KEY POINTS:
There could be few better places to publicise the hunt for fugitive Nai Yin Xue than from the US Marshals' command centre in the Federal Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.
It is built for justice: 17 courtrooms that would dwarf New Zealand's biggest.
It is home to authority: 5000 staff including the judges and US attorneys for LA and the state of California.
The Marshals' command centre is in the three-storey basement. Cellphones are blocked; apparently they can interfere with the communication technology.
The bronzed star of the Marshals on the wall of the conference room marks a fine history of more than 200 years of hunting down fugitives in every corner of the 52 states.
And propped up in front of the star is the US Marshals' notice for Nai Yin Xue - New Zealand's most wanted man.
The stars and stripes on the American flag draped beside the notice are a reminder that he is here somewhere, rather than in jail back at home.
Xue's dark eyes peer out from the black-and-white notice. There is an unflattering police mugshot picture of his puffy face, not seen in the week of extensive coverage that has relied on happy family and tai chi images of Xue.
Now he looks like a real fugitive. As the notice says, he is wanted for the murder of wife An An Xue.
The notice tells us he's five foot seven (1.55m) tall and weighs 200lbs (91kg). He has brown eyes and black hair. He is "armed and dangerous". Yet the notice has some glaring errors: it gives his nationality as "Pacific Islander". It gives his place of birth as New Zealand when it is mainland China. And there is a typo.
The mistakes are enough to chip at the gloss of justice and authority before a press conference - the first and only since Xue has been on the run - gets under way.
It is led by US Marshal Tom Hession. He tells reporters Xue is on the run and could be anywhere.
The message is "we're not going to tell you what leads we've got or even confirm details that are already out there". The armed and dangerous warning turns out to be generic.
An American journalist is bemused: why have the media been called in for a run-of-the-mill wife-killer on the run?
She has a right to be puzzled - the black-and-white details of the wanted notice don't have the back-story: the little girl nicknamed Pumpkin dumped in a Melbourne train station; the haunting images of a man bending down to whisper in her ear before he goes; that the man was Xue - a self-proclaimed martial arts master in New Zealand and father of Pumpkin - 3-year-old Qian Xue Xue.
The reporter didn't know that An An, the much-younger wife from their loveless and violent marriage went missing, and how police finally found her body in the boot of a car outside their home 45 hours after they first arrived.
BLUE-ON-BLUE?
The 45 hours before the body was found were critical.
Without a body, an Interpol red alert could not have been put out on Xue.
He was a man who had dumped his daughter. Bad, but the mother was nowhere to be found and it could have been a custody battle.
No matter how much speculation there was about the violent marriage and how long An An had been missing, without the red alert, the United States authorities had their hands tied.
The hunt for the body also created a vacuum for the media: Antipodean journalists started arriving in LA and calling authorities before the body turned up. The LA Chinese media - six newspapers, radio and TV stations - were also on the case. By the time the body was found, media attention had reached fever-pitch: LAPD officer Jason Lee handled the press and this week told the Weekend Herald it was his 300th call.
But who was handling the manhunt? The LAPD were on it as long as there was a likelihood Xue would turn up in the city. The Federal Bureau of Investigation put its hand up to help for a time, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency - ICE - were on it, so too were the US Marshals who have the nationwide role of hunting fugitives.
Was it a case of too many police on police, or as they say in American parlance, too much "blue-on-blue"?
Officer Lee was clear, if Xue had made it out of LA - and he could have been across the border to Mexico, let alone in another police district - it was not the LAPD's problem.
The Weekend Herald approached Officers Casas and Wood on the streets near Chinatown; they worked for another layer of law enforcement, the Californian county sheriff.
Had they heard about Xue? No they had not, but good luck to whoever is after him, they said.
THE RED NOTICE
The red notice, Interpol's highest alert on an individual, was switched on in New Zealand 40 minutes after An An's body was discovered.
This was the critical alert because both the LAPD and US Marshals said they could not start looking for Xue without it.
Why, then, did it take anywhere from 17 to 22 hours - longer than a flight - for the notice to get to the US?
The notice was critical. It meant that Xue would register on the computer of any law enforcement agency. He could not travel on his own passport.
As Officer Lee explained, without it Xue could have been stopped by an officer at a random traffic stop and the officer would have had no idea he was wanted for murder.
Top US Marshal Tom Hession and Superintendent Neville Matthews, the New Zealand police liaison officer based in Washington, said red notices were not activated worldwide at the same time, but went to head office first - in the US - and were "disseminated" from there.
Matthews said the red notice on Xue was "expedited quickly" in Washington.
