Fong noticed other things as well. Things that angered him deeply. Hundreds of windows faced the alley. Some of the windows contained plank extensions used for sleeping half in and half out of the crammed rooms. So many people! And children. This was a most unlikely place to choose for a murder. Shanghai seldom sleeps, but this place-this vibrant artery of the city-was vitally alive no matter what the hour. This murderer didn’t just take a life and then mutilate the body that encased that life-he did it consciously in a place of abundant life itself. As if affronted by the fact of the life here, he had chosen this very spot. Fong looked down to his feet. He knew what he would find. There on the cracked square paving tiles he saw the taped outline of the body, marking its likely position at time of death. Fong was standing squarely on the heart.
The morning after a murder the police station was always a riot of paper. Special Investigations handled most of the murders in Shanghai, a city of fourteen million. Most but not all. Domestic violence was handled by another unit. Shanghai had fewer than two hundred fifty murders a year. Per capita that was less than one one-hundredth of the murders in Detroit. But Special Investigations also tracked major fraud cases, multiple injury cases, and anything that influenced the growing foreign community in the city.
Murder, because of its relative rarity, was newsworthy. Murder of an American was especially newsworthy. And somehow the news about the Dim Sum Killer had already hit the stands.
Fong arrived at his office on Zhong Shan Road, in the old English Concession, in a fury. He hurled the newspaper on the table and exploded with anger at his assistant. “Who the hell let this out? What moron allowed the press access to this material?”
His assistant, a young man who claimed he had been assigned by his commune first to the police academy and then to work as Fong’s assistant, was not one to take responsibility for anything, so he did what he always did, he shrugged.
“That’s it, a shrug?”
“You want two shrugs?” For the umpteenth time it occurred to Fong that his assistant’s story of communal assignation had a hollow ring to it. Fong thought it more likely that this innocuous little rodent probably had good party connections and was there to keep an eye on him. Putting the thought aside, Fong snapped, “I want the editor of the paper on the phone, I want a meeting with the commissioner, and I want the coroner to call me. You capable of arranging that?”
The assistant shrugged again.
“That is an affirmative shrug, right?” Before the assistant could shrug again, Fong spat out, “From now on you hit the desk once for yes and twice for no.”
After the briefest pause in which Fong saw the unmistakable traces of hate in the young man’s face, the assistant hit the desk once.
“You’re progressing.” He pointed to a new file on the desk. “Is that from Wang Jun?”
The assistant was about to shrug but decided against it. He hit his desk once.
Fong picked up the file and headed toward his office.
All the lights on his desk phone were blinking as he entered. He punched through to the desk operator to ask who the calls were from. Two were from newspapers and one was from the American consulate. He told the operator to tell all three that he was in the field “avidly pursuing promising leads“ and could not be reached at this time. He then turned to Wang Jun’s report.
The older man had a terse style that pleased Fong.
PLACE:
Hianpi Alley off Julu Lu
TIME:
Arrival 10:47 P.M. April 18, departure 4:58 A.M. April 19 [then he gave the date in Chinese]
PROCEDURE:
Sectoring, blood typing, interviewing of area wardens and prefects on alley and across Julu Lu.
RESULTS:
Blood samples sent to laboratory. Photos of scene before and after removal of body enclosed.
Fong put aside the document for a moment and looked at the photos. They were taken with standard Wang Jun accuracy. Each was one of a pair-before with the body and after without. Each set was taken from precisely the same angle. There was a series of overhead shots, most likely taken while balanced on someone’s shoulders. A series of wide-angle shots of the alley came next. Nothing surprising here. The arrangement of the body parts on the pavement caught Fong’s eye. He went back to the wide-angle overhead photo. What was it here? No, it wasn’t the arrangement of the body parts as such, but rather some of the parts themselves. He rifled through the rest of the pictures looking at closeups of torso, of legs, of feet, and finally of hands.
Something about the hands. Both had been severed at the wrists then placed back where they should be. Something nagged Fong about the hands, though. He stood up and walked around the room trying to clear his head. What? What was wrong with the hands? He placed his own hands on the window and pressed them flat. Then he released the pressure and was about to walk away from the window when his eyes were drawn to his own curled fingers. Without pressure, fingers naturally curl. Of course they did. He raced back to the pictures on his desk. The fingers on both hands were not curled. They pointed. The killer had arranged the fingers to point. At what? He looked at the shots of the alley and couldn’t come up with an answer to his question.
Then he picked up the overhead full body shot. Wang Jun had drawn a grease pencil circle on the photo with a question mark at the side. Fong grabbed an old-style magnifying glass from a side desk drawer and examined the circled area. Between the legs a piece of viscera and a sealing strip came into focus. Neither were in the overhead “sans body” shot. Not a surprise really as they’d probably been discarded or put into the coroner’s package. He moved the magnifying glass to allow a further enlargement of the area. He could just make out the writing on the sealing strip. It said “Rip here for air sickness bag.” The writing was in both English and Japanese characters so he knew it had to be from a JAL flight. But that wasn’t his concern just now. Now he wanted to know what a killer would put into an air sickness bag. A waterproof bag that could be flicked open with one hand. Without putting down the picture he picked up his phone and punched the coroner’s extension.
The coroner answered with a cough and the particularly acute clearing of the throat that is the god-given right of every Han Chinese male.
“And good morning to you too.“
“Dim sum will never be the same,” croaked the coroner.
“Yeah,” Fong said, putting an end to this line of conversation.
“I hope to shit you’re not calling me for that fucking report at this ungodly hour of the morning. It took me a long time to work this one out.”
Still holding the picture in his hand, Fong allowed the older man to vent his spleen. He knew the coroner had probably worked all night at his ghastly trade.
“No, I can wait for the report.”
“Good.”
“I was just wondering if you checked for all the body parts.”
There was a lengthy pause at the other end of the line. Finally, the coroner responded, “I thought we were concerned with time of death, weapon used, that kind of shit.”