Volume 46: What Kind Of Trash Are You?

At midnight, when it was dark and windy, a group of people sneakily walked out of the housing district with black bags, poking their heads out to glance around as if they were holding some mysterious parade.

"Asshole, it had been taken away!"

"Let’s throw it on the street!"

The people carrying the bags went to the street in scattered groups of twos and threes. Although they didn’t know each other, they smiled knowingly the moment their eyes met, as if they had bumped into a comrade while in an enemy-occupied area.

Someone in the crowd shouted, "Hey, there is a trash can over there!"

"Go! Go!"

"What motherfucking garbage sorting!"

"Yes, damn that motherfucking garbage sorting, hahahaha!"

Everyone rushed merrily to the lonely trash can on the corner of the street. When the trash can was still a few steps away, the few people in front threw the bags in their hands like shot putters. Some fell right inside, and some fell outside the trash can.

These people didn’t care about this at all. Throwing the rubbish into the trash can was already a great civic act for them.

Not long ago, Long'an was designated as one of the pilot cities for garbage sorting. Many people couldn’t adapt to it. They didn’t understand what to do with wet garbage and dry garbage. A milk box had to be broken down into several parts before being thrown away, which was extremely troublesome.

"Don't the plastic bags used to separate all kinds of garbage pollute the environment even more?"

"China has its own national circumstances, and these things that came from Japan are simply not suitable for us."

"Originally, we had our own ecosystem, and the scavengers sorted the garbage themselves. This has messed up the whole process and wastes manpower and material resources. It’s probably just a transient experiment though."

Like several other pilot cities, there were protests everywhere in Long'an. Of course, they also complained in private.

Hence, a group of people would sneak out of the housing district in the dead of night to dispose of the garbage that had accumulated during the day.

Suddenly, a white beam of light shot out from behind the trash can. The midnight rubbish-trashers reflexively blocked the glare with their hands. At the other end of the glare, someone shouted, "Stop right there! Police!"

"Fuck, it’s the police! Run!"

Everyone dropped the garbage bags in their hands and ran away. The police officers and the garbage supervisors from the neighborhood committee who had hidden in ambush for a long time chased after them, but only caught one or two people. The people who were caught resigned themselves to their bad luck and paid the fines.

Soon, the tranquility of the night was restored. People from the neighborhood committee looked at the ground full of garbage bags and shook their heads, sighing, "Even after repeated prohibitions, this group always litters in the middle of the night, increasing our workload. Thank you, officers, for your work tonight."

"Haii, I feel that chasing and intercepting isn’t the way to go." An officer said.

"After all, the fine of two hundred yuan isn’t too high. If you get someone to throw out the trash for you, it would cost you four hundred a week. The sorting of trash has to be done slowly." A wise elderly woman from the neighborhood committee commented.

They started with the garbage on the ground. When a plastic bag was opened and the contents were poured out, a pale human hand suddenly appeared amidst a pile of fruit peels and toilet paper. The garbage collector was shocked and screamed, "Officer, what is this?!"

The policeman stepped forward and felt his scalp crawl. "Contact the comrades from the criminal police team to come over and deal with it!"

On April 2nd, Chen Shi received a text message from Lin Dongxue and went to the bureau. The pile of dismembered parts had been placed on Peng Sijue’s autopsy bench, and roughly assembled into a human shape. The corpse was in a total of nine pieces and seemed to be a woman. It had been a week since the time of death, and the cause of death was still unclear.

"What's the situation?" Chen Shi asked.

"Hasn’t garbage sorting been implemented recently? There are always people who secretly throw away garbage at night. Last night, the neighborhood committee and local police organized an operation to arrest this group of people. As a result, a dismembered body was found in the garbage discarded by this group of people... By the way, the dismembered body parts were packed in different bags." Lin Qiupu said, "However, by the time we got there, the people from the neighborhood committee had already emptied dozens of bags of rubbish. The whole place was full of rubbish, so we couldn't trace which bags originally contained the dismembered parts."

"Who are those people?"

"They come from over a dozen housing districts nearby. We can’t even ask around. After all, their motivation is to avoid garbage sorting, so of course they won't admit it."

"You can tell them that we’re investigating a case right now, and we won’t pursue the matter of littering."

Lin Qiupu smiled bitterly. "I think they won't believe the police even if we were to say this. These people are habitual littering offenders. It’s estimated that they can be fined over a thousand yuan, so they won't admit it, no matter what."

"Habitual littering offender!" Chen Shi wanted to laugh. The garbage sorting also brought a lot of trouble to his life. The garbage sorting pamphlet issued by the neighborhood committee gave him a headache just from reading it. Fortunately, Tao Yueyue helped to sort the garbage. He really missed the times when he could just throw a full bag of garbage away.

So-called civic virtues are all coercive methods at the beginning. Looking back a few decades ago, people never felt that spitting everywhere was immoral. Under the constraints of various explicit sanctions and fines, not spitting everywhere became a part of civic virtues.

In his opinion, garbage sorting was essentially letting citizens share the burden on behalf of the country. In this era, environmental protection should also become a part of morality, so even though he was reluctant, he still supported it.

"Chen Shi, what do you think?" Lin Qiupu asked.

"The person who abandoned the corpse is very smart." Chen Shi said, "The purpose of abandoning the corpse is to prevent the police from finding out two things: the source of the corpse and the identity of the deceased. They hid a piece of wood in the forest. Throwing it away in the city and throwing it away in the wilderness has the same effect."

"Did we call you here to praise the person who abandoned the corpse?" Lin Qiupu sneered.

"You have a forensic pathologist here. Why are you asking for my opinion?"

Peng Sijue said, “I haven’t figured out the identity of the deceased and the cause of death, but I found that the tool used to dismember the body seemed to be the same one, because the traces on the cut surfaces and the metal particles left behind by the tool were very close. However, these dismembered pieces had been treated with different methods. For example, the right leg had been washed with a steel wire ball and the left hand had been soaked in alkaline water. There were also tooth marks on the chest and I suspect that they were the result of a dog bite. The head is the most severely damaged. It has been washed with some corrosive liquid.

Chen Shi concluded, "I suspect that the people who threw away the corpse weren't the murderers. They are a group of people. The corpse had been dismembered by someone and the parts fell into their hands. They didn't know how to deal with it, so they adopted this method. But one thing is certain. They know each other. Otherwise, they wouldn’t meet up to abandon the corpse on the same night. They should be from the same circle."

"Neighbors?" Lin Dongxue asked.

"Neighbors aren’t considered people from the same small circle. I think they might be from the same company or perhaps they’re from a group of hobby enthusiasts."

"If the people who abandoned the parts aren’t the murderers, why didn't they call the police?" Lin Dongxue asked.

Chen Shi looked at the dismembered parts on the autopsy bench and said, "There is only one possibility. The deceased had a relationship with them. This relationship can’t come to light. The person who dismembered the corpse 'posted' the pieces to them as a kind of silent threat, as if saying ‘I know your secret.’!"