Bosch got only fitful sleep on the flight over the Pacific. Fourteen hours in the air, pressed against a window in the coach cabin, he never managed to sleep more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time before thoughts of his daughter and his guilt over her predicament intruded and jarred him awake.
By moving too fast to think during the day, he had kept himself ahead of the fear and guilt, the brutal recriminations. He was able to put it all aside because the pursuit was more important than the baggage he was carrying. But on Cathay Pacific flight 883 he could run no more. He knew he needed to sleep to be rested and ready for the day ahead in Hong Kong. But on the plane he was cornered and could no longer put his guilt and fear aside. The dread engulfed him. He spent most of the hours sitting in darkness, fists balled tightly and eyes staring blankly, as the jet hurtled through the black toward the place where Madeline was somewhere hidden. It made sleep fleeting if not altogether impossible.
The headwinds over the Pacific were weaker than anticipated and the plane picked up time on the schedule, landing early at the airport on Lantau Island at 4:55 a.m. Bosch rudely pushed around passengers reaching for belongings in overhead bins and made his way to the front of the plane. He carried only a small backpack containing things he thought might help him find and rescue his daughter. When the jet’s door opened he moved quickly and soon took over the lead of all passengers heading toward customs and immigration. Fear stabbed at him as he approached the first screening point-a thermoscan designed to identify fever carriers. Bosch was sweating. Had the guilt burning in his conscious manifested itself as a fever? Would he be stopped before he had even begun the most important mission of all?
He glanced back at the computer screen as he passed by. He saw the images of travelers turned to blue ghosts on the screen. No telltale blooms of red. No fever. At least not yet.
At the customs checkpoint an inspector flipped through his passport and saw the entry and exit stamps from the many trips he had made in the past six years. He then checked something on a computer screen Bosch couldn’t see.
“You have business in Hong Kong, Mr. Bosch?” the inspector asked.
He had somehow butchered the single syllable of Bosch’s last name, making it sound like Botch.
“No,” Bosch said. “My daughter lives here and I come to visit her pretty often.”
He eyed the backpack slung over Bosch’s shoulder.
“You checked your bags?”
“No, I just have this. It’s a quick trip.”
The inspector nodded and looked back at his computer. Bosch knew what was going to happen. Invariably when he arrived in Hong Kong the immigration inspector saw his law enforcement classification on the computer and put him into the search queue.
“Have you brought your weapon with you?” the inspector asked.
“No,” Bosch said tiredly. “I know that’s not allowed.”
The inspector typed something on his computer and then directed Bosch, as expected, into a chute for a search of his bag. It would waste another fifteen minutes but Harry stayed cool. He had gained a half hour on the schedule with his early arrival.
The second inspector carefully went through the backpack and made curious looks at the binoculars and other items, including the envelope stuffed with cash. But none of it was illegal to enter the country with. When he was finished he asked Bosch to step through a metal detector and then he was cleared. Harry headed into the baggage terminal and spotted a money exchange window that was open despite the early hour. He stepped up, pulled the cash envelope out of his backpack again and told the woman behind the glass he wanted to change five thousand U.S. dollars into Hong Kong dollars. It was Bosch’s earthquake money, cash he kept hidden in the gun locker in his bedroom. He had learned a valuable lesson back in ’94 when an earthquake rocked L.A. and severely damaged his house. Cash is king. Don’t leave home without it. Now the money he kept hidden for just such a crisis would hopefully help him overcome another. The exchange rate was a little less than eight to one, and his five thousand American became thirty-eight thousand Hong Kong dollars.
After getting his money he headed to the exit doors on the other side of the baggage terminal. The first surprise of the day came when he saw Eleanor Wish waiting for him in the main hall of the airport. She was standing next to a man in a suit who had the feet-splayed posture of a bodyguard. Eleanor made a small gesture with her hand in case Harry hadn’t noticed her. He saw the mixture of pain and hope on her face and had to drop his eyes to the floor as he approached.
“Eleanor. I didn’t-”
She grabbed him in a quick and awkward embrace that abruptly ended his sentence. He understood that she was telling him that blame and recriminations were for later. There were more important things now. She then stepped away and gestured to the man in the suit.
“This is Sun Yee.”
Bosch nodded but then put out his hand, a gesture he hoped would help him figure out what to call Sun Yee.
“Harry,” he said.
The other man nodded back and gripped his hand tightly but said nothing. No help there. He would have to take Eleanor’s cue with the name. Bosch guessed Sun Yee was in his late forties. Eleanor’s age. He was short but powerfully built. His chest and arms pressed the contours of the silk suit jacket to the limit. He wore sunglasses although it was still before dawn.
Bosch turned to his ex-wife.
“He’s driving us?”
“He’s helping us,” she corrected. “He works in security at the casino.”
Bosch nodded. That was one mystery solved.
“Does he speak English?”
“Yes, I do,” the man answered for himself.
Bosch studied him for a moment and then looked at Eleanor and saw in her face a familiar resolve. It was a look he had seen many times when they had been together. She wasn’t going to allow an argument on this. This man was part of the package or Bosch was on his own.
Bosch knew that if circumstances dictated it, he could split off and make his way alone through the city. It was what he had anticipated doing, anyway. But for now he was willing to go with Eleanor’s plan.
“You sure you want to do this, Eleanor? I was planning on working on my own.”
“She’s my daughter, too. Where you go I go.”
“Okay, then.”
They started walking toward the glass doors that would lead them outside. Bosch let Sun Yee take the lead so he could talk privately with his ex-wife. Despite the obvious strain playing clearly on her face, she was just as beautiful as ever to him. She had her hair tied back in a no-nonsense manner. It accented the clean line and determined set of her jaw. No matter how infrequently or what the circumstances, he could never look at her without thinking about the could-have-beens. It was an overworked cliché, but Bosch had always believed that they were meant to be together. Their daughter gave them a lifelong connection, but to Bosch it was not enough.
“So tell me what’s happening, Eleanor,” he said. “I’ve been in the air for almost fourteen hours. What’s new on this end?”
She nodded.
“I spent four hours at the mall yesterday. When you called and left a message from the airport, I must’ve been in security. I either didn’t have a signal or just didn’t hear the call.”
“Don’t worry about it. What did you find out?”
“They have surveillance video that shows her with the brother and sister. Quick and He. It’s all from a distance. They’re not identifiable on it-except for Mad. I’d be able to pick her out anywhere.”
“Does it show the grab?”
“There was no grab. They were hanging out together, mostly in the food court. Then Quick lit up a cigarette and somebody complained. Security moved in and kicked him out. Madeline walked out with them. Voluntarily. And they never came back in.”
Bosch nodded. He could see it. It could all have been a plan to lure her out. Quick lit up, knowing all along that he would be ejected from the mall and that Madeline would go out with him.
“What else?”
“That’s it from the mall. Quick is familiar to security there but they had no ID or file on him.”
“What time was it when they walked out?”
“Six-fifteen.”
Bosch did the math. That was Friday. His daughter had walked off the mall videotape almost thirty-six hours ago.
“When’s it get dark here? What time?”
“Usually by eight. Why?”
“The video that was sent to me was shot in daylight. So less than two hours after she walked out of the mall with them she was in Kowloon and they made the video.”
“I want to see the video, Harry.”
“I’ll show you in the car. You said you got my message. Did you find out about helicopter pads in Kowloon?”
Nodding, Eleanor said, “I called the head of client transportation at the casino. He told me that in Kowloon there are seven rooftop helicopter pads available. I have a list.”
“Good. Did you tell him why you wanted the list?”
“No, Harry. Give me some credit.”
Bosch looked at her and then moved his eyes to Sun, who had now opened up a several-pace lead on them. Eleanor got the message.
“Sun Yee’s different. He knows what’s going on. I brought him in because I can trust him. He’s been my security at the casino for three years.”
Bosch nodded. His ex-wife was a valuable commodity to the Cleopatra Resort and Casino in Macau. They paid for her apartment and the helicopter that brought her to and from work at the private tables where she played against the casino’s wealthiest clients. Security-in the form of Sun Yee-was part of that package.
“Yeah, well, too bad he wasn’t watching over Maddie, too.”
Eleanor abruptly stopped and turned toward Bosch. Unaware, Sun kept going. Eleanor got in Harry’s face.
“Look, you want to get into this right now? Because I can if you want. We can talk about Sun Yee and we can also talk about you and how your work put my daughter in this…this…”
She never finished. Instead, she roughly grabbed Bosch by the jacket and started shaking him angrily until she was hugging him and starting to cry. Bosch put his hand on her back.
“Our daughter, Eleanor,” he said. “Our daughter, and we’re going to get her back.”
Sun noticed they were not with him and stopped. He looked back at Bosch, his eyes hidden behind the dark glasses. Still in Eleanor’s grasp, Harry raised a hand to signal him to hold for a moment and keep his distance.
Eleanor finally stepped back and wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand.
“You need to keep it together, Eleanor. I’m going to need you.”
“Stop saying that, okay? I will keep it together. Where do we start”
“Did you get the MTR map I asked for?”
“Yes, I’ve got it. It’s in the car.”
“What about the card from Causeway Taxi? Did you check it out”
“We didn’t have to. Sun Yee already knew about it. Most of the taxi companies are known to hire triad people. Triad people need legitimate jobs to avoid suspicion and keep the police away. Most of them get taxi licenses and work a few shifts here and there as a front. If your suspect was carrying the fleet manager’s card, it was probably because he was going to see him about a job when he got over here.”
“Did you go to the address?”
“We went by last night but it’s just a taxi station. It’s where the cars get refueled and serviced and the drivers are dispatched at the start of shift.”
“Did you talk to the fleet manager?”
“No. I didn’t want to make a move like that without asking you. But you were in the air and I couldn’t ask. Besides, it looked to me like a dead end. This was a guy who was probably going to give Chang a job. That’s all. That’s what he does for the triads. He wouldn’t be involved in an abduction. And if he was involved, he wasn’t going to talk about it.”
Bosch thought Eleanor was probably right but that the fleet manager would be someone to come back to if other efforts to locate his daughter didn’t pan out.
“Okay,” he said. “When’s it going to be light out?”
She turned to look out the huge glass wall that fronted the main hall, as if to judge her answer by the sky. Bosch checked his watch. It was 5:45 a.m. and he had already been in Hong Kong nearly an hour. It seemed like the time was going by too quickly.
“Maybe half an hour,” Eleanor said.
Bosch nodded.
“What about the gun, Eleanor?”
She nodded hesitantly.
“If you’re sure, Sun Yee knows where you can get one. In Wan Chai?.”
Bosch nodded. Of course that would be the place to get a gun. Wan Chai was where the underside of Hong Kong came to the surface. He had not been there since going there from Vietnam on leave forty years before. But he knew that some things and places never changed.
“Okay, let’s get to the car. We’re losing time.”
They stepped through the automatic doors and Bosch was greeted by the warm, wet air. He felt the humidity start to cling to him.
“Where are we going first” Eleanor asked. “Wan Chai”
“No, the Peak. We’ll start there.”
It was known as Victoria Peak during colonial times. Now it was just the Peak, a mountaintop that rose behind the Hong Kong skyline and offered stunning vistas across the central district and the harbor to Kowloon. It was accessible by car and funicular tram and was a popular destination with tourists year-round and with locals in the summer months, when the city below seemed to hold humidity like a sponge holds water. Bosch had been there several times with his daughter, often eating lunch in the observatory’s restaurant or the shopping galleria built behind it.
Bosch and his ex-wife and her security man made it to the top before dawn broke over the city. The galleria and tourist kiosks were still closed and the lookout points were abandoned. They left Sun’s Mercedes in the lot by the galleria and walked down the path that edged the side of the mountain. Bosch had his backpack over his shoulder. The air was heavy with humidity. The pathway was wet and he could tell there had been an overnight shower. Already his shirt was sticking to his back.
“What exactly are we doing?” Eleanor asked.
The question was the first she had spoken in a long time. On the drive in from the airport Bosch had set up the video and handed her his phone. She watched it and Bosch heard her breathing catch. She then asked to watch it a second time and silently handed the phone back after. There was a terrible silence that lasted until they were on the path.
Bosch swung the backpack around and unzipped it. He handed Eleanor the photo print from the video. He then handed her a flashlight from the bag as well.
“That’s a freeze-frame from the video. When Maddie kicks at the guy and the camera moves, it catches the window.”
Eleanor turned on the flashlight and studied the print while they walked. Sun walked several paces behind them. Bosch continued to explain his plan.
“You have to remember that everything in the window is reflected backwards. But you see the goalposts on top of the Bank of China building? I have a magnifying glass here if you want to use it.”
“Yes, I see it.”
“Well, between those posts you can see the pagoda down here. I think it’s called the Lion Pagoda or the Lion Lookout. I’ve been up here with Maddie.”
“So have I. It’s called the Lion Pavilion. Are you sure it’s on here?”
“Yeah, you need the glass. Wait till we get up here.”
The path curved and Bosch saw the pagoda-style structure ahead. It was in a prominent position, offering one of the better views from the Peak. Whenever Bosch had been here in the past it was crowded with tourists and cameras. In the gray light of dawn it was empty. Bosch stepped through the arched entrance and out to the viewing pavilion. The giant city spread out below him. There were a billion lights out there in the receding darkness and he knew one of them belonged to his daughter. He was going to find it.
Eleanor stood next to him and held the printout under the beam of the flashlight. Sun took a bodyguard’s position behind them.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You think you can reverse this and pinpoint where she is?”
“That’s right.”
“Harry?…”
“There are other markers. I just want to narrow it down. Kowloon is a big place.”
Bosch pulled his binoculars from the backpack. They were powerful magnifiers he used on surveillance assignments. He raised them to his eyes.
“What other markers?”
It was still too dark. Bosch lowered the binoculars. He would have to wait. He thought maybe they should have gone to Wan Chai to get the gun first.
“What other markers, Harry?”
Bosch stepped close to her so he could see the photo print and point out the markers Barbara Starkey had told him about, particularly the portion of the backwards sign with the letters O and N. He also told her about the audio track from a nearby subway and reminded her of the helicopter, which was not on the printout.
“You add it all up and I think we can get close,” he said. “If I can get close, I’ll find her.”
“Well, I can tell you right now you are looking for the Canon sign.”
“You mean Canon cameras? Where?”
She pointed in the distance toward Kowloon. Bosch looked through the binoculars again.
“I see it all the time when they fly me in and out over the harbor. There is a Canon sign on the Kowloon side. It’s just the word canon standing free on top of a building. It rotates. But if you were behind it in Kowloon when it rotated toward the harbor, you would see it backwards. Then in the reflection it would be corrected. That has to be it.”
She tapped the O-N on the photo print.
“Yeah, but where? I don’t see it anywhere.”
“Let me see.”
He handed her the binoculars. She spoke as she looked.
“It’s normally lit up but they probably turn it off a couple hours before dawn to save energy. A lot of the signs are out right now.”
She lowered the binoculars and looked at her watch.
“We’ll be able to see it in about fifteen minutes.”
Bosch took the binoculars back and started searching for the sign again.
“I feel like I’m wasting time.”
“Don’t worry. The sun’s coming up.”
Thwarted in his efforts, Bosch reluctantly lowered the binoculars and for the next ten minutes watched the light creep over the mountains and into the basin.
The dawn came up pink and gray. The harbor was already busy as workboats and ferries crisscrossed paths in what looked like some kind of natural choreography. Bosch saw a low-lying mist clinging to the towers in Central and Wan Chai and across the harbor in Kowloon. He smelled smoke.