Hession said his team, the LA-based US Marshal-led Regional Fugitive Task Force, acted after the red notice.
So what time did Hession's team actually get the red notice?
"I don't know," he told the press conference. Matthews said he didn't know either.
When it was suggested the apparent delay had given Xue more of an headstart than he already had, Hession said that was "police bashing".
The Weekend Herald asked the police to clarify why it had taken so long for the red notice to be applied.
Auckland City police spokeswoman Noreen Hegarty responded, saying as "only a handful of readers" would be interested, police were too "busy" - hunting Xue - to do so.
THE PROVISIONAL WARRANT
This is different to the red notice, requiring a diplomatic process after New Zealand police issued their own warrant in New Zealand.
They did this quickly, getting it on Wednesday in Los Angeles.
Hession must have been unaware it had been issued when he told the Herald on Sunday - in a long interview on Friday afternoon - that US Marshals may have had trouble arresting or even detaining Xue while they waited for it to be issued.
If they had caught him the US Marshals were intending to use Xue's immigration offence - not filling in an arrivals card correctly - to detain him until it came through.
He was expecting it soon, and said they would still be able to "monitor" or "observe" Xue.
But at this time New Zealand police had been told the warrant had been seen.
THE HUNTED
While all this was happening, Xue was moving fast.
He had left his first Chinatown hotel, before news of "Pumpkin" being left in Melbourne had broken.
He didn't bother to stay the night. He had appeared harried while trying to buy air tickets in Melbourne, but by the time he reached the US he was apparently composed enough to tell lies on his arrivals card and to the first - and only - person he is known to have met: Walter, an attendant at the Royal Pagoda motel in Chinatown.
Walter recognised Xue's regional accent. Xue denied it; only for Walter to realise, when he picked up a Chinese newspaper two days later, why Xue was hiding his past.
He changed his appearance too; getting out of his favoured business suit and into an "American marines" hat.
But the man believed to have published up to 13 vanity publications about himself is not an ordinary fugitive.
He has written that he was born via immaculate conception. He alienates people: the enemies he left behind from his last stay in the US in 2000 were queuing up to put the boot into him.
Many have speculated that Xue's personality will trip him up.
But if he can get to the internet or one of the Chinese newspapers he will have been able to follow blow-by-blow coverage of the hunt for him.
He is streetwise and has previously bought a second-hand car and travelled around the US.
THE TERRITORY
A limitation for Xue is his English, universally described as poor.
He likes to speak in Mandarin but could be in few better places than LA, where there are 400,000 Chinese in the city alone and an estimated one million in the State of California.
The hunt has had little American-based news coverage outside the Chinese media, and Hession appealed directly to the Chinese community, which is vast.
In the San Gabriel Valley, you can drive past 40 or more blocks of Chinese neighbourhoods in the suburbs of Montery Park and Alhambra.
There are plenty of networks for illegal Chinese immigrants. But one source told the Weekend Herald it was unlikely these would shelter Xue, even if he paid.
"Illegal immigrants are hard workers. They are good Chinese people, he is not."
Xue has an old girlfriend there, Qiu Yan Xu, who he claims to have had a relationship with during his six-month stay in LA in 2000. He devoted a chapter of his book Inner Strength Kung Fu Shocks US to describing his love for her.
The US Marshals are aware of her but have not disclosed if she has come forward.
And the Marshals are now permanently on his tail as long as he is in the US.
As Hession told the press conference: "At some point this person will resurface somewhere and we will get him."
And it will be back to the Federal Courthouse, not for a press conference, but for a extradition hearing.
Timeline
* Xue dumps "Pumpkin" in Melbourne: Saturday morning September 15, NZ time.
* Xue arrives LA: Sunday morning NZ, Saturday afternoon LA.
* Body found in boot: Wednesday 1pm NZ, Tuesday 6pm LA.
* "Red notice" activated: Wednesday 1.40pm NZ, Wednesday 6.40pm LA.
* LA authorities receive red notice: Thursday 9.30am NZ, Wednesday 2.30pm LA, which gives Xue another 17 hours on the run.
* New Zealand warrant issued: Thursday NZ, Wednesday LA. Diplomatic process to get provisional US warrant started.
* Provisional warrant issued by US judge Saturday: 8am NZ, Friday 1pm LA.
* New Zealand police liaison officer arrives LA: Monday 9.30am NZ, Sunday 2.30pm LA.
* First public appeal by US Marshals: Tuesday 10am NZ, Monday 3pm LA.
* Xue now on run in US for 14 days.
