“He was going to Wenhui? Why?”
“According to his wife, Wei asked her to examine and reexamine the picture of Zhou that ran in the Wenhui Daily. The picture was too small and low-resolution for anyone to make out the brand of cigarettes. For all I know, he could have been coming to meet with anybody at the newspaper—even you.”
“Me?”
“Well, he didn’t say anything specific about it in the phone call. There’s a possibility that he wanted to discuss something with your colleague who handles the crime beat.”
“Yes, that’s possible,” she said contemplatively, “but do you mean that Party Secretary Li…?”
“I’m more inclined to assume that Li wasn’t directly involved in the conspiracy. But he must have revealed Wei’s plans to somebody above him, even though he wasn’t aware of the consequences at the time.”
“Somebody above him? Who do you think that could be?”
“I don’t know. Possibly Jiang or someone else in the city government. That would also explain Li’s claim that Wei died in a traffic accident. If Wei’s death was investigated, it might come around and incriminate Li,” he said, breaking a deep-fried crispy rice paddy eel into two. “But anyway, Wei must have been pushing in a direction that made some people panic. They had to get him out of the way, which means that it’s also a point of no return for me.”
“How is that? You’re just a consultant on this case, aren’t you?”
“I feel responsible for his death. I’d wanted to give Wei a free hand, so I told him he was to move ahead without discussing everything with me first. Wei seems to have done just that, despite the fact that there are some untouchable figures in the background of this case. There was a gap in communication between us, and I was also sick that weekend. Then Monday, the next day, he died in the ‘traffic accident.’
“Wei’s death, following Zhou’s as it did, gave me new avenues to investigate. If Zhou was murdered in a well-guarded hotel for reasons unknown, Wei must have been close to uncovering those reasons. Because of that, he, too, was killed. Setting up Wei’s death to resemble an ‘accident’ required planning and resources, so it’s reasonable to assume powerful people were involved.
“There are only two clues to be found in the phone call Detective Wei made to Party Secretary Li that morning. One is the interview with the hotel attendant. The other is the planned visit to Wenhui. Let’s leave the latter aside for the time being because there is too wide a range of possibilities. But with regard to that interview, I got a tape of it. I listened and relistened to it, but without getting anything from it.
“As far as I can see, once shuangguied, Zhou was already a ‘dead tiger.’ What he’d done wasn’t something the government wanted people to know the details of. But the exposure of another corrupt Party official isn’t exactly news in our socialism with Chinese characteristics, and evidence of Zhou’s corruption had already been revealed on the Internet. So there had to be something else, something that the people above Zhou were desperate about, something that threw them into a murderous panic when they suspected Detective Wei was getting close to it.
“What could it be?
“I thought about contacting the hotel attendant, but ever since the Party Discipline Committee team from Beijing arrived at the Moller Villa, the hotel has become too sensitive of a place for me to get close to. Wei’s death was a lesson I had to keep in mind. They are out there in the dark, watching, so I had to make my move without attracting their attention.
“In the meantime, I had to pursue other avenues of investigation. This might not be the time to go into all the details. While Wei’s death made it impossible for me to back away from the case, dogged persistence alone doesn’t necessarily pay off. Sometimes breakthroughs are the result of pure luck. So I’m truly grateful to you, Lianping, for your help with this difficult investigation.”
“What are you saying, Chen?”
“You provided me with a general introduction to the sordid scenes and secrets of the housing market. Your perspective and comments about resistance and revelations in the world of cyberspace were also helpful. But it was your introduction to Melong that really helped.”
“Melong?”
“Yes. His computer expertise led to me to a crucial link that I’d overlooked, and from there, to an unexpected breakthrough in Shaoxing. The subsequent developments came as a real surprise to me.”
“I’m lost again, Chen,” she said. “You went to Shaoxing for the festival, didn’t you?”