Bingxin waved her hands frantically and begged, “Please don’t do that, Xiaotao-jiejie! I promise I’ll do whatever you ask me, just please don’t tell my dad!”
“Okay,” said Xiaotao. “Then I’ll ask you to go home now.”
Bingxin pouted like a petulant child.
“But I want to solve the case with you!” she argued. “My dad is a police officer, and all my uncles and aunts are police officers too! Yet no one will let me join the police force! I really want to solve a murder case and catch the bad guys! Just like Song Yang-gege!”
Tears welled up in her eyes. I could see that her claims were sincere. I completely understood her feelings and the predicament that she was in, so I sympathized with her.
“Why don’t you let her help us, Xiaotao?” I suggested. “She’s an expert in toxicology. Her knowledge might come in handy.”
Xiaotao heaved a long sigh.
“Fine,” she said. “You can come with us. But you must always obey my orders, understood? One misstep and I’ll call your father immediately!”
Bingxin raised her hands and cheered, “Awesome! Xiaotao-jiejie, you’re a beautiful woman inside and out!”
“Enough talking,” Xiaotao replied, unimpressed. “Let’s go.”
Back at the police station, I first went to see the businesswoman’s body. It was just as Xiaotao described. The coroner had removed her internal organs for further testing, so there was nothing left that I could do.
A task force was quickly formed, and Captain Xing’s case was brought under the team too. We all gathered in a large conference room for a meeting. Xiaotao pinned the photos of the three victims on the board and said, “The first victim was a businesswoman, the second was a model, and the third was a college student. They never crossed paths or interacted with each other in any way. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were young and beautiful. That, and they were all poisoned to death. Anyone have any ideas about these three cases?”
“Did Captain Xing acquire the surveillance video from the hotel?” I asked.
“He did,” Xiaotao nodded. “The video confirms that a cleaner entered the murder scene between 9 am and 10 am. This must be the murderer. However, the hotel informed us that no staff on their record ever went near the room at that time. The murderer was probably under a disguise and snuck into the room when no one was paying attention.”
Xiaotao ordered a police officer to play the surveillance video on the projector. Unfortunately, the video was very grainy and the murderer was wearing thick layers of clothing, making it impossible to tell if it was a male or female. This brought us back to square one.
Because the investigation was still in its initial stage, everyone expressed their opinions and theories freely. Some people thought that since all the victims were young and beautiful women, the murderer must be a man, and the motivation for murder could be rejection to the murderer’s romantic propositions.
Many agreed with this opinion. Some suggested that if this was the case, we might be able to find someone all the victims had come into contact with from the social network, which could be a good starting point to start our investigation.
It was Bingxin’s first time in a police task force meeting. She seemed very excited and listened to everyone’s opinions intently.
“The three murders involved the use of three different poisons,” Wang Yuanchao stated. “This strongly suggests that the murder has solid medical knowledge and has easy access to a number of drugs. We should probably investigate the major hospitals in the city.”
Many people nodded in agreement. Xiaotao assigned a few officers to the task of investigating the hospitals in Nanjiang City. However, there were many hospitals, and this line of investigation would probably take quite some time to produce results.
“Song Yang, do you think you can use Triple Divination with this case?”
“Triple Divination?” Bingxin asked with surprise. “Isn’t that what you talked about in one of your stories?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “But unfortunately, I can’t use that technique with this case. There’s just not enough information about the murderer yet.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” Xiaotao chuckled. “I’m sorry, I realize that I’ve become accustomed to asking you for help. I guess we’ll have to rely on legwork this time. The three of you can go back now.”
“Is the meeting over already?” asked Bingxin disappointedly.
“Yes,” replied Xiaotao. “Just leave the investigation to the police for now.”
“But, Xiaotao-jiejie,” Bingxin continued, “which hospitals did you assign the officers to investigate?”
Xiaotao listed the names of the hospitals, which basically included all the major hospitals in Nanjiang City.
“I knew you’d miss one!” exclaimed Bingxin, laughing. “You forgot the university hospital where I study!”
