Capítulo 30: Living Dead (2)
On December 31, 1982, Liu Shifu moved Sean Xiao to the Turnpike Motel on Route 46 in Ridgefield, where Sean Xiao registered under the name Bill Li. His room was paid for each day just before checkout time. One of the maids at the motel remembered Mr. Li, a tall man with dark woolly hair, tired eyes and a drawn face. Mr. Li would never let her clean his room, just took the clean sheets and towels at the door and said he'd take care of it himself. She also remembered the white Cadillac with the blue top that came every day just before checkout time and parked in front of Mr. Li's room.
Sean Xiao was sleeping a little better now, but every once in a while he'd wake up in the middle of the night with that nightmare, Li Xian trying to grab him through the bed.
On Saturday, February 5, 1983, forty-four days after Li Xian's death, Liu Shifu moved Sean Xiao once again, this time to an apartment in a residential section of suburban Bergenfield, New Jersey. The studio apartment belonged to a young man named Rich Patterson, who was dating one of Shifu's daughters at the time. Patterson was away for the weekend, and Shifu had his own set of keys. Apartment 1 at 51 Fairview Avenue, Bergenfield, was the last place Sean Xiao ever had that nightmare.
.....
On Sunday, May 14, 1983, a man was riding his bicycle along Clinton Road in Milford Township, New Jersey. It was a warm spring day, and the early-morning sun was sparkling off the waters of the Clinton Reservoir. The air was fresh, and the woods were alive with new growth. There was seldom very much traffic on this road, especially on Sunday mornings, and there wasn't a house for miles. It was beautiful.
As the man rode along the reservoir, something caught his attention to his left. An unusually large black bird was perched high in a tree. The man pulled his bike to the side of the road and stared up at the bird. It was a turkey buzzard, the biggest one he'd ever seen. He figured it must be looming over a carcass, probably a dead deer left behind by hunters. He got off his bike and went into the woods to investigate. Under the buzzard's tree he found something wrapped in green plastic garbage bags. One end of the large bundle was ripped, most likely by the scavenger bird. As he stepped closer, his stomach lurched. Part of a human head was peeking through the tear in the bag.
The bicyclist ran back to the road and marked the spot where he'd entered the woods with a fallen branch. He intended to ride down to the nearest house and call the police, but a car happened to come by, and he flagged it down. He told the driver to call the police, there was a body in the woods.
...
The police arrived within the hour and summoned Dr. Geetha Natarajan, the acting chief medical examiner of Passaic County. She examined the body at the scene but left it in the garbage bags. After photographs were taken, the body was carefully lifted off the ground and put in a body bag. Samples of the dead leaves underneath the body were taken. They would help Dr. Natarajan determine when the body had been left there. The body was then taken to the State Medical Examiner's Office in Newark, where she would perform the autopsy.
At the ME's office, Dr. Natarajan's first task was to remove the plastic bags, taking note of how many were used and how expertly the victim's limbs had been bound with paper tape. Then came the one job she detested most: dealing with the bugs. She took samples of all the insects and larvae she found present on the body, mainly carrion beetles and blowflies. The number of insect generations on the body would help determine how long it had been left in the woods. Identifying the types of insects would also be helpful since different species thrive at different times of the year. When Dr. Natarajan was certain that she had samples of all the species present, she hosed the rest of the swarm down the drain and ground them in the garbage disposal, glad to be rid of them.
Laying the body on a stainless steel worktable, Dr. Natarajan then began the autopsy. The victim was a male, six feet one and a half inches, 173 pounds. The man's face was almost totally skeletonized, and there was only partial flesh on the limbs, but the torso was very well preserved. Spring had come late that year, so the cold had kept him relatively fresh, and fortunately the buzzard had not had that many meals off this carcass.
She removed the clothing—a white V-neck T-shirt with extensive brown-red staining, a pair of blue jeans, a black leather belt, blue socks—and took note of the absence of shoes or a coat. There were no gunshot or stab wounds, but she did find hemorrhaging on the neck just above the Adam's apple and on the whites of the eyes. A pinkish flush was apparent on the skin around the shoulder and chest on one side. This kind of discoloration, called pink lividity, can indicate several things, most commonly carbon monoxide poisoning.
When Dr. Natarajan got to the stomach contents, she found more than two pounds of undigested food: beef, beans, potatoes, carrots, and beer. It was a large meal but not unusually so for a man this size. There was no sign of gastric emptying—the food hadn't moved on from the stomach through the digestive tract—which meant that the man was killed soon after he had finished his meal, perhaps during the meal. She examined the food itself and noticed that the beans had been burned. The meal was probably home-cooked, she believed, because a restaurant couldn't get away with serving burned food. The man must have been very hungry to eat it.
In the pocket of the man's jeans she found a black wallet that contained no money or identification. She did find five wet slips of paper in the wallet, which turned out to be motel receipts. There were also three photographs that had stuck together. She soaked them and carefully separated them, laying them on paper towels to dry. They were pictures of children, two boys and a girl. Dr. Natarajan bagged them and sent them up to the Passaic County prosecutor.
When he received the photos, the prosecutor laid them on his desk and stared at them. There was something familiar about those kids, but he couldn't place them.
The pictures sat there for two days, haunting him, the little faces staring out at him, like three pathetic little orphans.
Then it dawned on him. He did know those kids.
They'd been in the Passaic County Prosecutor's Office with their mother and her lowlife boyfriend/husband, whatever the hell he was, Zhang Xiaohua. Those were Cao Feifei's kids. He picked up the phone and called the ME's office to tell Dr. Natarajan he had a good hunch who her body was. It was the father of those three kids, Sean Xiao.
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