by Song Ying
“Chief Cui,” Xiaochuan said, “I still think we shouldn’t overlook those twenty-five minutes.”
“Do you mean that he and Ding Lan were up to something?” Zheng Yong asked snidely.
Someone snickered.
“That’s not what I meant,” Xiaochuan stammered, his face turning red.
“I think we can accept Zhong’s alibi,” Cui said to end the discussion.
Xiaochuan followed that up with his conversation with Hong Yiming, after revealing what Nie Feng had alluded to.
“When I met Mr. Nie two nights ago, he thought we should find out what Hong and Hu talked about at dinner that night in Greater Meisha. It could be an important clue.”
“If a reporter from a mosquito press can solve a case, what do they need the police for?” Cui said, half in jest.
That got the desired result of general laughter.
“He’s not from a mosquito press,” Xiaochuan said in Nie Feng’s defense.
“He writes for Western Sun, doesn’t he? Well, it’s easy to play detective on paper.”
“It’s Western Sunshine, not Western Sun,” Xiaochuan corrected his superior.
“They’re the same, aren’t they? Why be so stubborn? Can you have sunshine without the sun?”
Now everyone was laughing, including Chief Wu.
Xiaochuan refused to give up. “But what I learned from Hong Yiming was significant,” he argued after the laughter died down.
“Tell us what you learned,” Chief Wu said.
Xiaochuan told them that during the interview he learned that Hong had an alibi. He’d played mah-jongg with some business associates all through the night of the twenty-fourth. He also told Xiaochuan about the dinner at Greater Meisha. At around six o’clock that evening, Hu invited him to dine at the Oceanview Restaurant in the Seaview Hotel. Hu ordered a tortoise pot, a spicy crab, some razor clams, and a few cold dishes. They enjoyed the meal and the conversation. A committed swimmer, Hu had no interest in golf, so the Seaview Hotel was his preferred place to meet business associates for business and for pleasure. Hong said he and Hu had known each other for years, and that he had been Hu’s assistant when they had started out in Hainan. After they had acquired some capital, they came to Shenzhen to try their luck, with Hong setting out on his own. The friends then became competitors. Hu had phoned him to have dinner at Greater Meisha that evening, but their conversation was pretty much limited to talk about real estate bubbles.
“Did you ask him about the land in Tiandongba?” Cui asked.
“I did. I said, ‘You’re business rivals, so you must have discussed Tiandongba.’ He said, ‘I thought he’d want to sound me out, but he didn’t say a word about the bid. That was unlike him, if you ask me.’”
“And then?”
“Then Hong added, ‘Maybe he wanted to talk about it but didn’t have time.’ I asked him, ‘What makes you say that?’ Hong said, ‘Hu got a phone call and said it was urgent, so we said good-bye.’ I asked when the call came in, and he said it was around seven. When I asked if Hu had asked him to wait, he said no, and since Hong had arranged to meet with some banking friends at Honey Lake Resort, that was the end of it.”
Yao Li took it from there.
“Hong played mah-jongg with three friends in suite number two of Honey Lake Resort all night. They were Deputy Section Head Li of the Municipal Construction Section, Bureau Chief Sun of the T District National Land Bureau, and General Manager Qian of MasterCard Worldwide. They ordered room service at around midnight.”
“Check out the phone call Hu received at dinner. It’s key,” Cui said.
“We did check it out. It was made at 7:01 from a mobile phone to Hu’s cell. It lasted less than a minute,” Xiaochuan said.
“Whose mobile was it?”
“The number began with one-three-six, from Shenzhou. It was a burn phone.”
“Shit!” Cui cursed angrily.
“This number is critical,” Chief Wu said to Cui. “Have the phone surveillance office put a trace on it.”
“Will do,” Cui said as he turned to Xiaochuan. “There’s something else. Tian Qing asked the city’s Criminal Investigation Bureau’s medical examiner to determine if a human hand had caused the scratches on Hu’s chest. They appear to have been made by a sharp metal object and are in the shape of the Chinese character for mountain.”