“Ah, you’re right!” cried Xiaotao. “I’ll have to go there myself!”
“Can you please bring us along?” begged Bingxin. “It’s on the way back to my dorm anyway.”
Xiaotao thought about it for a while and reluctantly agreed. She knew that Bingxin was smart, and she was the director’s daughter after all, so it wasn’t worth the effort to try to keep Bingxin out of the investigation.
So, the four of us got into Xiaotao’s car and drove to the university hospital. It was in a relatively quiet part of town, about three blocks away from the medical school itself. It was not a well-known hospital in Nanjiang City. Bingxin remarked that it was actually an internship hospital for the medical students in her college, and most of the staff in the hospital specialized in research rather than medical practice. Generally, major surgeries were not performed in this hospital.
It was the weekend that day, yet there were very few patients in the hospital. The first thing we did upon arrival was to investigate the hospital inventory. We went to the hospital storeroom where all the drugs were kept and Xiaotao asked for the records and the list of medicines as well as access to the storeroom. In the face of the sheer variety and volume of medicines on the shelf, Xiaotao was overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start. Luckily, Bingxin was there to help us. She clarified that everything checked out according to the inventory.
Upon hearing this, it was an implicit agreement between all of us that this hospital had nothing to do with the murders.
At that moment, Dali gasped out of a sudden and shouted, “A ghost!”
I was startled and turned towards the direction that he was pointing at. It turned out just to be a nurse who was taking medicine from the shelf. She had a large black birthmark that almost covered half of the right side of her face.
The nurse probably already suffered from low self-esteem due to the birthmark, and she quickly covered her face with her hands when she saw us. I scolded Dali for being so crude and apologized to the nurse profusely for Dali’s reaction earlier.
“It’s all my fault,” the nurse said timidly. “I must’ve startled you because I didn’t make any noise when I came in…. You don’t look like you work here.”
“No,” Xiaotao explained. “We’re the police. We’re investigating a case.”
“What case is it?” the nurse asked.
Xiaotao showed her the photos of the victims and asked, “Have you ever seen these women before?”
The nurse glanced at the pictures and answered, “No, I’m afraid not. Please excuse me. I’ve got to rush back to work.”
We then left the storeroom as well. Everyone wondered aloud about what we should do next, but I was silent and deep in thought.
“What’s wrong, Song Yang?” asked Xiaotao.
“That nurse,” I explained. “When she said she’d never seen the victims before, it looked like she was probably lying.”
“Probably? What do you mean?”
“Well… I couldn’t tell if she was lying or if she was just nervous.”
“We should investigate it nevertheless,” Xiaotao insisted. “Let’s go check out her department.”
We asked the storeroom administrator about the nurse. He informed us that her name was Qu Tingting. She worked in the gynecology department and everyone called her the blue-faced beast behind her back. He seemed to find this funny and burst out laughing when he talked about it, but I saw that Xiaotao and Bingxin were both glaring at him.
“Okay,” said Bingxin. “Thanks for the information, Mr. Barcode!”
The administrator was a middle-aged man whose comb-over hairstyle looked like a barcode. The nickname Bingxin gave him was just so apt and funny that Dali and I both couldn’t hold in our laughter. The administrator’s face was flushed with anger, and he spat, “How can the police speak like that?”
Bingxin grimaced and retorted, “If you can belittle other people, then why is it not acceptable for others to make fun of you? Isn’t that a double standard?”
“You… you… I’m going to lodge a complaint about you!”
“I’m sorry,” Xiaotao interrupted, trying to defuse the situation. “She’s new and inexperienced. I’ll definitely give her a good talking to later.”
We then excused ourselves and left the room. Once we were out, Xiaotao suddenly turned to Bingxin with a smile and praised her.
“I hate those men who make fun of girls for their physical defects!” Bingxin proudly proclaimed. Then she turned to me and said, “But you’re not like that at all, are you, Song Yang-gege?”
“Uh… you’re right!” I stuttered awkwardly in reply. “I always respect women!”