Nine Dragons

by Michael Connelly

  Gandle hesitated and then relented.

  “This way.”

  Gandle led them to the conference room off Captain Dodds’s office. Waiting there were the two men from Hong Kong. They stood up upon Bosch’s arrival and handed him business cards. Alfred Lo and Clifford Wu. They both were from HKPD’s Triad Bureau.

  Bosch introduced Haller and handed the cards to him.

  “Do we need a translator, gentlemen?” Haller asked.

  “That is not necessary,” Wu said.

  “Well, that’s a start,” Haller said. “Why don’t we sit down and hash this big old thing around.”

  Everyone, including Gandle, took a seat around the conference table. Haller spoke first.

  “Let me start things off here by saying that my client, Detective Bosch, is not waiving any of his constitutionally guaranteed rights at this time. We are on American soil here and that means he doesn’t have to speak to you gentlemen. However, he is also a detective and he knows what you two men are up against on a daily basis. Against my advice he is willing to talk to you. So the way we will work this is that you can ask him questions and he’ll try to answer them if I think he should. There will be no recording of this session but you can take notes if you like. We hope to end this conversation with you two fellows leaving with a greater understanding of the events of this past weekend in Hong Kong. But one thing that is for certain is that you will not be leaving with Detective Bosch. His cooperation in this matter ends when this meeting ends.”

  Haller punctuated his opening salvo with a smile.

  Before coming into the PAB, Bosch had met with Haller for nearly an hour in the back of Haller’s Lincoln Town Car. They were parked at the dog park near Franklin Canyon and were able to watch Harry’s daughter walk around and pet the sociable dogs while they talked. After they were finished, they took Maddie to her meeting with Dr. Hinojos and then drove over to the PAB.

  They were not operating in complete agreement but had forged a strategy. A quick Internet search on Haller’s laptop had even provided some backup material. They had come in ready to make Bosch’s case to the men from Hong Kong.

  Being a detective, Bosch was walking a thin line. He wanted his colleagues from across the Pacific to know what had happened, but he wasn’t going to put himself, his daughter or Sun Yee in jeopardy. He believed that all his actions in Hong Kong were justified. He told Haller he had been in kill-or-be-killed situations initiated by others. And that included his encounter with the hotel manager at Chung-king Mansions. In each case he had emerged victorious. There was no crime in that. Not in his book.

  Lo took out a pen and notebook and Wu asked the first question, revealing that he was the lead man.

  “First, we would ask, why did you go to Hong Kong on such short trip?”

  Bosch shrugged like the answer was obvious.

  “To get my daughter and bring her back here.”

  “On Saturday morning your former wife, she report the daughter missing to police,” Wu said.

  Bosch stared at him for a long moment.

  “Is that a question?”

  “Was she missing?”

  “My understanding is that she was indeed missing but on Saturday morning I was thirty-five thousand feet over the Pacific. I can’t speak to what my ex-wife was doing then.”

  “We believe your daughter was taken by someone named Peng Qingcai. Do you know him?”

  “Never met him.”

  “Peng is dead,” Lo said.

  Bosch nodded.

  “That doesn’t make me unhappy.”

  “Mr. Peng’s neighbor, Mrs. Fengyi Mai, she recall speaking with you at her home Sunday,” Wu said. “You and Mr. Sun Yee.”

  “Yes, we knocked on her door. She wasn’t much help.”

  “Why is this?”

  “I guess because she didn’t know anything. She didn’t know where Peng was.”

  Wu leaned forward, his body language easy to read. He thought he was zeroing in on Bosch.

  “Did you go to Peng’s apartment?”

  “We knocked on the door but nobody answered. After a while we left.”

  Wu leaned back, disappointed.

  “You acknowledge that you were with Sun Yee?” he asked.

  “Sure. I was with him.”

  “How do you know this man?”

  “Through my ex-wife. They met me at the airport Sunday morning and informed me that they were looking for my daughter because the police department there did not believe she had been abducted.”

  Bosch studied the two men for a moment before continuing.

  “You see, your police department dropped the ball. I hope you will include that in your reports. Because if I’m dragged into this, I certainly will. I’ll call every newspaper in Hong Kong—doesn’t matter what language—and tell them my story.”

  The plan was to use the threat of international embarrassment to the HKPD to make the detectives move cautiously.

  “Are you aware,” Wu said, “that your ex-wife, Eleanor Wish, died of gunshot wound to the head on fifteenth floor of Chungking Mansions, Kowloon?”

  “Yes, I am aware of that.”

  “Were you present when this happened?”

  Bosch looked at Haller and the attorney nodded.

  “I was there. I saw it happen.”

  “Can you tell us how?”

  “We were looking for our daughter. We didn’t find her. We were in the hallway about to leave and two men started to fire at us. Eleanor was hit and she…got killed. And the two men were hit, too. It was self-defense.”

  Wu leaned forward.

  “Who shot these men?”

  “I think you know that.”

  “You tell us, please.”

  Bosch thought of the gun he had put into Eleanor’s dead hand. He was about to tell the lie when Haller leaned forward.