“Which means they could have been left by the perpetrator as a sign, or some kind of marker.” Xiaochuan knew immediately what Cui was getting at.
“Quite likely,” Cui said. “That and the mysterious phone call, plus the disappearance of Hu’s clothing, all point to one thing—Hu’s death was not accidental. So I’ve asked Chief Wu’s permission to open an investigation.”
“The Bureau Party Secretary has agreed,” Chief Wu said. “We’ll call it the June Twenty-fifth Murder, and Cui Dajun will lead the investigation. You’ll need more people.”
“Everyone in the team will work on this case, except for Xiao Guan and Xiao Lu, who are tied up with the Sha Tao Kok fraud case,” Cui said to his suddenly animated officers.
“May I ask a question, Chief?” Xiaochuan said.
“Go ahead.”
“Is it a coincidence that Hu’s body was discovered near the Lesser Meisha Pier?”
Cui looked pleased.
“Good question. It’s possible it was taken by motorboat to the pier and dumped on the beach. That would be an easy way to get rid of a body without leaving traces. If that’s what happened, then this is a full-blown homicide.”
The excitement level rose dramatically.
“You.” Cui pointed to Zheng Yong. “Go with Da Wu to check out the motorboats at Greater and Lesser Meisha beaches tomorrow.”
— 2 —
While the police were going over the case late into the night, Nie Feng was by Lesser Meisha Pier on his haunches, lost in thought as he stared at the rippling waves.
Under the evening sky, the stone pier stretched out into the ocean, its pylons exposed by the low tide. There were no boats tied up at the pier. Looking toward the jetty, he saw, on his left, the dark shadow of a mountain range, which the travel map marked as Back Tsai Kok Beach. To the right was the craggy Chao Kok, where sparse lights shone above the horizon, throwing distant cargo ships into silhouette.
He’d taken the 103 Bus from Luofang Road to Lesser Meisha at three that afternoon. It had taken a quarter of an hour and cost only nine yuan. He’d long wanted to visit Lesser Meisha, known as the Haiwai’i of the East, and now here he was, ready to sunbathe and take a dip in the ocean, but most importantly, to see the spot where Hu’s body had been found.
Wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of beach shorts with piping, he looked carefree and smart with his beige baseball cap and a white canvas tote with the red ESPN logo.
After paying the fifteen yuan entrance fee, he walked from the main entrance to the Lesser Meisha Tourist Center, where he was immediately greeted by the smell of the ocean. Before him, coconut palms lining the path swayed gracefully in the ocean breezes while the waves lapped rhythmically.
The fine sand had a light yellow cast. Even on an overcast workday, many people were swimming, and there was a long line of beach umbrellas. Friends in Shenzhen had joked that he might find female swimming partners at the beach.
He bought a pair of black-and-red swimming trunks at the souvenir shop and changed into them right away. Then, after storing his street clothes in a locker, he went into the water, let a couple of waves wash over him, and swam out to the shark barrier buoy. It was an easy swim, so he did it twice. Nie was fond of working out, and he’d hoped to get a tan, but sunbathing was pointless on an overcast day.
After the swim, he surveyed the area. The beach was well equipped for vacationers, with villas, vacation cabins, restaurants with local cuisine, waterskiing, windsurfing, barbecue pits, and more—everything one could want to make it a vacationer’s paradise. When he thought he knew his way around well enough, he went to talk
to the staff at the tourist center about the morning of the twenty-fifth, when Hu’s body was found.
The man on duty was a cautious, heavyset, middle-aged man, who demanded to see Nie Feng’s press ID before taking him to the site.
He pointed out the spot—on the beach near the pier.
Standing on the stone jetty, Nie looked down on the spot a few feet below him, and took out his Pantex 928 to take pictures from different angles.
“So this was where Hu Guohao’s body was found,” he said to himself.
After looking around, he noted that the spot was thirty or forty meters from the swimming section. To his left a long row of red buoys marked the boundary for motorboats. To his right was Lovers’ Lane, backed against a hill on one side and the ocean on the other.
