Red Mandarin Dress (3 page)

Yu did not give too much credit to the random-act theory, but it was not a case assigned to his special case squad. He knew better than to cook in other people’s kitchens.

“So sensational,” Yu repeated, feeling obliged to speak again, since neither Li nor Liao made a response. “The very location of it.”

Still no response. Li started panting, his eye bags hanging heavier in the ominous silence. A man in his late fifties, Li had extraordinary eye bags and thick gray brows.

“Any breakthrough?” Yu said, turning to Liao.

“Breakthrough?” Li growled. “A second body in a red mandarin dress was found this morning.”

“Another victim! Where?”

“In front of the Newspaper Windows by the number one gate of the People’s Park—on Nanjing Road.”

“That’s outrageous—in the center of the city,” Yu said. The Newspaper Windows were a row of glass-covered newspaper cases along the park wall, and a large number of readers gathered there most of the time. “A deliberate challenge.”

“We have compared the two victims,” Liao said. “There are a number of similarities. Particularly the mandarin dress. The identical material and style.”

“Now the newspapers are having a carnival,” Li observed as a stack of the papers was being delivered to the office.

Yu picked up
Liberation Daily
, which featured a color picture of a young girl in a red mandarin dress lying under the Newspaper Windows.

“The first serial sex murder in Shanghai,” Liao said, reading aloud. “‘Red mandarin dress’ has now become a household word. Speculations spread like wildfire. The city shivers in anticipation—”

“The journalists are crazy,” Li cut him off short. “Precipitating an avalanche of articles and pictures, as if nothing else mattered in our city.”

Li’s frustration was understandable. Shanghai had been known for its government efficiency and, among other things, its low crime rate. Not that serial murders had never happened in Shanghai before, but because of the effective media control, they had never been reported. Such a case could have implied that the city police were incompetent, an implication that government-funded papers were anxious to avoid. In the mid-nineties, however, newspapers were now responsible for their own bottom lines: the journalists had to grab sensational news, and media control no longer worked out so well.

“Nowadays, with all the western mysteries in bookstores or on TV—some of them translated by our Chief Inspector Chen,” Liao said, “people start playing Sherlock Holmes in their columns. Look at
Wenhui.
It’s predicting the date of the next strike. ‘Another body in a red mandarin dress by next Friday.’ ”

“That’s common knowledge,” Yu said. “A serial killer strikes at regular intervals. If uncaught, he may continue throughout the course of his life. Chen has translated something about a serial killer. I think we should talk to him—”

“Damn the serial killer!” Li appeared exasperated by the term. “Have you talked to your boss? I bet not. He’s too busy writing his literature paper.”

The relationship between Chen and Li had not been good, Yu knew, so he refrained from responding.

“Don’t worry,” Liao commented sarcastically. “Even without Butcher Zhang, people will still have pork on the table.”

“These murders are a slap in the face to the police bureau. ‘I’ve done it again, cops!’ ” Li went on heatedly. “The class enemy is trying to sabotage the great progress in our reform, damaging the social stability by causing panic among the people. So let us focus on those with deep-rooted hatred for our government.”

Li’s logic was still echoing that little red book of Chairman Mao, and according to that logic, Yu reflected, anybody could be a so-called class enemy. The Party Secretary was known for formulating political theories about homicide investigations. The number one Party boss sort of fancied himself the number one criminal investigator too.

“The perpetrator must have a place to commit the crime first—most likely his home,” Liao said. “His neighbors could have noticed something.”

“Yes, contact all the neighborhood committees, especially those close to the two locations. As Chairman Mao says, we have to rely on the people. Now, in order to solve the case as quickly as possible,” Li concluded with all the official seriousness in his voice, “Inspector Liao and Detective Yu, you are going to head a special team.”

It was only after the Party Secretary left the office that the two cops were able to discuss the case in earnest.

“I know so little about the case,” Yu started, “practically nothing about the first victim.”

