The Ambassador's wife ist-1

by Jake Needham

  At just that moment, a burst of tinny music sounded from somewhere very close by. Tay couldn’t figure out where it was coming from or what it signified until Cally pulled the tiny telephone from a pocket and flipped it open.

  The sound of a telephone had become another one of those fundamental divisions between the old and the young that Tay thought might never be bridged. The old generally had telephones that rang like…well, like telephones. The young had telephones that rang with unsettling blasts of something that was presumably supposed to be recently recorded music. Of course, Tay had to take that largely on faith since he was pretty certain that he couldn’t identify any music recorded after 1980.

  “Hang on a minute,” Cally said into the telephone.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Tay, “but I’m going to have to step outside to take this.”

  No need to be sorry,” he said. “I hate listening to people talk on cell phones.”

  Tay speared a bit of hardboiled egg out of the remains of his salad and allowed his eyes to follow Cally as she walked away.

  Get a grip, Sam Tay, he told himself. This attractive young woman is just doing her job and chatting you up. It’s nothing more than that. She’s playing the good cop and letting DeSouza play the bad cop, which was really the only way they could have cast the parts anyway.

  Tay poked through the salad bowl again and this time came up with some beetroot. His eyes drifted over the room as he chewed on it and caught those of a woman at another table picking at a melting cup of ice cream. She didn’t react, her expression one of practiced boredom, and she appeared to have no interest at all in him. Still, he had caught a glimpse of an earpiece partially concealed by her hair and couldn’t help but wonder about it. Perhaps the woman was just listening to an iPod during her lunch break. Perhaps she was waiting for a call on her cell phone. Perhaps she was part of a super-secret unit of spies tasked with the surveillance of any Singaporean policeman who appeared in the cafeteria of the American embassy. Perhaps his imagination was running amuck.

  Tay finished his salad and pushed the bowl away. He looked at his watch and was surprised to see that it was now nearly one. He was drumming his fingers on the table and was just beginning to wonder if he should go look for Cally when she came back to the table.

  Cally sat down without saying anything. Tay could tell that something had happened by the way she was looking at him.

  “We’ve got another one,” she said after a moment.

  At first Tay didn’t get it.

  “Another body,” Cally said when she realized that he didn’t know what she was talking about. “Another woman beaten and posed.”

  “Where?” Tay asked. “Oh my God, not at the Marriott again?”

  “No, not in Singapore at all. In Bangkok. In an apartment in Bangkok.”

  Tay was frantically trying to refocus his thoughts from his cafeteria-table infatuation with Cally to what she was telling him.

  “Bangkok?” he repeated stupidly, struggling to get his mind working again.

  Cally nodded. “I don’t know much yet. They called me because I’m the acting security officer for the embassy in Bangkok. The guy there just retired and they haven’t been sent a replacement yet. Until then, I’m it.”

  “Are you saying there’s some connection with-”

  “I don’t know,” Cally interrupted, glancing at her watch. “The way they’re describing the scene to me, it sounds like the same kind of thing. They’re trying to get me on a two o’clock plane to Bangkok. I’ve got to get going.”

  She pushed her chair back so abruptly that the legs squealed over the floor and the few people left in the cafeteria all looked at them to see what was going on.

  “Say,” she said, pointing her forefinger at Tay who was still sitting, “you want to go with me?”

  “Me? What for?”

  “What for? Don’t you think it looks like we may have a serial killer on our hands here?”

  “Serial killer? I thought the party line around here was that Elizabeth Munson was the victim of terrorists.”

  Cally gave Tay a long look.

  “Are you coming or aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Look,” Tay said, getting to his feet, “aren’t you rushing this a little? You don’t even know whether there’s any connection.”

  “The Thai police got an anonymous call this morning and went to this apartment in Bangkok. The door was unlocked and they walked in and found a woman’s body. She had been beaten and posed in exactly the same way as Mrs. Munson.”

  “I guess I still don’t understand. What has the American embassy got to do with this dead woman in Bangkok?”

  “When the Thai cops found the body, they called the American embassy immediately. Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Why would they?”

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you?”

  Tay examined Cally’s face for signs that he was about to be the butt of some kind of elaborate joke. He found none.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “Another ambassador’s wife?”

  “No. It’s worse than that.”

  Dear God, Tay thought to himself, what could be worse than finding another ambassador’s wife murdered the way Elizabeth Munson had been murdered?

  The answer, of course, occurred to him at exactly the same moment Cally said it.

  “This time it’s an ambassador, Sam. The dead woman is Susan Rooney, the American ambassador to Thailand.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Tay had rehearsed what he was going to say to the OC before he went into his office. He had rehearsed it several times in fact, but he still hadn’t gotten it quite right. Now he was sitting in front of his boss’s desk feeling like a schoolboy who had just screwed up his recitations.

  “You want to go to Bangkok?” the OC said after a pause of suitable length to suggest reflection on Tay’s request.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bangkok?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Aren’t you a little old for that sort of thing, Sam?”

  Tay consulted his shoes. They told him to bite his tongue and so he did.