  “I don’t think I’m going to allow Detective Bosch to get into who-shot-whom theories,” he said. “I am sure your fine police department has tremendous forensic capabilities and has already been able to determine through firearm and ballistic analysis the answer to that question.”

  Wu moved on.

  “Was Sun Yee on the fifteenth floor?”

  “Not at that time.”

  “Can you give us more detail?”

  “About the shooting? No. But I can tell you something about the room where my daughter was held. We found tissue with blood on it. Her blood had been drawn.”

  Bosch studied them to see if they reacted to this information. They showed nothing.

  There was a file on the table in front of the men from Hong Kong. Wu opened it and took out a document with a paper clip on it. He slid it across the table to Bosch.

  “This is statement from Sun Yee. It has been translated into English. Please read and acknowledge for accuracy.”

  Haller leaned in next to Bosch and they read the two-page document together. Bosch immediately recognized it as a prop. It was their investigative theory disguised as a statement from Sun. About half of it was correct. The rest was assumption based on interviews and evidence. It attributed the murders of the Peng family to Bosch and Sun Yee.

  Harry knew they were either trying to bluff him into telling what really happened or had arrested Sun and forced him to sign his name to the story they preferred, namely that Bosch had been responsible for a bloody rampage across Hong Kong. It would be the best way to explain nine violent deaths on one Sunday. The American did it.

  But Bosch remembered what Sun had said to him at the airport. I will handle these things and make no mention of you. This is my promise. No matter what happens, I will leave you and your daughter out of it.

  “Gentlemen,” Haller said, completing his read of the document first. “This document is—”

  “Total bullshit,” Bosch finished.

  He slid the document back across the table. It hit Wu in the chest.

  “No, no,” Wu said quickly. “This is very real. This is signed by Sun Yee.�
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  “Maybe if you held a gun to his head. Is that how you do it over there in Hong Kong?”

  “Detective Bosch!” Wu exclaimed. “You will come to Hong Kong and answer these charges.”

  “I’m not going anywhere near Hong Kong ever again.”

  “You have killed many people. You have used firearms. You placed your daughter above all Chinese citizens and—”

  “They were blood-typing her!” Bosch said angrily. “They took her blood. You know when they do that? When they’re trying to match organs.”

  He paused and watched the growing discomfort on Wu’s face. Bosch didn’t care about Lo. Wu was the power and if Bosch got to him, he would be safe. Haller had been right. In the back of the Lincoln, he had set the subtle strategy for the interview. Rather than focus on defending Bosch’s actions as self-defense, make clear to the men from Hong Kong what would be brought to the international media stage should they pursue any sort of case against Bosch.

  Now was the time to make that play and Haller took over and calmly moved in for the kill.

  “Gentlemen, you can hang on to your signed statement there,” he said, a seemingly permanent smile playing on his face. “Let me summarize the facts that are supported by the actual evidence. A thirteen-year-old American girl was abducted in your city. Her mother dutifully called the police to report this crime. The police declined to investigate the crime and then—”

  “The girl had run away before,” Lo interjected. “There was no reas—”

  Haller held up a finger to cut him off.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, now a tone of contained outrage in his voice and the smile gone. “Your department was told an American girl was missing and chose, for whatever reason, to ignore the report. This forced the girl’s mother to look for her daughter herself. And the first thing she did was call in the girl’s father from Los Angeles.”

  Haller gestured to Bosch.

  “Detective Bosch arrived and together with his ex-wife and a friend of the family, Mr. Sun Yee, they began the search that the Hong Kong police had determined they would not be involved in. On their own, what they found was evidence that she had been kidnapped for her organs. This American girl, they were going to sell her for her organs!”

  His outrage was growing and Bosch believed it was not an act. For a few moments Haller let it float over the table like a thundercloud before continuing.

  “Now, as you gentlemen know, people got killed. My client isn’t going to get into the details with you about all of that. Suffice it to say that, left alone in Hong Kong without any help from the government and police, this mother and father trying to find their daughter encountered some very bad people and there were kill-or-be-killed situations. There was provocation!”

  Bosch saw the two Hong Kong detectives physically lean back as Haller shouted the last word. He then continued in a calm and well-modulated courtroom voice.

  “Now, we know you want to know what happened and you have reports that need to be filled out and supervisors who need to be informed. But you have to seriously ask yourself, is this the proper course to take?”

  Another pause.

  “Whatever happened in Hong Kong occurred because your department failed this young American girl and this family. And if you are now going to sit back and analyze what actions Detective Bosch took because your department failed to act properly—if you are looking for a scapegoat to take back with you to Hong Kong—then you won’t find one here. We won’t be cooperating. However, I do have someone here whom you will be able to talk to about all of this. We can start with him.”

  Haller pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and slid it across the table to them. Wu picked it up and studied it. Haller had shown it to Bosch earlier. It was the business card of a reporter from the Los Angeles Times.

  “Jock Meekeevoy,” Lo read. “He has information about this?”