He crouched down to measure the distance between the jetty and where the body had lain.
The tide receded in the evening and then rose again after midnight, which meant that the body had been seven or eight meters from the water at midnight. That was why there were no footprints or other marks, as Xiaochuan had said. Even if Hu’s body had been dumped here, the person’s footprints would have been washed away by the early morning tide. If this was indeed what had happened, then the spot and the time to drop off the body had been carefully thought out.
The barbecue ground, off to the west, was dotted with squat trees. Nie went to take a look and counted a hundred and eighteen cement pits encircled by cement benches.
Uniformed waitresses were setting out the fixings for the evening’s barbecues. One of them told Nie that the squat trees were rubber trees their boss had imported to absorb the smoke from the barbecues.
He timed his walk from the barbecue ground to the pier—it took two minutes.
* * *
Nie remained crouched near the pier; he could hear loud talk and laughter over at the barbecue grounds.
Several possible scenarios occurred to him:
Under the evening sky, Hu Guohao struggled ashore and passed out on the beach;
Hu’s body floated in the black ocean and washed up on the beach;
A shadowy figure carried the body and dropped it on the beach before mysteriously disappearing into the darkness.
“Could there be a fourth possibility?” he asked himself.
But there was still the puzzle of Hu’s clothing.
And one more puzzle—what significance lay behind the sheet of paper Hu received? What did the strange symbol and numbers mean?
“Seven-nine-one. Seven-nine-one,” he muttered to himself.
An ocean breeze carried a chill and the smell of the sea. As Nie stood up and stretched, he decided to call the young officer, Xiaochuan. He dialed the number.
“Hey, Officer Wang. It’s me, Nie Feng.”
“Oh, hello, Mr. Nie.”
“Is this a good time to talk?”
“I’m in a meeting at the station,” Xiaochuan whispered.
“I guess you’ve been busy. I’m at Lesser Meisha beach.”
“I see.”
“Have you mentioned my request?”
“I’ve—”
“Who’s that?” Cui cut in before Xiaochuan could finish.
“It’s Mr. Nie, the reporter.”
“The one from Western Sun?”
“It’s Western Sunshine,” Xiaochuan corrected his boss. “He wants to know what you think about his request to tag along as we investigate the case.”
“Tell Mr. Reporter I’ll let him come with us if he has a letter from the Provincial Public Security Office,” Cui said caustically.
“Er—” Xiaochuan didn’t know what to do.
“Tell him to stay out of police business,” Cui said with obvious displeasure. “Now, back to the case.”
“My boss said you can come, but—” Xiaochuan pressed his lips up against his phone.
“But what?”
“But you need a letter from the Provincial Public Security Office.”
“A letter from the Provincial Public Security Office? Is that what he said?”
“Yes.”
Xiaochuan felt awkward as he shut the phone. Nie Feng shook his head with a smile. After a moment’s thought, he placed a call to his parents’ home in Chengdu.
The young live-in maid picked up the phone and responded to his voice with pleasant surprise.
“Big Brother Nie! Where are you?”
“I’m in Shenzhen.”
“Your mother has been wondering why you’re not coming home.”
“I’ve been delayed by some urgent business,” Nie explained softly. “Say, is the old man home?”
“He is. He has guests.”
“Where from?”
“I don’t know, maybe an out-of-town public security bureau.”
“Where’s my mother?”
“Aunty is at the hospital.”
“Could you call my old man to the phone?”
He wanted to see if his father knew anyone in Guangdong Public Security.
A few moments later a loud baritone voice came through the phone. “Hello.”
“It’s me, Dad. How are you doing? I’m still in Shenzhen on assignment, but I’ll be back in a few days.”
“How’s it going?”
“Not bad. But the place is expensive. This is turning out to be a costly interview.”
“Are you trying to get me to chip in?” the old man joked.
“Don’t worry, Dad. Editor-in-chief Wu has promised extra pay for my special report. And I’ll make sure he picks up any additional expenses.”
“Your Mr. Wu knows how to deal with people.” His father laughed.
