Chai Rui's opium addiction

Chai Rui’s heroin addiction is a medically inferred condition and a cause of social exclusion, not an established explanation for her murder. In the investigation, signs of drug use on her heart prompt Margaret to consider whether the victims were selected for their organs; at the Black Rain Club, an owner confirms that he dismissed Chai Rui after learning she used heroin. Together, these details make addiction legible through both the body and the judgments imposed on it, while leaving the crime’s motive unresolved.

Medical Evidence and Inference

During discussion of the autopsy, Wang notices small vegetations on the leaflets of Chai Rui’s heart valves but is unfamiliar with them. Margaret explains that these crumbly formations can consist of bacteria associated with dirty injection sites, combined with fibrin and white blood cells. She suggests that the condition might not yet be common in China, but treats the medical finding as recognizable evidence of injection-drug use. The conversation therefore presents addiction not through Chai Rui’s own account, which is absent, but through a physical trace interpreted by medical investigators.

Margaret suspects heroin specifically, but the distinction between evidence and inference remains important. The vegetations point toward injection use; they do not, by themselves, provide a complete history of Chai Rui’s addiction. Margaret also criticizes Ma Runqi’s examination: a more thorough autopsy would have led him to search for injection marks, perhaps on a foot or in the inside crook of an arm. Her reasoning suggests that the initial failure to recognize the signs was not simply a missing fact, but a failure to follow the body’s evidence. She further thinks the surgeon who killed Chai Rui would have recognized the swelling on the heart’s right side, examined the valves, and looked for injection sites. The same evidence that escaped one examiner could have informed the killer’s knowledge of his victim.

Addiction and Exclusion

The account at the Black Rain Club supplies an independent social context for the medical inference. When Li questions the owner, he recalls Chai Rui by her nickname, Cherry, and says she worked at the club only briefly before he fired her. Asked why, he identifies her heroin use as the reason. His preference for girls he considered clean turns drug use into a standard of employability and respectability: once Chai Rui was known to be using, she was no longer acceptable to him as a hostess.

The owner’s response is limited and self-protective. He recalls the dismissal but says he does not know, and does not care, where Chai Rui went afterward. His recollection establishes a concrete episode in her working life while also showing how quickly that life could disappear from the perspective of someone who had employed her. The contrast is stark: the club owner can reduce her to a worker dismissed for heroin use, while the investigation gradually recovers a fuller identity from records and the traces left behind. The narrative does not provide Chai Rui’s own perspective on addiction, her reasons for using, or the conditions surrounding her dismissal, so these details should not be mistaken for a complete personal history.

The Organ-Removal Hypothesis

The medical finding has a further consequence for Margaret’s developing theory. She wonders whether the victims were being killed for their organs, then recognizes a problem: if Chai Rui used heroin, her organs would have carried a high risk of infectious disease. This is presented as a troubling possibility rather than a confirmed explanation of the murders. The addiction may have made Chai Rui a less suitable source of organs, but the scene does not establish that the perpetrators knew of her condition, that they selected her because of it, or that it determined what happened to her.

Margaret’s question about whether someone removing organs would keep a victim alive intensifies the unease without resolving it. The discussion places a potential medical risk beside the possibility of deliberate killing and organ removal, exposing the limits of what the autopsy alone can prove. Her reasoning shifts attention from the abstract question of organ supply to the particular body under examination: the signs of use may have mattered to the person who operated on her, even as they complicated any supposed value of her organs.

From Case Evidence to a Named Life

When Li later tells Margaret that the girl identified through dental records from Beijing was Chai Rui, he adds that she was twenty-two and known as Cherry. She had worked as a hostess and had been fired after her heroin use was discovered; Li also tells Margaret about an upscale apartment, a little girl, and a box of belongings that remained. The evidence of addiction is thus folded into a larger account of a young woman’s life, rather than left as a clinical label. The passage does not establish how addiction related to her child or the other circumstances Li recounts, but it makes clear how much had been missing when she was only an unidentified body.

Margaret reflects that it is easier to examine the dead when they have no name and no known husband, lover, or child. Learning those details makes her grieve for Chai Rui and for the other murdered women as people with relationships and hopes, not merely bodies in the mortuary. Her emotional response gives the investigation a change in emphasis: the medical signs remain important, but they cannot stand in for the person whose body bears them. Chai Rui’s heroin addiction is one fact among the evidence, and the narrative’s insistence on her name and child resists allowing that fact—or the stigma attached to it—to become her whole identity.