Red Mandarin Dress

information-shopping.
    Newspapers went wild with theories. No murderer would have dumped a body in such a dress, at such a location, without some reason. One reporter saw it pointing to someone at the Shanghai Music Institute, located across the street opposite the flower bed. One deemed it a political case, a protest against the reversal of values in socialist China, for the mandarin dress, once condemned as a sign of capitalistic decadence, had become popular again. A tabloid magazine went further, speculating that the murder had been orchestrated by a fashion industry tycoon. Ironically, one result of the media coverage was that several stores immediately displayed new lines of mandarin dresses in their windows.
    Yu had noticed the mystifying aspects of the case. According to the initial forensic report, bruises on her arms and legs indicated that the victim could have been sexually assaulted before death of suffocation, but no trace of semen was found on or in the body, and the body had been washed after her death. She had nothing on underneath the dress, which was in contradiction to the common dress code. Then the location itself was so public that few would have chosen to dump a body there.
    In one of the bureau’s initial theories, the murderer, having committed the crime, put clothes on her for the purpose of transporting, but in a hurry, he either forgot to put on her panties and bra, or did not think it necessary. The dress could have been the same one she had worn before the fatal encounter. The location might have no significance: the criminal could have been reckless and simply dumped her body at his first opportunity.
    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