  “This can’t be a coincidence, sir,” he said after a moment. “The two murders are almost certainly related.”

  “How are they related?”

  “That’s why I want to go to Bangkok, sir. To find out.”

  “Is it? Is that the reason?”

  The OC drummed his fingers on the desk and examined a point somewhere in the air just above Tay’s left ear.

  “That’s not why most people would want to go to Bangkok,” he said. “It’s sure as hell not why I’d want to go to Bangkok.”

  “Nevertheless, sir, it’s why I want to go.”

  “Uh-huh,” the OC said. “It might be at that.”

  Tay’s boss stopped drumming his fingers. He bent down and opened a bottom drawer in his desk and propped his feet on it, then apparently thinking better of it, he took his feet off the drawer and closed it again.

  “Why don’t we just let the Americans have this one, Sam? First an American ambassador’s wife is murdered here and then an American ambassador is murdered in Thailand. There can’t be much doubt anymore about terrorism being involved and that would give the Americans jurisdiction. I don’t see any reason to argue with them about it.”

  “The second murder doesn’t make you wonder, sir? About the terrorism theory, I mean.”

  “An American ambassador murdered in Bangkok? Why would that make me wonder?”

  “Both victims were women, sir. And both killings had sexual overtones. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing terrorists usually do and the press is bound to make something out of those overtones whether they have anything to do with the murders or not.”

  The OC looked unhappy. “What overtones?”

  “Well, sir, you’ll have to admit that the posing of Mrs. Munson’s body was unusual and from what I understand the woman in Bangkok was posed the same way.”

  “That
could just be a coincidence.”

  And you could be the next prime minister of Singapore, Tay thought, but that was not what he said.

  “What if the second murder does indicate that a serial killer is out there, Chief? If we just turn our case over to the Americans and don’t run our own investigation, how will that look for us?”

  The OC went back to drumming his fingers.

  “And, sir, one other thing.” Tay sensed he was almost over the finish line, so he pressed his luck a bit. “Don’t forget that I was personally invited to join the investigation by the State department’s Regional Security Officer in Singapore.”

  “And don’t you forget, Sam, you were personally invited to fuck off by the American ambassador to Singapore.”

  Tay kept quiet.

  “Why can’t you just do that, Sam?”

  “Do what, sir?”

  “Fuck off like they told you to. Let the bloody Yanks have this whole mess if they want it so much.”

  “Are you ordering me to turn this investigation over to the Americans, sir?”

  The OC leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He exhaled heavily.

  “No, of course I’m not, Sam. I’m only asking why in God’s name can’t you just leave this one alone?”

  “Elizabeth Munson wasn’t killed by terrorists, Chief. She was executed and battered to a bloody pulp by somebody she knew. And it happened right over there in the Marriott Hotel.”

  Tay thrust out his forefinger for effect, then realized he had no idea in what direction the Marriott lay and yanked it back.

  “Now there’s another woman in Bangkok who appears to have been murdered in exactly the same way,” he continued. “That’s two women in less than a week in two cities a couple of hours apart.”

  “But, Sam-”

  “There’s a connection, Chief. There has to be.”

  “Of course there’s a connection, Sam. One woman was the wife of the American ambassador to Singapore and the other woman was the American ambassador to Thailand. They almost certainly knew each other and a hell of a lot of people must have known both of them. I imagine they went to the same parties. That kind of thing. What does that prove?”

  “I meant some other connection, sir.”

  Tay considered briefly telling the boss about his conversation with Lucinda Lim and the story she had told him about Elizabeth Munson’s personal life, but he quickly came to his senses.

  The OC chewed on his lip and looked down at his desk.

  “I warned you, Sam.”

  Tay was momentarily puzzled. “Sir?”

  “I warned you that you might be getting in over your head here, that you might not be up to it.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with me going to Bangkok, Chief.”

  “You don’t have to go just to prove to me that you are up to it. You could just leave this alone.”

  Tay took a deep breath and looked away. He didn’t trust himself to do anything else.

  The OC apparently noticed. He sighed long and hard.

  “How long would you need?”

  “Only a day or two, sir. I just want to look at the crime scene. See where the investigation is going. That’s all.”

  “I’m probably going to regret this.”

  Knowing now that he had what he wanted, Tay watched the wall and waited patiently.

  “Okay, I’ll call somebody over there,” the OC said. “I’ll tell them to expect you.”

  He pulled his chair closer to the desk.

  “And, Sam,” he said, “try not to get into any trouble, but if you do, at least try not to get caught at it.”

  Tay mumbled something unintelligible and left it at that. There was no point in doing anything else. He had very little doubt that he and the OC were thinking about two very different kinds of trouble altogether.

  Tay went straight home after that and threw some stuff in a bag. He wasn’t any good at packing since he hadn’t had very much experience at it and at first he couldn’t decide what he ought to take with him. He resolved his quandary by packing whatever pieces of clothing his eyes happened to fall on until his bag was full. The bigger problem was finding his passport. When he eventually located it in a dresser drawer, buried beneath two unopened boxes of handkerchiefs he didn’t know he had, he was vastly relieved to see it hadn’t expired.

