“Busy?”
A pause. “No.”
“Want to meet at our old U-District haunt?”
“Big Time Brewery? Does it still exist?”
“Opens at 11:30.”
“Beer for breakfast?”
“Brunch.”
“It’s a little early, don’t you think?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I was talking to Wallace Zhang.”
“Lars—”
“You don’t approve? That’s actually funny.”
“I don’t hear from you in years and years, and now you want me to meet you for a beer breakfast. What’s this about?”
“Long story. I’ll explain when I see you. Suffice it to say there may be some serious money in it for you.”
*****
Severin was already half way through his first beer when Wallace Zhang strode through the front door of the old brewpub, with its familiar high ceilings, dark wood-paneled walls, and antique bar, a block or so from the picturesque University of Washington campus. Severin and Zhang were dorm roommates during their freshman and sophomore years at UW. After that, they moved into studio apartments on opposite ends of the vast campus and drifted apart for no particular reasons aside from their having divergent class schedules and living in different corners of the University District. Zhang had been quite a football star at Decatur High School. An all-conference cornerback until an overmatched and pissed off wide receiver from a crosstown rival threw a chop block at his right thigh, blowing his knee out and fracturing his femur during a game midway through his senior season. He was tall, still muscular, in good shape for his age, and carried himself with the poise of a man who’d been through the gauntlet more than once and knew he could take it. He was overdressed, as always. His clothes perfectly pressed. His hair coated in heaven only knew what sort of shiny en vogue men’s grooming product and sculpted to magazine photoshoot perfection. He was handsome enough for Severin to find it irritating. Severin thought Zhang could pass as a double for the actor Chow Yun-Fat from the films Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Replacement Killers. When he spotted Severin, he grinned and shook his head. They shook hands, bumping chests in the manner of surfers or rugby teammates.
“So what the hell, Lars?”
“First things first. What will you have? Atlas Amber Ale, right?”
“Good memory.”
Severin ordered his second as Zhang ordered his first.
“So the bartender tells me they’re planning to tear down our old dorm,” Severin said. “Probably because you and your digestive issues turned our room into a hazmat site. Cheaper to tear down than clean up.”
“I didn’t choose to be lactose intolerant.”
“But you did choose to keep drinking chocolate milk.”
“I like chocolate milk.”
“So what has your pretty self been up to?” Severin asked.
“What have I been up to? You mean in the hundred or whatever years since you last called me?”
“Yeah. You’re a doctor, right?”
Zhang yawned. “No, Lars. I’m not a doctor. Are you?”
“No. Married?”
“No. You?”
“Please.”
“Girlfriend, at least?” Zhang asked.
“Sort of. Until a couple of days ago, I guess.”
“Well, you know what my old friend Bill says,” Zhang said through a yawn. “Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.”
“Oh, no.”
In their time as roommates, after they’d dared each other to take the same class on Elizabethan literature in order to knock out dreaded liberal arts credit requirements, they would try to drive each other insane with quotes—usually bastardized—from the works of William Shakespeare.
“Merchant of Venice?” Severin asked.
“As You Like It.”
“Could we please not restart that?”
“Hard to say,” Zhang said with a grin. “Especially since you insist on calling me Man Pretty.”
“Point taken.”
“So you’re not a ladies’ man then?” Zhang asked.
“No, sure I’m a ladies’ man. Women love my self-defecating sense of humor.”
“Good one. Shakespeare again?”
“The Capitol Steps,” Severin said.
“The what?”
“D.C. comedy troupe. Never mind.”
“So why only until a couple of days ago?” Zhang asked. “The girlfriend, I mean.”
“I don’t know. I always seem to end up sabotaging relationships some way or another.”
“So, no med school? I know you had the grades. And you kicked ass on the MCAT, right? Didn’t you get accepted anywhere?”
“Yeah. Couple of schools. UCLA. Georgetown.”
“I thought you were going to be an orthopedic surgeon,” Zhang said. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.” A pause. “Did you know my parents were killed just before we graduated?”
“No. Both of them? What happened?” Zhang asked.
“They decided to take an after-dinner walk along the tulip fields down the hill from their house.”
“In LaConner?”
“Yes. Drunk washing machine repairman ran them down in his box truck. Didn’t even realize he’d hit them. Drove home to his place in Stanwood. When they found him an hour later, he was watching a basketball game on ESPN and eating a bag of Doritos.”
“I’m sorry, Lars. I had no idea.”
“It was a long time ago. I didn’t really advertise it. Plus, it was before social networking web sites and all that crap. Anyway, I guess I sort of went off the rails for a bit. Couldn’t really motivate myself to do anything, let alone register for med school. Everything just all of a sudden seemed so petty, you know?” He took a hefty drink of his beer. “But what about you? You were going to med school too, weren’t you?”
“I didn’t even end up taking the MCAT,” Zhang said.
“Why not?”
“I suppose the first crack in the road came when I was studying for a final exam in advanced biology and found that I just couldn’t motivate myself to memorize the evolution of molecular structures in the Kreb Cycle.”
