by Jake Needham
“Handcuffs?”
“Yes, definitely handcuffs. My guess is they were the plastic disposal type.”
“You mean like police cuffs?”
This time Dr. Hoi’s response came after a short but perceptible pause.
“Yes,” she said. “Quite similar or even possibly identical to police cuffs.”
A silence fell as Tay processed what he was hearing. Somewhere in the distance some sort of machinery whirred to life emitting a low-pitched humming sound.
“I gather you’re aware of the cause of death?” Dr. Hoi asked after a few moments had passed in silence.
“I assume it must have been the beating.”
“Certainly not. The woman was shot.”
Tay’s mouth dropped open.
“She was shot with a .22 caliber hollow point,” Dr. Hoi continued, “fired from a revolver with its muzzle placed in contact with her right ear.”
She made a little gun with her thumb and forefinger and then reached up and placed her forefinger into her ear.
“One shot,” she said. “Like this. Straight into the ear. Bam!”
It took Tay a moment to regain the power of speech, but when he did the words spilled out involuntarily.
“You’re shittin’ me.”
Dr. Hoi couldn’t suppress a smile. “No, Inspector, I shit thee not. This was why I wanted you to come over and look at the deceased yourself. Very unusual thing to see here in Singapore. Are you sure you won’t change your mind?”
“I’m sure.” Tay’s mouth was dry and he tried unsuccessfully to swallow. “Thank you.”
“Pity. As I said, very unusual thing.”
Dr. Hoi pursed her lips as if she was trying hard to recall something, although what it might be wasn’t clear to Tay.
“In any event,” she continued after a moment, “the entry wound is very small and completely hidden inside the ear. That’s probably why you missed it when you examined the deceased at the scene.”
“Probably,” Tay mumbled.
“The stippling is apparent once you find the point of entry and it leaves no doubt at all that this was a contact wound. The bullet took a downward path, entering through the primary motor cortex. There was extensive subdural hemorrhaging that ripped linear fractures through the entirety of her skull, then extended down to her neck. The consequential shock wave brought about major tissue trauma, which brought her nervous system to an immediate halt causing her blood pressure to drop like a rock.”
Dr. Hoi abruptly stopped talking.
“I’m sorry, Inspector. From the look on your face, I’m not sure you’re staying with me here. Is something distracting you?”
“Is something distracting me?” Tay rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ, does a cat have an ass?”
Dr. Hoi burst out laughing. “You do have a very colorful way of expressing yourself, Inspector.”
“My father was an American. He willed me his vocabulary.”
“That must come in handy in your line of work.”
“Particularly now. I’m bowled over.”
“Yes, firearms deaths in Singapore are unexpected, aren’t they?”
“I can’t think of one in years.”
“Well, you have one now.”
“There was no blood,” Tay said.
“What?” Dr. Hoi asked.
“There was no blood around her ear. None on the bed either.”
“Ah,” Dr. Hoi said. “I see what you mean.”
“Wouldn’t there have been bleeding? If she was shot?”
“Some perhaps. Not very much. As I said, the damage to the brain would have caused her blood pressure to drop very quickly and the entry wound was quite small. You didn’t see any blood at all?”
“No. The bed had been stripped.”
“Well, there you are. There wouldn’t have been enough blood to soak through the sheets to the mattress. It would have been easy to clean up the body as well. Although, offhand, I’m not sure why a killer would—”
“Did you recover the bullet?” Tay cut in.
Susan Hoi opened the center drawer of her desk, removed a clear plastic vial that looked like a pill bottle, and placed it on the desk in front of Tay. When he picked up the vial, it rattled loudly in the quiet office. Tay saw it contained nothing but some flecks of vaguely yellowish metal that looked more like pieces of glitter than a bullet.
“A hollow point,” Dr. Hoi said. “It exploded just like it was meant to. Then it pulverized her brain. I have nothing for you but these fragments.”
