Red Mandarin Dress

behind the bar.
    Yu hurried over and pushed open the door, which led out to a corridor. He saw a side elevator in the corridor around the corner.
    “He must have taken her out the side door, to the elevator, and then out of the gate—” Liao said in a husky voice, “but no, not yet, or they should have been seen and stopped by our people.”
    “That’s impossible—” Yu said, but he was seized by a premonition. “Damn. Check all the hotel rooms.”
    The front desk produced a list in no time. There were thirty-two rooms registered for the night. Following the list, the cops started pounding on the doors. At the third door, they got no response from inside. According to the list, it was registered for single occupancy just for the day. The waiter took out the key and opened the door into the room.
    It was the cops’ worst fear. They found no one in the room, only Hong’s clothes scattered about on the floor. The pink mandarin dress, bra, and panties. In a corner, the high-heeled shoes anchored the ominous silence of the room.
    She must have been abducted into the room, where the murderer stripped her like the others, put the red mandarin dress on her, and carried her out.
    Again they reviewed the videotape. This time, they noticed something they had seen, but not suspected earlier. A man in a hotel uniform helped another one walking out in a hurry. Both of them were in identical hotel uniforms and hats. The man looked to be in his mid-thirties or early forties. With his hat pulled low, plus a pair of amber-colored glasses, the video didn’t catch a clear shot of his face. The other one appeared to be female, with a wisp of black hair escaping the hat, perhaps sick, leaning heavily on the first one’s shoulder.
    The hotel manager hurried over, declaring that the two in the videotape were not hotel employees.
    So the murderer had registered with a fake identity, forced Hong into the room, where he changed her clothes and walked her out. Judging from the tape, she was already nearly unconscious. She must have been overcome without the time to alert her colleagues. Once outside the Joy Gate, he moved her into a car parked nearby or hailed a taxi. The plainclothesman stationed outside, however, didn’t remember having seen two hotel people getting into a car.
    The neighborhood committees and taxi companies were immediately contacted for information about two people in hotel uniforms, one of them probably unconscious.
    Party Secretary Li was swearing on the phones, screaming, striding back and forth like an ant crawling desperately on a hot wok. In spite of his earlier opposition, he ordered citywide surveillance of the families with private garages, for which the police again enlisted help from all the neighborhood committees.
    From the time recorded on the tape, it was now only about twenty-five minutes after their exit from the Joy Gate. The cops might still be able to intercept the criminal before he reached his secret den or catch him at the moment when he was entering the garage. They believed that he still had to put the red mandarin dress on her.
    The hotel manager called. A waitress reported that a middle-aged man had approached her, asking whether there was a new girl that night, but she could barely give a description of the customer, except that he wore gold-rimmed spectacles with amber-colored lenses. Since he sat at a table, she couldn’t tell his height.
    A neighborhood committee cadre also contacted them. Earlier in the evening, in a shabby side street one block north of the Joy Gate, he had seen a white car—a luxurious model, though he could not tell what brand—parked there. It wasn’t common for such a car to park on that street.
    But for the cops, all these tips were of little use at the moment.
    Time weighed on them, heavier by minute, the more unbearable because they had no information whatsoever, in spite of the fact that the entire city police machine was grinding on.
    Finally, around one a.m., a call came from a patrol officer near the Lianyi cemetery in the Hongqiao suburb.
    The cemetery had been deserted for years. In a recent security report to the bureau, it had turned into a hot spot for grave robbers, and the district police station sent a patrol there from time to time.
    About an hour before, one of the grave robbers stumbled upon something totally unexpected. The body of a young female in a red mandarin dress. Like others in his profession, he was superstitious, so he