The Shanghai Free Taxi by Frank Langfitt

Author:Frank Langfitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

WE HAD A few phone numbers from Winnie’s papers and decided to try them on the burner phone. The first number was out of service. The second, Winnie had put on flyers she’d distributed to try to rent some of her apartments. We didn’t want to spook anyone who might answer, so Yang took the phone and I listened in on headphones. The phone rang three times.

“Hello?” a man answered.

“Do you have any apartments to sell or rent?” Yang asked.

“Who are you?” the man answered.

“I want to buy an apartment. A realtor gave me your number.”

“What?”

Yang repeated the question.

“You dialed the wrong number.”

“Is this a Jinghong number?” Yang asked.

“Where are you?” asked the man, who sounded like he was in his forties.

“I want to buy an apartment in Jinghong.”

“I am asking where are you right now?” the man pressed.

“I’m now in Jinghong.”

“Where are you in Jinghong?” the man asked again, now sounding suspicious and aggressive.

“In the center of the city.”

“How do you know this is my number?”

“A realtor gave it to me.”

“Which realtor?”

Yang tried to finesse the question.

“Where are you from?” the man repeated.

“I’m from outside the province.”

“OK. Where are you right now?”

Yang, sensing danger, declined to say.

My heart began beating faster. These were not the questions of someone trying to hang up on a misdialed call or someone who might have been randomly reassigned Winnie’s phone number. This was the longest wrong-number conversation I’d ever heard. I felt like we were speaking to someone who must have known Winnie.

And he wanted to find us.

Now.

“Buying an apartment, I am telling you, I don’t have an apartment,” the man said.

Then, he added this: “Can we meet up? OK?”

“If you don’t have an apartment to sell,” Yang said, “we can forget about it.”

There was a long pause and then the man hung up.

Yang and I looked at each other wide-eyed.

“What did you think of that conversation?” I asked.

“He sounded very suspicious and asked a lot of questions about me.”

“He wanted to know exactly where you were,” I said. “That’s very dangerous. If you didn’t have an apartment to sell, why would you want to meet someone who had dialed a wrong number?”

If it hadn’t been clear earlier, it was now: we were entering uncharted territory, and the story of Winnie’s disappearance was growing more chilling with each new detail. We were investigating the disappearance of a mysterious woman with at least one assumed identity who had disappeared after apparently faking a pregnancy test. She’d been involved with a married man and had threatened to expose their affair. Even more alarming, she’d wished for his family’s destruction if he left her.

Meanwhile, our leads were drying up. The man who owned the border pass to Laos that Winnie had left behind in the farmhouse was dead. Police said they couldn’t find her first husband and had no interest in pursuing the case. Now, we’d called one of her phone numbers only to speak to a menacing voice that urgently wanted to track us down. I spoke with NPR security personnel, who thought continuing to look for Winnie was unwise.

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