The Killing Room

by Peter May

  III

  Margaret felt the chill edge of the wind cut through her as she hurried from the new Arrivals terminal at Beijing Capital Airport to the taxi rank. After the mist and rain of Shanghai, the capital was bright and crisp and clear. The sky was cloudless. The late autumn sunshine, set lower now in the sky, cut deep shadows against the sunlit surfaces of the proud new buildings that lined the expressway into the city. Everything here seemed more ordered. From the compass-oriented grid system of roads and buildings, and broad bicycle lanes lined with trees, to the taxi queues and the white-gloved traffic cops pirouetting on circular podiums at road junctions. It was all in stark contrast to the jumble of buildings and streets, and the confusion of traffic and cyclists, that was Shanghai. In the distance, far off to the west, Margaret could see the mountains cut sharp against the sky, snow-capped peaks tracing a brilliant white profile on the deepest of blues. She sat back in her taxi and let the city wash over her. If someone had told her two years ago that she would one day feel at home in Beijing, she would have told them they were insane. But after the pain of her father’s funeral, the sense of dislocation she had felt in Chicago, and the strangeness of Shanghai, it really did feel like coming home.

  For the first time since rushing to catch a taxi out to Hongqiao Airport early that morning, she took the time to reflect on the previous night. She remembered the reading of the horoscopes, and wondered in the cold light of day if five thousand years of civilisation had given the Chinese insights into people and their compatibilities that Western society could not even guess at. Could Margaret and Li’s conflicting birth years really explain the stormy nature of their relationship? Was she fighting a losing battle against the fates in even trying to hold on to him? She thought about Li’s lucky number three, and Mei-Ling’s dark and foreboding unlucky nine, her trigram the colour of dried blood. And for the first time, perhaps, Margaret began to see that there was a kind of desperation in Mei-Ling in her endeavours to win Li’s affections and shut Margaret out. A yang orphan her aunt had said she was. And there had been a clue in her brother’s description of her fight to succeed in a man’s world. A compensation for something lacking in her life. Margaret realised that she really knew nothing about Mei-Ling, and wondered if perhaps there had been some tragedy in her life that had made her the way she was. Or maybe, as her stars suggested, that tragedy was still to come, a dark shadow hanging over her future. Margaret shivered, as if someone had walked over her grave, and felt a disquiet in the thought that disturbed her.

  As her taxi turned off the expressway on to the third ring road, huge new structures rose all around into a sky crowded with neon advertisements for Japanese and American consumer goods. Margaret turned her thoughts to Li, and she remembered him making love to her in the semi-darkness of her hotel room. And then, through a fog of memories made hazier by alcohol, she recalled something else, something she had buried away in the depths of her subconscious. For even in her drunken state, she had been aware of a desperation in their lovemaking, that same quality she had seen in Mei-Ling. Something that owed more to fear than fulfilment. And now it came bubbling back to the surface and clouded her day with depression. She was, she knew, losing him, and perhaps the desperation she saw in Mei-Ling was merely a reflection of the hopelessness she felt in herself.

  The taxi had negotiated its way on to the second ring road, and now turned south at the Yong Hegong Lamasery into a labyrinth of hutongs, narrow lanes bounded by siheyuan courtyards that owed their origins to the Mongol conquerors who swept down from the north centuries before. The Beijing Municipal Police Department of Forensic Pathology was buried away in an anonymous white building in Pau Jü Hutong. Margaret’s taxi pulled up beside the concrete ramp that ran up to gates leading into the basement of the building. She paid the driver and stepped out into the midday chill. The brown, brittle leaves of autumn rattled along the cobbles in the breeze. Margaret remembered a moment at this spot when she and Li had almost kissed for the first time, pulling back only at the last moment when they became aware of an armed guard watching them from the gate. There was still an armed guard at the gate, but the world had moved on since then. She thought of Li’s whispered farewell in the early hours of last night. He had to get back to his hotel, he had said. Mei-Ling was picking him up in the morning. He had left Margaret’s airplane ticket on the bedside table and ordered an alarm call for her from the telephone in her room. She had still been drunk, but not so drunk that it hadn’t occurred to her that the only reason Li wanted to go back to his hotel was so that Mei-Ling would not find out he had spent the night with Margaret. The faintest traces of a lingering headache reminded her of her excesses in toasting Mei-Ling to oblivion. It hadn’t taken much. Which was just as well, because Margaret had had a considerable head start in the consumption of alcohol. She wondered how Mei-Ling felt today.

