The Lake Ching Murders - A Mystery of Fire and Ice (6 page)

So alive. Then suddenly so dead.

The specialist turned back to the boat. No doubt there had been a lot of activity on board before the murderers arrived. A celebration perhaps. A party. For what? A celebration then sudden swooping death.

Chen’s men were busily tagging garments and evidence bags as the specialist carefully descended the ladder and left the ship. Moments later a muffled sound came from the belly of the boat — no more than a cough in the blowing wind — and the boat began to list. Chen and his men got off the vessel quickly. Shortly afterward, it began to sink beneath the lake’s icy surface.

The specialist watched the boat enter the nothingness. And he shivered. Then he stopped and began to plan. He knew what Beijing wanted. He also knew what he wanted, no, needed. Slowly, as he watched the last parts of the boat disappear beneath the dark waters of the lake, a plan came into focus.

In Beijing the speaker phone announced the sinking of the boat. The tallish Han Chinese man smiled. But only briefly. This was far from over and he knew it.

Three hours later, at the Ching police station, Chen showed the specialist the documents that had been taken from the men.

One of the Taiwanese had a ship pilot’s licence. “Well, that settled one question. Only five thousand left,” he thought.

Another document showed a receipt for the boat rental. The specialist circled the name of the boat operator. In another wallet the specialist found a receipt for a large amount of prepared food. The specialist circled the name and address of the restaurant in Ching.

Much of the rest of the material was in languages the specialist didn’t understand. He pushed them aside and looked at Chen.

“Yes, sir?”

“Tell me about the local 14K Triad activity,” he scratched on his pad.

Chen did.

“So they’re big enough and strong enough to do this sort of thing?” the specialist inquired.

“I guess, sir. Shall I arrange to bring in their leaders?”

The specialist put down his pen and stared at his ancient hands. He closed his eyes and forced himself to mentally retrace his steps through the death rooms on the boat, ending with the 14K Triad insignia on the mirror. He sighed and opened his eyes.

Chen awaited his orders.

The specialist snatched up his pen and slashed at the pages, “Make sure the Triad leaders don’t go anywhere. Tell them they are to stay put until we find out who murdered the seventeen foreigners on the boat. You can do that tomorrow. Right now bring me some suspects, Captain Chen. I have a plane to catch and I need to make an arrest.”

At Chen’s shocked look, the specialist turned to the window. How very different this small city was from his home. He sighed silently. How very different his life had become since the night he was shot in the Pudong industrial area, across the Huangpo River from Shanghai.

Chen held out an arrest warrant.

The specialist took it and signed the bottom — Inspector Wang.

Fong drank in China’s heartland as it sped past. He wished he could open the window but wasn’t about to give the thug and the politico the joy of hearing him ask.

He was slowly piecing together where they were going. They’d been travelling southeast for two days. This area of China, either in Shanxi or Shaanxi province — he couldn’t tell which yet — was far from his stomping grounds in Shanghai, but he was a lot closer to home than he had been a mere three days ago. At least he was on the right side of the wall and blessedly far from the windswept loess plateau on which “his” village in the west stood.

Then he saw the first of the road signs. Five hundred kilometres to Xian — the ancient imperial capital of the Qin Dynasty. Fong stared at the sign with its shadowed image of the terra-cotta warriors. For a second he couldn’t figure out what was bothering him about it. Then he got it. It was in English. Of course, Xian was a major tourist destination.

Good.

He sat back in his seat and allowed his eyes to shut. The growing heat and the rumble of the car engine lulled sleep out of his bones. And in this sleep there were visions. Visions so sweet he dreaded that on his waking they would make him cry out to sleep again.

That night they parked him in another jail cell. This one was older than the previous night’s and gratefully, as far as Fong was concerned, empty.

Fong caught an image of himself in the polished steel mirror that was set deep in the cell’s brickwork. For the first time in a very long while he allowed himself to examine his appearance closely. The hardness of his features surprised him. His skin, as if somehow rougher, no longer accented the delicate bones of his face. He removed his Mao jacket and dropped it to the floor. The rustle of the Shakespeare texts he’d hidden there was reassuring. He pulled his shirt and undershirt over his head. The assassin’s wound stood out in high relief on his side, an ugly reminder of a near ending. He turned sideways. His body was undeniably thickening. “I’m no longer young,” he thought, “no longer able to . . .” He didn’t bother completing the thought. He turned from the mirror and put on his clothes. He’d already had two great loves in his life, Fu Tsong and the American, Amanda Pitman. He expected no more. Two loves were unusual largess from the Great God Irony, who rules unopposed in the hearts of the Chinese. Fong knew that to be true.

