Lei Mi - Profiler

Tai Wei laughed, and then told one of his fellow officers to go to the hospital pharmacy and get the medicine Tang Yu’e had been prescribed so they could take it back to the lab for testing. Then he told the director to summon Dr. Cao, who had been in charge of the woman's case.

Minutes later, as Dr. Cao was rushing over, he was stopped on the way by members of the dead woman's family. One of them, a man in his early 40s, asked the doctor if he was Dr. Cao. When he said yes, the man slugged him in the face without another word. If the police hadn't heard all the commotion and hurried to see what was going on, Dr. Cao may well have joined his patient in the afterlife.

Sighing, Tai Wei looked at Dr. Cao's battered face, at the sobbing young nurse, and at the dead woman's family who were still trying to break free of the policemen so they could rush at the doctor.

"All right," he said, waving his hand, "we'd better just take them back to the station and figure things out there."

Dr. Cao and the young nurse both shot looks at the outpatient director, but he had intentionally turned away.

The young nurse gave the outpatient director a hostile look. It certainly wasn’t the way he’d acted two days ago when he was grabbing her butt.

While trying to get the witnesses into the cop cars, the police ran into some more trouble. The middle-aged, self-proclaimed husband of the deceased simply refused to let them leave with Dr. Cao, saying that he needed to kill him to avenge his wife's death. For a while Tai Wei just held him back, but eventually he got fed up and let him go.

"Well, go on then," Tai Wei relented. "Kill him! This will be the easiest murder case we ever solve!"

Hearing this, the man stopped in his tracks and just stared at Dr. Cao, panting heavily.

As Tai Wei was about to get into the car, the man again stopped him and asked, "This has to be a case of medical negligence, right?"

"Who knows!" yelled Tai Wei, slamming the door in his face. "We haven't even started our investigation."

Then as he started the car, Tai Wei clearly heard the man ask the person standing next to him: "So how much does the hospital have to pay if someone dies?"

Man, what a world , thought Tai Wei. Smiling grimly, he shook his head and drove off.

Any hope the husband had of compensation was eliminated by the test results. There was no problem in the least with Dr. Cao's prescription, the medication dispensed by the pharmacy, or the compound concocted by the young nurse and then fed into the IV. Although traces of sedative were found in the victim's blood, the actual cause of death was brain swelling and respiratory exhaustion resulting from heroin poisoning. This finding shocked the police, who then closely reexamined the evidence taken from the scene. At last they discovered a tiny, needle-sized hole in the IV tube, leading them to suspect that someone had injected liquid heroin into the victim's IV, poisoning her to death.

But that wasn't even the strangest part, for while going through the victim's bag, police discovered a pornographic Japanese manga, which contained shockingly graphic drawings of gay sex and BDSM. Taking for granted that a middle-aged married woman like the deceased really did have a special fondness for such stuff, it was clearly best enjoyed secretly, in the privacy of her own home; so what was she doing bringing it to the hospital? And if it wasn't hers, then whose was it?

After interviewing members of the victim's family and other related parties, the police learned the following information: The victim was a 43-year-old woman named Tang Yu’e who had been unemployed since 1999 after being laid-off at a state-owned company located in JiangbinCity. Her husband, Pang Guangcai, was an electrician who worked for the maintenance department at JiangbinCityUniversity. Together they had one daughter, then in high school.

Tang Yu’e had been an honest and hardworking woman never known to have bad blood with anyone. She also lived a highly moral life, and was so strict with her daughter that if there was so much as a kiss on TV, she would immediately change the channel. At one point, the police wondered whether the manga might have belonged to the husband Pang Guangcai, but not only did he flatly deny this charge, he also had only a sixth-grade education, so the difficulty of reading a Japanese comic would have been quite high. Aside from that, every big street in the city was full of shops selling pornography. If he had wanted to read something like this in Chinese it would have been easy; no reason to spend all that effort deciphering a foreign language.

A significant discovery was soon made while interviewing the staff at the JiangbinCityUniversityHospital. According to one of the nurses, she had been leaving work the morning of the murder when she saw Tang Yu’e being led by a roughly 5'9", white-coated doctor into Observation Room 2. Unfortunately, she had only glanced at him from behind, and for no more than a moment. Feeling almost certain that this man was the killer, police ordered all the doctors from the hospital to wear white coats and line up facing away from the nurse, so that she could identify whom she had seen. Although she indicated several of them as potential suspects, each man was soon cleared of suspicion. Thus it could be more or less concluded that the killer was someone from outside the hospital.

This meant that he had most likely disguised himself as a doctor, brought Tang Yu’e to Observation Room 2, found some opportunity to give her a sedative, and then injected enough heroin into the IV to kill her.

Still, two questions remained. First, why use something as expensive as heroin to kill her? Far cheaper poisons were easily available and just as deadly.

Second, where had that pornographic manga come from? And what did it mean?

Tai Wei had the nagging feeling that the manga was not only the most curious part of the case-it was also a way to split it wide open. After considering the matter over and over, he jumped in his car and drove to JiangbinCityUniversity.

Again he found him on the basketball courts, but instead of shooting alone, Fang Mu was now playing in a fiercely competitive game of three-on-three. Tai Wei had to basically pull him aside to get him to talk. He could tell Fang Mu was a little reluctant.

Tai Wei hadn't brought the case files, so he just told Fang Mu a summarized version of what happened. Fang Mu kept his head down the whole time and wiped the sweat from his face. But even though he didn’t look too pleased, it was clear that he was playing very close attention.

When he was finished speaking, Tai Wei turned to Fang Mu and asked him frankly: "What do you think of all this?"

Fang Mu didn't immediately answer, just frowned and stared off into the distance. After a long time, and with a seemingly great amount of determination, he finally said: "What does this have to do with me?"

"Huh?" For a moment Tai Wei was stunned, and he didn't know what to say.

"Officer Tai, I'm not a cop, I'm just an ordinary person. This stuff has already caused me a great deal of trouble. I don't think I can help you." Fang Mu's eyes were on the ground as he spoke, his voice almost a whisper.

Tai Wei stared at him for a long time before saying: "You're not still mad at me because of that other thing, are you?"

"No," said Fang Mu, looking up. "I just feel exhausted, and want to be a normal student like everyone else."

Tai Wei opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out. The two of them sat there in awkward silence for a moment. At last, forcing a smile, Tai Wei patted Fang Mu on the shoulder. "I can understand," he said. "After all, you're still too young to be spending all your time dealing with this kind of stuff." He sighed, and then shrugged his shoulders. "It's funny, this whole time I never thought of you as a student, but as a fellow officer." He smiled and patted Fang Mu's shoulder again. "Take good care of yourself." Then he stood up and got ready to leave.