“You know what?” Severin said, grinning. “I still have recurring final exam nightmares about not remembering how to draw the molecule for Acetyl-coenzyme-A.”
“Then there was that time I threw up on my partner’s arm in biology lab after getting motion sick from trying to count how many fruit flies had red or white eyes under a microscope while breathing formaldehyde vapors. But really, the final straw came during the summer after our junior year, when I interned at a family practice. The experience made me realize I’d never had any genuine interest in being a doctor. It also made me realize that I’d been following the med school track to please my parents. To meet their expectations. Maybe finally be deemed worthy of their approval and unconditional love.”
“Damn, Wallace. I never knew you to have a shred of self-awareness. I don’t even know who you are anymore.” That got Zhang grinning. “Your parents were definitely of the emotionally unavailable taskmaster variety though, weren’t they?”
“They were. They are. So I bugged out. Went to Alaska for a year. Worked on a factory trawler until I had enough money to buy a car. Came back down here and started DJing.”
“You? A DJ? That’s cool. And by cool, I mean something only a total tool would do.”
“Took some computer programming classes. Started doing contract coding work. Supplemented my income for a little while dealing ecstasy at the rave parties I DJ’d. Sometimes weed. Nothing too crazy.”
“You were a drug dealer?” Severin asked.
“Not a very serious one. It was just until the computer work started to pay.”
“Do you use?”
“Smoke.”
“A lot?”
“Whenever I can.”
“That’s not how I expected you to end up, of
all people.”
“Guess I kind of went off the rails too. So what’s on your curriculum vitae?”
“Well, I was in law enforcement for a while,” Severin said with a wide grin.
Zhang’s eyebrows rose, his face betraying his shock. “You’re joking. You’re a cop?”
“Was. And not a very serious one,” he said with a wink.
“Damn. That’s not where I expected you to end up, either.”
“Life is funny that way. After college, I was a patrolman up in Anacortes for about three years. Had a bit of a penchant for nailing drunk drivers.”
“I can imagine.”
“Was a detective for three years after that. The youngest detective ever on the force, actually. Then six years with U.S. Customs. Three as a special agent. Three as assistant customs attaché to the American embassy in Seoul, South Korea.”
“What does customs attaché mean?”
“I was a sort of intelligence officer.”
“What did you do?”
“All sorts of things.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know. It’s hard to explain without, uh—”
“Never mind.”
“Since then, I’ve been doing investigations and audits for this outfit called Agrisymbiosis here in Seattle. It’s what they call a third-party organic farm certifier.”
“A what?”
“It’s a company that farms pay to certify them as being in accordance with organic farming practices.”
“What could you possibly need to investigate?”
“Mostly it’s just checking their books to make sure they aren’t secretly buying pesticides from Dow Chemical, genetically modified seed from Monsanto, or stuff like that. Looking for disguised or otherwise suspicious expenditures. They test the soil, too. But I’m not involved with that part of it.”
“Why did you leave Customs? Especially an overseas posting? Isn’t that a totally plum job?”
“Long story.”
“Huh.”
“Looks like neither of us are where we thought we’d be,” Severin said. “But here we are.”
“Do you ever hear from any of the guys from the dorm?” Zhang asked.
“I heard Tim Dawson is a millionaire investment banker or some such thing.”
“That meathead?”
“I know. Crazy, right?”
“Jeff Tully is a heart surgeon,” Zhang said. “Invented some sort of surgical tool that made him a fortune. Four kids. Hottie, totally cool wife who is a 767 pilot for UPS. They live in a Tudor style palace on Lake Washington, about five doors down from Bill Gates.”
“Good for him.” Severin looked reflective for a moment. “Do you ever wonder where you’d be if you’d just stayed the course? Not gone off the rails?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’d probably be rich orthopedic surgeons with big houses, wives, and kids. Big family Christmas gatherings. Vacations to Hawaii.”
“Innumerable birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese.”
“Well, yes. But still.”
“You sound a little sad,” Zhang said.
“I’m not.”
“So you’re happy?”
“What a question.”
“Really, though. Are you happy?”
“I’m too smart and well-informed to be happy.”
“That’s profound, Lars.”
“I just wonder about how things could have been, if not for this, that, or the other thing, you know? I mean look at Dawson and Tully. We all lived on the same dorm floor. Ate the same food. Took a lot of the same classes. Probably wore the same brand of striped bikini briefs. It’s just odd to consider that at one time we were all on more or less the same road.”
“And then we took the one less traveled, and that made all the difference?”
“The difference being that you live in your parents’ basement, Mr. Frost, while I’m edging ever closer to vagrancy.”
“Comparison is the thief of joy,” Zhang said.
“Shakespeare again?”
“Teddy Roosevelt.”
“Remind me not to play against you in Trivial Pursuit.”
*****
For the next 10 minutes—after learning that Zhang’s anemic software design career left ample time for other things—Severin filled him in on the details of the Thorvaldsson case.