“It smells like L.A. after the riots,” he said. “Like the city’s on fire.”
“It is in a way,” Eleanor said. “We’re halfway through Yue Laan.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“The Hungry Ghost festival. It began last week. It’s set to the Chinese calendar. It is said that on the fourteenth day of the seventh lunar month the gates of hell open and all the evil ghosts stalk the world. Believers burn offerings to appease their ancestors and ward off the evil spirits.”
“What kind of offerings?”
“Mostly paper money and papier-mâché facsimiles of things like plasma screens and houses and cars. Things the spirits supposedly need on the other side. Sometimes people burn the real things, too.”
She laughed and then continued.
“I once saw somebody burning an air conditioner. Sending an air conditioner to an ancestor in hell, I guess.”
Bosch remembered his daughter talking about this once. She said she had seen someone burning an entire car.
Bosch gazed down on the city and realized what he had taken as morning mist was actually smoke from the fires, hanging in the air like the ghosts themselves.
“Looks like there’s a lot of believers out there.”
“Yes, there are.”
Bosch raised his gaze to Kowloon and brought up the binoculars. Sunlight was finally hitting the buildings along the harborside. He panned back and forth, always keeping the goalposts on top of the Bank of China in his field of vision. Finally, he found the Canon sign Eleanor had mentioned. It sat atop a glass-and-aluminum-skinned building that was throwing sharp reflections of light in all directions.
“I see the sign,” he said, without looking away.
He estimated the building that the sign was on at twelve floors. The sign sat atop an iron framework that added at least another floor to its height. He moved the binoculars back and forth, hoping to see something else. But nothing grabbed at him.
“Let me see again,” Eleanor said.
Bosch handed over the binoculars and she quickly zeroed in on the Canon sign.
“Got it,” she said. “And I can see that the Peninsula Hotel is across the street and within two blocks of it. It’s one of the helicopter-pad locations.”
Bosch followed her line of sight across the harbor. It took him a moment to find the sign. It was now catching the sun full-on. He was beginning to feel the sluggishness of the long flight breaking off. Adrenaline was kicking in.
He saw a wide road cutting north into Kowloon next to the building with the sign on top.
“What road is that?” he asked.
Eleanor kept her eyes at the binoculars.
“It’s got to be Nathan Road,” she said. “It’s a major north-south channel. Goes from the harbor up into the New Territories.”
“The triads are there?”
“Absolutely.”
Bosch turned back to look out toward Nathan Road and Kowloon.
“Nine Dragons,” he whispered to himself.
“What?” Eleanor asked.
“I said, that’s where she is.”
Bosch and his daughter usually took the funicular tram up and back down from the Peak. It reminded Bosch of a sleek and greatly extended version of Angels Flight back in L.A., and at the bottom his daughter liked to visit a small park near the courthouse where she could hang a Tibetan prayer flag. Often the small, colorful flags were strung like laundry on clotheslines across the park. She had told Bosch that hanging a flag was better than lighting a candle in a church because the flag was outside and its good intentions would be carried far on the wind.
There was no time to hang flags now. They got back into Sun’s Mercedes and headed down the mountain toward Wan Chai. Along the way, Bosch realized that one route down would take them directly by the apartment building where Eleanor and his daughter lived.
Bosch leaned forward from the backseat.
“Eleanor, let’s go by your place first.”
“Why?”
“Something I forgot to tell you to bring. Madeline’s passport. Yours, too.”
“Why?”
“Because this won’t be over when we get her back. I want both of you away from here until it is.”
“And how long is that?”
She had turned to look back at him from the front seat. He could see the accusation in her eyes. He wanted to try to avoid all of that so that the rescue of his daughter was the complete focus.
“I don’t know how long. Let’s just get the passports. Just in case there is no time later.”
Eleanor turned to Sun and spoke sharply in Chinese. He immediately pulled to the side of the road and stopped. There was no traffic coming down the mountain behind them. It was too early for that. She turned fully around in her seat to face Bosch.
“We’ll stop for the passports,” she said evenly. “But if we need to disappear, don’t think for a minute we will be going with you.”
Bosch nodded. The concession that she would be willing to do it was enough for him.
“Then maybe you should pack a couple bags and put them in the trunk, too.”
She turned back around without responding. After a moment Sun looked over at her and spoke in Chinese. She responded with a nod and Sun started down the mountain again. Bosch knew that she was going to do what he’d asked.
Fifteen minutes later Sun stopped in front of the twin towers commonly known by locals as “The Chopsticks.” And Eleanor, having said not a single word in those fifteen minutes, extended an olive branch to the backseat.
“You want to come up? You can make a coffee while I pack the bags. You look like you could use it.”
“Coffee would be good but we don’t have-”
“It’s instant coffee.”
“Okay, then.”
Sun stayed with the car and they went up. The “chopsticks” were actually two interlinked and oval-shaped towers that rose seventy-three stories from the midslope of the mountain above Happy Valley. It was the tallest residential building in all of Hong Kong and as such stuck out at the edge of the skyline like two chopsticks protruding from a pile of rice. Eleanor and Madeline had moved into an apartment here shortly after arriving from Las Vegas six years earlier.
Bosch gripped the railing in the speed elevator as they went up. He didn’t like knowing that just below the floor was an open shaft that went straight down forty-four floors.
The door opened on a small foyer leading to the four apartments on the floor, and Eleanor used a key to go in the first door on the right.
“Coffee’s in the cabinet over the sink. I won’t take long.”
“Good. You want a cup?”
“No, I’m good. I had some at the airport.”
They entered the apartment and Eleanor split off to go to her bedroom while Bosch found the kitchen and went to work on the coffee. He found a mug that said World’s Best Mom on its side and used that. It had been hand-painted a long time before and the words had faded with each cycle the mug had gone through in the dishwasher.
He stepped out of the kitchen, sipping the hot mixture, and took in the panorama. The apartment faced west and afforded a stunning view of Hong Kong and its harbor. Bosch had only been in the apartment a few times and never tired of seeing this. Most times when he came to visit, he met his daughter in the lobby or at her school after classes.
A huge white cruise ship was making its way through the harbor and steaming toward the open sea. Bosch watched it for a moment and then noticed the Canon sign sitting atop the building in Kowloon. It was a reminder of his mission. He turned toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms. He found Eleanor in their daughter’s room, crying as she put clothes into a backpack.
“I don’t know what to take,” she said. “I don’t know how long we’ll be away or what she’ll need. I don’t even know if we’ll ever see her again.”
Her shoulders trembled as she let the tears fall. Bosch put a hand on her left shoulder but she immediately shrugged it off. She would take no comfort from him. She roughly zipped the backpack closed and left the room with it. Bosch was left to look about the room by himself.
Keepsakes from trips to L.A. and other places were on every horizontal surface. Posters from movies and music groups covered the walls. A stand in the corner had several hats, masks and strings of beads hanging on it. Numerous stuffed animals from earlier years were crowded against the pillows on the bed. Bosch couldn’t help but feel like he was somehow invading his daughter’s privacy by being in the room uninvited by her.
On a small desk was an open laptop computer, its screen dark. Bosch stepped over and tapped the space bar and after a few moments the screen came alive. His daughter’s screen saver was a photograph taken on her last trip to L.A. It showed a group of surfers in a line, floating on their boards and waiting for the next set of waves. Bosch remembered that they had driven out to Malibu to eat breakfast at a place called Marmalade and afterward had watched the surfers at a nearby beach.
Harry noticed a small box made of carved bone next to the computer’s mouse. It reminded Bosch of the carved handle of the knife he had found in Chang’s suitcase. It looked like something you would keep important things in, like money. He opened it and found that it contained only a small string of carved jade monkeys-see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil-on red twine. Bosch took it out of the box and held it up to see it better. It was no more than two inches long and there was a small silver ring on the end so that it could be attached to something.
“You ready?”
Bosch turned. Eleanor was in the doorway.
“I’m ready. What is this, an earring?”
Eleanor stepped closer to see it.
“No, the kids hook those things on their phones. You can buy them at the jade market in Kowloon. So many of them have the same phones, they dress them up to be different.”
Bosch nodded as he put the jade string back in the bone box.
“Are they expensive?”
“No, that’s cheap jade. They cost about a dollar American and the kids change them all the time. Let’s go.”
Bosch took a last look around his daughter’s private domain and on the way out grabbed a pillow and a folded blanket off the bed. Eleanor looked back and saw what he was doing.
“She might be tired and want to sleep,” Bosch explained.
They left the apartment and in the elevator Bosch held the blanket and pillow under one arm and one of the backpacks in the other. He could smell his daughter’s shampoo on the pillow.
“You have the passports” Bosch asked.
“Yes, I have them,” Eleanor said.
“Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
He acted like he was studying the pattern of ponies on the blanket he was holding.
“How far can you trust Sun Yee? I’m not sure we should be with him after we get the gun.”
Eleanor answered without hesitation.
“I told you, you don’t have to worry about him. I trust him all the way and he’s staying with us. He’s staying with me.”
Bosch nodded. Eleanor looked up at the digital display that showed the floors clicking by.
“I trust him completely,” she added. “And Maddie does, too.”
“How does Maddie even-”
He stopped. He suddenly understood what she was saying. Sun was the man Madeline had told him about. He and Eleanor were together.
“You get it now?” she asked.
“Yeah, I get it,” he said. “But are you sure Madeline trusts him?”
“Yes, I’m sure. If she told you otherwise, then she was just trying to get your sympathy. She’s a girl, Harry. She knows how to manipulate. Yes, her life has been…disrupted a bit by my relationship with Sun Yee. But he has shown her nothing but kindness and respect. She’ll get over it. That is, once we get her back.”
Sun Yee had the car waiting in the drop-off circle at the front of the building. Harry and Eleanor put the backpacks in the trunk but Bosch took the pillow and blanket with him into the backseat. Sun pulled out and they went the rest of the way down Stubbs Road into Happy Valley and then over to Wan Chai.
Bosch tried to put the conversation from the elevator out of his mind. It wasn’t important at the moment because it wouldn’t help him get his daughter back. But it was hard to compartmentalize his feelings. His daughter had told him back in L.A. that Eleanor was in a relationship. And he’d had relationships himself since their divorce. But being hit with the reality of it here in Hong Kong was difficult. He was riding with a woman he still loved on some basic level and her new man. It was hard to take.
He was sitting behind Eleanor. He looked over the seat at Sun and studied the man’s stoic demeanor. He was no hired gun here. He had more of a stake than that. Bosch realized that could make him an asset. If his daughter could count on and trust him, then so could Bosch. The rest he could put aside.
As if sensing the eyes on him, Sun turned and looked at Bosch. Even with the blackout shades guarding Sun’s eyes, Bosch could tell he had read the situation and knew there were no secrets any longer.
Bosch nodded. It wasn’t any sort of approval he was giving. It was just the silent message that he now understood they were all in this together.
Wan Chai was the part of Hong Kong that never slept. The place where anything could happen and anything could be had for the right price. Anything. Bosch knew that if he wanted a laser sight to go with the gun they were going to pick up, he could get it. If he wanted a shooter to go with the setup, he could probably get that, too. And this didn’t even begin to address the other things, like drugs and women, that would be available to him in the strip bars and music clubs along Lockhart Road.
It was eight-thirty and full daylight as they cruised down Lockhart. Many of the clubs were still active, shutters closed against the light but neon burning brightly up above in the smoky air. The street was wet and steamy. Fragmented reflections of neon splashed across it and over the windshields of the taxis lining the curbs.
Bouncers stood on post and female hawkers sat on stools waving down pedestrians and motorists alike. Men in rumpled suits, their steps slowed by a night of alcohol or drugs, were moving slowly on the pavement. Double-parked outside the rows of red taxis the occasional Rolls-Royce or Mercedes idled, waiting for the money to run out inside and the journey home to finally begin.
In front of almost every establishment was an ash can for burning offerings to the hungry ghosts. Many were alive with flames. Bosch saw a woman in a silk robe with a red dragon on the back standing outside a club called Red Dragon. She was showering what looked like real Hong Kong dollars into the flames leaping from the can in front of her club. She was hedging her bets with the ghosts, Bosch thought. She was going with the real thing.
The smell of fire and smoke mixed with an underlying scent of fried foods got into the car despite the windows being up. Then a harsh odor Bosch couldn’t identify, almost like one of the cover-up odors he’d pick up from time to time in the coroner’s office, hit him and he started breathing through his mouth. Eleanor flipped down her visor so she could see him in the makeup mirror.
“Gway lang go,” she said.
“What?”
“Turtle-shell jelly. They make it around here in the mornings. They sell it in the medicine shops.”
“It’s strong.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it. You think the smell’s strong, you should actually taste it sometime. Supposed to be the cure for whatever ails you.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
In another two blocks the clubs got smaller and seedier from the outside. The neon signage was more garish and usually accompanied by lighted posters containing photographs of the beautiful women supposedly waiting inside. Sun double-parked next to the taxi that was first in line at the intersection. Three of the corners were occupied by clubs. The fourth was a noodle shop that was open and already crowded.
Sun released his seat belt and opened his door. Bosch did the same.
“Harry,” Eleanor said.
Sun turned back to look at him.
“You don’t go,” he told Bosch.
Bosch looked at him.
“You sure? I have money.”
“No money,” Sun said. “You wait here.”
He got out and closed the door. Bosch closed his door and stayed in the car.
“What’s going on?”
“Sun Yee’s calling on a friend for the gun. It’s not a transaction involving money.”
“Then, what does it involve”
“Favors.”
“Is Sun Yee in a triad?”
“No. He wouldn’t have gotten the job in the casino. And I wouldn’t be with him.”
Bosch wasn’t so sure about the casino job being off-limits to a triad man. Sometimes the best way to know your enemy is to hire your enemy.
“Was he in a triad?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. They don’t let you just quit.”
“But he’s getting the gun from a triad guy, right”
“I don’t know that either. Look, Harry, we are getting the gun you told me you had to have. I didn’t think there would be all of these questions. Do you want it or not?”
“Yes, I want it.”
“Then, we are doing what needs to be done to get it. And Sun Yee is risking his job and freedom doing it, I might add. Gun laws are very harsh here.”
“I understand. No more questions. Just thank you for help-ing me.”
In the silence that followed, Bosch could hear muffled but pulsing music coming from one of the shuttered clubs or maybe from all three of them. Through the windshield he saw Sun approach three men in suits who were standing outside a club directly across the intersection. Like with most of the establishments in Wan Chai, the sign out front was in Chinese and English. The place was called the Yellow Door. Sun spoke briefly with the men and then nonchalantly opened his suit jacket so they could see he was not armed. One of the men did a quick but competent pat-down and Sun was then allowed to enter through the signature yellow door.
They waited for nearly ten minutes. During that time Eleanor said almost nothing. Bosch knew she was fearful about their daughter’s situation and angry with his questions, but he needed to know more than he knew.
“Eleanor, don’t get upset with me, okay? Let me just say this. As far as we know, we have the element of surprise here. As far as the people who have Maddie know, I’m still in L.A., deciding whether to kick their guy loose or not. So if Sun Yee is going to the triad here to get me a gun, won’t he have to tell them where the gun is going and what it might be used for? Won’t the guy with the gun then turn around and give the triad guys across the harbor in Kowloon the heads-up? You know, like, look who’s in town and, oh, by the way, he’s coming your way.”
