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your case,” she said with a smile. “Perhaps more than one store. What did the clerks tell you?”
    “Liao and I both visited boutiques specializing in the dress, as well as high-end department stores which carry them, but none of them carried such an old-fashioned mandarin dress. According to the store clerks, no store in the city would stock anything close to it. The specific style is too old. At least ten years old. In the mid-nineties, a mandarin dress usually comes with higher thigh-revealing slits and more sensual curves. It’s sleeveless and sometimes backless too, not at all like the ones on the victims.”
    “Do you have a picture of the mandarin dress with you?”
    “Yes,” Yu said, taking several photographs out of the folder on the nightstand.
    “The dress may be worth further study,” she said thoughtfully, examining the pictures closely. “Also, there might have been something about the first victim which sent the murderer over the edge.”
    “I’ve thought about that too,” Yu said. “Before his first psychopathic action, before he turned into a nut, his initial attack—the one on Jasmine—could have been triggered by something in her, something still comprehensible to us.”
    As always, the discussion with Peiqin helped. Especially with regard to Jasmine. Yu had talked to Liao about it, but Liao insisted that his squad had already done a thorough job checking on her background and that there would be no point in repeating the effort. Lying beside Peiqin, however, Yu decided he would reexamine her file the next day.
    Stretching himself under the quilt, his feet touched hers again. Slightly sweaty, he reached to caress her hair, his hand gradually moving down.
    “Qinqin may come back soon,” she said, sitting up. “I’ll warm the cake in the microwave for you. You have not had your dinner yet, and we both have to get up early tomorrow.”
    He was disappointed. But he would have to go into the bureau for an early morning teleconference tomorrow, and he was tired.

FIVE
    DETECTIVE YU WAS AT his office early the next morning.
    Sitting behind his desk, he steadily drummed his middle finger knuckle on the desktop, as if counting the efforts made by the cops. Dozens of political lectures delivered by Party Secretary Li; the crime scenes photographed and studied hundreds of times; thousands of tips from the public registered and followed up on; the meager material from the victims examined time and time again by the forensic laboratory; two more computers installed for their group; numerous known sexual deviants checked and double-checked; several detained and questioned about their activities during the time of the first and second murders. . . .
    For all their work, there was little progress made in the investigation, but a considerable number of theories and speculations kept popping up both in and outside of the bureau.
    Little Zhou, the bureau driver who had just started taking an evening police course, barged into Yu’s office.
    “What do we find in common between the two cases, Detective Yu?” Little Zhou started dramatically. “The red mandarin dress. A dress known for its Manchurian origin in the Qing dynasty. What else? Bare feet. Both victims had no stockings or shoes on. Now, a woman may appear sexy walking barefoot in a bathrobe, but in a mandarin dress she has to wear pantyhose and high heels. It’s the basic dress code. Otherwise she simply makes a laughingstock of herself.”
    “That’s true,” Yu said, nodding. “Go on.”
    “The murderer was able to afford the expensive mandarin dress and had the time to put her body into the dress. Why would he have left off her stockings and shoes?”
    “So what do you think?” Yu asked, beginning to be intrigued by the would-be detective’s argument.
    “I was watching a TV series last night, Emperor Qianlong Visiting South of the Yangtze River . One of the gifted and romantic emperors in the Qing dynasty. There are different