Police Search the Shanghai World Clinic

Police Search the Shanghai World Clinic is the investigation’s decisive move from suspicion to a physical search of the place Margaret Campbell identifies as the likely killing site. Li Yan secures a warrant despite resistance from senior officials, and the raid uncovers a deliberately emptied clinic, a prepared operating room, and a computer trail leading to Transplants Online. The search does not immediately resolve who directed the crimes, but it reframes them as an operation whose evidence has been systematically removed and whose possible reach extends beyond the clinic.

Background and the Fight for a Warrant

The search follows Jiang Baofu’s account of finding body parts in a freezer and arranging to dispose of them at a construction site. Jiang says that he had worked as an orderly at the clinic before taking a night-watchman job, and that he began moving the remains after discovering them there. Li Yan believes Jiang may be telling the truth about not participating in the killings, but the account points toward the clinic and makes an urgent search necessary. Li has also concluded that the operations could not have been carried out by one person alone: the victims’ sedation and medical support imply collaboration, even if the identities and roles of the others remain unknown.

Li’s effort to obtain authorization becomes a confrontation with Procurator General Yue. After more than three hours of interrogation and little sleep, Li demands a warrant from Section Chief Huang’s office. Yue argues that the available account comes from a medical student who admits to handling and burying bodies, not from evidence directly implicating Cui Feng. He suggests that the procedures could have taken place without Cui’s knowledge and treats Jiang as a sufficient suspect. Li counters with the scale and layout of the Shanghai World Clinic: it has only two operating theatres and a small number of special-care beds, and Cui has his office there. To Li, it is implausible that repeated operations could have occurred there without Cui knowing.

The stakes are sharpened by Li’s personal urgency. Xinxin has been kidnapped, and he tells Yue that he will take detectives and forensic officers to the clinic whether or not a warrant is issued. If forced to proceed without one, he threatens to investigate Yue for obstructing justice and to pursue corruption allegations. He also warns that he will take the matter to authorities in Beijing, invoking earlier corruption prosecutions to make clear that Yue’s political connections cannot guarantee protection. Yue warns Li that a failure to find evidence against Cui will have consequences for his career. Soon afterward, Li tells Margaret that he has obtained the warrant. The authorization clears the way for a formal search, but it does not settle the conflict between the need to act quickly and the need to establish Cui’s involvement with evidence.

Arrival at the Clinic

The police and forensic convoy travels west in the rain. When Li reaches the clinic, it is dark, its gates are chained shut, and the grounds appear deserted. He concludes that someone has warned the occupants. Officers cut the chain, and the search team enters after putting on gloves and protective shoe covers to preserve evidence. The arrival confirms that the investigation has moved beyond interviews and competing interpretations: the officers are now examining the site itself, while the possibility that its occupants have had time to destroy or remove evidence hangs over the operation.

Inside, the reception area has been stripped. Filing-cabinet drawers stand open, but the records are gone; there is not even a loose sheet of paper left at the desk. A half-finished mug of tea is the one visible sign that the departure was hurried. The power is off as well. Li orders officers to find state employment records, identify the clinic’s staff, and seek arrest warrants for them. He explicitly includes Cui Feng in that demand. Nien Mei-Ling cautions that they cannot arrest someone in Cui’s position without evidence, and Li responds by directing the team to find it. Every employee is to be brought in for questioning.

The clinic’s absence of records has its own evidentiary significance. The empty cabinets and darkened building are consistent with a warning reaching the occupants before the police arrived, although they do not identify who gave it. Li observes that the evacuation could not have been completed in only a few hours: the patient records are gone, the bedrooms have been cleared, and the beds have been remade. He suspects Cui anticipated another visit after the police had come to the clinic previously. That inference intensifies the need to search what remains before further traces can disappear.

The Operating Room

Margaret Campbell and Nien Mei-Ling enter operating room number one. Margaret’s familiarity with operating-room procedure shapes the way she examines it: in this setting, protective clothing is needed not only for clinical cleanliness but to avoid disturbing evidence. The room’s equipment supplies a concrete counterpart to the surgical traces already observed during the investigation. There are ceiling-mounted operating lamps, a wheeled steel table, a surgical instrument table, an electrocautery machine, and cupboards containing gloves and sutures. Margaret connects the cautery equipment to the dark material she had previously noted along incision edges on the bodies from Lujiazui. The equipment therefore supports the possibility that the clinic was used for the operations under investigation, though the room alone does not identify the people who performed them.

Other objects deepen that inference without completing it. A stainless-steel bowl, empty measuring jugs, several large plastic droppers, and two insulated cool boxes stand near the surgical nurse’s table. Margaret’s reaction to the boxes suggests that they connect to a possibility she has been reluctant to accept, but at this point she does not yet explain what they signify. She and Mei-Ling also discover a CD player wired to speakers around the room. When Mei-Ling switches it on, the music is Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, a piece Margaret recognizes and says she may no longer be able to hear without associating it with the crimes. She considers the music together with the Y-shaped incision and suspects that the surgeon may have been American. This is a working inference, not an identification.

Margaret estimates that at least fifty-four women may have been brought through the operating room since Jiang became involved. The figure expresses her understanding of the scale suggested by the evidence; it is not a count established by the search itself. Li separately reports finding a walk-in freezer that could hold the equivalent of as many as twenty bodies in pieces. It is empty. He proposes that forensic officers examine the meltwater after defrosting it, while Margaret warns that the people responsible have been careful. The vacant freezer and the cleared clinical spaces make the search a contest between the investigators’ ability to recover traces and the clinic’s prior removal of material.

The Computer and the Emerging Network

In the administration office, Li examines a Macintosh PowerPC G4. Its files appear to have been erased, and the clinic’s patient records are missing. Margaret notes that the operating system and applications remain intact, suggesting that the hard disk itself was not wiped. Deleted files may still be recoverable until overwritten, although she says a specialist will be needed to retrieve them. Li turns to Nien Mei-Ling and Detective Dai to arrange for a computer expert. Margaret, however, notices a different route into the computer’s recent activity: Internet use may leave a history even when ordinary files have been removed.

She opens the browser and accesses the history list, which contains the last five hundred visited sites organized in dated folders. The newest folder is dated two days earlier. Its final address is tol.com. When Margaret opens it, the page resolves into Transplants Online. The site displays a photograph and biography of Al Gardner, identified as chief executive of the New York Transplant Co-ordination Clinic, and presents a list of organs with links to recipient information. Margaret opens the kidney section, where the page shows coded listings and criteria such as age, sex, blood type, and HLA. Nien Mei-Ling recognizes these as the details required to match a kidney with a potential recipient.

The site changes the meaning of the objects in the operating room. The insulated cool boxes had led Margaret toward the possibility of organ transport, while the computer history supplies an apparent connection to a system for matching organs with recipients. The search thus moves from establishing that the clinic may have served as a place of surgery to exposing a possible link between those operations and an international market in transplantation. The browser’s retained history is not, by itself, proof of who used the site or what transactions occurred. Nor does its presence establish Cui Feng’s personal role. It is, however, a specific trace left behind when the clinic’s files and paper records have vanished.

Margaret recognizes that she had seen suggestive details but failed to draw their implications together. Earlier, she had described the danger of being distracted by an abundance of information, as in a riddle whose answer had been visible all along. At the clinic, the equipment and the online history make that pattern part of the investigation itself: physical clues and digital traces must be read together, while each inference remains distinct from what has actually been established. The raid ends not with an arrest or a complete account of the crimes, but with a widened investigative target and a new evidentiary trail to pursue.