Margaret Returns to Shanghai to Investigate

Margaret Campbell’s return to Shanghai begins with a news report and ends, in the evidence available here, with a new line of inquiry into the victims. Still in the United States after her father’s funeral, she learns that the Shanghai authorities want her to perform autopsies on bodies recovered from a construction site. The invitation draws her back to the work, the country, and Li Yan that she has missed; once in Shanghai, her forensic perspective helps the investigation question its assumptions and look again at what the victims have in common.

The invitation and decision

Margaret first encounters the discovery as a story on television. The mass grave has been found on a building site in Shanghai, and the Chinese authorities have imposed a media blackout. News coverage nevertheless continues, including statements from the New York-Shanghai Bank and an interview with its chief executive, who had been caught up in the discovery. The number of recovered bodies is not yet reliably known. Margaret watches with professional interest, but that interest is shadowed by regret: she is not part of the investigation.

The case brings into focus the distance she has been keeping from her former life. She misses her work, China, and Li, but has not brought herself to visit her apartment in Lincoln Park. To her, the apartment stands for a past identity she is reluctant to revisit. Her recent encounter with David Webber has also left her with the recognition that the past offers no refuge; she will have to move forward rather than remain suspended between lives.

A news report changes the question from whether she wants to return to whether she has been asked. The Shanghai authorities announce that they have invited her to help. A photograph from her earlier work assisting with autopsies at Waco appears with the report, which also recalls her previous work with police in Beijing and her warning about genetically contaminated rice. The reported body count has risen to eighteen. Startled to see herself made part of the story, Margaret realizes that the invitation is connected to Li: since her departure for her father’s funeral, he has been writing to her almost every day, and she has recently introduced him to email as a direct way to communicate.

She opens a message from Li titled Autopsies. Her mother enters as Margaret is reading it and asks why she is on television. Margaret explains that she has decided to return to China and perform the autopsies. Her mother has never understood her choice of work, and their exchange makes clear that Margaret is not asking for approval. But she also says she does not want to fight. The decision is an assertion of professional purpose, not a resolution of the strain between them.

Arrival and reunion

Margaret reaches Shanghai exhausted by travel across time zones and the international date line, uncertain whether she is arriving in the past or the future. Her plane descends over the mud flats to the new airport in Pudong, and the vast terminal makes her arrival feel less like a homecoming than entry into an unfamiliar space. The journey has taken her back to the city, but reunion with the work and people she missed does not happen smoothly.

At the detectives’ office, Margaret has been soaked by the rain and delayed while trying to find her way inside with her luggage. Waiting at the doorway, she sees Li talking with Nien Mei-Ling, his Shanghai counterpart. Mei-Ling touches his hand, and Margaret, already uncertain about her place in Li’s life, experiences the moment as intimate. Her initial anger gives way when Li sees her and hurries over, but he cannot greet her as freely as she wants in the busy office.

The awkward arrival is compounded by a failed pickup. Li says he had sent a car; Mei-Ling says she had requested one and will make inquiries. Margaret suspects that Mei-Ling arranged the failure deliberately, reading a knowing quality in her smile. Li, apparently unaware of the tension, introduces Mei-Ling as the person working with him on the case. Mei-Ling says Li has told her a great deal about Margaret, while Margaret’s unusually firm handshake registers the rivalry she has already begun to feel. The professional partnership Margaret has returned to join is thus also a personal triangle: she and Li are lovers, and his colleague appears, to Margaret, to be a possible rival.

Forensic work and changing hypotheses

Margaret’s involvement gives the investigators another way to think about the deaths. Li recalls her earlier, partly joking suggestion of a deranged surgeon while considering the possibility that the women underwent surgery while alive. But Detective Dai points out that the procedures could not have been carried out by a lone person: another participant would have had to administer medication and assist with breathing. Li accepts the point and recognizes that the team must consider collaboration rather than assume a solitary perpetrator. He nevertheless insists that speculation should not displace the immediate task of identifying the victims.

That exchange shows how Margaret’s return affects the investigation even when she is not the speaker in the scene. Her earlier hypothesis has entered the team’s discussion, but it does not become a settled conclusion. Instead, it helps prompt a more complex question about how the crimes could have been carried out. The investigation’s emphasis remains practical and human: before theories can be tested against individual lives, the victims must be identified.

The overlooked connection

Later, discussion of one victim’s history gives Margaret a new way to approach the case. Li tells her about Chai Rui, a twenty-two-year-old known as Cherry, who had worked as a hostess and had lost that job after her drug use became known. He also recounts what investigators learned about her apartment, her young daughter, and the box of possessions left behind. Margaret thinks of the bodies she examined and of the lives, relationships, and hopes that the women had beyond the forensic table. Learning names and family histories makes the work more painful, but it also changes what she notices.

Margaret then recognizes that Chai Rui had a child. She is angry with herself for not seeing the importance of this earlier, describing the problem as having too much information obscure the obvious. She compares the error to a bus-driver riddle: attention can be captured by numbers and the names of stops while the simple answer remains in plain view. Looking at the womb on the autopsy table, she tells Li that she has identified a feature connecting the victims beyond coincidence. The evidence provided here stops before she explains that connection. What is established is the change in her approach: the accumulated details have not yet yielded the answer, but a victim’s particular life has made Margaret recognize what the investigators had not thought to look for.

Significance

Margaret’s return is both a professional recommitment and a return to unresolved personal attachments. The invitation gives her a reason to act at a moment when she has been avoiding the physical reminder of her old life in Lincoln Park; arriving in Shanghai brings her face to face with Li and with a colleague she immediately reads as a rival. Those tensions accompany, rather than replace, the forensic work.

The case also exposes a productive contrast between gathering information and knowing how to see it. Margaret’s later insight does not come from setting aside the victims’ individual histories, but from taking one of those histories seriously. Chai Rui’s child prompts her to reconsider the bodies as more than a set of measurements and names, and to search for a shared clue that had been present all along. Her return therefore marks the beginning of a renewed investigation in both senses: she resumes the work, and she learns to ask a different question of its evidence.