Nine Dragons

by Michael Connelly

He held up his hand to stop Sun from entering further into the apartment.

  “You feel that, Sun Yee?”

  “No. Feel what?”

  “Somebody’s dead. Don’t touch anything, and follow in my steps if you can.”

  The apartment layout was the same as the unit next door. A two-room dwelling, this one shared by a mother with her two teenage children. There was no sign of any disturbance or danger in the first room. There was a sofa that had a sleeping pillow and sheet haphazardly tossed on it and Bosch assumed the boy slept on the couch while the sister and mother took the bedroom.

  Bosch moved across the room and into the bedroom. A curtain was drawn across the window and the room was dark. With his elbow Bosch pushed up the wall switch and a ceiling light over the bed came on. The bed was unmade but empty. There was no sign of struggle or disturbance or death. Bosch looked to his right. There were two more doors. He guessed one led to a closet and the other led to a bathroom.

  He always carried latex gloves in his coat pocket. He pulled a pair out and put a glove on his left hand. He opened the door on the right first. It was a closet that was packed tightly with clothes on hangers and in stacks on the floor. The overhead shelving was crowded as well with boxes that had Chinese writing on them. Bosch backed up and moved to the second door. He opened it without hesitation.

  The small bathroom was awash in dried blood. It had been splashed over the sink, the toilet and the tiled floor. There were spatter and drip lines on the back wall and on the dirty white plastic shower curtain with flowers on it.

  It was impossible to step into the room without stepping on one of the blood trails. But Bosch didn’t worry about it. He had to get to the shower curtain. He had to know.

  He quickly moved across the room and yanked the plastic back.

  The shower stall was tiny by American standards. It was no bigger than the old phone booths outside Du-Par’s in the Farmers Market. But somehow someone had managed to pile three bodies on top of one another in there.

  Bosch held his breath as he leaned over and in to try to identify the victims. They were fully clothed. The boy, who was the biggest, was on top. He was facedown atop a woman of about forty—his mother—who was sitting slouched against a wall. Their positioning suggested some sort of Oedipal fantasy that probably was not the killer’s intention. Both of their throats had been savagely cut from ear to ear.

  Behind and partially underneath the mother—as if hiding—was the body of a young girl. Her long dark hair was covering her face.

  “Ah, God,” Bosch called out. “Sun Yee!”

  Soon Sun came in behind him and he heard the sharp intake of his breath. Bosch started putting on the second glove.

  “There’s a girl on the bottom and I can’t tell if it’s Maddie,” he said. “Put these on.”

  He pulled another pair of gloves from his pocket and handed them to Sun, who quickly snapped them on. Together they pulled the body of the dead boy out of the shower stall and lowered it to the floor beneath the sink. Bosch then gently moved the mother’s body until he could see the face of the girl on the tile beneath. She, too, had been slashed across the throat. Her eyes were open and looked fearfully at death. It tore Bosch’s heart to see that look, but it wasn’t his daughter’s face.

  “It’s not her,” he said. “It’s gotta be her friend. He.”

  Harry turned away from the carnage and squeezed past Sun. He went out to the bedroom and sat down on the bed. He heard a bumping sound from the bathroom and guessed that Sun was putting the bodies back as they had found them.

  Bosch exhaled loudly and leaned forward, arms folded across his chest. He was thinking about the girl’s frightened eyes. He almost fell forward off the bed.

  “What happened here?” he asked in a whisper.

  Sun stepped out of the bathroom and adopted his bodyguard stance. He said nothing. Harry noticed that there was blood on his gloved hands.

  Bosch stood up and looked around the room as if it might hold some explanation for the scene in the bathroom.

  “Could another triad have taken her from him? Then killed them all to cover the tracks?”

  Sun shook his head.

  “That would have started a war. But the boy is not triad.”

  “What? How do you know that?”

  “There is only one triad in vertical Tuen Mun. Golden Triangle. I looked and he did not have the mark.”

  “What mark?”

  Sun hesitated for a moment, turning toward the bathroom door but then turning back to Bosch. He pulled off one of his gloves, then reached up to his mouth and pulled down his lower lip. On the soft, inside skin was an old and blurred black-ink tattoo of two Chinese characters. Bosch assumed they meant Golden Triangle.

  “So you are in the triad?”

  Sun released his lip and shook his head.

  “No more. It has been more than twenty years.”

  “I thought you can’t just quit a triad. If you leave, you leave in a box.”

  “I made a sacrifice and the council allowed me to leave. I also had to leave Tuen Mun. This is how I went to Macau.”

  “What kind of sacrifice?”

  Sun looked even more reluctant than when he’d shown Bosch the tattoo. But slowly he reached up to his face again, this time removing his sunglasses. For a moment Bosch noticed nothing wrong, but then he realized that Sun’s left eye was a prosthetic. He had a glass eye. There was a slightly noticeable scar hooking down from the outside corner.

  “You had to give up a fucking eye to quit the triad?”

  “I do not regret my decision.”

  He put his sunglasses back on.

  Between Sun’s revelations and the horror scene in the bathroom, Bosch was beginning to feel like he was in some sort of medieval painting. He reminded himself that his daughter wasn’t in the bathroom, that she was still alive and out there somewhere.