  The mutilated remains of what had once been a young woman lay assembled on the autopsy table. Decompositional juices trickled into the drainage channels and the smell of decay hung thick in the air. When they found her body in February, she had already been in the ground for about a week. Now the original carnage inflicted on her, followed by an autopsy and eight months in the freezer, and then four days of slow defrosting, had all taken their toll. The face of the severed head had been virtually obliterated by decay. The white crusting of freezer burn on the skin was being destroyed in turn by the formation of slimy dark green blisters filled with the collected fluids of decomposition.

  “I am glad I never ask her out on date,” Dr. Wang said and he grinned across the table at Margaret.

  “Just as well. She’d probably have turned you down,” Margaret said dryly. Wang made a little snort through his mask that indicated he was not amused. “Did you do the original on this girl?” Margaret asked.

  Wang shook his head. “No. That was Dr. Ma Runqi. He is gone now.”

  “That’s convenient.”

  Wang looked at her and asked guardedly, “Why?”

  “Well, it means there’s nobody to answer for this . . .” she turned and picked up the translation of the autopsy report, “this shambles.” Wang did not respond. “Have you read it?” Margaret asked.

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  “And?”

  Wang shrugged noncommittally. He was reluctant to criticise a colleague, even one now departed. “It is not what I would have done,” he said.

  “No.” And Margaret knew that Wang would have done a much better job. She had worked with him the previous year on the city’s first serial killings, and developed a healthy respect for his work, if not for his sense of humour. She dropped the report on to the worktop and turned back to the body. She scraped gently around the edge of the “Y”-shaped entry wound. The yellow-brown colouring of the betadine that Ma Runqi had noted in his report was no longer discernible, but there were still traces of mud clinging to the skin and clogging the open edge of the wound. “He didn’t even clean off the body properly. And he missed the bits of black gritty material here in the areas of haemorrhage along the incision edges.” She picked at them with the point of the scalpel. “You know what they are?”

  Wang said, “Sure. Someone used electrocautery device to heat-seal small bleeders.”

  “Which would kind of lead you to think that maybe this person was still alive when they were cut open, wouldn’t it? That and the iodine tincture applied to the skin before the incision was made.” Wang nodded mutely. Margaret pressed on, “I mean, Dr. Ma notes the tincture, but draws no conclusions, and misses the cauterisation completely. No wonder Section One weren’t making any progress with the investigation. This is a shoddy piece of work, Doctor. What else do you suppose we’re going to find?”

  Dr. Wang’s silence spoke volumes. And for the moment, at least, his sense of humour appeared to have deserted him.

  It was less than ten minutes later that Margaret came across her next “find.” It was a tiny suture, half buried in the retroperitoneal fat behind the spleen, ty
ing off one of the renal arteries. Margaret removed the blue polypropylene thread, still tied in its distinctive knot, and held it up for Wang to see. “I don’t think it’s any coincidence,” she said, “that I found the same suture, tied with the same blue thread, in most of the victims in Shanghai. It seems that Dr. Ma didn’t like getting his hands greasy.” She took some paper towels to wipe the worst of the fat off her latex gloves to prevent her scalpel from slipping.

  “So this one is same as bodies in Shanghai?” Wang asked.