“No, Harry,” she said dismissively. “That’s not how it works.”
“Well, then how does it work?”
“I told you. Sun Yee is calling in a favor. That’s it. He doesn’t have to provide any information because the guy with the gun owes him the favor. That’s how it works. Okay?”
Bosch stared at the club entrance. No sign of Sun.
“Okay.”
Another five minutes went by silently in the car and then Bosch saw Sun step back through the yellow door. But instead of heading back to the car, he crossed the street and went into the noodle shop. Bosch tried to track him through the glass windows but the reflecting neon outside was too strong and Sun disappeared from sight.
“Now what, he’s getting food?” Bosch asked.
“I doubt it,” Eleanor said. “He was probably sent over there.”
Bosch nodded. Precautions. Another five minutes went by and when Sun emerged from the noodle shop he was carrying a Styrofoam to-go carton that was secured closed with two rubber bands. He carried it flat, as if trying not to dishevel the plate of noodles within. He returned to the car and got in. Without a word he handed the carton over the seat to Bosch.
Holding the carton low, Bosch took off the rubber bands and opened it as Sun pulled the Mercedes away from the curb. The carton contained a medium-size pistol made of blue steel. There was nothing else. No backup magazine or extra ammunition. Just the gun and whatever was in it.
Bosch dropped the carton to the floor of the car and held the pistol in his left hand. There was no brand name or marking on the bluing. Just serial and model numbers, but the five-point star stamped into the grip told Bosch the weapon was a Black Star pistol manufactured by the government of China. He had seen them on occasion in L.A. They were made by the tens of thousands for the Chinese military and a growing number ended up being stolen and smuggled across the ocean. Many of them obviously stayed in China and were smuggled into Hong Kong.
Bosch held the pistol down between his knees and ejected the magazine. It was double-stacked with fifteen 9 millimeter Parabellum rounds. He thumbed them out and put them into a cup holder in the armrest. He then ejected a sixteenth round from the chamber and put it in the cup holder with the others.
Bosch looked down the sight to focus his aim. He peered into the chamber, looking for any sign of rust, and then studied the firing pin and extractor. He checked the gun’s action and trigger several times. The weapon seemed to be functioning properly. He then studied each bullet as he reloaded the magazine, looking for corrosion or any other indication that the ammunition was old or suspect. He found nothing.
He firmly pushed the magazine back into place and jacked the first round into the chamber. He then ejected the magazine again, pushed the last bullet into the opening and once more put the gun back together. He had sixteen rounds and that was it.
“Happy?” Eleanor asked from the front seat.
Bosch looked up from the weapon and saw that they were on the down ramp to the Cross Harbour Tunnel. It would take them directly to Kowloon.
“Not quite. I don’t like carrying a gun I’ve never fired before. For all I know, the pin on this thing could have been filed and I’ll be drawing dead when I need it.”
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about that. You just have to trust Sun Yee.”
Sunday morning traffic was light in the two-lane tunnel. Bosch waited until they passed the low point in the middle and had started up the incline toward the Kowloon side. He’d heard several backfires from taxis along the way. He quickly wrapped his daughter’s blanket around the gun and his left hand. He then pulled the pillow over and turned to look out the rear window. There were no cars in sight behind them because the cars back there had not reached the midpoint of the tunnel.
“Whose car is this, anyway?” he asked.
“It belongs to the casino,” Eleanor said. “I borrowed it. Why?”
Bosch lowered the window. He held the pillow up and pressed the muzzle into the padding. He fired twice, the standard double pull he employed to check the mechanism of a gun. The bullets snapped off the tunnel’s tiled walls.
Even with the wadding around the gun, the two reports echoed loudly in the car. The car swerved slightly as Sun looked into the backseat. And Eleanor yelled.
“What the hell did you do?”
Bosch dropped the pillow to the floor and raised the window. The car smelled like burnt gunpowder but it was quiet again. He unwrapped the blanket and checked the weapon. It had fired easily and without a jam. He was down to fourteen bullets and was good to go.
“I had to make sure it worked,” he said. “You don’t carry a gun unless you’re sure.”
“Are you crazy? You could get us arrested before we get a chance to do anything!”
“If you keep your voice down and Sun Yee stays in his lane, I think we’ll be fine.”
Bosch leaned forward and tucked the weapon into his waistband at the small of his back. Its slide was warm against his skin. Up ahead he saw light at the end of the tunnel. They would be in Kowloon soon.
It was time.
The tunnel delivered them to Tsim Sha Tsui, the central waterside section of Kowloon, and within a few minutes Sun turned the Mercedes onto Nathan Road. It was a wide, four-lane boulevard lined with high-rise buildings as far as Bosch could see. It was a crowded mix of commercial and residential uses. The first two floors of every building were dedicated to retail and restaurant space, while the floors rising above were residential or office space. The clutter of video screens and signs in Chinese and English was an intense riot of color and motion. The buildings ranged from dowdy midcentury construction to the slick glass-and-steel structures of recent prosperity.
It was impossible for Bosch to see the top of the corridor from the car. He lowered his window and leaned out in an effort to find the Canon sign, the first marker from the photo generated from his daughter’s abduction video. He couldn’t find it and pulled back into the car. He raised the window.
“Sun Yee, stop the car.”
Sun looked at him in the rearview.
“Stop here”
“Yes, here. I can’t see. I have to get out.”
Sun looked at Eleanor for approval and she nodded.
“We’ll get out. You find a place to park.”
Sun pulled to the curb and Bosch jumped out. He’d taken the photo print from his backpack and had it ready. Sun then pulled away, leaving Eleanor and Bosch on the sidewalk. It was now midmorning and the streets and sidewalks were crowded with people. Smoke was in the air and the smell of fire. The hungry ghosts were close. The streetscape was replete with neon, mirrored glass and giant plasma screens broadcasting silent images of jerking motion and staccato edits.
Bosch referred to the photo and then looked up and traced the skyline.
“Where’s the Canon sign?” he asked.
“Harry, you’re mixed up,” Eleanor said.
She put her hands on his shoulders and turned him completely around.
“Remember, everything is backwards.”
She pointed almost directly up, her finger drawing a line up the side of the building they were in front of. Bosch looked up. The Canon sign was directly overhead and at an angle that made it unreadable. He was looking at the bottom edge of the sign’s letters. It was rotating slowly.
“Okay, got it,” he said. “We start from there.”
He looked back down and referred to the photo.
“I think we have to go at least another block further in from the harbor.”
“Let’s wait for Sun Yee.”
“Call him and tell him where we’re going.”
Bosch started off. Eleanor had no choice but to follow.
“All right, all right.”
She pulled her phone and started to make the call. As he walked, Bosch kept his eyes high on the buildings, looking for air-conditioning units. A block here was several buildings long. Looking up as he walked, he had a few near misses with other pedestrians. There seemed to be no collective uniformity of walking to your right. People moved every which way and Bosch had to pay attention to avoid collisions. At one point the people moving in front of him suddenly stepped left and right and Bosch almost stumbled over an old woman lying on the pavement, her hands clasped in beseeching prayer above a coin basket. Bosch was able to avoid her and reached into his pocket at the same time.
Eleanor quickly put her hand on his arm.
“No. They say any money you give them is taken by the triads at the end of the day.”
Bosch didn’t question it. He stayed focused on what was ahead of him. They walked another two blocks and then Bosch saw and heard another piece of the puzzle drop into place. Across the street was an entrance to the Mass Transit Railway. A glass enclosure leading to the escalators down to the underground subway.
“Wait,” Bosch said, stopping. “We’re close.”
“What is it?” Eleanor asked.
“The MTR. You could hear it on the video.”
As if on cue the growing whoosh of escaping air rose as a train came into the underground station. It sounded like a wave. Bosch looked down at the photo in his hand and then up at the buildings surrounding him.
“Let’s cross.”
“Can we just wait a minute for Sun Yee? I can’t tell him where to meet us if we keep moving.”
“Once we’re across.”
They hurried across the street on a flashing pedestrian signal. Bosch noticed several ragtag women begging for coins near the MTR entrance. More people were coming up out of the station than were going down. Kowloon was getting more and more crowded. The air was thick with humidity and Bosch could feel his shirt sticking to his back.
Bosch turned around and looked up. They were in an area of older construction. It was almost like having walked through first class to economy on a plane. The buildings on this block and heading further in were shorter-in the twenty-story range-and in poorer condition than those in the blocks closer to the harbor. Harry noticed many open windows and many individual air-conditioning boxes hanging from windows. He could feel the reservoir of adrenaline inside open up.
“Okay, this is it. She’s in one of these buildings.”
He started moving down the block to get away from the crowding and loud conversations surrounding the MTR entrance. He kept his eyes on the upper levels of the buildings surrounding him. He was in a concrete canyon and somewhere up there in one of the crevices was his missing daughter.
“Harry, stop! I just told Sun Yee to meet us at the MTR entrance.”
“You wait for him. I’ll be just down here.”
“No, I’m coming with you.”
Halfway down the block, Bosch stopped and referred to the photo again. But there was no final clue that helped him. He knew he was close but he had reached a point where he needed help or it would be a guessing game. He was surrounded by thousands of rooms and windows. It was beginning to dawn on him that the final part of his search was impossible. He had traveled more than seven thousand miles to find his daughter and he was about as helpless as the ragtag women begging coins from the pavement.
“Let me see the photo,” Eleanor said.
Bosch handed it to her.
“There’s nothing else,” he said. “All these buildings look the same.”
“Let me just look.”
She took her time and Bosch watched her regress two decades to the time she was an FBI agent. Her eyes narrowed and she analyzed the photo as an agent, not as the mother of a missing girl.
“Okay,” she said. “There’s got to be something here.”
“I thought it would be the air conditioners but they’re on every building around here.”
Eleanor nodded but kept her eyes on the photo. Just then Sun came up, his face flushed from the exertion of trying to track a moving target. Eleanor said nothing to him but slightly moved her arm to share the photo with him. They had reached a point in their relationship where words weren’t necessary.
Bosch turned and looked down the corridor of Nathan Road. Whether it was a conscious move or not, he didn’t want to see what he no longer had. From behind he heard Eleanor say, “Wait a minute. There’s a pattern here.”
Bosch turned back.
“What do you mean?”
“We can do this, Harry. There’s a pattern that will lead us right to that room.”
Bosch felt a ghost run down his spine. He moved in close to Eleanor so he could see the photo.
“Show it to me,” he said, urgency fueling each word.
Eleanor pointed to the photo and ran her fingernail along a line of air conditioners reflected in the window.
“Not every window has an air-conditioning unit in the building we are looking for. Some, like this room, have open windows. So there is a pattern. We only have part of it here because we don’t know where this room is in relation to the building.”
“It’s probably in the center. The audio analysis picked up muffled voices cut off by the elevator. The elevator is probably centrally located.”
“That’s good. That helps. Okay, so let’s say windows are dashes and AC boxes are dots. In this reflection we see a pattern for the floor she is on. You start with the room she is in-a dash-and then you go dot, dot, dash, dot, dash.”
She tapped her nail on each part of the pattern on the photo.
“So that’s our pattern,” she added. “Looking up at the building, we’d be looking for it going left to right.”
“Dash, dot, dot, dash, dot, dash,” Bosch repeated. “Windows are dashes.”
“Right,” Eleanor said. “Should we split up the buildings? We know because of the subway that we’re close.”
She turned and looked up at the wall of buildings that ran the entire length of the street. Bosch’s first thought was to not trust any of the buildings to anybody else. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he had scanned each building for the pattern himself. But he held back. Eleanor had found the pattern and made this break. He would ride her wave.
“Let’s start,” he said. “Which one should I take”
Pointing, she said, “You take that one, I’ll take this one and, Sun Yee, you check that one. If you get done, you leapfrog to the next building. We go till we find it. Start at the top. We know from the photo, the room is up high.”
She was right, Bosch realized. It would make the search faster than he’d anticipated. He stepped away and went to work on the building he was assigned. He started on the top floor and worked his way down, his eyes scanning back and forth floor by floor. Eleanor and Sun separated and did the same.
Thirty minutes later Bosch was halfway through scanning his third building when Eleanor called out.
“I’ve got it!”
Bosch headed back to her. She had her hand raised and was counting up the floors of the building directly across the street. Sun soon joined them.
“Fourteenth floor. The pattern starts just a little to the right of center. You were right about that, Harry.”
Bosch counted the floors, his eyes rising with his hopes. He got to the fourteenth level and identified the pattern. There were twelve windows across in all and the pattern fit the last six windows to the right.
“That’s it.”
“Wait a minute. This is only one incidence of the pattern. There could be others. We have to keep-”
“I’m not waiting. You keep looking. If you find another match for the pattern, call me.”
“No, we’re not splitting up.”
He zeroed in on the window that would have been the one that caught the reflection in the video. It was closed now.
He lowered his eyes to the building’s entrance. The first two levels of the building were retail and commercial use. A band of signage, including two large digital screens, wrapped the entire building. Above this the building’s name was affixed to the facade in gold letters and symbols:
CHUNGKING MANSIONS
The main entrance was as wide as a double-car garage door. Through the opening Bosch saw a short set of stairs leading to what looked like a crowded shopping bazaar.
“This is Chungking Mansions,” Eleanor said, recognition in her voice.
“You know it” Bosch asked.
“I’ve never been here but everybody knows about Chungking Mansions.”
“What is it?”
“It’s the melting pot. It’s the cheapest place in the city to stay and it’s the first stop for every third- and fourth-world immigrant who comes here. Every couple of months you read about somebody being arrested or shot or stabbed and this is their address. It’s like a postmodern Casablanca-all in one building.”
“Let’s go.”
Bosch started across the street in the middle of the block, wading into slow-moving traffic, forcing taxis to stop and hoot their horns.
“Harry, what are you doing” Eleanor yelled after him.
Bosch didn’t answer. He made it across and went up the stairs into Chungking Mansions. It was like stepping onto another planet.
The first thing that hit Bosch as he stepped up into the first level of the Chungking Mansions was the smell. Intense odors of spices and fried food invaded his nostrils as his eyes became accustomed to the dimly lit third-world farmers’ market that spread before him in narrow aisles and warrens. The place was just opening for the day but was already crowded with shopkeepers and customers. Six-foot-wide shop stalls offered everything from watches and cell phones to newspapers of every language and foods of any taste. There was an edgy, gritty feel to the place that left Bosch casually checking his wake every few steps. He wanted to know who was behind him.
He moved to the center, where he came to an elevator alcove. There was a line fifteen people deep waiting for two elevators, and Bosch noticed that one elevator was open, dark inside and obviously out of commission. There were two security guards at the front of the line, checking to make sure everybody going up had a room key or was with somebody who had a key. Above the door of the one functioning elevator was a video screen that showed its interior. It was crowded to maximum capacity, sardines in a can.
Bosch was staring at the screen and wondering how he was going to get up to the fourteenth floor when Eleanor and Sun caught up to him. Eleanor roughly grabbed him by the arm.
“Harry, enough with the one-man army! Don’t run off like that again.”
Bosch looked at her. It wasn’t anger he saw in her eyes. It was fear. She wanted to be sure she wasn’t without him when she faced whatever there was to face on the fourteenth floor.
“I just want to keep moving,” Bosch said.
“Then move with us, not away from us. Are we going up”
“We need a key to go up.”
“Then we have to rent a room.”
“Where do we do that?”
“I don’t know.”
Eleanor looked at Sun.