  “That’s Jack McEvoy. And he has no information now. But he would be very interested in a story like this.”

  This was all part of the plan. Haller bluffing. The truth was, and Bosch knew, that McEvoy had been laid off by the Times six months earlier. Haller had dug the old card out of a stack of business cards he kept wrapped in a rubber band in his Lincoln.

  “That’s where it will start,” Haller said calmly. “And I think it will make a great story. Thirteen-year-old American girl kidnapped in China for her organs and the police do nothing. Her parents are forced into action and the mother is killed trying to save her daughter. From there it will go international for sure. Every paper, every news channel in the world will want a part of this story. They’ll make a Hollywood movie out of it. And Oliver Stone will direct it!”

  Haller now opened his own file that he had carried into the meeting. It contained the news stories he had printed in the car following his Internet search. He slid a set of printouts across the table to Wu and Lo. They moved closer together to share.

  “And finally, what you have there is a package of news articles that I will be providing to Mr. McEvoy and any other journalist who makes an inquiry of me or Detective Bosch. These articles document the recent growth of the black market in human organs in China. The waiting list in China is said to be the longest in the world, with some reports of as many as a million people waiting for an organ at any given time. Doesn’t help that a few years back and under pressure from the rest of the world, the Chinese government banned the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners. That only heightened the demand and value of human organs on the black market. I am sure you will be able to see from those stories from very credible newspapers, including the Beijing Review, where Mr. McEvoy will be going with his story. It’s up to you now to decide if that is what you want to happen here.”

  Wu turned so he could whisper in rapid-fire Chinese directly into Lo’s ear.

  “No need to whisper, gentlemen,” Haller said. “We can’t understand you.”

  Wu straightened himself.

  “We would like to make private telephone call before continuing the interview,” he said.

  “To Hong Kong?” Bosch asked. “It’s going on five in the morning there.”

  “This does not matter,” Wu said. “I must make the call, please.”

  Gandle stood up.

  “You can use my office. You’ll have privacy.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  The Hong Kong investigators stood up to go.

  “One last thing, gentlemen,” Haller said.

  They looked at him with what now? written on their faces.

  “I just want you and whoever it is you are calling to know that we are also very concerned about the disposition of Sun Yee in this matter. We want you to know that we’ll be getting in touch with Mr. Sun and if we can’t reach him or if we learn that he has encountered any sort of impediment to his personal freedom, we plan to bring that issue up before the court of public opinion as well.”

  Haller smiled and paused before continuing.

  “It’s a package deal, gentlemen. Tell your people that.”

  Haller nodded, keeping the smile going the whole time, his demeanor contradicting the obvious threat. Wu and Lo nodded that they understood the message and followed Gandle out of the room.

  “What do you think?” Bosch asked Haller when they were alone. “Are we in the clear?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Haller said. “I think this thing just ended. What happens in Hong Kong stays in Hong Kong.”

  43

  Bosch decided not to wait in the conference room for the Hong Kong detectives to return. He remained bothered by the verbal altercation he’d had with his partner the day before and went into the squad room to try to find Ferras.

  But Ferras was gone and Bosch wondered if he had intentionally gone to lunch in order to avoid further confrontation. Harry stepped into his own cubicle to check the desk for interoffice envelopes and other messages. There were none, but he saw a blinking red light on his phone. He had a
message. He was still getting used to the practice of having to check his phone line for messages. In the squad room at Parker Center, things were antiquated and there was no personal voice mail. All messages went to a central line, which the squad secretary monitored. She then wrote out message slips that went into mailboxes or were left on desks. If the call was urgent the secretary personally tracked the detective down by pager or cell phone.

  Bosch sat down and typed his code into the phone. He had five messages. The first three were routine calls about other cases. He made a few notes on a desk pad and erased the messages. The fourth had been left the night before by Detective Wu of the HKPD. He had just landed and checked into a hotel and wanted to set up an interview. Bosch erased it.

  The fifth message was from Teri Sopp in latent prints. It had been left at 9:15 that morning, just about the time Bosch was opening the flat box that contained his daughter’s new computer desk.

  “Harry, we did the electrostatic enhancement test on the casing you gave me. We pulled a print off it and everybody around here’s pretty excited. We got a match on the DOJ computer, too. So give me a call as soon as you get this.”

  As he called latents, Bosch looked up over the wall of his cubicle and saw Gandle escorting the two HKPD detectives back to the conference room. He waved his arm at Bosch, signaling him to come back as well. Bosch held up a finger, telling him that he needed a minute.

  “Latents.”

  “Let me speak to Teri, please.”

  He waited another ten seconds, excitement growing. Bo-Jing Chang might have been kicked loose and might already be back in Hong Kong for all Bosch knew, but if his fingerprint was on the casing of one of the bullets that killed John Li, then that was a game changer. It was direct evidence linking him to the murder. They could charge him and seek an extradition warrant.

  “This is Teri.”

  “It’s Harry Bosch. I just got your message.”

  “I was wondering where you were. We got a match on your casing.”