  Margaret shook her head. “No, it’s quite different in a number of ways.” She had not completed the re-examination, but already there were obvious differences. Wang looked at her for elucidation. She said, “Although it is clear that the subject was still alive when the procedure began, as with the Shanghai victims, the lungs and one of the kidneys are still present. As are the eyes. In Shanghai all these organs had been removed. Also, it is quite clear from the examination of the amputation wounds, that the bones have been sawn through, rather than chopped, as again they were in Shanghai.”

  “Then the girl was killed by different person?”

  “No, I think it was probably just the circumstances that were different. I believe this girl was murdered by the same hand.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Well, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence. The iodine tincture, the ‘Y’ entry cut, the cauterisation of the incision edges. Then there’s the toxicology. The succinic acid and the benzodiazepine in the urine.” And with her tweezers, she picked up again the blue polypropylene suture knot. “And this.”

  Wang shrugged. “It is just suture knot.”

  “It’s a one-handed tie. I remember practising this one for hours when I was at med school. The difference is, I’m right-handed. The way this one loops through, it could only have been tied by a left-hander, as were all the others in Shanghai. And it would be some coincidence if different surgeons hundreds of miles apart used exactly the same blue plastic thread, don’t you think?” Wang nodded, and Margaret said, “I’ll want to take a sample of the twine used to sew up the body back to Shanghai. Forensics will be able to determine if it’s the same stuff.”

  “So why you think some organs and eyes are left?” Wang’s curiosity was aroused, and Margaret guessed that he was jealous of her involvement in the Shanghai murders.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s almost as if they were interrupted, or . . .” she lifted the original autopsy report again and scanned it thoughtfully, “or something made them give up.” Something caught her attention and she frowned. “I see Dr. Ma notes that the right side of the heart was thickened and enlarged when he performed the original autopsy. So he didn’t miss quite everything.”

  The heart, which had been found in a separate bag with the liver, one of the kidneys and the pancreas, had been cut open and was seriously deformed by decomposition. It was impossible now to see the gross evidence of inflammation that Dr. Ma had noted eight months earlier. Margaret stood staring at it for a long time. “I wonder . . . ?” she murmured, and she turned the heart over, carefully leaning in to ease open the stump of the aorta to get a look at the aortic valve. She scrutinised it carefully for several minutes before turning her attention to the pulmonary artery and the pulmonic valve. She let out a small gasp of satisfaction and glanced up at Wang. “You want to take a look?”

  Perplexed, he leaned over the heart and repeated her examination. “What do you see?” she asked.

  He said, “Tiny vegetations on the leaflets of the valves.” He looked up. “I am not familiar with this.”

  “They’re little crumbly chunks of bacteria, often collected from the skin at dirty injection sites,” she said. “It’s quite common for them to combine with fibrin and white blood cells on the flaps of the valves that separate the chambers of the heart. Probably not a phenomenon that’s all that common yet in China. But it’ll come.”

  Wang frowned. “She was junkie?”

  “Heroin probably. And if Ma Runqi had been doing his job properly he would have seen those and gone on to look for injection sites, maybe in the foot or the inside crook of the arm.” She sighed. “In all likelihood, that’s exactly what the surgeon who killed her did. When he removed the heart he would have seen the telltale evidence of swelling on the right side and checked out the valve flaps. This guy knew his stuff, knew that the little vegetations gathered there meant that the girl was a user. He probably went on to do what Dr. Ma didn’t—check for injection sites.”

  Wang was puzzled now. “But what difference would it make to them if this girl was junkie?”

  Margaret had a sick, sinking feeling in her stomach. “I don’t know. Unless . . .” she was reluctant even to entertain the thought, because it simply didn’t make sense, “unless they were after her organs. In which case they’d have been useless because of the high risk of infectious disease.”

  Wang was watching her carefully. “You don’t think they were?”

  “Well, you tell me,” Margaret said. “If you were going to murder someone for their organs, would you keep them alive while you removed them?”

  Wang laughed. “Of course not. This would be insane.” And she heard an exact echo of the words she had used with Li and Mei-Ling.

  “My point exactly,” Margaret said.