  “Okay,” he said, “I don’t know what happened here or why, but we have to stay on the trail. There’s got to be something in this apartment that will tell us where Maddie is. We’ve got to find it and we’re running out of time.”

  Bosch reached into his pocket but it was empty.

  “I’m out of gloves, so be careful what you touch. And we probably have blood on the bottom of our shoes. No sense in transferring it around the place.”

  Bosch removed his shoes and cleaned the blood off them in the sink in the kitchenette. Sun did the same thing. The men then searched the apartment, beginning in the bedroom and working their way toward the front door. They found nothing that was useful until they got to the small kitchen and Bosch noticed that, like the apartment next door, there was a dish of salt on the table. Only the salt was piled higher on this plate and Bosch could see finger trails left by someone who had built the granules into a mound. He ran his own fingers through the pile and displaced a small square of black plastic that had been buried in salt. Bosch immediately recognized it as the memory card from a cell phone.

  “Got something.”

  Sun turned from a kitchen drawer he had been looking through. Bosch held up the memory card. He was sure it was the card missing from his daughter’s cell phone.

  “It was in the salt. Maybe he hid it just as they came.”

  Bosch looked at the tiny plastic card. There was a reason Peng Qingcai removed it before burning his daughter’s phone. There was a reason he had then tried to hide it. Bosch wanted to go to work on those reasons right away but decided that for Sun and him to extend their stay in an apartment with three bodies in the shower was not a smart move.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  Bosch moved to the window next to the door and looked down through the curtain to the street before giving the all-clear sign. Sun opened the door and they quickly exited. Bosch pulled the door closed before stripping off his gloves. He glanced behind him as he stepped away and saw that the old woman next door was on the walkway, kneeling in front of her altar and burning another sacrific
e to the ghosts. Bosch did a double-take when he saw that she was using a candle to light one of the real hundred-dollar bills he had given her.

  Bosch turned and walked quickly down the walkway in the opposite direction. He knew he was in a world beyond his understanding. He only had to understand his mission to find his daughter. Nothing else mattered.

  33

  Bosch retrieved the gun but left the blanket behind. As soon as he was back in the car, he took out his phone. It was an exact duplicate of his daughter’s that he’d bought as part of a package deal. He opened the rear compartment and removed the battery and memory card. He then slid the card from his daughter’s phone into the cradle. He replaced the battery, closed the compartment and switched the phone on.

  While they waited for the phone to boot, Sun pulled the car away from the curb and they headed away from the building where the family had been massacred.

  “Where are we going?” Harry asked.

  “To the river. There is a park. We go there until we know where we are going.”

  In other words, there was no plan yet. The memory card was the plan.

  “That stuff you told me about the pirates when you were a kid, that was the triad, wasn’t it?”

  After a moment Sun nodded once.

  “Is that what you did, smuggle people in and out?”

  “No, my job was different.”

  He said nothing else and Bosch decided not to press it. The phone was ready. He quickly went to the call records. There were none. The page was blank.

  “There’s nothing on here. No record of any calls.”

  He went to the e-mail file and again found the screen empty.

  “Nothing transferred with the card,” he said, agitation growing in his voice.

  “This is common,” Sun said calmly. “Only permanent files go on the memory card. Look to see if there are any videos or photos.”

  Using the little ball roller in the middle of his phone’s keyboard, Bosch went to the video icon and selected it. The video file was empty.

  “No videos,” he said.

  It began to dawn on Bosch that Peng might have pulled the card from Madeline’s phone because he believed it held a record of all uses of the phone. But it didn’t. The last, best lead was looking like a bust.

  He clicked on the photo icon and here he found a list of stored JPEG photos.

  “I’ve got photos.”

  He started opening the photos one by one, but the only shots that seemed recent were the photos of John Li’s lungs and ankle tattoos that Bosch had sent her. The rest were photos of Madeline’s friends and from school trips. They were not specifically dated but did not appear to be in any way related to her abduction. He found a few photos from her trip to the jade market in Kowloon. She had taken photos of small jade sculptures of couples in Kama Sutra positions of sexual intercourse. Bosch wrote these off as teenage curiosity. Photos that would be sure to provide uneasy giggles among the girls at school.

  “Nothing,” he reported to Sun.

  He kept trying, moving across the screen and clicking on icon after icon in hopes of finding a hidden message. Finally, he found that Madeline’s phone book was also on the card and had been transferred to his phone.

  “Her phone book’s on here.”

  He opened the file and saw the list of contacts. He didn’t know all of her friends and many were simply listed by nicknames. He clicked on the listing for Dad and got a screen that had his own cell and home numbers but nothing else, nothing that shouldn’t be there.

  He went back to the list and moved on, finally finding what he thought he might be looking for when he got to the Ts. There was a listing for Tuen Mun that contained only a phone number.

  Sun had pulled into a long, thin park that ran along the river and under one of the bridges. Bosch held the phone out to him.

  “I found a number. It was listed under Tuen Mun. The only number not listed under a name.”

  “Why would she have this number?”