“This is the file about the first one.” Liao produced a bulging folder. “At the moment, we are still gathering the information about the second.”

Yu picked up an enlarged picture of the first body. The victim’s face partially covered by her black hair, she showed a good figure, her curves accentuated by the tight-fitting dress.

“Judging from the bruise on her arms and legs,” Liao said, “she could have suffered some sort of sexual assault. But there is no sign of any semen or secretion in her vagina, and the medical people have ruled out condom-use as the reason. There was no condom lubrication found there, either. Whatever he did to her, he afterward put the dress back on her rigid body roughly and in a hurry. Which explains the torn slits and loose buttons.”

“But we can be pretty sure that the red mandarin dress was not hers,” Yu said, “since the second victim was found in an identical dress.”

“No, the dress was not hers.”

Yu examined the torn slits and loose buttons in the picture. If someone had indeed gone to the trouble of arranging for an expensive, fashionable dress beforehand, then why had he dressed the body in such a reckless way—and on both occasions?

“On the second victim, is the dress also torn in its slits?”

“I see what you are getting at,” Liao said grumpily, nodding.

“When did you establish the identity of the first victim?”

“Not until three or four days after the body was found. Tian Mo, twenty-three. People called her Jasmine. She worked at the Seagull Hotel, which is near the intersection of Guangxi and Jingling Roads. She lived with her paralyzed father. According to her neighbors and colleagues, she was a nice, hard-working girl. She didn’t have a boyfriend, and none of the people who knew her believed that she had had any enemies, either.”

“It appears that the murderer dumped her body from a car.”

“That’s too obvious.”

“What about a taxi driver or a private car owner?”

“Taxi drivers work in a shift rotation of twelve hours. After the second victim was reported, we immediately checked those working on both of the two nights. Less than twenty fit into the time frames, and every one of them has receipt tabs for at least one of the nights. Now, how would a taxi driver between fares have time to murder her, wash her—probably in a private bathroom—and put her into the mandarin dress?” Liao shook his head before moving on. “The private car is a possibility. The number of them has been increasing dramatically in the last few years, with all the Big Bucks in business and Big Bugs in the Party. But we don’t have the resources to knock on their doors, one after another, throughout the city, even if our Party Secretary turns on the green light.”

“What do you make of the locations, then?”

“For the first one,” Liao said, producing a picture with the traffic light visible at the intersection in the background, “the murderer had to step out of the car to place the body. A high risk. In the area, traffic is practically nonstop. The number 26 trolley bus stops running only after two thirty, and then it starts again around four. Besides, there are occasional cars passing by, and late-working students moving in and out of the institute across the street.”

“Do you think that the place the body was dumped has a specific meaning in connection to the music institute, as those journalists claim?” Yu said.

“We looked into that. Jasmine never studied at the institute. She was fond of music, like most young girls, humming a song or two occasionally, but nothing more than that. Nor did her family have anything to do with the school. Since the second victim was dumped at a different location, I don’t see any point in taking the newspaper crap about the music institute seriously.”

“Li may have a point here. The two locations both being very public, the criminal could be bent on making a statement,” Yu said. “You must have already contacted all the nearby neighborhood committees.”

“You bet, but the queries focused on one type of criminal—sex offenders with previous records. Nothing so far. The second body came up only this morning.”

“Tell me what you know about the second one.”

“The body was discovered by a
Wenhui
boy who came to replace the newspapers there. He pulled down the mandarin dress over her bare thighs and covered her face with newspapers, then he called the newspaper office instead of us. When we got to the scene, a large number of people had been gathered around there for quite a while, having possibly turned the body over and over. So any examination of the scene was practically meaningless.”

“Has the forensic report come out?”