  “So why would discovery that she is drug addict make them cut short procedure?”

  Margaret shook her head, totally mystified. “If they weren’t after the organs, then I have no idea.”

  They spent the next twenty minutes further retracing Dr. Ma Runqi’s erratic steps, leading eventually to the bivalved womb which Dr. Wang laid out carefully on the table. In spite of further deterioration, Margaret saw that the endometrium bore the same distinctive adhesive scarring she had noted in several of the women in Shanghai. Wang let out a derisive snort. “Hmmmph! How often have I seen this?”

  Margaret looked at him curiously. “You have?”

  “Sure. These cowboy doctors. They don’t give shit about the poor women when they scrape them out.”

  “Of course,” Margaret realised. “She’s had an abortion.” And immediately she felt an empathy with the poor dead girl.

  “Too many like this,” Wang said. And he glanced around and lowered his voice, as if he might be overheard. “One Child Policy.”

  Margaret nodded. “I’d have thought maybe you guys would have got good at this by now, after all the practice you’ve had.”

  Wang shook his head. “Not this guy.” He grinned. “Use condom, then no need abortion.”

  When they had stripped off their gowns and gloves and masks, and showered away the stench of death, Margaret and Wang met up again in his office to review their findings. Margaret was still browsing thoughtfully through Ma Runqi’s original report. She looked up suddenly and found Wang watching her appraisingly. He was momentarily discomposed at being caught gaping so openly. She said, “These gold foil restorations she’d had done to her teeth . . . In the States, if you saw dental work like this on a Jane Doe, you’d think either she was very rich or very poor. Rich because she could afford to have it done. Or poor because she went to the dental school for free treatment and let the students practise on her with the gold foil.” She paused. “Work like that would be expensive in China, right?”

  “Ve-ery expensive,” he said. “Only rich people and foreigner can pay for that.”

  “Yet here’s this Chinese girl, a junkie, who no one seems to have missed, and she can afford to have work like this done on her teeth? I guess treatment’s not free at the dental schools here?”

  Wang shook his head. “No. And we check out all the clinics in Beijing that can do this.”

  Margaret frowned. “But what if she wasn’t from Beijing? What if she was from Shanghai? I guess they’ve got places there capable of doing this kind of work?”

  “Sure.”

  “So did anyone check out the clinics there?”

  Wang shook his head. “Why
should we think she come from Shanghai?”

  “No reason. Until now, maybe.” Margaret ran her hands thoughtfully back through her damp hair. “I’ll take the x-rays down to Shanghai with me, and someone can check that out.” And then, almost thinking out loud, “But if she was from Shanghai, then why would they follow her to Beijing just to kill her?” It suggested to her that the victims were not simply picked at random. Margaret lifted the report again. “Blood type O. The most common blood type on earth.” She paused and thought about it. “Which would also make her a universal donor.”

  “But they no need to come to Beijing for blood type O,” Wang said.

  “No . . .” Margaret shook her head slowly. There was no clear understanding for her in any of this. She lifted Ma Runqi’s report again. A thought wrinkled her brow. “I don’t suppose anyone thought to DNA-match the body parts?”

  Wang shook his head decisively. “Why would we, Doctah Cambo? Visual matching was only requirement. All the pieces were found together.”

  “According to the report the arms, legs and head were separately wrapped, even though they were found in the same bag as the torso. Dr. Ma notes that the severed pieces were slightly better preserved.” She reflected on this for a moment. “Would it be possible for you to DNA-match all the parts now? I mean, do you have that facility here?”

  “Not here,” Wang said. “At Centre of Material Evidence Determination. At University of Public Security. It take a couple of days, maybe.” He paused. “You think maybe the parts come from different bodies?”

  Margaret took a long, deep inhalation of breath and shook her head. “I have not the faintest idea, Doctor. As we say in America, I’m flying a kite here.”

  Wang frowned. “You want to fly kite in Beijing, you should go to Tiananmen Square.”