“A hollow point,” Tay repeated, still trying to process what he was hearing. “So you don’t think this could have been a crime of passion, the result of some kind of—”
“Inspector, this was an execution,” Dr. Hoi interrupted. “The killer chose a .22 revolver loaded with hollow points, a weapon that is useless for anything except an execution. Whoever this woman is, her killer came prepared to murder her and then coldly did so.”
“Then why did he beat her so badly first?”
“He didn’t.”
`”What are you talking about?” Tay asked. “Her face looked like hamburger.”
“The beating occurred postmortem,” Dr. Hoi said. “As you have already pointed out, there was relatively little bleeding. If the decedent had been alive at the time she was beaten, she would have bled a great deal.”
Dr. Hoi paused for Tay to frame another question, but when he didn’t she continued.
“Your killer handcuffed this woman’s wrists and ankles, put an assassin’s handgun against her right ear, fired one shot, and then used some sort of club to crush her face. The facial marks are consistent with the butt of a gun so I’d guess her killer shot her in the head and then used the same revolver to beat her face in.”
“Why would the killer beat her after she was already dead?”
“Rage?” Dr. Hoi shrugged. “That would be my guess, but you’re the detective here, Inspector. I just cut up dead bodies and try to find out what made them dead.”
Dr. Hoi leaned back and waited a few moments for Tay to speak again. When he didn’t, she fiddled briefly with her pen, then abruptly pushed herself away from her desk and stood up.
“That’s about all I have now, Inspector. I should get back to the report. I ought to have it completed by Monday and I’ll see that you get it immediately. Now unless there’s something else…”
“No, I don’t think so,” Tay said as he rose slowly to his feet. “Nothing else. Thank you.”
Dr. Hoi offered her hand and Tay took it. It was cool to the touch. He was suddenly seized by a wild impulse to pull it toward him, open her fingers, and press her palm to his forehead, but he resisted.
“Take a left outside and go through the door,” Dr. Hoi said.
“Follow that corridor all the way to the end and you’ll be back in reception.”
“Thank you, yes,” Tay said.
Tay sensed Susan Hoi was waiting for him to say something else, but he couldn’t think what it might be.
“Have a nice weekend,” she eventually said when he remained silent.
“Thank you.”
And then he left, closing the door behind him.
Tay followed Dr. Hoi’s instructions and before long found himself outside the mortuary, standing on a concrete walkway next to a lawn that was mowed as smooth and tight as a putting green. He got his bearings and began to walk back to his office, taking it slow.
That’s the ticket, Tay thought to himself. Take it slow. Take it all slow.
The afternoon was hot and clear and the sky was a dense, crystalline blue. It looked as perfect as the inside of a ceramic bowl.
EIGHT
THIS time Tay remembered to bring the letter from New York home with him, but when he called that evening he was unable to reach the lawyer named Rosenthal. A secretary told him that Mr. Rosenthal was at his house at the shore and wouldn’t be in the office again until Monday morning. Tay left both his home and his cell phon
e numbers, suppressing his annoyance at finding himself a supplicant to a man who not only could take his Fridays off but also had a house at some shore. He hung up wishing he had never made the call in the first place.
It rained all day Saturday and Tay did nothing but read the Martin Cruz Smith novel, smoke, and think about the murdered woman. He felt as if he were becalmed in the eye of a hurricane. All around he could hear the wind howling and feel the storm coming, but he had no way to guess when or from what direction it might strike. Major cases were like that, he knew. Periods when nothing happened followed by periods when everything happened. Something would come up. He had no idea what it would be, but he had no doubt he would be off and running again soon. It always worked that way. At least it always had.
His mother was a different matter entirely. There Tay lacked any experience of value to him in trying to assess the future. Assuming what Rosenthal told him in the letter was true, what did it all actually mean? More to the point, although he flinched from the nakedness of the question, he knew he was really wondering what effect it would have on his own life.
He simply had no idea at all.
