Red Mandarin Dress

stray buttons, scrap paper. With the scene already so damaged, Yu didn’t think their efforts would yield anything useful.
    But he saw a light-colored fiber on the sole of her left foot. Possibly from her socks, or she could have picked it up while walking barefoot somewhere. He removed it and put it in a plastic envelope.
    He stood up. A chilly wind was blowing from the river in a squealing gust. The big clock atop the Custom House started striking. The same melody, never lost in the change of times, reverberated against the gray sky, oblivious of the irreversible loss of a young girl in the morning.
    He knew he had to go back to the bureau, leaving his colleagues to work the scene.
    The Shanghai Police Bureau, too, seemed to be shuddering in the cold morning wind. Even the retired-and-rehired doorman, Comrade Old Liang, stood there shaking his head at Yu, like a helpless plant frostbitten overnight.
    Phone calls started pouring in from the city government, from the media, from the public. Everyone was talking about a serial killer at large, a murderer brazenly defiant of the city police.
    The knowledge that all this had happened twice before and that it was likely to happen again was a staggering blow to the police force. Three victims in three weeks and, given that they had made no progress in their investigation, quite possibly another one at the end of another week.
    Yu’s colleagues were going all out, extending the search into every possible corner. The technical division was reexamining the scene of the crime, a temporary hotline was receiving tips from the public, every radio patrol car was on the watch.
    A picture of the victim was faxed and posted everywhere. There was no point covering it up, and no attempt was made. Far more graphic pictures were being printed in the newspapers along with lurid descriptions. The news was spreading like wildfire, threatening to consume the city.
    Grinding out his fourth cigarette in the morning, Yu looked up to see Liao striding into his office with the initial medical report. It confirmed strangulation as the cause of death. Lividity and rigor were also consistent with Yu’s estimated time of death. Like the second victim, there were no indications that the girl had sex before her death.
    Since the second victim was a three-accompanying girl, Liao suggested that they try to identify the new victim by focusing on the entertainment business. It was consistent with his new focus, and Yu agreed.
    Sure enough, around eleven o’clock, her identity was established. She was Tang Xiumei, a singing girl, more commonly known as a K girl, at the Music Box Karaoke Center. The manager, alert after the earlier cases, recognized her from the faxed picture.
    “What did I tell you?” Liao said, waving a fax page in his hand.
    What a K girl did in a private K room was open knowledge in the city. If a Big Buck took a fancy to her, he could demand services other than singing, and outside of the karaoke room, too, by paying for the so-called “company hour.” No club would say no. Tang’s coworkers said that she hadn’t shown up at the club that evening. But that wasn’t uncommon for her.
    According to the manager, Tang didn’t come to work last night or the night before. What a girl chose to do on her own time was beyond the club’s control or knowledge. The manager’s statement, along with the testimony of several other girls, ruled out the possibility that the murderer picked her up in the club Thursday night.
    Inquiries about the customers she’d met for the previous few nights led nowhere; the regular customers had solid alibis for that night, and none of the new ones had left their name or address.
    Yu contacted Tang’s neighborhood committee. Liu Yunfei, the head of the committee as well as a neighbor of Tang’s in the same building, answered the phone.
    “What can I say about those girls? Materialistic from head to foot. Tang had a favorite saying: to work well is not so important as to marry well. So she went to work in a K club, hoping that she could meet and marry a Big Buck.”
    “Did you notice anything suspicious about her in the last few days?”
    “She hardly talked to anybody in the neighborhood. If she wasn’t ashamed for herself, we were ashamed for her.”
    “Did her neighbors notice anything on Thursday?”
    “Well, she left a bit earlier, according to Auntie Xiong, who lives on the same floor. Around three. Normally she did not leave until around