“We have to go up.”
That was all she said but the message was transmitted. He nodded and led them away from the alcove and farther into the labyrinth of shop stalls. Soon they came to a row of counters with signs in multiple languages.
“You rent the room here,” Sun said. “There is more than one hotel here.”
“You mean in the building” Bosch asked. “More than one”
“Yes, many. You pick from here.”
He gestured to the signs on the counters. And Bosch realized that what Sun was saying was that there were multiple hotels within the building, all of them competing for the business of the cut-rate traveler. Some, by virtue of the language on their signs, targeted travelers from specific countries.
“Ask which one has the fourteenth floor,” he said.
“There won’t be a fourteenth floor.”
Bosch realized he was right.
“Fifteenth, then. Which one has the fifteenth floor?”
Sun went down the line, asking about the fifteenth floor, until he stopped at the third counter and waved Eleanor and Bosch over.
“Here.”
Bosch took in the man behind the counter. He looked like he had been there for forty years. His bell-shaped body seemed form-fitted to the stool he sat on. He was smoking a cigarette attached to a four-inch holder made of carved bone. He didn’t like getting smoke in his eyes.
“Do you speak English” Bosch asked.
“Yes, I have English,” the man said tiredly.
“Good. We want a room on the four-the fifteenth floor.”
“All of you? One room”
“Yes, one room.”
“No, you can’t one room. Only two persons.”
Bosch realized that he meant the maximum occupancy of each room was two people.
“Then give me two rooms on fifteen.”
“You do.”
The deskman slid a clipboard across the counter. There was a pen attached with a string and under the clip a thin stack of registration forms. Bosch quickly scribbled his name and address and slid the board back across the counter.
“ID, passport,” the deskman said.
Bosch pulled his passport and the man checked it. He wrote the number down on a piece of scratch paper and handed it back.
“How much?” Bosch asked.
“How long you stay?”
“Ten minutes.”
The deskman moved his eyes over all three of them as he considered what Bosch’s answer meant.
“Come on,” Bosch said impatiently. “How much?”
He reached into his pocket for his cash.
“Two hundred American.”
“I don’t have American. I have Hong Kong dollars.”
“Two room, one thousand five hundred.”
Sun stepped forward and put his hand down over Bosch’s money.
“No, too much.”
He started speaking quickly and authoritatively to the deskman, refusing to let him take advantage of Bosch. But Harry didn’t care. He cared about momentum, not the money. He peeled fifteen hundred off his roll and threw it on the desk.
“Keys,” he demanded.
The deskman disengaged from Sun and swiveled around to the double row of cubbyholes behind him. As he selected two keys from the slots, Bosch looked at Sun and shrugged.
But when the deskman turned back and Bosch put out his hand, he withheld the keys.
“Key deposit one thousand.”
Bosch realized he should never have flashed his roll. He quickly pulled it again, this time holding it below the counter, and peeled off two more bills. He slapped them down on the counter. When the man on the stool finally offered the keys, Harry grabbed them out of his hand and started back to the elevator.
The room keys were old-fashioned brass keys attached to red plastic diamond-shaped fobs with Chinese symbols on them and room numbers. They had been given rooms 1503 and 1504. Along the way back to the alcove, Bosch handed one of the keys to Sun.
“You’re with him or me,” he said to Eleanor.
The line for the elevator had gotten longer. It was now more than thirty men deep and the overhead video showed that the guards were putting eight to ten people on each time, depending on the size of the travelers. The longest fifteen minutes of Bosch’s life were spent waiting to go up. Eleanor tried to calm his growing impatience and anxiety by engaging in conversation.
“When we get up there, what’s the plan?”
Bosch shook his head.
“No plan. We play it like it lays.”
“That’s it? What are we going to do, just knock on doors?”
Bosch shook his head and held up the photo of the reflection again.
“No, we’ll know what room it is. There is one window in this room. One window per room. We know from this that our window is the seventh down on the side that fronts Nathan Road. When we get up there, we hit the seventh room from the end.”
“Hit?”
“I’m not knocking, Eleanor.”
The line moved forward and it was finally their turn. The security guard checked Bosch’s key and passed him and Eleanor toward the elevator door, but then put his arm out behind them and stopped Sun. The elevator was at capacity.
“Harry, wait,” Eleanor said. “Let’s take the next one.”
Bosch pushed onto the elevator and turned around. He looked at Eleanor and then at Sun.
“You wait if you want. I’m not waiting.”
Eleanor hesitated for a moment and then stepped onto the elevator next to Bosch. She called out something in Chinese to Sun as the door closed.
Bosch stared up at the digital floor indicator.
“What did you say to him?”
“That we’d be waiting on fifteen for him.”
Bosch didn’t say anything. It didn’t matter to him. He tried to compose himself and slow his breathing. He was readying himself for what he might find or be confronted with on fifteen.
The elevator moved slowly. It stunk of body odor and fish. Bosch breathed through his mouth to try to avoid it. He realized he was also a contributor to the problem. The last time he’d showered was on Friday morning in L.A. To him, that seemed like a lifetime ago.
The ride up was more excruciating than the wait down below. Finally, on its fifth stop, the door opened on fifteen. By then the only passengers left were Bosch, Eleanor and two men who had pushed sixteen. Harry glanced at the two men and then ran his finger down the row of buttons below the one marked 15. It meant the elevator would stop multiple times on the way down. He stepped off first, with his left hand behind his hip and ready to go for the gun the moment it was necessary. Eleanor came out behind him.
“I guess we’re not going to wait for Sun Yee, are we” she said.
“I’m not,” Bosch said.
“He should be here.”
Bosch wheeled around on her.
“No, he shouldn’t.”
She raised her hands in surrender and stepped back. This wasn’t the time for this. At least she knew it. Bosch turned away and tried to get a sense of their bearings. The elevator alcove was in the center of an H floor design. He moved toward the hallway to the right because he knew this would be the side of the building fronting Nathan Road.
He immediately started counting doors and came up with twelve on the front side of the hall. He moved to the seventh door, room 1514. He felt his heart hit a higher gear as a charge went through him. This was it. This was what he was here for.
He leaned forward, putting his ear to the door’s crack. He listened intently but heard no sounds from within the room.
“Anything” Eleanor whispered.
Bosch shook his head. He put his hand on the knob and tried to turn it. He didn’t expect the door to be unlocked but he wanted a feel for the hardware and how solid it might be.
The knob was old and loose. Bosch had to decide whether to kick the door in and use the element of complete surprise, or to pick the lock and possibly make a sound that would alert whoever was on the other side of the door.
He dropped to one knee and looked closely at the doorknob. It would be a simple pick but there could be a bolt lock or a security chain inside. He thought of something and reached into his pocket.
“Go to our room,” he whispered. “Find out if there’s a dead bolt or a security chain.”
He handed her the key to room 1504.
“Now?” Eleanor whispered.
“Yeah, now,” Bosch whispered back. “I want to know what’s inside here.”
She took the key and hurried down the hall. Bosch pulled his badge wallet out. Before going through airport security he had slid his two best picks behind the badge. He knew the badge would light up on the X-ray but that the two thin metal strips behind it would likely be mistaken for part of the badge. His plan had worked and now he removed the picks and quietly maneuvered them into the doorknob lock.
It took him less than a minute to turn the lock. He held the knob without pushing the door open until Eleanor came hurrying back down the dimly lit hallway.
“There’s a security chain,” she whispered.
Bosch nodded and stood up, still holding the knob with his right hand. He knew he could easily shoulder the door past a security chain.
“Ready?” he whispered.
Eleanor nodded. Bosch then reached back and under his jacket and pulled the gun. He thumbed off the safety and looked at Eleanor. In unison, they mouthed the words one, two, three and he pushed the door open.
There was no security chain in place. The door moved all the way open and Bosch quickly entered the room. Eleanor came in right behind him.
The room was empty.
Bosch stepped through the room to the tiny bathroom. He slapped the dirty plastic shower curtain back from a small, tiled shower space but it was empty. He walked back into the room and looked at Eleanor. He said the words he dreaded.
“She’s gone.”
“Are you sure this is even the room?” she asked.
Bosch was. He had already looked at the pattern of cracks and nail holes on the wall over the bed. He took the folded photo print out of his jacket and handed it to her.
“This is the room.”
He put the gun back under his jacket and in the waistband of his pants. He tried to keep the searing sense of futility and dread from engulfing him. But he wasn’t sure where to go from here.
Eleanor dropped the photo on the bed.
“There’s got to be some sign that she was here. Something.”
“Let’s go. We’ll talk to the guy downstairs. We’ll find out who rented the room Friday.”
“No, wait. We have to look around first.”
She dropped down and looked under the bed.
“Eleanor, she’s not under the bed. She’s gone and we need to keep moving. Call Sun and tell him not to come up. Tell him to get the car.”
“No, this can’t be.”
She moved from looking under the bed to kneeling next to it, elbows on top, as if she were a child praying before bedtime.
“She can’t be gone. We…”
Bosch came around the bed and leaned down behind her. He put his arms around her and pulled her up standing.
“Come on, Eleanor, we have to go. We’re going to find her. I told you we would. We just have to keep moving. That’s all. We have to stay strong and keep moving.”
He ushered her toward the door, but she broke free and headed toward the bathroom. She had to see it empty for herself.
“Eleanor, please.”
She disappeared into the room and Bosch heard her pull the shower curtain back. But then she didn’t return.
“Harry?”
Bosch quickly crossed the room and entered the bathroom. Eleanor was leaning over the side of the toilet and lifting the wastebasket. She brought it around to him. At the bottom of the basket was a small wad of toilet paper with blood on it.
Eleanor retrieved it with two fingers and held it up. The blood had made a stain smaller than a dime. The size of the stain and the wadding of the tissue suggested it had been held against a small cut or wound to stanch the flow of blood.
Eleanor leaned into Bosch, and Harry knew that she was assuming that they were looking at their daughter’s blood.
“We don’t know what this means yet, Eleanor.”
His counsel was ignored. Her body language suggested a breakdown was coming.
“They drugged her,” she said. “They put a needle in her arm.”
“We don’t know that yet. Let’s go downstairs and talk to the guy.”
She didn’t move. She stared at the blood and tissue like it was a red-and-white flower.
“Do you have something to put this in”
Bosch always carried a small quantity of sealable evidence bags in his coat pockets. He pulled one out now and Eleanor placed the wad in it. He closed it and put it into his pocket.
“Okay, let’s go.”
They finally left the room. Bosch had one arm around Eleanor’s back and was looking at her face as they entered the hall. He half expected her to break free and run back to the room. But then he saw some sort of recognition flare in her eyes as she focused down the hall.
“Harry”
Bosch turned, expecting it to be Sun. But it wasn’t.
Two men were approaching from the end of the hall. They were walking side by side with purpose. Bosch realized that they were the two men who had been the last passengers with them in the elevator going up. They had been going to sixteen.
The moment the men saw Harry and Eleanor enter the hallway, their hands went inside their jackets to their waistbands. Bosch saw one man close his grip and instinctively knew he was pulling a gun.
Bosch brought his right arm up to the center of Eleanor’s back and shoved her across the hall toward the elevator alcove. At the same time, he brought his left hand up behind his back and grabbed his gun. One of the men yelled something in a language Bosch didn’t understand and raised his weapon.
Bosch pulled his own gun and brought it around on aim. He opened fire at the same moment shots were fired from one of the men down the hall. Bosch fired repeatedly, at least ten shots, and continued after he saw both men go down.
Holding his aim, he moved forward on them. One was lying on top of the other’s legs. One was dead, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. The other was still alive and breathing shallowly at the same time he was still trying to pull his gun from his waistband. Bosch looked down and saw that the hammer spur had gotten snagged in the waistband of his pants. He had never gotten the gun out.
Bosch reached down and took the man’s hand off the weapon and roughly pulled the gun loose. The man dropped his hand to the floor. Bosch slid the gun across the carpet out of his reach.
There were two wounds in the man’s upper chest. Bosch had gone for body mass and his aim was true. The man was bleeding out quickly.
“Where is she?” Bosch said. “Where is she?”
The man made a grunting sound and blood dripped from his mouth down the side of his face. Bosch knew he would be dead in another minute.
Bosch heard a door open down the hallway and then quickly close. He checked but saw no one. Most people in a place like this wouldn’t want to get involved. Still, he knew it wouldn’t be long before the police stormed the hotel on the report of a shooting.
He turned back to the dying man.
“Where is she?” he repeated. “Where’s my?-”
He saw that the man was dead.
“Shit!”
Bosch got up and turned back to the alcove and Eleanor.
“They had to have-”
She was on the floor. Bosch rushed to her and dropped down to the floor.
“Eleanor!”
He was too late. Her eyes were open and just as blank as the man’s in the hallway.
“No, no, please, no. Eleanor!”
He couldn’t see any wound but she wasn’t breathing and her eyes were fixed. He shook her by the shoulders and got no response. He put one hand behind her head and opened her mouth with the other. He leaned forward to blow air into her lungs. But then he felt the wound. He pulled his hand out of her hair and it was covered in blood. He turned her head and saw the wound in the hairline behind her left ear. He realized she had probably been hit as he had pushed her into the alcove. He had pushed her into the shot.
“Eleanor,” he said quietly.
Bosch leaned forward and put his face down on her chest between her breasts. He smelled her familiar fragrance. He heard a loud, awful groan and realized it had come from himself.
For thirty seconds he didn’t move. He just held her there. Then he heard the elevator open behind him and finally raised himself up.
Sun stepped off the elevator. He took in the scene and his focus quickly went to Eleanor on the floor.
“Eleanor!”
He rushed to her side. Bosch realized it was the first time he had heard him say her name. He had pronounced it Eeeleanor.
“She’s gone,” Bosch said. “I’m sorry.”
“Who did this?”
Bosch started to get up. He spoke in a monotone.
“Over there. Two men fired on us.”
Sun looked into the hallway and saw the two men on the ground. Bosch saw the confusion and horror on his face. He then turned back to Eleanor again.
“No!”
Bosch stepped back into the hall and picked up the gun he had pulled from the man’s waistband. Without examining it, he tucked the weapon into his own pants and went back to the alcove. Sun was on his knees next to Eleanor’s body. He was holding her hand in his.
“Sun Yee, I’m sorry. They took us by surprise.”
He waited a moment. Sun said nothing and didn’t move.
“I have to do something here and then we have to go. I’m sure the police are on their way.”
He put his hand on Sun’s shoulder and pulled him back. Bosch knelt next to Eleanor and picked up her right arm. He wrapped her hand around the gun he had gotten from Sun. He fired a shot into the wall next to the elevator. He then carefully placed her arm back down on the floor, her hand still holding the gun.
“What are you doing?” Sun demanded.
“Gunshot residue. Is the gun clean or will it be traced back to whoever gave it to you”
Sun didn’t respond.
“Sun Yee, is the gun clean?”
“It’s clean.”
“Then let’s go. We have to take the stairs. There’s nothing we can do for Eleanor now.”
Sun bowed his head for a moment and then slowly stood up.
“They came from the stairs,” Bosch said, referring to the gunmen. “We’ll go that way.”
They moved down the hall but Sun suddenly stopped to examine the two men on the floor.
“Come on,” Bosch prompted. “We have to go.”
Sun finally followed. They hit the stairwell door and started down.
“They’re not triad,” Sun said.
Bosch was two steps ahead. He stopped and looked back up at him.
