Fifteen minutes later, when the doctor quietly pushed open the observation room door, Tang Yu’e was already leaning back in the chair, fast asleep. The doctor took the empty paper cup from her hand and placed it in the pocket of his white coat. Then, from another pocket, he produced a syringe and injected its contents into the IV tube. Finally, he placed a thin book in Tang Yu’e's bag, and then departed just as he had come, swiftly and soundlessly.
After nine, the number of sick people coming to the JiangbinCityUniversityHospital gradually increased. One after another, various IV bag-toting patients sat in Observation Room 2, but no one took any notice of the middle-aged woman napping in the chair. At last, a young woman who was there accompanying her boyfriend while he got an IV pointed at Tang Yu’e.
"Hey, look at that woman over there. She hasn't moved an inch this whole time."
"She's probably just sleeping," her boyfriend said, holding his stomach.
Pushing the glasses up off the bridge of her nose, the girl stared at the motionless woman.
"No way…" she said, her face growing pale. "I don't think she's even breathing!"
Plucking up her courage, the girl took a few steps forward, cautiously leaned into the woman's ear and shouted, "Miss!"
No response.
After hesitating for a moment, the girl reached out and pushed her.
It was like pushing a block of wood.
Before the girl could react, Tang Yu’e fell rigidly off the side of the chair and onto the floor.
When Tai Wei walked out of Observation Room 2, a frown on his face, the director of the outpatient clinic was screaming his head off at the nurse who had given Tang Yu’e the IV.
The young nurse was backed against a table, sobbing and sniffling and saying that 30 minutes after she'd injected the IV, she'd gone to Observation Room 1 to check on Tang Yu’e. When she didn't see her, she assumed that once the IV was empty, the lady had removed it herself and left. After that, she hadn't thought about the matter again.
Seeing Tai Wei appear, the director quickly motioned for the nurse to shut her mouth. Then, before Tai Wei could speak, he abruptly stated their position: "We don't know a thing, so all this will have to wait until the higher-ups tell us what to do."
Tai Wei laughed, and then told one of his fellow officers to go to the hospital pharmacy and get the medicine Tang Yu’e had been prescribed so they could take it back to the lab for testing. Then he told the director to summon Dr. Cao, who had been in charge of the woman's case.
Minutes later, as Dr. Cao was rushing over, he was stopped on the way by members of the dead woman's family. One of them, a man in his early 40s, asked the doctor if he was Dr. Cao. When he said yes, the man slugged him in the face without another word. If the police hadn't heard all the commotion and hurried to see what was going on, Dr. Cao may well have joined his patient in the afterlife.
Sighing, Tai Wei looked at Dr. Cao's battered face, at the sobbing young nurse, and at the dead woman's family who were still trying to break free of the policemen so they could rush at the doctor.
"All right," he said, waving his hand, "we'd better just take them back to the station and figure things out there."
Dr. Cao and the young nurse both shot looks at the outpatient director, but he had intentionally turned away.
The young nurse gave the outpatient director a hostile look. It certainly wasn’t the way he’d acted two days ago when he was grabbing her butt.
While trying to get the witnesses into the cop cars, the police ran into some more trouble. The middle-aged, self-proclaimed husband of the deceased simply refused to let them leave with Dr. Cao, saying that he needed to kill him to avenge his wife's death. For a while Tai Wei just held him back, but eventually he got fed up and let him go.
"Well, go on then," Tai Wei relented. "Kill him! This will be the easiest murder case we ever solve!"
Hearing this, the man stopped in his tracks and just stared at Dr. Cao, panting heavily.
As Tai Wei was about to get into the car, the man again stopped him and asked, "This has to be a case of medical negligence, right?"
"Who knows!" yelled Tai Wei, slamming the door in his face. "We haven't even started our investigation."
Then as he started the car, Tai Wei clearly heard the man ask the person standing next to him: "So how much does the hospital have to pay if someone dies?"
Man, what a world, thought Tai Wei. Smiling grimly, he shook his head and drove off.
Any hope the husband had of compensation was eliminated by the test results. There was no problem in the least with Dr. Cao's prescription, the medication dispensed by the pharmacy, or the compound concocted by the young nurse and then fed into the IV. Although traces of sedative were found in the victim's blood, the actual cause of death was brain swelling and respiratory exhaustion resulting from heroin poisoning. This finding shocked the police, who then closely reexamined the evidence taken from the scene. At last they discovered a tiny, needle-sized hole in the IV tube, leading them to suspect that someone had injected liquid heroin into the victim's IV, poisoning her to death.
But that wasn't even the strangest part, for while going through the victim's bag, police discovered a pornographic Japanese manga, which contained shockingly graphic drawings of gay sex and BDSM. Taking for granted that a middle-aged married woman like the deceased really did have a special fondness for such stuff, it was clearly best enjoyed secretly, in the privacy of her own home; so what was she doing bringing it to the hospital? And if it wasn't hers, then whose was it?
After interviewing members of the victim's family and other related parties, the police learned the following information: The victim was a 43-year-old woman named Tang Yu’e who had been unemployed since 1999 after being laid-off at a state-owned company located in JiangbinCity. Her husband, Pang Guangcai, was an electrician who worked for the maintenance department at JiangbinCityUniversity. Together they had one daughter, then in high school.
Tang Yu’e had been an honest and hardworking woman never known to have bad blood with anyone. She also lived a highly moral life, and was so strict with her daughter that if there was so much as a kiss on TV, she would immediately change the channel. At one point, the police wondered whether the manga might have belonged to the husband Pang Guangcai, but not only did he flatly deny this charge, he also had only a sixth-grade education, so the difficulty of reading a Japanese comic would have been quite high. Aside from that, every big street in the city was full of shops selling pornography. If he had wanted to read something like this in Chinese it would have been easy; no reason to spend all that effort deciphering a foreign language.
A significant discovery was soon made while interviewing the staff at the JiangbinCityUniversityHospital. According to one of the nurses, she had been leaving work the morning of the murder when she saw Tang Yu’e being led by a roughly 5'9", white-coated doctor into Observation Room 2. Unfortunately, she had only glanced at him from behind, and for no more than a moment. Feeling almost certain that this man was the killer, police ordered all the doctors from the hospital to wear white coats and line up facing away from the nurse, so that she could identify whom she had seen. Although she indicated several of them as potential suspects, each man was soon cleared of suspicion. Thus it could be more or less concluded that the killer was someone from outside the hospital.
This meant that he had most likely disguised himself as a doctor, brought Tang Yu’e to Observation Room 2, found some opportunity to give her a sedative, and then injected enough heroin into the IV to kill her.
Still, two questions remained. First, why use something as expensive as heroin to kill her? Far cheaper poisons were easily available and just as deadly.