“Say, Dad. I want to ask you something.”
“What is it?”
“Do you know anyone in the Guangdong Provincial Public Security Bureau?”
“Guangdong? Sure. Deputy Chief Yao, who’s in charge of criminal investigations. He and I were schoolmates.”
“Perfect.” It was more than Nie hoped for.
“What’s so perfect about it?”
“My magazine is working on a report on the public security front. I’m heading that way and I’ll pay Uncle Yao a visit.” Nie paused purposefully before asking, “Would you like me to take a message along?”
“Hmm, it’s been two years since I last saw Old Yao.” Nie’s father took the bait. “Why don’t you take a couple of packets of good jasmine tea with you and tell him Old Nie from Sichuan sends his best. I’ve got to go. We have visitors.”
“I promise to carry out my mission, Commissioner Nie.” Nie Feng, the happy camper.
“No more of this Commissioner Nie stuff.” His father was laughing.
— 3 —
The meeting was still under way in the crime unit conference room.
Cui passed out cigarettes, and once again columns of smoke rose.
“We have a report on Zhou Zhengxing,” Xiaochuan said. “He’s still on a business trip, but we got hold of him with the help of Hu’s office assistant, Ah-ying.”
“Where is he?”
“In Pudong, Shanghai, on finance issues, we’re told.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t mince words. He said he went back to his hometown in Nan’ao for the weekend. On the afternoon of June twenty-fourth, he presided over a computer donation ceremony at a local primary school, so he couldn’t have been at Lesser Meisha.”
“He’s from Shuitou Village in Nan’ao,” Yao Li added.
Dapeng Bay, along Shenzhen’s eastern coast, was over seventy kilometers long, with many blue-water, golden-sand beaches like Greater and Lesser Meisha, Xichong, Shuitousha, and Xiyong, all well-known tourist sites. Nan’ao Township, a one-time fishing village two kilometers south of Shuitousha, a stone’s-throw from Hong Kong’s Ping Chau Island, had been developed into a swanky coastal town.
A simple inquiry verified that Zhou had donated six computers to a primary school and had hosted a banquet at the Bayview Restaurant for the principal and the head of
Shuitou Village; he’d later spent the night at his mother’s house, where he’d had many visitors, including neighbors, aunts, uncles, and other relatives. They had talked till midnight. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, Zhou, a filial son, had taken his mother to a hospital in town and bought some herbal medicine for her cold. He had driven back to Shenzhen after lunch.
“Where was he on that first day after midnight?” Cui asked.
“At his mother’s house.”
“Did anyone see him?” Chief Wu asked.
“Only his mother.”
“Close relatives like that can’t provide a credible alibi,” Chief Wu commented. “There’s an hour gap between midnight on the twenty-fourth and one a.m. on the twenty-fifth. We need to find out what he was doing during that hour.”
“Did Zhou say when he’s coming back to Shenzhen?” Cui asked.
“He told us he’d be back tomorrow night for something called a ‘Real Estate Elites Forum’ at Guanlan Lake the following morning.”
“So all four of them have an alibi.” Cui summed up the situation. “But think about it, everyone, with the exception of Zhong Tao, could benefit from Hu Guohao’s death, and they all have motives.”
“Hong Yiming would want Hu dead for the sake of his business,” Xiaochuan said, “and Zhou Zhengxing would gain control if he replaced Hu at Landmark, but Zhu Mei-feng, a graceful beauty if I’ve ever seen one—it’s hard to see what her motive might have been.”
“I heard from Landmark employees that Hu liked the ladies and that she was unhappy with him,” Yao Li added.
“But enough to kill him?”
“I think something else is going on. We just have to find out what it is,” Xiaochuan commented.
Team leader Cui frowned, but said nothing.
Yao Li and the others looked on, not sure what to do next. By now the office was shrouded in a pall of cigarette smoke, as they had all turned into human chimneys, except for Xiaochuan, the youngest, and Yao Li, the only woman. To all present, the case itself seemed cloaked in fog.