Li looked at the body of the athlete thoughtfully. If he was dead behind the wheel of the car before the crash, then it seemed improbable that the others in the car were still alive.
He turned as the assistants wheeled in the cryostat, a deep-freeze about the size of a washing machine for preparing frozen sections of organs for fast microscopic examination. Permanent paraffin sections took hours to prepare. Frozen sections took minutes. Li crossed to the other table and watched as Margaret prepared a section of heart tissue by pressing it into a metal chuck along with a glob of jelly-like support medium. He said, ‘Why can’t you tell what killed him?’
‘Because I haven’t finished examining all the evidence, Section Chief.’
‘What about toxicology?’
‘I’ve sent samples of urine, bile, heart blood, the contents of his stomach and a portion of his liver for analysis,’ she said. ‘We won’t get the results until sometime tomorrow. And even that’s pushing it.’
He nodded towards the samples she was preparing for the cryostat. ‘Why are you doing microscopic sections of the heart?’
‘Instinct,’ she said. ‘No matter what causes it, in the end we all die because our hearts stop. On the face of it, I can’t find any reason why this particular subject’s heart stopped. It was firm, the size you would expect. The epicardium was smooth and had the usual amount of epicardial fat. The musculature of both the left and right heart was red-brown, and grossly there were no areas of infarct or fibrosis. The endocardial surface had a normal appearance and there were no mural thrombi. The valves were thin and pliable and neither stenoic nor dilated. The coronary arteries had a normal distribution with little or no atherosclerotic disease. There were no thrombi, and the aorta was patent, without injury, and again showing minimal atherosclerosis.’ She smiled at him, enjoying the opportunity to exercise her knowledge.
He gave her a look. ‘All of which means…?’
‘That I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. There was no obvious reason why it stopped beating.’
She set her samples on a rack in the cold working area of the cryostat and pressed metal heat sinks against the face of the tissue, to flatten and to freeze it. Minutes later, the samples were ready. She transferred the first one, still in its chuck, to a special cutting area where she drew a wafer-thin blade across its surface. She touched the wisp-thin section of tissue on to a glass microscope slide and Li saw it melt instantly. She stained it with chemicals, and slipped the glass under her microscope to peer at it through the lens.
After a moment she straightened up, pressing both her hands into her lumber region and arching backwards. She appeared to be looking at Li, but he saw that her eyes were glazed. She was looking right through him at something that existed only in her mind.
‘What is it?’ he said.
Her focus returned, but all her flippancy was gone. ‘I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like it in a healthy young male before,’ she said, and she shook her head. ‘In stimulant abusers, yes. Cocaine, methamphetamine, could do it. But I don’t think this young man was into stimulants. Steroids, perhaps, although there’s no evidence of that yet.’
Li said, ‘He was urine-tested a week before he died.’
‘And?’
‘He was clean.’
Margaret nodded.
But Li couldn’t contain his impatience any longer. ‘So what did you see in the microscope?’
Margaret said, ‘There are big coronary arteries on the surface of the heart that we all seem to manage to clog up as we age. It’s the most common cause of what you might call a heart attack.’ She paused. ‘But there are also tiny arteries that run through the muscle of the heart. Microvasculature we call them. It’s possible for these to thicken, but for the heart to still look normal, even when it’s sectioned. It takes a microscopic section to reveal the problem.’
Li was unaccountably disappointed. This didn’t sound like much of a revelation. ‘And that’s what Xing had?’ Margaret nodded. ‘So what clogged them?’
‘The thing is,’ she said, frustrated in her attempt to describe what she had seen, ‘they’re not really clogged with anything. It’s like the smooth muscle that lines those tiny arterioles got hypertrophied, thickened somehow. Effectively they closed themselves up and caused him to have a massive coronary.’
‘What would make them do that?’
She shrugged, at a loss. ‘I’ve no idea.’
Li was impatient. ‘Come on, Margaret, you must have some thought about it.’
She tutted. ‘Well, if you were to ask me to guess, and that’s all it would be, I’d say it looked like they could — maybe — been attacked by some kind of virus.’
‘If it was a virus, you’d be able to find it in his blood, wouldn’t you?’
‘Maybe.’ She prevaricated again. ‘The thing is, knowing what you’re looking for. And if you don’t know that there’s even something there…’
Sun had followed Li over to the table, listening intently, concentrating hard on trying to understand everything. But the technical vocabulary had been beyond him. ‘So how he die?’ he asked Margaret.
‘At this stage it’s just a theory,’ Margaret said. ‘And if you quote me I’ll deny it. But in layman’s terms, it looks like he had a heart attack brought on — maybe — by a virus.’
Li’s abortive interview at Beijing Security seemed a lifetime away now, of little importance, and no relevance. Instead his head was filled with a single, perplexing question. He gave it voice. ‘Why would you take someone who had died of natural causes and try to make it appear they had been killed in a car crash?’
Margaret waggled a finger. ‘I can’t answer that one for you, Li Yan. But I have another question that we can answer very quickly.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Were our suicide-murder and our weightlifter also suffering from a thickening of the microvasculature?’
Li looked nonplussed. ‘Were they?’
Margaret laughed. ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to look, won’t we?’ She pushed her goggles back on her forehead. ‘I prepared permanent paraffin sections of Sui Mingshan’s heart for storage. I assume Doctor Wang will have done the same with Jia Jing’s. Why don’t you phone him and ask him to look at sections of Jia’s heart under the microscope while I dig out the ones I prepared yesterday?’
When Li returned from telephoning Pau Jü Hutong, Margaret had dug out the slides the lab had prepared with the tissue reserved from the previous day’s autopsy, and she was slipping the first one under the microscope. She set her eyes to the lens and adjusted the focus. After a moment she inclined her head and looked up at Li. ‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘If someone hadn’t taken our boy out and strung him up from a diving platform at Qinghua his heart would have seized up on him. Sooner rather than later. Same as our friend on the table. He had pronounced thickening of the microvasculature.’
There was nothing to discuss. The facts spoke for themselves, but made absolutely no sense. And Li was reluctant to start jumping to conclusions before they had heard from Doctor Wang. So Margaret had the results of the toxicology on Sui’s samples sent up from the lab. By now they were used to preparing copies for her in English as well as Chinese. She had stripped off her gown and her apron, her gloves and her mask and had scrubbed her hands, although she would not feel clean until she had taken a shower. She sat on a desk in the pathologists’ office and read through the results while Li and Sun watched in expectant silence. She shrugged. ‘As I predicted, I think. Blood alcohol level almost zero-point-four percent. Apart from that, nothing unusual. And nothing that would suggest he had been taking steroids. At least, not in the last month. But I’ll need to ask them to screen his blood again for viruses. Though, like I said, you really need to know what you’re looking for.’