He looked down at his hands. On the night of his exile from Shanghai, a train porter had slammed the carriage door on his left hand. It had snapped a small bone and broken a blood vessel under the nail of the ring finger. The snapped bone he had ignored, but the broken blood vessel had forced a small pool of blood to form at the very base of the cuticle between the nail and the skin. The pain caused by the pressure took four days to pass, three days before the hard-seat journey to the west ended.

The purple stain rose as the nail grew. It was now, more than two years later, all but gone. “Like much of my life,” he thought as he walked around the cell consciously avoiding looking into the polished steel mirror a second time.

Late that night he awoke. The cell’s mesh-covered overhead bulb flooded the cell with a garish green light. Fong had no idea of the time, but he knew it was late because of the silence in the place. Jails are noisy, except in the dead of the night. Then he saw three large manilla packets on the floor of the cell.

They were the same as the one he’d seen in the car. He knelt down and opened one. There were over a hundred 3 1/2” X 3 1/2” photographs. The second contained a few less. The third a few more. The top of each photo had a hole punched in it.

He tossed the packets aside — but not through the bars.

He knew they wanted him to look at the pictures — to be lured into analyzing them. Despite that. Despite knowing that, he picked up a packet. Once he looked at the first photo he was hooked. Suddenly he was back in Shanghai. A real police officer again. The head of Special Investigations. For, if ever there was a case for special investigations — a crime against foreigners — this was it.

A boat. Naturally — they were going to a lake!

He sorted the pictures. Exterior shots, shots of a bedroom, shots of a room with a small runway, shots of a video room and shots of a bar. Shots of Triad markings and a 14K medallion.

He went back to the exterior shots of the flat-bottomed boat. He examined the Triad markings just above the waterline. They glistened. At first it was hard for him to discern that the boat was covered in ice. Then he saw the scorch marks through the ice and a shiver shot down his spine — the mongoose rolled over and blinked into waking.

Fong got up and paced. He went to look out the window, as if he were still in his office on Shanghai’s Bund. As if he could see the rising figures of the great new buildings of the Pudong industrial area just across the Huangpo River. Of course, all he saw was brick and bars. This was hardly the splendour of his office on the Bund. This was a provincial jail and he was being used, but he didn’t care. He felt alive. On the trail of something. Then he stopped himself. No. Not on the trail of anything — except a way home.

He flipped through the pictures of the boat’s exterior, separating out the photos of the Triad insignias and the scorch markings. Then he took four that had close-ups of the portals. He went to lean the pictures against the base of the wall then noticed the surface was covered with small nails placed at four-inch intervals, perfect for hanging photos like the ones in his hands.

“Fuck them,” he thought, but he couldn’t resist hanging the four pictures he’d selected. Then he chose photos of the rooms that showed exterior windows. It took him some time, but eventually he figured out the positioning of the four rooms in the boat. All were in the bow. The video room on deck level to port, the room with the raised stage beside it to starboard, the two other rooms directly beneath them.

He couldn’t guess what was midship or aft. He’d never been on a boat. He hated the water almost as much as he hated the countryside.

Then he sorted the photos of the victims. Using the wide shots of the spaces, he was able to divide the victims into their respective rooms. Quickly he realized that the five gutted men were Japanese, the two decapitated men were Caucasian (from their clothes he guessed American but he’d noticed in his last years working in Shanghai that most Westerners dressed like Americans — he couldn’t for the life of him imagine why). The three in the video room were Korean. He guessed that the seven faceless men were Chinese.

Fong hung the full-body shots beneath the photos of the rooms in which they’d been found. Then he hung the many detail photographs of each victim below the fullbody shot.

He paused for a moment and approached the pictures of the bar room. Something was missing. He checked the wide-angle shots. What was missing? What? Then he figured it out — and smiled.

By the time he had all the pictures arranged it was midmorning and there was hardly any empty space on the cell walls. It had taken him at least six hours. Maybe more. It was as if he’d fallen into the photographs and time had slipped away. Now, surrounded by the gruesome gallery, he examined the panorama of his handiwork, the order he had brought to this stupendous chaos. Another shiver up his spine. He couldn’t tell whether it was from excitement or fear.

Fong turned slowly in the midst of the images. He was an intruder here, a voyeur of the dead. Then he stopped. He understood why he’d shivered. All this death made him feel alive. Gave him a reason to be. “No,” he told himself. “A way home,” he insisted. Yet he wasn’t sure.

“Nicely done, Zhong Fong.”

