American forensics, but the gourmet system

Jesse took the shovel, rubbed his hands together, and began digging along the edge of the small hole that Ka had dug.

Anyone who frequently buries corpses knows that digging a pit by hand is actually a very strenuous task.

Even though Jesse was a strong and fit man, and even though the temperature was already quite low in the middle of the night in late autumn in New York, sweat still kept pouring from his forehead.

Clarkson stood to the side, looking at the uprooted turf with a pained expression. Little Clarkson was ecstatic, running wildly around the excavated soil, sniffing Captain Hansen's trouser legs one moment and the police dog Luodor's rear the next.

Twenty minutes later, Jesse looked up, wiped the sweat from his brow, and stared at Captain Hansen and Russell standing by the pit, his face grim.

"It's already more than half a meter deep, and we still haven't found anything... I'm wondering if the police dog's nose is malfunctioning..."

"Luoduo can smell things buried six feet underground," the police dog handler said quietly.

Russell subconsciously converted six feet to 1.83 meters, and then mentally muttered a complaint about the imperial unit.

"Huh?" Jesse grinned wryly. "We have to dig another meter or so?"

"Let me dig for a bit." Russell reached out and pulled Jesse out of the pit, taking the shovel from his hand. "It's a pity Diaz isn't here; he'd be a real expert at manual labor."

"That's right," Jesse muttered, wiping his sweat. "Even if he's tired, he won't say anything. I've been Diaz's colleague for over a year, and I've never heard him utter a single sentence with more than ten words..."

Russell smiled, jumped into the pit, and used a shovel to clear away the loose soil at the bottom. He estimated that Jesse had dug to about 70 centimeters deep. Normally, when people dig a pit to bury something, they probably wouldn't go much deeper than that.

Russell shoveled the shovel at a 45-degree angle downwards into the soil, then stepped on the top edge of the shovel to push it deeper.

but……

The shovel seemed to have caught something very flexible, and even when Russell stepped on it, it only went in a tiny bit.

"Eh!"

Russell's eyes lit up. He shoveled up the small mound of dirt, and half a dirty corner of his clothes appeared in the pit. Along with the clothes, a piece of white hand bone was also pulled out.

"Huh?"

Jesse was a little confused.

He dug for ages and came up empty-handed, while Russell found something with just two shovelfuls...

Is there any justice in this world?!

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"Eh!"

Captain Hansen, Clarkson, and the police dog handler all exclaimed in unison.

However, the emotions conveyed in the three people's interjections were different.

Captain Hansen spoke faster, slightly excited:

"Jesse, go ask your two colleagues at the scene if they've finished collecting fingerprints. If they have, come to the backyard immediately. If not, finish up and come to the backyard within ten minutes."

Clarkson stared at the stark white skeleton in the pit, his expression a mixture of helplessness and worry. He muttered to himself:

"There really were corpses..."

The police dog handler happily patted Luodor's head:

"Well done, Luodor. You'll get extra food tomorrow!"

Ludo tucked his ears behind his head with a reserved air, his tail wagging gently as he basked in his trainer's praise.

Russell used a shovel to climb out of the pit. Before the body was dug out, it was fine to use a shovel to dig so roughly, but after the body was dug out, using a shovel might damage the bones.

Captain Hansen took out his phone and started making a call, which seemed to be to Marty and Diaz, who were re-examining Joey's rental house.

Russell turned to Clarkson:

"Mr. Clarkson, please leave the backyard now. We'll be setting up a cordon here shortly. You can take your son upstairs to rest and get some sleep. We shouldn't be too noisy tonight."

Clarkson glanced at the bones in the pit and muttered:

"Who can sleep now... Ka, let's go upstairs. I shouldn't have called you a stupid dog, I didn't expect you actually smelled something..."

He picked up Little Ka again and went into the house.

Little Ka wagged its tail proudly in Clarkson's arms.

……

As the first rays of dawn appeared in the sky, a pit about 2 meters long, 1.5 meters wide, and 80 centimeters deep had been dug out of Clarkson's beloved lawn, with a skeleton missing its right leg lying at the bottom.

The skeleton itself was structurally intact, with almost no connective tissue residue on the surface, except for a small amount of grayish-white adipocere residue near the buttocks.

The wool smock on the skeleton had rotted and crumbled into many small pieces, while what Russell dug out with his shovel was the sleeve of a nylon coat.

Besides the clothing remaining on the remains, several other items were also unearthed from the pit:

A portable chainsaw, a brass alcohol spray gun, a wooden-handled hammer, and a few pieces of clothing stained with mud.

Of course, the clothes that still retain their original shape are mostly made of synthetic fibers, while clothes made of cotton, linen, wool, etc., have become unrecognizable after two long years.

Russell squatted in the pit, wearing a mask and nitrile gloves, and picked up the skeleton from the pit, carefully placing it piece by piece back in its original scattered positions on a stretcher beside the pit.

Finally, Russell had collected all the bones from the pit. He climbed out and said to Captain Hansen, who was standing nearby with noticeable dark circles under his eyes:

"Captain, based on the degree of skeletal decay of the bones at the scene and the fracture marks on the victim's right leg, we can preliminarily determine that this body is that of Romo Simeonni, the victim of the severed leg case on October 21st two years ago. Judging from the obvious wounds on the skull, I believe his cause of death was a blunt force trauma to the back of the head. His severed leg was likely cut off and burned by the killer after death. As for why the killer didn't dispose of the rest of the body, I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps he thought the risk of disposing of the body was too high, or perhaps he harbored some lingering guilt..."

"Thank you for your hard work, Dr. Russell..." Captain Hansen said wearily. "You can go home and rest after you take this skeleton back to the forensic center."

Russell knew that it was now the job of the on-site investigation technicians to collect the physical evidence scattered at the bottom of the pit.

The clothes buried underground likely still have traces of the victim's blood, and the murder weapon and tools used to dismember and destroy the body likely also have the murderer's fingerprints.

With this evidence, even if the murderer who killed Romo is dead, the truth of the case can be revealed.

Marty and Diaz, who were standing to the side, stepped forward to lift the stretcher and walked with Russell out the door.

A hearse sent by the medical examiner's center was parked in front of Mr. Clarkson's door, and the driver was the same one from last time.

"A skeleton?" the driver said to Russell as he opened the door. "Pretty rare, isn't it? But that's good, at least we won't have to smell blood and feces anymore..."

Marty and Diaz loaded the stretcher into the vehicle, both of them showing varying degrees of exhaustion.

"I'd rather investigate a case where we can catch the suspect..." Marty mumbled, his tongue clearly stiff from staying up all night. "Who would have thought that the murderer in this case would be the victim of the previous one?"

Diaz stood beside the car with his arms crossed, coldly uttering a sentence:

"It will happen eventually."

Russell didn't reply, but waved goodbye to the two of them, opened the passenger door of the hearse, and got in.

The hearse started and drove toward the street where the first rays of sunlight were beginning to fall.