“What? How do you know”
“They’re not Chinese. Not Chinese, not triad.”
“Then what are they?”
“Indonesian, Vietnamese-I think Vietnamese. Not Chinese.”
Bosch started down again and picked up the pace. They had eleven flights of stairs to go. As he moved he thought about this piece of information from Sun and couldn’t see how it fit with what was already known.
Sun fell behind the pace. And no wonder, Bosch thought. When he stepped off that elevator, his life irrevocably changed. That would slow anybody down.
Soon Bosch was a whole floor ahead of him. When he got to the bottom, he opened the exit door a crack to get his bearings. He saw that the door opened onto a pedestrian alley that ran between the Chungking Mansions and the building next door. Bosch could hear traffic and sirens close by and knew the exit was very close to Nathan Road.
The door was suddenly pushed closed. Bosch turned and Sun had one hand flat on the door. He pointed angrily at Harry with the other.
“You! You get her killed!”
“I know. I know, Sun Yee. It’s all on me. My case brought all of this-”
“No, they not triad! I told you?.”
Bosch stared at him for a moment, not comprehending.
“Okay, they’re not triad. But-”
“You show your money and they rob.”
Bosch now understood. He was saying that the two men lying dead on the fifteenth floor with Eleanor had merely been robbers after Bosch’s money. But there was something wrong. It didn’t work. Harry shook his head.
“They were in front of us in the line for the elevator. They didn’t see my money.”
“They were told.”
Bosch considered this and his thoughts turned to the man on the stool. He had wanted to pay that man a visit already. The scenario Sun had spun made the need more immediate.
“Sun Yee, we need to get out of here. The police are going to close all the exits once they get up there and see what they have.”
Sun dropped his hand off the door and Bosch opened it again. It was clear. They stepped out into the alley. Twenty feet to their left was where the alley opened on Nathan Road.
“Where’s the car?”
Sun pointed toward the opposite end of the alley.
“I paid a man to watch it.”
“Okay, get the car and drive around front. I’m going back inside but I’ll be out front in five minutes.”
“What will you do”
“You don’t want to know.”
Bosch walked out of the alley onto Nathan Road and immediately saw the crowd of onlookers gathered to watch the police response to the call inside the Chungking Mansions. Police and fire rescue vehicles were arriving and stopping and causing traffic snarls and confusion. Barricades had not yet been set up, as the arriving officers were probably too busy trying to get up to the fifteenth floor to find out what had happened. Harry was able to join the end of a flow of paramedics carrying a stretcher up the steps and into the first level of the building.
The commotion and confusion had drawn many of the shopkeepers and customers into a crowd around the elevator alcove. Someone was barking orders at the crowd in Chinese but no one seemed to be reacting. Bosch pushed his way through and got to the rear aisle where the hotel desks were. He saw that the diversion had worked in his favor. The aisle was completely empty.
When he got to the desk where he had rented the two rooms, he saw that a security gate had been pulled halfway down from the ceiling, indicating the desk was closed. But the man on the stool was there with his back turned while he sat at the rear counter, shoving paperwork into a briefcase. It looked like he was getting ready to leave.
Without losing momentum Bosch jumped up and slid over the counter and under the gate, smashing into the man on the stool and knocking him to the floor. Bosch jumped on top of him and hit him twice in the face with his fist. The man’s head was on the concrete floor and he absorbed the full impact of the punches.
“No, please!” he managed to spit out between punches.
Bosch quickly glanced back over the counter to make sure it was still clear. He then pulled the gun from behind him and pressed the muzzle into the roll of fat below the man’s chin.
“You got her killed, you motherfucker! And I’m going to kill you.”
“No, please! Sir, please!”
“You told them, didn’t you? You told them I had money.”
“No, I have not.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me or I’ll kill you right now. You told them!”
The man lifted his head off the floor.
“Okay, listen, listen, please. I said nobody to get hurt. You understand? I said nobody to-”
Bosch pulled the gun back and brought it down hard on the man’s nose. His head snapped back against the concrete. Bosch pushed the barrel into his neck.
“I don’t care what you said. They killed her, you fuck! Do you understand that?”
The man was dazed and bleeding, his eyes blinking as he wavered in and out of consciousness. With his right hand, Bosch slapped his cheek.
“Stay awake. I want you to see it coming.”
“Please, no…I am very sorry, sir. Please don’t-”
“Okay, this is what you’re going to do. You want to live, then you tell me who rented room fifteen fourteen on Friday. Fifteen fourteen. You tell me right now.”
“Okay, I tell you. I show you.”
“Okay, you show me.”
Bosch pulled his weight back off him. The man was bleeding from the mouth and nose and Bosch was bleeding from the knuckles of his left hand. He quickly reached up and pulled the security fence all the way down to the counter.
“Show me. Now.”
“Okay, it is here.”
He pointed to the briefcase he had been loading. He reached into it and Bosch raised the gun and pointed it at his head.
“Easy.”
The man pulled out a stack of room registration forms. Bosch saw his own on top. He reached over and grabbed it off the stack and crumpled it into the pocket of his coat. All the while he kept his aim on the man.
“Friday, room fifteen fourteen. Find it.”
The man put the stack of forms on the back counter and started going through them. Bosch knew he was taking too much time. The police would come any moment to the hotel desks and find them. It had been at least fifteen minutes since the shootings on fifteen. He saw a shelf under the front counter and put the gun there. If the police caught him with it, he’d go to prison, no matter what.
Looking at the robber’s gun as he placed it down prompted the realization that he had left his ex-wife and the mother of his daughter lying dead and alone up there on fifteen. It put a spear through Bosch’s chest. He closed his eyes for a moment to try to push the thought and vision away.
“Here it is.”
Bosch opened his eyes. The man was turning to him from the rear counter. Bosch heard a distinct metal snap. He saw the man’s right arm start to swing around and up from his side and Bosch knew there was a knife before he saw it. In a split-second decision, he chose to block rather than parry the attack. He moved forward and into the man, raising his left forearm to block the knife and driving his right fist toward his attacker’s throat.
The knife tore through the sleeve of Bosch’s jacket and he felt the blade slice into the inside of his forearm. But that was all the damage he took. His punch to the throat sent the man backwards and he fell on the overturned stool. Bosch dropped on him again, grabbing his knife hand by the wrist and smashing it back repeatedly against the floor until the weapon clattered loose on the concrete.
Bosch raised himself up while still holding the man down by the throat. He could feel blood sliding down his arm from the wound. He thought again about Eleanor lying dead up on fifteen. Her life and everything taken from her before she could even say a word. Before she could see her daughter safe again.
Bosch raised his left fist and struck the man viciously in the ribs. He did it again and again, punching body and face, until he was sure most of the man’s ribs and jaw were broken and he’d lapsed into unconsciousness.
Bosch was winded. He picked up the switchblade and folded it closed and dropped it into his pocket. He moved off the man’s unmoving body and gathered the fallen registration forms. He then got up and shoved them back into the counterman’s briefcase and closed it. He leaned over the counter to look out through the security gate. It was still clear in the aisle, though he could now hear announcements being made through a bullhorn coming from the elevator alcove. He knew that police procedure would have to be to shut the place down and secure it.
He raised the security gate two feet and then grabbed the gun off the shelf and put it into his rear waistband. He climbed over the counter with the briefcase and slid out. After checking to make sure he had left no blood on the counter, he lowered the gate and walked away.
As he moved, Bosch held his arm up to check the wound through the rip in his coat sleeve. It looked superficial but it was a bleeder. He pulled his coat sleeve up to bunch it around the wound and absorb the blood. He checked the floor behind him to make sure he wasn’t dripping.
At the elevator alcove the police were herding everybody out to the street and into a cordoned-off area where they would be held for questioning about what they might have heard or seen. Bosch knew he couldn’t go through that process. He made a U-turn and headed down an aisle toward the other side of the building. He got to an intersection of aisles and caught a glimpse to his left of two men hurry-ing in a direction away from the police activity.
Bosch followed, realizing he wasn’t the only one in the building who wouldn’t want to be questioned by the police.
The two men disappeared into a narrow passageway between two of the now-shuttered shops. Bosch followed.
The passage led to a staircase down into a basement where there were rows of storage cages for the shopkeepers above, who had such limited public retail space. Bosch followed the men down one aisle and then turned right. He saw them heading toward a glowing red Chinese symbol over a door and knew it had to be an exit. The men pushed through and an alarm sounded. They slammed the door behind them.
Bosch ran toward the door and pushed through. He found himself in the same pedestrian alley he had been in earlier. He quickly walked out to Nathan Road and looked for Sun and the Mercedes.
Headlights flashed from half a block away and Bosch saw the car waiting ahead of the clot of police vehicles parked haphazardly in front of the entrance to Chungking Mansions. Sun pulled away from the curb and cruised up to him. Bosch at first went to the back door but then realized Eleanor wasn’t with them anymore. He got in the front.
“You took long time,” Sun said.
“Yeah, let’s get out of here.”
Sun glanced down at the briefcase with Bosch’s bleeding knuckles wrapped around the handle. He said nothing. He accelerated and headed away from the Chungking Mansions. Bosch turned in his seat to look back. His eyes rose up the building to the floor where they had left Eleanor. Somehow, Bosch had always thought they would grow old together. Their divorce didn’t matter. Other lovers didn’t matter. They’d always had an on-and-off relationship but that didn’t matter either. It had always been in the back of his mind that the separations were what were temporary. In the long run they would be together. Of course, they had Madeline together and that would always be their bond. But he had believed there would be more.
Now all of that was gone and it was because of the choices he had made. Whether it was because of his case or his momentary lapse in flashing his money didn’t really matter. All roads led back to him and he wasn’t sure how he was going to live with it.
He leaned forward and put his head in his hands.
“Sun Yee, I’m sorry…I loved her, too.”
Sun didn’t respond for a long time and when he spoke, he brought Bosch out of the downward spiral and back into focus.
“We must find your daughter now. For Eleanor we will do this.”
Bosch straightened up and nodded. He then leaned forward and pulled the briefcase onto his lap.
“Pull over when you can. You have to look at this stuff.”
Sun made several turns and put several blocks between them and Chungking Mansions before pulling to a stop against the curb. They were across the street from a ramshackle market that was crowded with westerners.
“What’s this place” Bosch asked.
“This is the jade market. Very famous for westerners. You will not be noticed here.”
Bosch nodded. He opened the briefcase and handed Sun the unruly stack of hotel registration forms. There were at least fifty of them. Most had been filled out in Chinese and were unreadable to Bosch.
“What do I look for” Sun asked.
“Date and room number. Friday was the eleventh. We want that and room fifteen fourteen. It’s got to be in that stack.”
Sun started reading. Bosch watched for a moment and then looked out the window at the jade market. Through the open entry points he saw rows and rows of stalls, old men and women selling their wares under a flimsy roof of plywood and tenting. It was crowded with customers coming and going.
Bosch thought of the jade monkeys on red twine that he had found in his daughter’s room. She had been here. He wondered if she had come this far from home on her own or with friends, maybe with He and Quick.
Outside one of the entrances an old woman was selling incense sticks and had a bucket fire going. On a folding table next to her were rows of papier-mâché items for sale to be burned. Bosch saw a row of tigers and wondered why a dead ancestor would need a tiger.
“Here,” Sun said.
He held a registration form up for Bosch to read.
“What’s it say?”
“Tuen Mun. We go there.”
It sounded to Bosch like he had said Tin Moon.
“What’s Tin Moon?”
“Tuen Mun. It is in the New Territories. This man lives there.”
“What’s his name”
“Peng Qingcai.”
Qingcai, Bosch thought. An easy jump to an Americanized name to use with girls at the mall might be Quick. Maybe Peng Qingcai was He’s older brother, the boy Madeline had left the mall with on Friday.
“Does the registration have his age or birth date?”
“No, no age.”
It was a long shot. Bosch had not put his birth date down when he had rented the rooms, and the deskman had only taken his passport number, none of the other particulars of identity.
“The address is there?”
“Yes.”
“Can you find it?”
“Yes, I know this place.”
“Good. Let’s go. How long?”
“It is long time in the car. We go north and then west. It will take one hour or more. The train would be faster.”
Time was at a premium but Bosch knew the car gave them autonomy.
“No,” he said. “Once we find her we’ll need the car.”
Sun nodded his agreement and pulled the car away from the curb. Once they were on their way, Bosch shrugged off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeve to take a better look at the knife wound on his arm. It was a two-inch slash on the upper inside of his forearm. Blood was finally clotting in the wound.
Sun looked over at it quickly and then back at the road.
“Who did this to you?”
“The man behind the counter.”
Sun nodded.
“He set us up, Sun Yee. He saw my money and set us up. I was so stupid.”
“It was a mistake.”
He had certainly backed off his angry accusation in the stairwell. But Bosch wasn’t backing off his own assessment. He had gotten Eleanor killed.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t the one who paid for it,” he said.
Bosch pulled the switchblade out of the jacket pocket and reached to the backseat for the blanket. He cut a long strip off the blanket and wrapped it around his arm, tucking the end underneath. He made sure it wasn’t too tight but that it would keep blood from running down his arm.
He rolled his shirtsleeve back down. It was soaked with blood between the elbow and cuff. He pulled his jacket back on. Luckily it was black and the bloodstains weren’t readily noticeable.
As they moved north through Kowloon the urban blight and crowding grew exponentially. It was like any large city, Bosch thought. The further you got from the money, the more gritty and desperate the appearances grew.
“Tell me about Tuen Mun,” he said.
“Very crowded,” Sun said. “Only Chinese. Heavy-duty.”
“Heavy-duty triad?”
“Yes. It is not a good place for your daughter to be.”
Bosch didn’t think it would be. But he saw one thing positive about it. Moving in and hiding a white girl might be hard to do without notice. If Madeline was being held in Tuen Mun, he would find her. They would find her.
In the past five years, Harry Bosch’s only financial contribution to the support of his daughter had been to pay for her trips to Los Angeles, give her spending money from time to time and write an annual check for twelve thousand dollars to cover half her tuition to the exclusive Happy Valley Academy. This last contribution was not the result of any demand by his ex-wife. Eleanor Wish had made a very comfortable living and never once asked Bosch directly or indirectly through legal channels for a dollar of child support. It was Bosch who needed and demanded to be allowed to contribute in some way. Helping to pay for her schooling allowed him wrongly or rightly to feel that he played some sort of integral part in his daughter’s upbringing.
Consequently, he grew to have a paternal involvement in her studies. Whether in person on visits to Hong Kong or early every Sunday morning-for him-on their weekly overseas phone call, Bosch’s routine was to discuss Madeline’s schoolwork and quiz her about her current assignments.
From all of this came an incidental, textbook knowledge of Hong Kong history. He therefore knew that the place he was now heading toward, the New Territories, was not actually new to Hong Kong. The vast geographic zone surrounding the Kowloon peninsula had been added by lease to Hong Kong more than a century ago as a buffer against outside invasion of the British colony. When the lease was up and the sovereignty of all of Hong Kong was transferred from the British back to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, the New Territories remained part of the Special Administrative Region, which allowed Hong Kong to continue to function as one of the world’s centers of capitalism and culture, as a unique place in the world where East meets West.
The NT was vast and primarily rural but with government-built population centers that were densely crowded with the poorest and most uneducated citizens of the SAR. Crime was higher and money scarcer. The lure of the triads was strong. Tuen Mun would be one of these places.
“Many pirates were here when I grew up,” Sun said.