  Bosch thought for a moment, trying to put it together.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Sun took the phone and studied the screen.

  “This is a cell number.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It begins with a nine. This is a cell designation in Hong Kong.”

  “Okay, so what do we do with it? It’s labeled Tuen Mun. It might belong to the guy who has my daughter.”

  Sun stared out the windshield at the river, trying to come up with an answer and a plan.

  “We could text him,” he said. “Maybe he will respond to us.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Yeah, try to deke him. Maybe we get a location from him.”

  “What is ‘deke’?”

  “Decoy him. Fake him out. Act like we know him and set up a meet. He gives us his location.”

  Sun pondered this while continuing to watch the river. A barge was slowly making its way south toward the sea. Bosch started thinking of an alternate plan. David Chu back in L.A. might have the sources that could run down the name and address attached to a Hong Kong cell number.

  “He may recognize that number and know it is a deke,” Sun finally said. “We should use my phone.”

  “You sure?” Bosch asked.

  “Yes. I think the message should be sent in traditional Chinese. To help with the deke.”

  Bosch nodded again.

  “Right. Good idea.”

  Sun pulled his cell phone out and asked for the number Bosch had found. He opened up a text field but then hesitated.

  “What do I say?”

  “Well, we need to put some urgency into it. Make it seem like he has to respond, and then has to meet.”

  They talked about it back and forth for a few minutes and finally came up with a text that was simple and direct. Sun translated and sent it. Written in Chinese, the message said, We have a problem with the girl. Where can we meet?

  “Okay, we wait,” Bosch said.

  He had decided not to bring Chu into this unless he had to.

  Bosch checked his watch. It was 2 P.M. He had been on the ground in Hong Kong for nine hours and he was no closer to his daughter than when he had been thirty-five thousand feet over the Pacific. In that time he had lost Eleanor Wish forever and now was playing a waiting game that allowed thoughts of guilt and loss to enter his imagination with nothing to deflect them. He glanced over at the phone in Sun’s hand, hoping for a quick return to the message.

  It didn’t come.

  Minutes of silence went by as slowly as the boats on the river. Bosch tried to concentrate his thoughts on Peng Qingcai and on how the abduction of Bosch’s daughter had gone down. There were things that didn’t make sense to him without having all the information, but there was still a chronology and a chain of events that he could put together. And as he did so, he knew that everything led back to his own actions.

  “This all comes back to me, Sun Yee. I made the mistake that allowed all of this to happen.”

  “Harry, there is no reason to—”

  “No, wait. Just hear me out. You need to know all of this because you might see something I don’t.”

  Sun said nothing and Bosch continued.

  “It all starts with me. I was working a case with a triad suspect in L.A. I couldn’t get any answers, so I asked my daughter to translate the Chinese markings on a tattoo. I sent her a photo. I told her it was a triad case and she couldn’t show the tattoo or talk about it with anybody. But that was my mistake. Telling that to a thirteen-year-old was like announcing it to the world—her world. She’d been hanging out with Peng and his sister. They were from the other side of the tracks. She probably wanted to impress them. She told them about the tattoo and the case and that’s where this all started.”

  He looked over at Sun but couldn’t read his face.

  “What tracks?” he asked.

  “Never mind, it’s just an expression. They weren’t from Happy Valley, that’s all th
at means. And like you said, Peng wasn’t part of any triad in Tuen Mun but maybe he knew people, maybe he wanted to get in. He was hanging out all the way across the harbor in Happy Valley. Maybe he knew somebody and thought this might be his ticket in. He told someone what he had heard. They put it together with L.A. and told him to grab the girl and send me the message. The video.”

  Bosch stopped there for a moment as thoughts of his daughter’s situation distracted him again.

  “But from there, something happened. Something changed. Peng took her to Tuen Mun. Maybe he offered her to the triad up here and they took her. Only they still didn’t take him. Instead, they killed him and his family.”

  Sun shook his head slightly and finally spoke. There was something about Bosch’s storyline that didn’t make sense to him.

  “But why would they do this? Kill his whole family.”

  “Look at the timing, Sun Yee. The lady next door heard the voices through the wall in the late afternoon, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “By then I was on the plane. I was coming and they somehow knew it. They couldn’t risk that I would find Peng or his sister or mother. So they eliminated the threat and tied it off right there. If it wasn’t for the memory card Peng hid, where would we be? At a dead end.”

  Sun incisively zeroed in on something Bosch had left out.

  “How did they know you were coming on the plane?”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “Good question. From the start there’s been a leak in the investigation. But I thought I was at least a day ahead of it.”

  “In Los Angeles?”

  “Yeah, back in L.A. Somebody tipped the suspect that we were onto him and that made him try to split. That was why we had to arrest him before we were ready and why they grabbed Maddie.”

  “You don’t know who?”

  “Not for sure. But when I get back I’ll find out. And I’ll take care of it.”

  Sun read more into that than Bosch had intended.

  “Even if Maddie is safe?” he asked.

  Before Bosch could respond, the phone in Sun’s hand vibrated. He had received a text. Bosch leaned over to look as Sun read. The message, in Chinese, was short.