Do you know about Dong Fang bullying Guo Hua?"
Deng Jia hesitated for a moment, nodding and shaking her head, then timidly said: "Bai Xiaoxiao is more familiar with Guo Hua. I have a normal relationship with her."
Song Wen understood it; even if she knew it, ordinary girls like them didn't dare to care about it. Even if they saw it, they could just pretend they didn't see it. They asked Deng Jia a few more questions, and she basically said the same thing as Bai Xiaoxiao's story.
It was already getting bright outside, the sun poured in through the not-so-drawn curtains, the dark clouds dispersed, and in the end, the rain still did not fall down.
Song Wen and Lu Siyu glanced at each other, and when they were about to finish, he asked routinely: "We have almost covered what we want to know, do you have anything else to add?"
Deng Jia bit her lip, as if she had made up her mind: "Half a month ago, at a very late hour, around 11:30 in the evening, I left my things in the study room. When I went to pick it up at night, I saw Ma Aijing coming in with a middle-aged man from a distance. That man seemed to be a professor from their civil engineering department..."
"Did you see it clearly at that time?" Song Wen added. According to Deng Jia's description, it was very late and far away, so it was easy to be mistaken.
"It should be Ma Aijing.." Deng Jia recalled, "I recognize her umbrella, she has a very distinctive style of flower umbrella that’s printed with Van Gogh's sunflowers. So on a rainy night, it was particularly eye-catching."
Song Wen nodded: "Thank you for the clues, we will find out all these things later." He sent Deng Jia out.
The questioning at Fu Linjiang's side had also ended and several detectives came together to summarize the information.
Song Wen briefly explained their results here before looking up to ask Fu Linjiang: "How about your side? Are there any results?"
"We asked their homeroom teachers and a few teachers who taught the class, but they all knew nothing about it. The class teacher started to get very emotional, saying that it was definitely not Guo Hua, nor Lin Wanwan. She knows her own students, they are good kids. When I asked her if Guo Hua was bullied and whether she knew about it, she changed her mind and said that she didn't know." Fu Linjiang sighed. "She’s a twenty-six-year-old female teacher who just graduated from graduate school, not much older than the students."
Song Wen nodded, he did not expect to find more clues on that side. The gap of a few years was like an insurmountable gulf; one side was an adult who had embarked on society, the other side was still a child in school.
If a class in a university compares students to a flock of sheep, the teacher was like a shepherd dog who only cared about which sheep had fallen out of line, but were always slow and indifferent to the fights in the flock.
Song Wen turned his head and asked Lu Siyu: "What do you think after finding this out?"
Lu Siyu didn't expect to be picked on again, so he thought about it and opened his mouth: "The exact source of the poison and the person who did it are still not clear. The relationships between them seem simple, but I always feel that something is not right."
Fu Linjiang interjected: "Yes ah. How can civil engineering students who are not from the Chemistry department get such controlled toxic materials? Did they know the students in the Chemistry department, so they can take out the poison from the laboratory?"
Song Wen said, "There are various drug control methods in the university. If you want to take out the poison from it, it is difficult to leave no trace. There is surveillance when you come and go, and you’ll be asked by the teacher.” In several similar cases in China in the past, there had been cases where poisons had been taken out from chemical laboratories. After those cases, laboratories in universities and colleges around the world tightened their control.
At the end of the conversation, Song Wen's cell phone rang. Seeing that it was Lin Xiuran's call, he raised his hand and pressed the answer button: "Hello, Old Lin? How's the situation?"
After two minutes of answering, Song Wen turned his head and said to others, "Part of the results of the autopsy came out. It’s true that Dong Fang died of poisoning, and Ma Aijing was suffocated to death. The main substance in the poison was sodium cyanide, and a small amount of anesthetic was also found in their bodies."
The expression on Lu Siyu's face changed slightly. His eyebrows suddenly stretched out, as if the suspicion that had been troubling him had finally been confirmed. Then, he bowed his head and said: "Then the suspect is between Guo Hua and Lin Wanwan?"