“Please go on, Chief Inspector Chen.”
There was half a bottle of whiskey on the coffee table, along with a single glass. Was she drinking alone? She got up and fetched another glass from the cabinet, poured out a finger, and offered it to him. There was a faint touch of alcohol on her breath as she leaned over to hand him the glass.
“This evening, I’m not talking to you as a police officer, which I’m not, though I still can’t help feeling like one,” he started. “You might have heard that I was moved to a new position outside of the police bureau. As a cop, I’ve ruffled high feathers, so I wasn’t totally surprised. But after that, things happened in such quick succession that I was overwhelmed. To begin with, I nearly fell prey to a setup in the Heavenly World last week.”
“The Heavenly World?” she interrupted.
“Yes, it was touch-and-go. If not for an unexpected phone call from my mother, I might have ended being another Pan Ming that night.”
She didn’t appear to be mystified by the name Pan Ming. It had been a notorious setup.
“Detective Yu thought that all of this-my sudden removal from the police department, the attempt to discredit me in a setup-must have something to do with one of the cases recently assigned to the squad. In other words, it was to prevent me from looking into one of those cases. So that’s exactly what we did. Detective Yu and I checked into each and every one of those cases, including those involving Shang’s son, the dead pigs on the river, and your missing husband. To our surprise and confusion, though, everything turned out to be unbelievably bizarre. I’ve translated some mysteries, as you may have heard, and from time to time, I find fault with the implausibility of the plots. That’s just fiction, you may well say. But things in China can be far stranger than fiction.
“I don’t have time to dwell on some of the cases Yu and I have explored and reexplored in the past few days, so I’ll stick to the pertinent details.
“Now, shortly after I was removed from the police bureau and made a director, I went to Suzhou on some personal business. There I met a young woman named Qian, who mistook me for a PI. She offered me the job of catching her cheating man back in Shanghai, and I took on her case in exchange for her help making inquiries about the nightclub. Before any progress was made on my part, however, Qian was killed in a home invasion robbery. As it turned out, her phone was tapped and her calls recorded, including the inquiries she made on my behalf.”
He produced the CD, with her profile still smiling wistfully on the cover.
“She was also a very attractive woman, like you,” he said with difficulty. “I hold myself responsible for her death.”
Wei made no response, studying the cover of the CD intently.
“Meanwhile, Detective Yu, who took my place as the head of the Special Case Squad, was working on the Liang missing person case. He investigated various scenarios to find out what had happened to Liang. When officials who are the subject of a corruption investigation disappear, the most likely scenario is that they’ve gone into hiding with the hope of staging a comeback later. With so many scandals in today’s China, any given transgression might easily blow over. But when Liang’s body turned up in Nanhui, that changed things. Both Detective Yu and you ruled out the possibility of suicide. Then what had happened?
“Somebody must have been anxious to quickly and permanently get him out of the way. With Liang in the limelight, his death had to be orchestrated as a disappearance, so that the real cause of his death wouldn’t come to light for months, or years, if ever. It might have played out that way but for a crane accident at a faraway construction site.
“Now, Qian’s death and Liang’s might appear unrelated, but there was one thing the victims had in common. Both were threats to a person or persons in power. The murderers wanted them out of the way to make sure they couldn’t speak out against them.
“Speak about what? About something in which the stakes were too high for the murderers to risk failure. Were there several important secrets to protect, or just one? I didn’t have any clue initially.
“I came back to Shanghai two days ago to deliver a long-promised lecture. The car that the police bureau sent over to take me to the conference was practically destroyed in an explosion. I happened to have already left to take care of something else before the car arrived, but the driver, my former colleague Skinny Wang, was paralyzed in the incident.
“In the meantime, in the midst of my bumping about like a headless fly, I also heard about the death of an American in Sheshan. Intriguingly, I heard about it more than once, and from various sources. That death wasn’t even a case for our squad. Nor for the bureau. But the topic came up repeatedly.”
She nodded contemplatively, picking up her glass but putting it down again without touching a drop.
“Have you heard of it?”
“Yes, different versions.”
“People talked about his connections to the top.”
This time, she didn’t respond.
“Now, that death may have had nothing to do with me, with Qian, with Liang, or with the other cases we’ve been looking into,” Chen went on. “But then there was another missing person, a local policeman from Sheshan named Fei. At this moment, Fei’s still listed as missing, but I got a call from Wuxi just about an hour ago. A body was found there, matching Fei’s description. He was the first one in the hotel room where the American died. Later, he was joined there by Internal Security and another local cop. Fei and his colleague were told to turn the investigation over to Internal Security. The American was cremated the next day without an autopsy being performed. The cause of his death was announced as alcohol poisoning. The dead man, however, was known to be someone who didn’t drink, according to the gossip in social media.
“Back in the hotel room, Fei had sensed this American’s death was something more than merely gossip material. He moved fast, and he got the recordings from the hotel surveillance camera before Internal Security arrived. He didn’t report this to the higher authorities immediately, for the people implicated by the hotel footage were untouchable. Before he could do anything, however, he found himself under suspicion and questioned about his actions at the crime scene. It could only mean more trouble, he knew, if he turned over the footage from the hotel surveillance camera. He’d seen too much, and had become too much of the threat to those involved in the murderous conspiracy resulting in the American’s death. Fei was suddenly sent to Wuxi, where he went missing…”
“Yes, horrible things are happening, Chief Inspector Chen,” Wei said, “but I’m having a hard time following you. What’s connection among all of these and, in particular, with my husband’s death?”
“You’re right. It’s difficult to see the connections. That’s why I didn’t think of coming to you earlier. That’s also why I’m telling you the story in this way. It’s a long chain of related and interrelated links. Almost too long. All these diabolical actions weren’t just about Liang, about me, or about any other victim. It’s a particularly high-stakes political move at this crucial moment that is the hidden common denominator among all of them.”
“At this crucial moment?”
“The National Congress of the Communist Party of China is scheduled for the end of the year, when the members of the most powerful Politburo Standing Committee will be replaced by new people. Shanghai Party Secretary Lai is on the rapid rise and has a good chance to grab one of the top positions. But he has political rivals within the Forbidden City. So he can’t afford to have anything go wrong at this moment. As luck would have it, things went wrong.”