The Woman in the Video

Chapter 1

I had a colleague in another department, an Obscene-Content Review Officer—the kind of police specialist the public simply called a “pornography examiner.”

Everyone called her Mara Ellis. She was a married woman in her early thirties and had spent four or five years reviewing obscene material. This story began with one of the videos she examined on the job.

Mara said she had seen a dead woman in it.

(I)

Several years ago, our unit received a report about an Illegal Obscene-Video Website. The site was extremely well hidden. Everything visible to the public appeared legal and legitimate, but once users paid for access, the site’s administrative backend pushed obscene videos to their accounts.

After Mara and several other Obscene-Content Review Officers finished examining the suspected illegal videos one by one, she suddenly told me that in one of them—

“There’s a girl in it who doesn’t look alive.”

At first, I didn’t believe her.

“Could the woman have been drugged?”

Mara shook her head and described the video to me.

It was about seven minutes long. A man had filmed it with his phone, and the setting appeared to be a bedroom in someone’s home. It definitely wasn’t a hotel. As the man moved the camera around, it caught furniture and appliances that no hotel room would have had. There was even a One Piece bedroom poster on the wall.

The man used the phone’s rear camera throughout, so his face never appeared. The footage did, however, unavoidably capture his stomach and lower body.

Because his movements were so forceful, he failed to hold the phone steady. While shifting the camera, he accidentally filmed the woman’s face twice. The two shots lasted only about a second altogether.

That single second was what caught Mara’s attention.

She told me the woman showed no reaction at all during the seven-minute video. Based on her experience, Mara could rule out drunkenness. If the woman had been drugged, her mouth would generally have hung open during the assault, with snoring or uneven breathing audible.

“I’ve reviewed countless videos of women who were drugged and assaulted,” Mara said. “I know their reactions better than anyone. I just kept feeling that the girl in this video wasn’t breathing anymore.”

The brief glimpse of the woman’s face made Mara suspicious. She watched the video dozens of times. The more she watched, the more certain she became that something was wrong.

“She looked completely rigid, like her whole body was stiff. She didn’t react at all. I even ran the audio through noise-reduction software. Honestly, all I could hear was the man’s groaning. That girl didn’t make a sound.”

The image stayed with Mara. She told me that from that day on, whenever she closed her eyes, she had nightmares. In them, the man who had filmed the video was on top of a dead woman.

Chapter 2

I had known Mara for years, and I trusted her professional ability and experience. Investigations depended on evidence, of course, but an officer’s first instinct and accumulated experience mattered just as much.

Better to investigate and be wrong than overlook a possibility. And, if I was honest, I also wanted to help Mara escape the psychological shadow the video had cast over her.

After thinking it through carefully, I made my decision.

“I’ll apply to the Criminal Investigation Detachment to review the video.”

(II)

The video had been uploaded to the site seven days earlier.

The Technical Services Division had already processed the audio with noise-reduction software. We could hear the person filming breathing with startling clarity. The man’s voice was rough, and he kept swearing under his breath. Although the woman never responded, the man remained extremely excited.

My colleague Daniel Hart and I had seen plenty of homicide victims’ bodies. After hearing Mara’s description beforehand, we both instinctively felt that the girl’s body looked unnaturally stiff—especially around the joints of her arms and legs, which showed mild signs of being unable to bend.

Rigor mortis.

The term appeared in my mind at once.

The other pornography examiners felt the same way. Compared with the women they had seen in videos after being drugged, the woman in this one was clearly different.

But none of us could say with any certainty whether she was dead.

After the audio had been processed with noise reduction, we still couldn’t hear the woman’s breathing. But that could just as easily have been caused by a defect in the phone used to record the video.

The shot showing her face was far too brief, so the Technical Services Division had already extracted stills from it and enhanced them slightly with image-processing software. The woman had shoulder-length hair and delicate features. In the stills, her eyes were tightly shut, as were her lips.

“Take the video and the images back to the Criminal Investigation Detachment’s forensic lab,” I suggested. “Let the forensic team examine them.”

Director Adrian Cole, who oversaw the forensic lab, laughed when he heard that we’d sent over a video and some photographs. He said that in all his years on the job, he had never once tried to determine whether someone was alive or dead from images alone.

That night, Director Cole called me. His voice was heavy when he said, “The woman in the video is most likely dead.”

III

I returned to the detachment that same night for a meeting.

Director Cole briefed us first. The woman’s postmortem lividity couldn’t be observed, but based on the degree of stiffness visible in her body, he made a bold estimate: she had already been dead for more than twelve hours but less than twenty-four when the video was recorded.

Chapter 3

There were no visible bleeding wounds in the footage, and no ligature marks around her neck. That meant they couldn’t determine the cause of death. However, the skin around her nose and mouth was slightly different in color from the rest of her face.

In other words, she might have been smothered.

Smothering was a common form of asphyxial death. Usually, the victim’s nose and mouth were covered with a soft object until she suffocated. In some cases, the force used by the attacker left crescent-shaped marks or abrasions on both cheeks—scratches made by fingernails. Clearly, we hadn’t seen anything like that in either the video or the enhanced stills.

Because of the pressure applied during the attack, a pale area could also sometimes remain around the victim’s nose and mouth.

Director Cole had based his theory on that slight difference in skin tone.

The detachment gave us several orders.

First, the belief that the woman was already dead was not a conclusion. It was only an unofficial lead, so the information could not be released to the public yet.

Second, the Criminal Investigation Detachment would take complete control of the investigation into the illegal obscene-video website. We had three days to arrest the suspects responsible for creating the site and uploading and distributing the videos.

Third, we had to determine the woman’s identity and locate her family. That would allow us to investigate whether the woman in the video had been deliberately killed. If she had, we needed to identify the suspect as quickly as possible—the man involved in recording the video.

With the Technical Services Division involved, the website’s encryption was cracked by the following day.

Our colleagues in Technical Services told us that the site’s comment function was still under construction and had not yet been opened to users. They suspected the culprit might log in to the administrative backend at any time to finish setting it up.

After breaking through one layer of encryption after another, the technicians secretly planted Police Website-Tracking Software in the site’s backend.

That afternoon, the suspect logged in, exactly as predicted.

It seemed he noticed something wrong almost immediately and logged out at once. But he had underestimated the capabilities of the police technical team. The tracking program bypassed the overseas server and the virtual dynamic IP he was using, then sent us a highly detailed address.

It was in another city.