It was the first either he or Bosch had spoken in more than twenty minutes of driving as each man had lapsed into private thoughts. They were just entering the city on a freeway. Bosch saw row after row of tall residential structures that were so plainly uniform and monolithic that he knew they had to be government-built public housing estates. They were surrounded by rolling hills crowded with smaller homes in older neighborhoods. This was no gleaming skyline. It was drab and depressing, a fishing village turned into a massive vertical housing complex.
“What do you mean by that? You’re from Tuen Mun?”
“I grew up here, yes. Until I was the age of twenty-two.”
“Were you in a triad, Sun Yee?”
Sun didn’t answer. He acted like he was too busy engaging the turn signal and making important checks of the mirrors as they exited the freeway.
“I don’t care, you know,” Bosch said. “I only care about one thing.”
Sun nodded.
“We will find her.”
“I know that.”
They had crossed a river and entered a canyon created by the walls of forty-story buildings lining both sides of the street.
“What about the pirates” Bosch asked. “Who were they?”
“Smugglers. They came up the river from the South China Sea. They controlled the river.”
Bosch was wondering if Sun was trying to tell him something by mentioning this.
“What did they smuggle?”
“Everything. They brought in guns and drugs. People.”
“And what did they take out?”
Sun nodded as if Bosch had answered a question rather than asked one.
“What do they smuggle out now?”
It was a long moment before Sun answered.
“Electronics. American DVDs. Children sometimes. Girls and boys.”
“And where do they go?”
“This depends.”
“On what?”
“What they want them for. Some of it is sex. Some is organs. Many mainlanders buy boys because they have no sons.”
Bosch thought of the wad of toilet paper with the bloodstain on it. Eleanor had jumped to the conclusion that they had injected Madeline, that they had drugged her to better control her. He now realized that they could have extracted rather than injected, that blood-typing would require a withdrawal of blood from a vein with a syringe. The wad could have been a compress to stop the blood after the needle was removed.
“She would be very valuable, wouldn’t she?”
“Yes.”
Bosch closed his eyes. Everything changed. His daughter’s abductors might not be simply holding her until Bosch kicked Chang loose in Los Angeles. They might be preparing to move her or sell her into a netherworld of dark choices from which she would never return. He tried to push the possibilities out of the way. He looked out the side window.
“We have time,” he said, knowing full well he was talking to himself and not to Sun. “Nothing’s happened to her yet. They wouldn’t do anything until they heard from L.A. Even if the plan was never to give her back, they wouldn’t do anything yet.”
Bosch turned to look at Sun and he nodded in agreement.
“We will find her,” he said.
Bosch reached behind his back and pulled out the gun he had taken from one of the men he had killed in the Chungking Mansions. He studied it for the first time and immediately recognized the weapon.
“I think you were right about those guys being Vietnamese,” he said.
Sun looked over at the weapon and then back at the road.
“Please do not shoot the gun in the car,” he said.
Despite everything that had happened, Bosch smiled.
“I won’t. I don’t need to. I already know how to use this one and I doubt the guy was carrying a gun that didn’t work.”
Bosch held the weapon in his left hand and looked down the sight to the floor. He then held it up and studied it again. It was an American-made Colt.45, Model 1911A1. He had carried the exact same gun as a soldier in Vietnam almost forty years before. When his job was to drop down into the tunnels and seek out and kill the enemy.
Bosch ejected the magazine and the extra round from the chamber. He had the maximum eight rounds. He checked the action several times and then started to reload the gun. He stopped when he noticed something scratched into the side of the magazine. He held it up closely to try to read it.
There were initials and numbers hand-etched in the black steel siding of the magazine, but time and use-the loading and reloading of the weapon-had nearly worn them away. Angling the surface for better light, Bosch read JFE Sp4, 27th.
All at once, Bosch remembered the care and protection all tunnel rats had placed in their weapons and ammunition. When all you went down into the black with was your.45, a flashlight and four extra ammo clips, you checked everything twice and then you checked it again. A thousand feet into a line was not where you wanted to find you had a weapon jam, wet ammo or dead batteries. Bosch and his fellow rats marked and hoarded their clips the way surface soldiers guarded their cigarettes and Playboy magazines.
He studied the etching closely. Whoever JFE was, he had been a spec 4 with the 27th Infantry. That meant he could have been a rat. Bosch wondered if the gun he was holding had been left behind in a tunnel somewhere in the Iron Triangle, and whether it had been taken from JFE’s cold, dead hand.
“We are here,” Sun said.
Bosch looked up. Sun had stopped in the middle of the street. There was no traffic behind them. He pointed through the windshield at a government apartment tower so tall that Bosch had to lean down beneath the visor to see its roofline. Open walkways along the front of every floor offered views of the front doors and windows of what must have been three hundred different dwellings. Laundry hung over the walkway railings at different intervals on almost every floor, turning the drab facade of the building into a colorful mosaic that differentiated it from the duplicate buildings on either side of it. A sign in multiple languages over the tunnel-like entrance at center announced incongruously that the place was called Miami Beach Garden Estates.
“The address is on the sixth floor,” Sun said after double-checking the Chungking Mansions registration form.
“Park it and we’ll go up.”
Sun nodded and pulled past the building. At the next intersection he made a U-turn and drove back, pulling to the curb in front of a playground that was surrounded by a ten-foot fence and crowded inside with children and their mothers. Bosch knew he had parked there as an edge against having the car stolen or vandalized while they left it alone.
They got out and walked along the fence line until turning left toward the entrance to the building.
The tunnel was lined on both sides with mailboxes, most of which had popped locks and small graffiti insignias scrawled on them. The passageway led to a bank of elevators where two women holding the hands of small children waited. They paid no mind to Sun and Bosch. A security guard sat behind a tiny counter but never looked up from his newspaper.
Bosch and Sun followed the women onto the elevator. One of the women inserted a key at the bottom of the control board and then pushed two buttons. Before she pulled the key Sun quickly reached over and hit the 6 button.
The first stop was on six. Sun and Bosch moved down the walkway to the third door on the left side of the building. Bosch noticed that against the railing in front of the door of the next apartment down was a small altar with an ash can that was still smoking following a sacrifice to the hungry ghosts. The odor of burnt plastic was in the air.
Bosch took a position to the right of the door where Sun had stopped. He swung his arm back underneath his coat and gripped the handgun but didn’t pull it. He felt the clotted blood in the wound on his arm break free with the movement. He was going to start bleeding again.
Sun looked at him and Bosch nodded that he was ready. Sun knocked on the door and they waited.
No one answered.
He knocked again. This time louder.
They waited again. Bosch glanced out over the playground to the Mercedes and saw that so far it had been left alone.
No one answered.
Sun finally stepped back away from the door.
“What do you wish to do?”
Bosch looked down at the smoking ash can thirty feet away.
“There’s somebody home next door. Let’s ask them if they’ve seen this guy around.”
Sun led the way and knocked on the next door. This time it was opened. A small woman of about sixty peeked out. Sun nodded and smiled and spoke to her in Chinese. Soon the woman relaxed and opened the door a little bit wider. Sun kept talking and soon after that she opened it all the way and stood aside so they could enter.
As Bosch stepped over the threshold Sun whispered to him.
“Five hundred Hong Kong dollars. I promised her.”
“No problem.”
It was a small two-room apartment. The first room served as kitchen, dining room and living room. It was sparely furnished and smelled like hot cooking oil. Bosch peeled five hundred-dollar bills off his roll without taking it out of his pocket. He put the bills under a dish of salt that was on the kitchen table. He then pulled out a chair and sat down.
Sun remained standing and so did the woman. He continued his conversation in Chinese, pointing at Bosch for a moment. Bosch nodded and smiled and acted like he knew what was being said.
Three minutes went by and then Sun broke off the interview so he could summarize for Bosch.
“She is Fengyi Mai. She lives here alone. She said she has not seen Peng Qingcai since yesterday morning. He lives next door with his mother and his younger sister. She has not seen them either. But she heard them yesterday afternoon. Through the wall.”
“How old is Peng Qingcai?”
Sun communicated the question and then translated the response.
“She thinks he is eighteen. He doesn’t go to school anymore.”
“What’s his sister’s name?”
Another back and forth and then Sun reported that the sister’s name was He. But he didn’t pronounce it the way Harry’s daughter had.
Bosch thought about all of this for a few moments before asking the next question.
“She’s sure it was yesterday that she saw him? Saturday morning? What was he doing?”
While Bosch waited for the translation he watched the woman closely. She had maintained good eye contact with Sun during the earlier questions but she began looking away while answering the latest questions.
“She is sure,” Sun said. “She heard a sound outside her door yesterday morning and when she opened it, Peng was there, burning an offering. He was using her altar.”
Bosch nodded but he was sure there was something the woman had left out or was lying about.
“What did he burn?”
Sun asked the woman. She looked down the whole time she gave her answer.
“She said he burned paper money.”
Bosch stood up and went to the door. Outside he turned the ash can over on the walkway. It was smaller than a conventional water bucket. Smoking black ash spread across the walkway. Fengyi Mai had obviously burned a sacrifice within the last hour or so. He grabbed an incense stick from the altar and used it to poke through the hot debris. There were a few pieces of unburned cardboard but for the most part it was all ash. Bosch pushed it around some more and soon uncovered a piece of melted plastic. It was charred black and shapeless. He tried to pick it up but it was too hot.
He went back inside the apartment.
“Ask her when she last used the altar and what it was she burned.”
Sun translated the answer.
“She used it this morning. She also burned paper money.”
Bosch was still standing.
“Ask her why she’s lying.”
Sun hesitated.
“Ask her.”
Sun asked the question and the woman denied lying. Bosch nodded when he received her answer, then walked over to the table. He lifted the dish of salt off the five bills and put them back in his pocket.
“Tell her we pay nothing for lies, but that I’ll pay two thousand for the truth.”
The woman protested after hearing Sun’s translation but then Sun’s demeanor changed and he angrily barked at her, and the woman clearly got scared. She put her hands together as if to beg his forgiveness and then walked into another room.
“What did you tell her?” Bosch asked.
“I told her she must tell the truth or she would lose her apartment.”
Bosch raised his eyebrows. Sun had certainly kicked it up a notch.
“She believes I am police officer and you are my supervisor,” he added.
“How’d she get that idea?” Bosch asked.
Before Sun could answer, the woman came back carrying a small cardboard box. She went directly to Bosch and handed it to him, then bowed as she backed away. Harry opened it and found the remains of a melted and burnt cell phone.
While the woman gave Sun an explanation, Bosch pulled his own cell phone and compared it to the burned phone. Despite the damage, it was clear the phone the woman retrieved from her ash can was a match.
“She said Peng was burning that,” Sun said. “It made a very foul smell that would be displeasing to the ghosts so she removed it.”
“It’s my daughter’s.”
“Are you sure?”
“I bought it for her. I’m sure.”
Bosch opened his own phone and went to the photo files. He scrolled through his photos of his daughter until he found one of her in her school uniform.
“Show her this. See if she’s seen her with Peng.”
Sun showed the phone to the woman and asked the question. The woman shook her head as she responded, putting her hands together in prayer to underline that she was telling the truth now. Bosch didn’t need the translation. He stood up and pulled out his money. He put two thousand Hong Kong dollars on the table-less than three hundred American-and headed to the door.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They knocked on Peng’s door once again but got no answer. Bosch knelt down to untie and retie his shoe. He studied the lock on the doorknob as he did so.
“What do we do?” Sun asked after Bosch stood back up.
“I have picks. I can open the door.”
Bosch could see reluctance immediately cloud Sun’s face, even with the sunglasses.
“My daughter could be in there. And if she isn’t, there might be something that tells us where she is. You stand behind me and block anyone’s view. I’ll get us in in less than a minute.”
Sun looked out at the wall of duplicate buildings surrounding them like giants.
“We watch first?,” he said.
“Watch?” Bosch asked. “Watch what?”
“The door. Peng could come back. He could lead us to Madeline.”
Bosch looked at his watch. It was half past one.
“I don’t think we have time. We can’t go static here.”
“What is ‘static?’”
“We can’t stand still, man. We have to keep moving if we are going to find her.”
Sun turned from the view and looked directly at Bosch.
“One hour. We watch. If we come back to open the door, you don’t take the gun.”
Bosch nodded. He understood. Getting caught breaking and entering was one thing. Getting caught breaking and entering with a gun was about ten years of something else.
“Okay, one hour.”
They went down the elevator and out through the tunnel. Along the way Bosch tapped Sun on the arm and asked him which one of the mailboxes had Peng’s apartment number on it. Sun found the box and they saw that the lock had long been punched out. Bosch glanced back through the tunnel to the security guard reading the paper. He opened the mailbox and saw two letters.
“Looks like nobody got Saturday’s mail,” Bosch said. “I think Peng and his family have split.”
They returned to the car and Sun said he wanted to move it to a less noticeable spot now that they were back in it. He drove up the street, turned around and then parked by a containment wall that surrounded the trash bins for the building across the street and down one. They still had a view of the sixth-floor walkway and the door to Peng’s apartment.
“I think we’re wasting our time,” Bosch said. “They’re not coming back.”
“One hour, Harry. Please.”
Bosch noted it was the first time Sun had called him by his name. It didn’t placate him.
“You’re giving him another hour’s lead time, that’s all.”
Bosch pulled the box out of his jacket pocket. He opened it up and looked at the phone.
“You watch the place,” he said. “I’m going to work on this.”
The plastic hinges on the phone had melted and Bosch struggled to open it. Finally, it broke in two when he applied too much pressure. The LCD screen was cracked and partially melted. Bosch put that part aside and concentrated on the other half. The battery compartment cover was melted, its seams fused together. He opened his door and leaned out. He struck the phone on the curb three times, harder each time, until the impacts finally cracked the seams and the compartment cover fell off.
He pulled back in and closed the door. The phone’s battery appeared to be intact but again the deformed plastic made it difficult to remove. This time he pulled his badge case and removed one of his picks. He used it to pry the battery out. Beneath it was the cradle for the phone’s memory card.
It was empty.
“Shit!”
Bosch threw the phone down into the foot well. Another dead end.
He looked at his watch. It had only been twenty minutes since he had agreed to give Sun the hour. But Bosch couldn’t remain still. All of his instincts told him he had to get into that apartment. His daughter could be in there.
“Sorry, Sun Yee,” he said. “You can wait here, but I can’t. I’m going in.”
He leaned forward and pulled the gun out of his waistband. He wanted to leave it outside the Mercedes in case they were caught in the apartment and the police connected them with the car. He wrapped the gun in his daughter’s blanket, opened the door and got out. He walked through an opening in the containment wall and put the bundle on top of one of the overfull trash bins. He would easily be able to retrieve it when he got back.
When he stepped out of the containment area, he found Sun out of the car and waiting
“Okay,” Sun said. “We go.”
They started back to Peng’s building.
“Let me ask you something, Sun Yee. Do you ever take those shades off”
Sun’s answer came without explanation.
“No.”
Once again the security guard in the lobby never looked up. The building was big enough that there was always somebody with a key waiting for an elevator. In five minutes they were back in front of Peng’s door. While Sun stood at the railing as a lookout and visual block, Bosch went down to one knee and worked the lock. It took him longer than expected-almost four minutes-but he got it open.
“Okay,” he said.
Sun turned away from the railing and followed Bosch into the apartment.