  Tay managed to get to Changi Airport in time to make a Thai Airways flight that left just after six. The flight took barely two hours. With the one-hour time change between the two cities, by seven-thirty he had cleared immigration in Bangkok and was waiting at the baggage belt for his suitcase. He had thought about calling Bangkok and leaving a message at the American embassy for Cally about when he was arriving, but he didn’t do it. Maybe it was nothing more than his normal instinct not to tell people anymore than he really had to that had stopped him, or maybe it was something else altogether. He wasn’t quite sure.

  Regardless, he hadn’t called Cally before he left and there didn’t seem to be any point in doing it now. He would just find a hotel for the night, get up early and check in with the Thai police, and then see what came from that. He might try to call Cally after that or he might not. Well, probably he would.

  His bag came more quickly than he expected and he pulled it off the belt and headed off to look for a hotel booking desk. The customs channels were deserted so he walked straight through and emerged into a large, brightly lit lobby. Behind a barrier quite some distance away, he saw a crowd of people apparently there to meet arriving passengers, but right outside the door from customs, leaning casually against a pillar, was Cally Parks.

  “What are you doing here?” Tay asked, too incredulous to come up with anything more memorable.

  “Waiting for you, of course. Do I seem like the sort of girl who just hangs around airports?”

  “How did you know-”

  “I’m a trained law enforcement officer, remember?” Cally said. “I am a seeker of truth, a seer of the unseen, a finder of the unfindable.”

  “But I didn’t even know which-”

  “I called your office about four o’clock to see if you were coming. They said you had just left, so I checked the flight schedules and there was only one flight from Singapore to Bangkok between five and eight. I figured you’d be on it, and…” Cally spread her hands, palms up, “here you are.”

  She winked at him. “Not bad for a girl, huh?”

  Tay wasn’t sure exactly what to say to that, so he settled for something generic. “It’s really very nice of you to come out to the airport, but I could have just taken a taxi into town.”

  “You’re not going into town.”

  “I’m not?”

  “Nope. You’re going to Pattaya.”

  “Where?”

  Cally tilted her head and examined Tay with more care than he would have thought his question merited.

  “Are you trying to tell me that you’ve never heard of Pattaya?” she asked.

  Tay thought he probably had, but nothing was coming to him right at that moment.

  “Do you really expect me to believe,” Cally continued, “that you are the only male in all of Asia, perhaps the only male in the entire known universe, who has never heard of Pattaya, Thailand?”

  And then Tay remembered.

  Pattaya was a slightly shabby beach resort a couple of hours south of Bangkok that had a reputation for commercial sex and freewheeling debauchery sufficient to overwhelm the limits of most people’s imaginations. Tay had never been to Pattaya. He was no prude, at least he didn’t think he was, but he had heard enough about Pattaya to know that he probably wouldn’t like it very much.

  To tell the truth, Tay didn’t like anywhere in Thailand very much. Beneath its veneer of exotic cuisine, extravagant temples, and saintly monks lay the dark heart of a country that lived off very little but sex and greed. No matter how you tried to dress the place up, Tay thought, Thailand would always have the soul of a whore.

  Tay
shifted his bag from his left hand to his right.

  “Why am I going to Pattaya?” he asked.

  “Not just you. We’re both going.”

  “Then why are we going to Pattaya?”

  “Because I want to talk to a man who lives in Pattaya and I want you to hear what he has to say.”

  “What does this have to do with your ambassador being murdered?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Maybe nothing. Look, Sam, I’ve got a car outside and I’m driving to Pattaya right now. If you don’t want to go, well…”

  Cally pointed over Tay’s shoulder. When he glanced back, he saw a sign hanging above a battered counter that read Hotel Book Here. Behind the counter were two local women, both holding clipboards and looking in his direction with what he thought were unreasonably hopeful expressions.

  Tay picked up his bag and followed Cally out to her car.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Cally had the dark blue Volvo up to ninety within a minute or two of hitting the expressway to Pattaya.

  “Let me know when we’re airborne,” Tay said.

  “I’m a great driver. You’ll see.”

  The expressway was a four-lane divided highway set in flat and unpromising countryside. In the median strip, yellow vapor lamps on high aluminum poles streaked the heavy night air with sulphurous stripes. Scrawny brush and thin clumps of unidentifiable vegetation were scattered in patches over the sandy ground along both sides of the road.

  “Where did you get the car?” Tay asked.

  “Embassy motor pool. I went over there after I looked at the crime scene.”

  “Was the crime scene here the same as mine in Singapore?”

  “Your crime scene?” Cally raised her eyebrows and looked at Tay for longer than he thought the driver of a car going ninety should look at anything other than the road. “Getting a little proprietary on me there, aren’t you, pal?”

  Tay said nothing, hoping that would encourage Cally to get her eyes back to where they ought to be.

  “There’s a digital camera on the back seat,” she said after the silence had stretched on for a minute or two. “Check it out yourself.”