“Sounds like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Zhang said.
“Sort of, I guess. Anyway, after a week or two of all-expenses-paid high adventure, if we can find enough information to make these people happy, they’re going to cut me a check for $10,000,” he lied, “which I’ll split with you 50/50. Strictly under the table.”
“Five thousand dollars tax free? And you want me to work with you because—what?—I speak Chinese?”
“And for your big brain and hacking skills.”
“I’m not a hacker, Lars. I don’t know how to do any of that crap.”
“But you know people who do.”
He gave Severin a dubious look. “Maybe. But I don’t have any investigative experience either.”
“It isn’t rocket science. We aren’t going to be processing any crime scenes or performing any autopsies. Go with your gut. Or just follow my lead. At any rate, it’s always good to have two brains. Things will occur to you that won’t occur to me.”
“What about licensing and jurisdiction?”
“We’re just going to be talking to people. Having conversations. That’s it. No interrogations. No waterboarding. If folks don’t want to talk to us, so be it. We’ll say we tried. Think of it as akin to us being journalists. We’re just writing our article for the Thorvaldssons instead of The Seattle Times.”
Zhang looked skeptical. “What’s your plan of attack?”
“The family suspects the husband, of course. And he worked with her at the U.S. Department of Commerce. So I figured, if they’re willing, which is a big question mark, I’d talk to the government people who were involved in the investigation, Kristin Powell’s friends and coworkers, and the people who last saw her alive over in China. Then, once we have a clearer picture of what might have gone down, we can rattle the husband’s cage a bit to see what kind of feel he gives us. In general, I want to talk to as many people in the U.S. as possible before worrying about going to China. Maybe we won’t need to.”
“Why doesn’t Thorvaldsson just hire a private detective in China?”
“And pay a Chinse detective instead of us? Come on. Who knows and who cares? Let’s make some money.” Severin took a big gulp of his beer. “Although that does remind me, there is one other aspect.”
“What other aspect?”
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense that these people would hire me, a washed up burnout, if everything was truly above board. For that matter, there’s a lot of information blacked out or left out of the U.S. State Department’s report of investigation. It could be—or rather, it’s probably just your basic run-of-the-mill sensitive information. Stuff the State Department doesn’t want to have advertised to the general public for whatever reason. To keep the names of their own personnel out of the media shit-storm. To keep their personnel from getting into hot water with the Chinese where maybe their visas are revoked or they’re put on the blacklist and denied future entry. Maybe to protect the job security or even safety of Chinese nationals who agreed to talk to the State Department investigators. That type of thing.”
“But … .”
“But it’s at least a little bit odd—something diligence demands we learn more about.”
“What else could it be?”
“I don’t know. And admittedly, I’ve been out of the game for a while so my intuition is rusty.”
“Never knew you had any.”
“But when I channel my inner Sherlock Holmes, it tells me that Thorvaldsson is holding something back. Maybe something embarrassing about his niece. Maybe something else he knew about the government investigation. I can’t put a finge
r on it. Assuming there even is an it. But my gut tells me there’s definitely more to the story here. So I suppose that before I do anything else, I’ll want to talk to any government types who might be able to paint a fuller picture of the circumstances of the investigation, explain why the report is so small, and so forth—starting with the U.S. Department of Commerce official who signed off on the State Department report. She should be able to shed some light.”
“What part of China is this company, Yin … .”
“Yinzhen Sorghum Processing, or YSP for short.”
“What part of China is YSP in?”
“Shandong Province. It’s on the edge of the town of Yinzhen, 50 or 60 miles inland and southwest of the port city of Qingdao. You know where those are?”
“I know Qingdao. My mom’s people were from around Jinan, which isn’t too far away.”
“So they’ll speak the same dialect as you?”
“That’s why I asked. But yes, I think so. They should speak Mandarin there.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” Severin said, drawing his smartphone from his pocket. “Take a look at this.” He showed Zhang a photograph of one of the documents he’d found during his break-in of the night before. “Can you tell what this deals with?”
“It looks like an order from a construction company in Taipei, Taiwan, to another Taiwanese company of some kind. For plastic pipe, I think. Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s for plastic pipe. Does that help you?”
“Are either of the companies called Sun Ocean Trade or Yinzhen Sorghum Processing?”
“No. Not even close.”
“Anything to indicate that something is being imported or exported?”
Zhang looked closely. “No. These are domestic Taiwanese transactions.”
They looked through Severin’s photos of the other sample documents only to discover that they were similarly irrelevant. Severin was frustrated by the apparent dead-end, but encouraged by what he took to be a look of puzzle solver’s curiosity on Zhang’s face as he eyeballed the documents. “So you’re interested?” Severin asked at last. Zhang looked thoughtful for a moment. Severin couldn’t hold back. “Wallace, what’s to consider? You’re living in your parents’ basement, for Pete’s sake.”
“Hey now.”
“Probably still driving that piece of crap white Volkswagen Golf.”
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