“No, not yet. Only an initial report done on the scene. Again, death by suffocation. The victim seemed to have suffered no sexual assault, but like the first one, she had nothing whatsoever on underneath the mandarin dress.” Liao produced more pictures on the desk. “No trace of semen, with vaginal, oral, and anal swabs taken. The latent-print people have done their job too, and they did not see even a single stray hair on the body.”

“Any copycat possibility?”

“We have examined the two dresses. The same material with an imprinted design on it, and the same style too. No copycat could have known or reproduced all those details.”

“What else have you done for the second?”

“A notice with her picture has been sent out. Phone calls have been coming in, offering a number of possible leads. The bureau machine is clunking into high gear.”

“Whether Li likes the term
serial murderer
or not,” Yu said, “there’s no ruling out the possibility. In a week, we might find ourselves with a third body in a mandarin dress.”

“Politically, Shanghai cannot acknowledge a serial killer. That’s why Li brought in your special case squad.”

“In case it is a serial killer,” Yu said, aware of the long rivalry between the homicide and the special case squads, “we need to establish a profile.”

“Well, the dresses are very expensive, so he probably is rich. He has a car. He most likely lives by himself: he could not have done all of this without a place of his own—an apartment, or an independent villa. Certainly not in a single room in a
shikumen
house with twenty other families squeezed together—there is no way to quietly move the bodies in the midst of all those neighbors.”

“That’s true,” Yu said, nodding. “He is also a loner, and a pervert too. The victims were stripped naked, but there’s no standard sexual assault. He’s a psycho who gets his mental release from the ritualistic killing, leaving the red mandarin dress as his signature.”

“A psychopath with his mental release?” Liao exclaimed. “Come on, Detective Yu. You sound just like those mysteries your boss translates. Full of psychological mumbo-jumbo, but with nothing we can grasp.”

“But from that sort of a psychological file we may move on to learn other things about him,” Yu said. “I think I read about it in a book he translated, but it was quite a long time ago.”

“Well, my file is far more practical, material rather than otherwise, and it is effective in narrowing down our suspect range. At least, we don’t have to worry about those who don’t meet these material conditions.”

“What about the red mandarin dress?” Yu said, avoiding for the moment a confrontation with Liao.

“I thought about putting up a reward for information, but Li vetoed the idea, worrying about rampant speculation—”

Their talk was interrupted by the entrance of Hong, a young graduate from Shanghai Police Academy who worked as an assistant to Liao. She was a handsome girl with a sweet smile that showed white teeth. Her boyfriend was said to be a dentist who had studied abroad.

“Well, I’ll start looking into the folders,” Yu said, standing up. As he walked out, he found himself thinking that Hong bore a slight resemblance to the first victim.

THREE

CHIEF INSPECTOR CHEN WAS
on his way to the Shanghai Library.

That morning, he chose to walk along Nanjing Road, his pace leisurely as he thought about a possible topic for his first literature paper.

Near Fujian Road, he stopped at a new construction site and lit a cigarette. Looking ahead into the crowd of new stores and signs, he still recognized a couple of old stores, though these were thoroughly redecorated, as if having undergone plastic surgery.

The Shanghai First department store, once the most popular in the city, appeared shabby, almost depressed in contrast to the new buildings. He had worked on a homicide case in the store. At the time, the decline of the store was not foreseeable to the victim, a national model worker who had been worried about her own fading political status. Now, the state-run store, instead of representing reliability and respectability, was known for its poor “socialist service and quality.” The change was symbolic: capitalism was now recognized as superior.

In the store window, a slender model—a foreign one—stretched herself in an amorous gesture, staring out at Chen, who pulled himself back from wandering thoughts.

An idea for his first paper had come from his talk with Bian, from one particular phrase:
thirsty illness.
He had looked up the term in dictionaries at home; none of them supported the way Bian had used it. While
thirsty
might be used as a general metaphor for yearning,
thirsty illness
referred only to diabetes. So he planned to spend the morning looking through reference books in the library. Perhaps he could get something out of it—maybe an evolution of semiotics—for the paper.