ON Sunday morning Tay rose late, made toast and coffee, and then thought about what to do with the final day of his weekend. He knew a lot of people claimed Singapore was boring. ‘Singabore,’ tourists sometimes called it. Usually that annoyed him, but sometimes he thought those people might well have a point. Still, he realized there was another possible explanation for his lethargy, and he liked that one even less. Maybe it was he who was boring, not the city. Perhaps he was just turning into an old fart, cranky and tedious, and that was that.
When Tay finished breakfast, he considered starting on the three-volume Graham Greene biography he had bought on Friday at Borders, but it had stopped raining and the air had turned mild and dry. The day looked promising and it did seem a shame to spend it inside with his nose in a book. Graham Greene would go down better some other day, perhaps one when a tropical rainstorm was soaking the city or maybe when the air was so hot and heavy with humidity you had to haul yourself through it hand over hand. That was Graham Greene territory, not a pleasant summer’s day when people were outside enjoying themselves.
Instead of reading, Tay thought, perhaps he ought to go for a ride on his new bicycle. After all the whole idea of buying the thing was because he thought he should be getting more exercise. He could stand to lose some weight, and he might even find himself feeling better in a general sort of way. Actually, to tell the truth, he was a bit vague on the effects of exercise, but he was certain there were many and that they were all good.
Buying the bicycle had actually been suggested to him by Cindy Shaw, a woman who lived two doors up Emerald Hill Road. She was either a widow or divorced, Tay wasn’t sure which, and she had made her interest in him so plain it was slightly embarrassing. Ordinarily he would have been flattered at almost any woman’s attention. This was an exception, and not just because Cindy Shaw had long flat hair and a long flat face, although she did and he found neither characteristic particularly appealing. He had some trouble putting his finger on exactly what it was about Cindy Shaw that annoyed him so much, but the matter of the bicycle was as good a case in point as any.
Tay was unlocking his gate one evening when Cindy came out of her house on her way to somewhere and stopped to talk. When he mentioned he had been feeling tired lately, he was just making polite conversation, but Cindy seemed to take his comment as a cry for help and immediately launched into a long list of prescriptions for his malaise.
One of Cindy’s prescriptions was for him to buy a bicycle and start getting more exercise. He gave the idea no more thought until he had been whiling away a rainy Saturday afternoon walking around Suntec City and saw a display of bicycles in the Royal Sporting House. They were all Chinese-made and not too expensive and he had to admit they looked pretty sharp. All at once the idea of biking by the sea out along the East Coast Parkway or maybe through the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve seemed quite enticing, even sexy. On a whim, he bought one of the bikes, a red one, but it had been sitting in a spare room upstairs ever since. He had been afraid to ride it for fear Cindy Shaw might think he had taken her advice and who knew where that would lead?
Tay took a sip of coffee, now gone cold, and gave the largely novel notion of physical exercise careful consideration. Would his smoking be a problem? He had heard that smoking reduced your lung capacity or something like that, but he had no idea what his lung capacity was supposed to be so he wasn’t sure what that meant. Of course, he realized that he couldn’t smoke and ride a bicycle at the same time — that would be too unseemly even to consider — but he could always ride slowly, and he could stop every now and then and take a smoke break somewhere discreetly out of view. That was starting to sound like a plan.
Yes, Tay abruptly decided, he would ride his new bicycle today and to hell with whether Cindy Shaw thought he was taking her advice or not. Actually, he guessed he was taking her advice, so the real issue was what she would make of that if she saw him. Maybe she wouldn’t see him. And if she did, he could deal with whatever came of it, couldn’t he? He certainly wasn’t going to be intimidated by Cindy Shaw, at least not to the extent that he avoided doing something he really wanted to do, and right now, for some curious reason, he really did want to ride his new bicycle.
