Ji Li Rong’s bracelet

Ji Li Rong’s bracelet is both an identifying possession and a hinge in the investigation: its match to a missing student gives a name to one of the women recovered from the mass burial, while its presence at Jiang Baofu’s place forces him to explain his connection to her. The bracelet does not, by itself, settle who killed Ji Li Rong or establish the full course of the crimes. Its importance lies in how it converts an intimate object into a test of competing accounts—and a lead toward the victims’ identities and histories.

Discovery and Identification

The bracelet first enters the investigation among the objects found at Jiang Baofu’s place. Dai recalls that Li Yan had asked investigators to compare files of missing girls against a nickname associated with the bracelet. The task had been delegated while the team was handling several lines of inquiry; Qian, a younger detective, found a match and brought the result to the group. This procedural chain matters: the object produces no answer on its own. It becomes legible through the careful comparison of a recovered possession, missing-person records, and information from a family.

Qian identified the missing girl as Ji Li Rong, a second-year student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University who had disappeared about nine months earlier. Her family said that she was known as Moon. Her father had given her the nickname when she was a baby because her face was round like the moon. When Li Yan asked whether the bracelet was hers, Qian confirmed that her parents had identified it as belonging to her. The match linked the object to a particular person rather than merely to an unknown victim.

Li Yan then asked whether Ji Li Rong had ever had an abortion. Qian reported that she had, midway through her first year, because she did not want an unwanted pregnancy to interfere with her education. That history gave the identification further investigative weight: the bracelet connected a named missing student to the women recovered at Lujiazui, while her abortion aligned with a pattern the investigators were trying to understand. The connection does not make the bracelet proof of the motive or method behind her death; it makes it a route from identity to a consequential line of inquiry.

A Lead That Corrects an Earlier Account

The bracelet becomes especially significant when Li Yan confronts Jiang Baofu. Jiang had attributed the nickname Moon to a girl he described as beautiful, offering his own explanation for the name. Li Yan counters with the bracelet’s identification: it belonged to Ji Li Rong, whose father had given her that nickname in infancy, and her parents had identified her at the mortuary as one of the women found at Lujiazui. The correction is precise. Moon is not simply Jiang’s private description of an unnamed girl; it is a family nickname attached to a victim whose identity can be checked.

Jiang initially resists the implication. Looking at the bracelet, he suggests that it is merely similar and that he may have picked it up at the site, confusing it with another bracelet associated with the Zhang girl. This alternative explanation places the object among the things he claims to have encountered while working around the bodies, rather than acknowledging at once that he kept it from Ji Li Rong. Li Yan responds by saying the interview will end and Jiang will be formally charged with murder. Jiang objects, and, when Mei-Ling is about to stop the recorder, prevents her from doing so. After a pause, he agrees to answer questions.

The bracelet therefore functions as an evidentiary pressure point, not as a self-sufficient confession. Its confirmed ownership contradicts the ambiguity Jiang tries to introduce, and Li Yan uses it to press him about where he obtained it, how he paid for his expensive clothes, electrical goods, and apartment, and what work he performed during two summers at the Shanghai World Clinic. Those questions widen the inquiry from possession of one object to Jiang’s resources and his connection to the clinic. The bracelet opens that examination; it does not answer every question it raises.

Jiang Baofu’s Explanation

Asked about the bracelet again, Jiang’s manner changes. He says he does not know how it escaped notice and recalls that it was still on the girl when she was brought out. He explains that he kept it because he considered her beautiful and says that he had fallen in love with her. He presents keeping the bracelet as a response to his attachment and grief, not as evidence that he killed her. His account is disturbing precisely because it joins a claim of tenderness to his admitted role in handling her remains.

That distinction is important to what the object can establish. Jiang’s account links him personally to the bracelet and to Ji Li Rong after her death; it also gives investigators a new statement to test against the circumstances of the case. But he maintains that he had nothing to do with killing the women and says that he was never allowed into the operating theatre. He claims that he did not learn what had happened until he found body parts in a freezer. These statements remain his assertions, not conclusions proved by the bracelet. The object makes his relationship to the victim harder to leave unexplained, even as his account attempts to separate possession from responsibility for the murders.

Investigative and Narrative Significance

The bracelet’s progress—from an item found at Jiang Baofu’s place, to a match in missing-person files, to confirmation by Ji Li Rong’s parents, and finally to an object Jiang describes keeping—gives the investigation a concrete sequence of verification and challenge. Each step changes what the object means. At first it is a clue without a securely established owner; the family’s identification makes it personal, and Jiang’s shifting explanations make it contentious. The bracelet allows investigators to move between records, family memory, forensic identification, and interrogation without treating any one source as sufficient by itself.

Its role also echoes Margaret Campbell’s realization that an excess of information can obscure what matters. She uses the bus-driver riddle to emphasize that the answer may have been visible all along, while investigators had been distracted by numbers and names. In the bracelet inquiry, the breakthrough likewise depends on noticing a specific personal clue and asking whose it was. Yet this is not a simple deduction from the object alone: Dai’s request, Qian’s file search, the parents’ recognition, and Li Yan’s confrontation all contribute to the result.

For Ji Li Rong, the bracelet restores a particular identity to one of the otherwise anonymous dead: a student called Moon by her family, missing for months, whose belongings can be tied to a person and a history. For Jiang Baofu, it becomes the possession he must account for and the focus of an increasingly difficult interview. For the investigation, it is a small but consequential bridge between the mass burial and the people who disappeared into it. Its force comes from that double movement: it brings one victim into view while bringing the person who kept it under sharper scrutiny.