Before he had even closed the door Bosch knew they would find death in the apartment. There was no overpowering odor, no blood on the walls, no physical indication at all in the first room. But after attending more than five hundred murder scenes over the years as a cop, he had developed what he considered a sense for blood. He had no scientific backing to his theory, but Bosch believed that spilled blood changed the composition of air in an enclosed environment. And he sensed that change now. The fact that it could be his own daughter’s blood made the recognition dreadful.
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 sacrifice 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.
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 that 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.
“What’s it say?”
“Wrong number.”
“That’s it?”
“He did not accept the deke.”
“Shit.”
“What now?”
“Send another message. Tell him we meet or we go to the police.”
“Too dangerous. He might decide just to get rid of her.”
“Not if he has a buyer lined up. You said she’s valuable. Whether it was for sex or organs, she’s valuable. He won’t get rid of her. He might hurry up the deal and that’s the chance we take, but he won’t get rid of her.”
“We don’t know if this is even the right person. This is just a phone number on your daughter’s list.”
Bosch shook his head. He knew Sun was right. Shooting messages into the dark was too risky. His thoughts took him back to David Chu. The AGU detective might very well be the leak in the investigation that got Bosch’s daughter abducted. Did he risk calling him now?
“Sun Yee, do you have anybody in casino security who could run this number down and get us a name and billing address?”
Sun considered the question for a long moment and then shook his head.
“No, this is not possible with my associates. There will be an investigation because of Eleanor…”
Bosch understood. Sun had to do what he could to limit the blowback on his company and the casino. That tipped the scale toward Chu.
“Okay. I think I might know someone.”
Bosch opened his phone to go to his contact list but then realized the card from his daughter’s phone was still in place. He started through the process of replacing his own card and returning the phone to his settings and contacts.
“Who will you call?” Sun asked.
“A guy I was working with. He’s in the Asian Gang Unit and has contacts over here.”
“Is he the man you think could be the leak?”
Bosch nodded. Good question.
“I can’t rule him out. But it could have been anyone in his unit or another police department we were working with. At the moment, I don’t see where we have any choice.”
When he had the phone rebooted, he went to his contact list and found Chu’s cell number. He made the call and checked his watch. It was almost midnight Saturday night in Los Angeles.
Chu answered after one ring.
“Detective Chu.”
“David, it’s Bosch. Sorry to call so late.”
“Not late at all. I’m still working.”
Bosch was surprised.
“On the Li case? What’s happening”
“Yes, I spent a good part of the evening with Robert Li. I am trying to convince him to cooperate with a prosecution of Chang for extortion.”
“Is he going to?”
There was a pause before Chu answered.
“So far no. But I have till Monday morning to work on him. You’re still in Hong Kong, right? Have you found your daughter”
Chu’s voice picked up an urgent tone as he asked about Madeline.
“Not yet. But I have a line on her. That’s where I need your help. Can you run down a Hong Kong cell number for me?”
Another pause.
“Harry, the police there are much more capable of this than I am.”
“I know, but I am not working with the police on this.”
“You’re not.”
It wasn’t a question.
“I can’t risk the potential for a leak. I’m close. I’ve tracked her all day and it’s down to this number. I think it belongs to the man who has her. Can you help me?”
Chu didn’t respond for a long moment.
“If I help you, my source on this will be within the Hong Kong police, you know that, right?”
“But you don’t have to tell them the reason you need the information or who you are going to give it to.”
“But if things blow up over there, it could come back to me.”
Bosch began to lose his patience but tried to keep it out of his tone as he bluntly gave voice to the nightmare he knew was unfolding.
“Look, there isn’t a lot of time. Our information is that she is being sold. Most likely today. Maybe right now. I need this information, Dave. Can you get it for me or not?”
This time there was no hesitation.
“Give me the number.”
Chu said he would need at least an hour to run the cell number down through his contacts in the Hong Kong police. Bosch hated the idea of giving up so much time when every minute could be the minute his daughter changed to the next set of hands, but he had no choice. He believed that Chu well understood the urgency of the situation. He closed the phone call by telling Chu not to share Bosch’s request with anyone inside the department.
“You still think there’s a leak, Harry?”
“I know there is but now’s not the time to talk about it.”
“What about me? You trust me?”
“I called you, didn’t I?”
“I don’t think you trust anybody, Harry. You called me because there was no one else.”
“You know what? Just work that number and get back to me.”
“Sure, Harry. Whatever you say.”
Bosch closed the phone and looked at Sun.
“He said it might take as long as an hour.”
Sun remained impassive. He turned the key and started the car.
“You should get food while we wait.”
Bosch shook his head.
“No, I can’t eat. Not with her out there and…what happened. My stomach…I couldn’t keep anything down.”
Sun turned the car back off. They would wait there for Chu’s callback.
The minutes went by very slowly and felt very costly. Bosch reviewed his moves going back to the moments he crouched behind the counter at Fortune Liquors and examined the body of John Li. He came to fully realize that his relentless pursuit of the killer had put others in jeopardy. His daughter. His ex-wife. A whole family in faraway Tuen Mun. The burden of guilt he would now carry would be the heaviest of his life and he was not sure he was up to it.
For the first time he put if into the equation of his life. If he got his daughter back he would find a way to redeem himself. If he never saw her again, there could be no redemption.
All things would end.
These realizations made him physically shudder and he turned and opened the car door.
“I’m going to take a walk.”
He stepped out and closed the door before Sun could ask him a question. There was a path that went along the river and he started walking it. He had his head down, his mind on dark thoughts and he did not notice the people who passed him on the path or the boats that moved swiftly by him on the river.
Eventually, Bosch realized he wasn’t helping himself or his daughter by dwelling on things he could not control. He tried to shake off the dark shroud that was coming down on him and focus on something useful. The question about the memory card from his daughter’s phone was still open and bothersome. Why had Madeline stored the cell number marked Tuen Mun on her phone?
After grinding the question down he finally saw an answer that had escaped him earlier. Madeline had been abducted. Therefore, her phone would have been taken away from her. So it was probably her abductor, not Madeline, who had stored the number on her phone. This conclusion led to a cascade of possibilities. Peng had taken the video and sent it to Bosch. So he was in possession of the phone. He could very well have been using it rather than his own phone to complete the abduction and set up the exchange of Madeline for whatever he had bartered her for.
He probably saved the number to the card. Either because he was using it a lot in the negotiations or because he simply wanted to leave a trail just in case something happened. And this would be why he hid the card in the salt. So somebody would find it.
Bosch turned around to take his new conclusion back to Sun. He was a hundred yards away and could see Sun already standing outside the car, excitedly waving him back. Bosch looked down at the phone in his hand and checked the screen. He had not missed a call and there was no way Sun’s excitement could be related to his call to Chu.
Bosch started trotting back.
Sun dropped back into the car and closed the door. Bosch soon jumped in beside him.
“What?”
“Another message. A text.”
Sun held up his phone to show Bosch the message, even though it was in Chinese.
“What’s it say?”
“It says, ‘What problem? Who is this?’”
Bosch nodded. There was still a lot of deniability in the message. The sender was still feigning ignorance. He didn’t know what this was about, yet he had sent this text unbidden, and this told Bosch that they were closing in on something.
“How do we respond?” Sun asked.
Bosch didn’t answer. He was thinking.
Sun’s phone started to vibrate. He looked at the screen.
“This is a call. It’s him. The number.”
“Don’t answer,” Bosch said quickly. “That could blow it. We can always call back. Just see if he leaves a message first.”
The phone stopped vibrating and they waited. Bosch tried to think of the next move to make in this very delicate and deadly game. After a while, Sun shook his head.
“No message. It would have alerted me by now.”
“What’s your outgoing message say? Do you give your name on it?”
“No, no name. I use the robot.”
That was good. A generic outgoing message. The caller was probably hoping to pick up a name or a voice or some other sort of intel.
“Okay, send him back a text. Say, no talking on phones or text because it’s not safe. Say you want to meet in person.”
“That’s it? They ask what the problem is. I don’t answer”
“No, not yet. String it along. The longer we keep this going, the more time we give Maddie. You see?”
Sun nodded once.
“Yes, I see.”
He typed in the message Bosch had suggested and sent it.
“Now we wait again,” he said.
Bosch didn’t need the reminder. But something told him the wait would not be long. The deke was working and they had someone on the other end of the text on the hook. He had no sooner come to this conclusion than another text came in on Sun’s phone.
“He wants to meet,” Sun said, looking at the screen. “Five o’clock at Geo.”
“What’s that?”
“A restaurant at the Gold Coast. Very famous. It will be very crowded on a Sunday afternoon.”
“How far is the Gold Coast?”
“Almost an hour’s drive from here.”
Bosch had to consider that the person they were dealing with was playing them, sending them an hour out of the way. He checked his watch. It had been almost an hour since he had talked to Chu. Before committing to the Gold Coast meeting, he first needed to check on what Chu had come up with. As Sun started the car and headed out of the park, Bosch called Chu’s number again.
“Detective Chu.”
“It’s Bosch. It’s been an hour.”
“Not quite but I’m still waiting. I made the call and haven’t heard back.”
“Did you talk to somebody?”
“Uh, no, I left a message with my guy over there. I guess because it’s so late he might not be-”
“It’s not late, Chu! It’s late there, not here. Did you make the call or not”
“Harry, please, I made the call. I just got mixed up. It’s late here, it’s Sunday over there. I think maybe because it’s Sunday, he isn’t as tied to his phone as he normally is. But I made the call and I will call you as soon as I have something.”
“Yeah, well, it might be too late by then.”
Bosch closed the phone. He was sorry he had trusted Chu in the first place.
“Nothing,” he said to Sun.
They got to the Gold Coast in forty-five minutes. It was a resort on the western edge of the New Territories that catered to travelers from the mainland as well as Hong Kong and the rest of the world. A tall, gleaming hotel rose above Castle Peak Bay and open-air restaurants crowded the promenade that edged the harbor.
The Geo was wisely chosen by the text contact. It was sandwiched between two similar open-air restaurants and all three were heavily crowded. An arts and crafts show on the promenade doubled the number of people in the area and the places from which an observer could hide from view. It would make identifying someone who didn’t want to be identified extremely hard to do.
In accordance with the plan Bosch and Sun hatched on the drive, Bosch was dropped at the entrance to the Gold Coast. The two men synchronized their watches and then Sun drove on. As he walked through the hotel, Bosch stopped in the gift shop and bought sunglasses and a baseball-style hat with the hotel’s golden emblem on it. He also bought a map and a throwaway camera.
By ten of five, Bosch had made his way to the entrance of a restaurant called Yellow Flower, which was next to and afforded a full view of the seating area of Geo. The plan was simple. They wanted to identify the owner of the phone number Bosch had found in his daughter’s contact list and follow him when he left Geo.
Yellow Flower, Geo and a third restaurant on the other side, Big Sur, were crowded with tables under white canopies. The sea breeze kept the patrons cool and the canopies aloft. As he waited to be seated, Bosch alternately checked his watch and surveyed the crowded restaurants.
There were several large parties, whole families joined together for a Sunday afternoon meal. These tables were easy for him to discount in looking for the cell phone contact because Bosch didn’t expect their man to be part of a large party. But even so, he quickly realized how daunting the task of spotting the contact would be. Just because the supposed meeting was set for Geo did not mean the person they were looking for was in the restaurant. He could be in any of the three restaurants doing exactly what Bosch and Sun were doing-looking to surreptitiously identify the other contact.
Bosch had no choice but to continue with the plan. He held up one finger to the hostess and was led to a bad table in a corner that had a view of all three restaurants but no glimpse of the sea. It was a bad table they passed off on singles and that was just what he had hoped for.
He checked his watch again and then spread the map out on the table. He weighted it with the camera and took his hat off. It had been cheaply made and was ill fitting, anyway. He was glad to take it off.
He made one more survey of the restaurants before five o’clock but did not see any likely candidates for the contact. No one like him, sitting by himself or with other mysterious men, wearing sunglasses or any other sort of disguise. He began to think the deke hadn’t worked. That the contact had gotten wise to their charade and had deked them instead.
He checked his watch just as the second hand swept toward the twelve and it would be five o’clock. The first text from Sun would go out exactly at five.
Bosch looked out across the restaurants, hoping to see a quick movement, somebody glancing at a text on their phone. But there were too many people and he saw nothing as the seconds ticked by.
“Hello, sir. Just one?”
A waitress had come up to the side of his table. Bosch ignored her, his eyes moving from person to person at the tables in Geo.
“Sir?”
Bosch answered without looking at her.
“Can you bring me a cup of coffee for now? Black.”
“Okay, sir.”
He could feel her presence move away. Bosch spent another minute with his eyes on the crowd. He expanded the search to include Yellow Flower and Big Sur. He saw a woman talking on a cell phone but nobody else using a phone.
Bosch’s own phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and answered, knowing it would be Sun.
“He answered the first text. He said, ‘I am waiting.’ That’s all.”
The plan had been for Sun to send a text at exactly five o’clock that said he was caught in traffic and would be late. He had done that and the message was received and responded to.
“I didn’t see anyone,” Bosch said. “This place is too big. He picked the right place.”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“At the bar at the back of Big Sur. I didn’t see anyone.”
“Okay, ready for the next one?”
“Ready.”
“We’ll try again.”
Bosch closed the phone as a waitress brought his coffee.
“Ready to order?”
“No, not yet. I have to look at the menu.”
She went away. Bosch took a quick sip of the hot coffee and then opened the menu. He studied the listings while keeping his right hand on the table so he could see his watch. At 5:05 Sun would send the next text.
The waitress came back and once more asked Bosch to order. The hint was clear. Order or move on. They needed to turn the table.
“Do you have gway lang go?”
“That is turtle-shell gelatin.”
She said it in a tone suggesting he had made a mistake.
“I know. The cure for whatever ails you. Do you have it?”
“Not on menu.”
“Okay, then just bring me some noodles.”
“Which noodle?”
She pointed to the menu. There were no pictures on the menu so Bosch was lost.
“Never mind. Bring me fried rice with shrimp in it.”
“That all?”
“That’s all.”
He handed her the menu so she would go away.
The waitress left him and he checked the time again before resuming his watch on the restaurants. The next text was going out. He scanned from table to table quickly. Again he picked up nothing that fit. The woman he had noticed before took another call and spoke briefly to someone. She was sitting at a table with a little boy who looked bored and uncomfortable in his Sunday clothes.
Bosch’s phone vibrated on the table.
“Got another response,” Sun said. “‘If you’re not there in five minutes, the meeting is off?.’”
“And you didn’t see anybody?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you send the next one?”
“I will at five-ten.”
“Okay.”
Bosch closed the phone and put it down on the table. They had designed the third text as the one that would finally draw the contact out. The message would say that Sun was canceling the meeting because he had spotted a tail and believed it was the police. He would urge the unknown contact to leave Geo immediately.
The waitress came and put down a bowl of rice. The shrimp on top were whole, their distended eyes cooked white. Bosch pushed the bowl away.
His phone buzzed. He checked his watch before answering it.
“You already sent it?” Bosch asked.
At first there was no response.
“Sun Yee?”
“Harry, it’s Chu.”
Bosch checked his watch again. It was time for the last text.
“I gotta call you back.”
He closed the phone and once more looked out across the tables of three restaurants, hoping for the needle-in-the-haystack moment that would reveal the contact. Somebody reading a text, maybe typing a response.