The dead woman at the Marriott was weighing on Tay and he knew that was more than likely the explanation for his inexplicable motivation toward physical activity. A woman beaten to death at the Marriott would have been bad enough, but at least that could have been the result of a violent quarrel between lovers. A woman shot in the ear with an assassin’s pistol at the Marriott was a whole different ball game. That couldn’t have been anything but a carefully planned murder, but they still didn’t even know who the woman was, much less why anyone would want to murder her. On Saturday, he had been comfortable enough placing his faith in serendipity. Now, on Sunday, serendipity didn’t feel like much of a strategy any longer.
Sergeant Kang had a few more names left to check from the list the Immigration Department had given them, but so far he had come up with nothing and that whole process was starting to looklike it was going to get them nowhere. The woman’s fingerprints had gone to Interpol, too, of course, but God only knew how long it would be before they replied, if they ever replied at all. Still, there was at least the possibility that Interpol would get a hit on the prints from some country and they would get their identification that way. If they ran both the whole list from Immigration and the prints through Interpol and still came up empty, Tay didn’t even want to think about where that would leave them.
He glanced at his watch. Although it was nearly noon, he could walk up to Orchard Road, have some lunch, and still be out on the bike by two. Was eating before going on a bicycle ride a good idea? He thought it was swimming you weren’t supposed to do right after eating, but he wasn’t absolutely certain. Maybe biking was a problem, too. In any event he wasn’t going to worry about it. He would just do what he wanted to do and see how it went.
After all, if he felt bad after lunch for any reason, he could always leave the bike ride for another day, couldn’t he?
TAY felt fine after lunch. To tell the truth, he had lingered over it a bit and felt absolutely wonderful, and he hadn’t wavered in the slightest in his conviction that spending the rest of Sunday afternoon on his new bicycle was an inspired idea. Why, it might even be the beginning of a whole new approach to life for him, mightn’t it?
He pulled on a pair of khaki shorts and a plain white T-shirt and laced up a new pair of Nikes he had bought at the same time as the bicycle but hadn’t yet worn. Then he buckled the strap of his black bicycle helmet under his chin and tugged it tight. The first time he tried on the helmet, he thought it made him look stupid, but now he wasn’t so sure. There was something racy and vigorous about the elongated shape of it and the purple stripes along its sides. He liked the way he looked in it j
ust fine.
Hoisting his bicycle to one shoulder, Tay carried it down the stairs and through the front door. He wheeled the bike out to the sidewalk and closed the gate behind him.
That was when the man waiting there spoke to him.
“You’re Sam Tay, aren’t you?”
Tay had been so absorbed in juggling the bike and the heavy gate without hurting himself that he hadn’t noticed anyone on the sidewalk. He turned toward the sound and looked the man over. Tay was reasonably sure he didn’t know him. If they had ever met, Tay certainly didn’t remember it.
The man was just over six feet tall and almost completely bald on top. He had an unruly fringe of silver hair, a lush silver mustache, oddly tiny ears, and a face that looked Irish: slightly red tending to pink with a soft, almost powdered look to his skin. His shirt was white oxford cloth, long-sleeved with a button-down collar, and he wore it tucked into sharply pressed khakis with a red necktie and black tassel loafers.
“I’m sorry to surprise you this way,” the man continued when Tay didn’t say anything. “I wouldn’t have bothered you if it weren’t important. Normally, by now I’d be teeing off on the back nine myself anyway.”
The man tossed out a grin he evidently thought illustrated the accidental camaraderie he and Tay had just achieved, two guys whose Sundays were both being loused up by the vicissitudes of an unreliable world. The grin didn’t do a damned thing for Tay.
“Who are you?” Tay asked.
“I’m Tony DeSouza. I’m the legal attaché at the American embassy.”
Ah, Tay thought, the local FBI man. He had always wondered why FBI agents insisted on calling themselves legal attachés when they were posted abroad. It seemed pretentious to him.
“What are you doing in front of my house?”
DeSouza served up another grin and this time tried to put something rueful into it, but Tay still wasn’t biting.