Fong turned to see a uniformed officer standing outside his cell door. He immediately tucked his chin to his chest and bowed his head. But even in his brief look at the man, Fong was struck by his blunt, stocky, pimply ugliness.

“No need for that. My name is Captain Chen. I am in charge of the investigation. We are honoured to have a man of your reputation working on the case.”

Fong looked up. Captain Chen was younger than Fong. Probably in his late twenties, definitively ugly. His square hairless face bore just the slightest wisp of foreign markings. Tibetan? No, Korean. They were the only things of delicacy in his entire being. Fong pulled his eyes away from the younger man’s face. He noted the army bars on his uniform. Only Shanghai, Beijing and Ghuongdzu had their own police forces. The rest of the country was policed by the army.

Chen repeated himself. “We are honoured to have a man of your reputation working on the case.”

“I bet you are,” Fong thought. But when he lifted his chin, the smile on his lips was completely noncommittal. A Chinese smile.

Chen pulled on the door and entered. It wasn’t locked.

“If I may, Zhong Fong,” he said as he took a close-up of one of the Americans and put it under the other American’s full-body shot. “The heads had been switched.”

Fong found himself raising his eyebrows. Interested. He immediately covered by coughing into his hand.

“A specialist from the North supervised the taking of these pictures. I hope you find them adequate.”

“This ‘specialist’ knew what he was doing.”

“He was very efficient.”

Fong looked at the photos again. Each was one of a set. A shot of a body then the same from a higher elevation. Perhaps standing on the shoulders of another man. Perhaps not. But meticulous. A professional. Someone who knew his way around a crime scene. Fong took in the pictorial display again. “A lot of dead people on a boat,” he said.

“A boat covered in ice, stuck on a shoal, out in a lake. Ironically, it was also burnt.”

“Burnt in the ice?” Fong was surprised by the intensity of his own interest.

“We had a freezing rain followed by a frigid snap. The three coldest days in living memory.”

“So can I assume these were taken in March?”

“If you did, you’d be wrong. January. Very early January.”

“January? That’s over three months ago!” Fong almost shouted.

Captain Chen nodded. “It’s a sensitive case. Beijing wanted all due care taken.”

“Now why would that be?”
Fong thought, but he put a false smile on his face and asked, “What is it you want from me, Captain Chen?”

“Nothing, Traitor Zhong.” The politico stepped out of the shadows across the way. “Captain Chen wants nothing from you. This kind of personal thinking got you into trouble to begin with, Traitor Zhong. Captain Chen wants nothing from you. Your country wants something from you. Is that understood, Traitor Zhong?”

Fong tilted his head, but only after a pause that was clearly noted by all three men. The politico was about to rise to the bait, but then he backed off and lit a cigarette. The sweet fumes tugged at Fong’s nose. “You were the head of Special Investigations, Traitor Zhong. You have dealt with crimes against foreigners before. We want to know who did this to the foreigners. What else would we want?”

Fong chose to dodge that question but noted that the “we” the politico used sounded strangely like a first person pronoun. “Why the delay? Three months is a long time.” Fong thought he knew the answer to his question, but he couldn’t resist hearing the man admit that they couldn’t solve this one on their own.

The politico smiled. “Even you, Traitor Zhong, can understand that this has become a matter of international concern.” Then, as if it were an afterthought, he added, “Foreign governments want to see justice done.”

Fong stared at the man. Finally he spat out, “Just pick out some dumb peasants and claim they did it. Execute them in public if the West wants blood for blood.” He almost said “measure for measure.”

“The specialist did that — picked out some dumb peasants, Traitor Zhong.”

Fong again stared at the man in front of him. This was all the more baffling for his admission. “So?” he asked, completely at a loss.

“Would you like to interview them, Traitor Zhong?” The politico was smiling.

“They haven’t been executed?”

“Obviously not, unless, Traitor Zhong, you’re capable of interrogating the dead.”

It was hard to argue with that. But it bothered Fong that the politico’s final statement was the only thing out of the man’s mouth that made much sense.

Fong had seen both sides of a jail’s bars. He preferred the side he was standing on now. The side that had a corridor leading to an unlocked exit door.

The three men in the cell on the other side of the bars were nondescript men of the land. More like stones than men. They looked a lot like each other. They were brothers. The guards prodded them to taciturn awakening. Three flat resigned sets of eyes focused on Fong as he entered the cell. Fong looked down at the files Captain Chen had given him.

Fong knew that interrogations were best done in private. But he decided against causing a scene by asking the thug, the politico and Chen to leave. There was Fong’s vanity too. He was always a gifted interrogator and he couldn’t resist showing these men that he had lost none of his talent.

He did his best not to wince when the door slammed shut behind him.