Dai

Dai is a detective on Li Yan’s team whose practical contributions help move the Shanghai bodies investigation from isolated clues toward an interconnected case. He recognizes that the suspected killer could not have performed every part of the operation alone, helps identify Chai Rui through her dental records, and carries leads between the detectives as the inquiry expands. His work is often collective rather than solitary: he delegates searches, draws in colleagues, and reports information that gives Li’s investigation its next direction.

Investigative Role and Operational Insight

During a discussion of the suspected killer, Dai challenges the idea that the perpetrator could have acted alone. The women had apparently undergone live operations, and Dai points out that someone else would have needed to administer Midazolam and operate the Ambu bag. This is more than a practical objection to an arrest theory: it shifts attention from the image of a lone, conspicuous night watchman to the medical labor and coordination the crimes would have required. Li acknowledges the point, while insisting that speculation must not displace the immediate task of identifying the victims.

That exchange establishes one of Dai’s useful functions in the inquiry. He tests a working explanation against what the crime would physically demand. The question of assistance remains a hypothesis at this stage, not a solved part of the case, but it changes the detectives’ understanding of the likely scale of the operation. The scene also places Dai within a team that revises its reasoning through discussion: he raises a logistical problem, and Li incorporates it without allowing it to distract from the investigation’s priorities.

Identifying Chai Rui

Dai brings Li a breakthrough in the identification of one of the victims. A dental clinic had records of gold-foil work performed roughly eighteen months earlier, and those records linked the dental evidence to a twenty-two-year-old named Chai Rui, who preferred the name Cherry. The clinic was a Sino-Canadian joint venture at the World Medical Centre. Dai relays not only the identification but also the circumstances in which it was established: a dental assistant remembered Chai Rui and said she had been a hostess at the Black Rain Nightclub.

The trail gives the victim details that the anonymous remains could not. Chai Rui had sought expensive dental work and paid cash; Dai reports that the assistant remembered her as attractive and flirtatious. He also describes the clinic’s location in Xujiahui, among new apartment blocks and upscale shopping centres, and notes its proximity to Shanghai Medical University without claiming that the proximity proves anything. The information is concrete but incomplete: a name, an occupation, a neighborhood, and a person who remembered her. Li welcomes the identification as another step forward, while the scene makes clear that recognizing a victim does not yet explain how she came to be among the dead.

Following the Bracelet and Missing-Person Files

Dai’s work also connects objects recovered during the investigation to the records of missing women. Li asks him to check the photograph and description of a bracelet found at Jiang Baofu’s home against the families of missing girls already in the files. The search is deliberately broad: if no match appears in the first twelve months of records, Li wants the team to go back another twelve. Dai groans at the scale of the task, but the request gives the bracelet a specific investigative purpose rather than treating it as an isolated possession.

Later, Dai reports a breakthrough before explaining how the team reached it. He had delegated the missing-file check because the detectives were already carrying a heavy workload; at the time, he was also pursuing the Zhang family from Jiang Baofu’s hometown. Qian confirms that the bracelet belonged to the girl the team was looking for. Dai says that he had asked Qian to check whether she had ever had an abortion, and Qian reports that she had undergone one during the middle of her first year at school, to prevent an unwanted pregnancy from interfering with her education. Dai then tells Li that the family is on its way to the mortuary to try to identify her.

The sequence shows both the reach and the limits of Dai’s method. Delegation allows the team to pursue several strands at once, but it means the breakthrough emerges through other detectives’ work and returns to Li through Dai’s report. The victim’s history gives the bracelet a human and evidentiary context, while the family’s journey to the mortuary brings the investigation back to its most difficult task: matching a name and a life to remains. Dai conveys the development; the identification at the mortuary is still pending.

Witness Reports and the Pursuit of Stein

Dai also brings Li a description assembled from witnesses who had seen a Westerner running down Ziyun Road toward the Yan’an flyover. The man, described as dark-haired and wearing jeans and a pale jacket, had chased a light-grey van, caught up with it briefly at an intersection, and banged on its side before it drove onto the elevated road. Witnesses then saw him stand in the street, stop a taxi, and leave in the same direction as the van. Dai stresses why the incident attracted notice: the man had been running down the middle of the road, an unusual sight. The report supplies a sequence of observable actions rather than an established explanation of what the man intended.

Later, Dai contacts Li by radio with news from the airport. The American surgeon Daniel F. Stein has been picked up while trying to board an Air India flight to Delhi. Dai reports that Stein had a briefcase full of computer disks that might contain significant material. The update places a named surgeon, a hurried attempt to leave Shanghai, and potentially important digital evidence in the same line of inquiry. Dai does not interpret the disks or establish what they contain; he gives Li the information at a moment when Li is driving alone, and the radio report carries the investigation forward beyond the immediate search for the victims.

Teamwork and Narrative Function

Across these episodes, Dai is presented through concrete work: he gathers and communicates leads, proposes that the crimes required assistance, and coordinates inquiries with colleagues such as Qian. His occasional humor—the pun he makes while announcing the dental identification—sits alongside the grim material he has to handle, but it does not obscure the function of his reports. Each one has a practical consequence: a victim gains a name, a bracelet is checked against missing-person files, a family is sent to the mortuary, a witness description reaches Li, or a suspect is intercepted at an airport.

Dai’s role is therefore not that of a lone investigator solving the case through a single flash of insight. The investigation advances by distributing work and reassembling its results. His admission that he delegated a demanding search makes that process visible, while his reports show how information moves through the team and reaches Li. In a case that increasingly points beyond one perpetrator and one crime scene, Dai’s attention to coordination and follow-up helps give the investigation its working shape.