Nothing came. He saw no one pull a phone and glance at the screen. There were too many people to cover at the same time and the futility of the plan began to open a hollow in his chest. His eyes moved to the table where the woman and boy had sat and he saw that they were gone. He swept the restaurant and saw them leaving. The woman was moving fast, dragging the boy by the hand. In her other hand she carried her cell phone.
Bosch opened his phone and punched in a call to Sun. He answered immediately.
“The woman and the boy. They’re coming your way. I think it might be her.”
“She got the text?”
“No, I think she was sent to make the contact. The texts went offsite. We have to follow the woman. Where’s the car?”
“Out front.”
Bosch stood up, put three hundred-dollar bills down on the table and headed toward the exit.
Sun was already in the car waiting out front of the Yellow Flower. As Bosch was opening the door, he heard a voice calling from behind him.
“Sir! Sir!”
He turned and it was the waitress coming after him, holding out his hat and the map. She had also brought the change from his tab.
“You forgot these, sir.”
Bosch grabbed the items and said thanks. He pushed the change back toward her.
“You keep that,” he said.
“You did not enjoy your shrimp rice,” she said.
“You got that right.”
Bosch ducked into the car, hoping that the momentary delay would not cost them the tail on the woman and the boy. Sun immediately pulled away from the restaurant and into traffic. He pointed through the windshield.
“They are in the white Mercedes,” he said.
The car he pointed at was a block and a half ahead, moving in light traffic.
“Is she driving?” Bosch asked.
“No, she and the boy got into a waiting car. A man was driving.”
“Okay, you got them? I need to make a call.”
“I have them.”
As Sun followed the white Mercedes, Bosch called Chu back.
“It’s Bosch.”
“Okay, I got some information through HKPD. But they were asking me a lot of questions, Harry.”
“Give me the information first.”
Bosch pulled out his notebook and pen.
“Okay, the phone number you gave me is registered to a company. Northstar Seafood and Shipping. Northstar is one word. It’s located in Tuen Mun. That’s up in the New-”
“I know. You have the exact address”
Chu gave him an address on Hoi Wah Road and Bosch repeated it out loud. Sun nodded his head. He knew where it was.
“Okay, anything else?” Bosch asked.
“Yes. Northstar is under suspicion, Harry.”
“What’s that mean? Suspicion of what”
“I couldn’t get anything specific. Just of illegal shipping and trade practices.”
“Like human trafficking”
“It could be. Like I said, I could not get specific information. Just questions about why I was tracing the number.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That it was a blind trace. The number was found on a piece of paper in a homicide investigation. I said I didn’t know the connection.”
“That’s good. Is there any name associated with this phone number”
“Not directly to the number, no. But the man who owns Northstar Seafood and Shipping is Dennis Ho. He is forty-five years old and that’s all I could get without making it seem like I was working something specific. Does it help?”
“It helps. Thanks.”
Bosch ended the call and then updated Sun on what he knew.
“Have you heard of Dennis Ho?” he asked.
Sun shook his head.
“Never.”
Bosch knew they had to make a major decision.
“We don’t know if this woman has anything to do with this,” Bosch said, pointing ahead at the white Mercedes. “We could be just spinning our wheels here. I say we break off of this and go directly to Northstar.”
“We don’t need to decide yet.”
“Why not? I don’t want to waste time on this.”
Sun nodded in the direction of the white Mercedes. It was about two hundred yards ahead.
“We are already heading toward the waterfront. They may be going there.”
Bosch nodded. Both angles of investigation were still in play.
“How’s your gas?” Bosch asked.
“Diesel,” Sun replied. “And we are fine.”
For the next half hour they edged the coastline on Castle Peak Road, staying a good distance behind the Mercedes but always keeping it in sight. They drove without speaking to each other. They had reached a point where they knew time was short and there was nothing else to say. Either the Mercedes or Northstar would lead them to Maddie Bosch or it was likely they would never see her again.
As the vertical buildup of housing estates in Central Tuen Mun appeared ahead of them, Bosch saw the turn signal on the Mercedes engage. The car was turning left, away from the waterfront.
“They’re turning,” he warned.
“That’s a problem,” Sun said. “The industrial waterfront is ahead. They are turning toward residential neighborhoods.”
They were both silent for a moment, hoping a plan would materialize or maybe the driver of the Mercedes would realize they needed to go straight and correct the car’s course.
Neither happened.
“Which way?” Sun finally asked.
Bosch felt a tearing inside. His choice here could mean his daughter’s life. He knew that he and Sun could not split up with one following the car and the other going to the waterfront. Bosch was in a world he did not know and would be useless on his own. He needed Sun with him. He came to the same conclusion he had reached after the call from Chu.
“Let her go,” he finally said. “We go to Northstar.”
Sun kept going straight and they passed the white Mercedes as it took the left on a road marked Tsing Ha Lane. Bosch glanced out the window at the car as it slowed down. The man driving glanced back at him but only for a second.
“Shit,” Bosch said.
“What is it?” Sun asked.
“He looked at me. The driver. I think they knew we were following them. I think we had it right-she’s part of this.”
“Then this is good.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“If they knew we were following, then their turning away from the waterfront could be an effort to lead us away from Northstar. You see?”
“I see. Let’s hope you’re right.”
Soon they entered an industrial waterfront area filled with ramshackle warehouses and packing plants lined along the wharfs and piers. There were river barges and medium-size seafaring boats docked up and down, sometimes two and three abreast. All of it seemed abandoned for the day. No work on Sunday.
Several fishing boats were moored out in the harbor, all safe behind a typhoon shelter created by a long concrete pier that formed the outer perimeter of the harbor.
Traffic thinned and Bosch began to worry that the casino’s slick black Mercedes would be too noticeable as they made the approach to Northstar. Sun must have been thinking the same thing. He pulled into the parking lot of a closed food shop and stopped the car.
“We are very close,” he said. “I think we leave the car here.”
“I agree,” Bosch said.
They got out and walked the rest of the way in, holding tight against the warehouse facades and scanning in all directions for forward spotters. Sun led the way and Bosch was right behind him.
Northstar Seafood and Shipping was located on wharf 7. A large green warehouse with Chinese and English printing on its side fronted the dockside and a pier extended out into the bay beyond it. Four -seventy-five-foot net boats with black hulls and green pilothouses were tied up on either side of the pier. Docked at the end was a bigger boat with a large crane jutting skyward.
From his viewpoint at the corner of a warehouse on wharf 6, Bosch could see no activity. The loading bay doors of the Northstar warehouse were all rolled down and the docks and boats looked buttoned up for the weekend. Bosch was beginning to think he had made a terrible mistake in not keeping the tail on the white Mercedes. Then Sun tapped his shoulder and pointed down the length of the pier to the crane boat at the end.
His aim was high and Bosch followed it to the crane. The steel arm extended from a platform that sat atop a rail system fifteen feet over the deck of the boat. The crane could be moved up and down the length of the boat depending upon which ship’s hold was being filled with cargo. The boat was obviously designed to go out to sea and relieve smaller net boats of their catch so that they could continue to harvest. The crane was controlled from a small booth on the upper platform that protected the operator from the wind and other elements at sea.
It was the tinted windows of the booth that Sun was pointing at. With the sun in the sky beyond the boat, Bosch could see the silhouette of a man in the booth.
Bosch pulled himself back around the corner with Sun.
“Bingo,” he said, his voice already tightening with the sudden blast of adrenaline. “Do you think he saw us?”
“No,” Sun said. “I saw no reaction.”
Bosch nodded and thought about their situation. He now believed with complete conviction that his daughter was somewhere on that boat. But getting to the boat without the lookout spotting them seemed impossible. They could wait for him to come down for a meal or bathroom break or a changing of the watch, but there was no telling when that would be or if it would even happen. Waiting defied the urgency that was growing in Bosch’s chest.
He checked his watch. It was almost six. It would be at least two hours before total darkness. They could wait and then make a move. But two hours could be too long. The text messages had put his daughter’s abductors on notice. They could be about to make some sort of move with her.
As if to drive this possibility home, the deep throb of a marine engine suddenly sounded from the wharf. Bosch stole a glimpse around the corner and saw exhaust rising from the stern of the crane boat. And now he saw movement behind the windows of the pilothouse.
He ducked back.
“Maybe he saw us,” he reported. “They started the boat.”
“How many did you see?” Sun asked.
“At least one inside the pilothouse and one still up on the crane. We need to do something. Now.”
To accent the need to move, he reached behind his back and pulled the gun. He was tempted to move around the corner and go down the wharf shooting. He had a fully loaded.45 and liked his chances. He’d seen worse in the tunnels. Eight bullets, eight dragons. And then there would be him. Bosch would be the ninth dragon, as unstoppable as a bullet.
“What’s the plan/” Sun asked.
“No plan. I go in and I get her. If I don’t make it, I’ll make sure none of them do either. Then you go in and get her and put her on a plane out of here. You’ve got her passport in your trunk. That’s the plan.”
Sun shook his head.
“Wait. They will be armed. This plan is not good.”
“You got a better idea? We can’t wait for dark. That boat’s about to go.”
Bosch moved to the edge and took another look. Nothing had changed. The lookout was still up in the booth and there was somebody in the pilothouse. The boat was rumbling on idle but still tied to the end of the pier. It was almost as if they were waiting for something. Or someone.
Bosch ducked back and calmed himself. He considered everything around him and what was available to use. Maybe there was something other than a suicide run at this. He looked at Sun.
“We need a boat.”
“A boat?”
“A small boat. We can’t go down the pier without being seen. They’ll be watching for it. But with a small boat we could create a distraction on the other side. Enough for somebody to go down the pier.”
Sun moved past Bosch and looked around the corner. He surveyed the end of the pier and then ducked back.
“Yes, a boat could work. You want me to get the boat?”
“Yeah, I’ve got the gun and I’m going down the pier to get my daughter.”
Sun nodded. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the car keys.
“Take the keys. When you have your daughter, you drive away. Don’t worry about me.”
Bosch shook his head and pulled out his phone.
“We’ll get someplace nearby but safe and then I’ll call you. We’ll wait for you.”
Sun nodded.
“Good luck, Harry.”
He turned to go.
“And good luck to you,” Bosch said.
After Sun left, Bosch kept his back against the front wall of the warehouse and prepared to wait. He had no idea how Sun would commandeer a boat but he trusted that somehow he’d get his part done and then would create the distraction that allowed Bosch to make his move.
He also thought about finally making the call to the Hong Kong police, now that he had located his daughter, but he quickly discarded that idea as well. Police swarming the pier was no guarantee of his daughter’s safety. He’d stick with the plan.
He turned to look around the corner of the warehouse and make another check of activities on the Northstar boat, when he saw a car approaching from the south. He noted the familiar styling of the front grille of a Mercedes. The car was white.
Bosch slid down the wall to make himself less noticeable. Nets that had been hung to dry from the rigging of two boats between him and the approaching car also gave him camouflage. He watched as the car slowed and turned onto wharf 7 and then headed down the pier toward the crane boat. It was the car they had followed from the Gold Coast. He caught a glimpse of the driver and identified him as the same man who had returned his look earlier.
Bosch did some quick computing and concluded that the man behind the wheel was the man whose phone number had been placed by Peng in the contact list on his daughter’s phone. He had sent the woman and child-probably his wife and son-inside Geo as decoys that would help him identify the person who had been texting him. Spooked by the last message sent by Sun, he had driven them home or to some other safe spot, dropped them and then driven to wharf 7, where Bosch’s daughter was being held.
It was a lot to string together, considering the few known facts he had, but Bosch believed he was on target and that something was about to happen that wasn’t part of the Mercedes man’s original plan. He was deviating. Hurrying things up or moving the merchandise or doing something worse-getting rid of the merchandise.
The Mercedes stopped in front of the crane boat. The driver jumped out and quickly moved across a gangway onto the boat. He yelled something to the man up in the booth but did not break stride as he quickly headed to the pilothouse.
For a moment, there was no further movement. Then Bosch saw the man step out of the crane booth and start climbing down from the platform. After reaching the deck, he followed the Mercedes man into the pilothouse.
Bosch knew that they had just committed a strategic error that gave him a momentary advantage. This was his chance to move down the pier unseen. He pulled his phone again and called Sun. The phone rang and then went to message.
“Sun, where are you? The Mercedes man is here and they left the boat unguarded. Never mind the distraction, just get back here and be ready to drive. I’m going in.”
Bosch pocketed the phone and stood up. He checked the crane boat one last time and then bolted from cover. He crossed the wharf to the pier and began moving toward the end. He held the gun in a two-handed grip, up and ready.
Stacks of empty crates on the pier afforded Bosch partial cover but the last twenty yards to the gangway of the crane boat were wide open and exposed. He picked up his speed and quickly covered the distance, ducking at the last moment behind the Mercedes idling next to the gangway. Bosch noted the distinctive sound and smell of the diesel engine. He peeked over the line of the trunk and saw no reaction to his moves coming from the boat. He jumped from cover, moved quickly and quietly across the gangway and then picked his way between six-foot-wide hatch covers on the deck. He finally slowed his pace as he reached the pilothouse. He pressed himself against the wall next to the door.
Harry slowed his breathing and listened. He heard nothing over the sound of the throbbing engines other than the wind through the rigging of the boats on the pier. He turned to look in through a small square window in the door. He saw no one inside. He reached to the handle and quietly opened the door and entered.
The room was the operation center of the boat. Besides the wheel, Bosch saw glowing dials, double radar screens, twin throttles and a large gimballed compass. Against the back wall of the room was a chart table next to a set of built-in bunks with curtains that could be pulled for privacy.
On the floor on the forward left was an open hatch with a ladder leading down into the hull. Bosch moved over and crouched next to the opening. He heard voices down below but the language spoken was Chinese. He tried to separate them and count how many men were down there but the echo effect of the hull made this impossible. He knew at a minimum there were three men in the hull. He did not hear his daughter’s voice, but he knew she was down there, too.
Bosch moved to the boat’s control center. There were several different dials and switches but all were marked in Chinese. Finally, he zeroed in on two side-by-side switches with red button lights above them. He turned one switch off and immediately heard the hum of the engines decrease by half. He had killed an engine.
He waited five seconds and turned the other switch, killing the second engine. He then moved to the rear corner of the room and onto the lower bunk. He pulled the curtain closed halfway and crouched and waited. He knew he would be in a blind spot for anyone coming up the ladder from the hull. He returned his gun to his belt and took the switchblade out of his coat pocket. He quietly opened the blade.
Soon he heard running steps from below. This told him the meeting of the men below was in the forward section of the hull. He counted only one set of approaching steps. That would make it easier.
A man began to rise through the hatch, his back to the bunks and his eyes on the control center. Without looking around he moved quickly to the controls and looked for a reason for the double engine stall. He found nothing wrong and went through procedures to restart the engines. Bosch quietly crawled out of the bunk and moved toward him. The moment the second engine trundled to life, he put the point of the switchblade against the man’s spine.
Grabbing him by the back collar, Bosch pulled him away from the control center and whispered in his ear.
“Where’s the girl?”
The man said something in Chinese.
“Tell me where the girl is.”
The man shook his head.
“How many men are below?”
The man said nothing and Bosch roughly yanked him out through the door onto the deck. He moved him over to the rail and bent him over the side. The water was twelve feet below.
“Can you swim, asshole? Where’s the girl?”
“No…speak,” the man managed to say. “No speak.”
Keeping the man down over the rail, Bosch looked around for Sun-his translator-but didn’t see him. Where the hell was he?
The momentary distraction allowed the man to make a move. He swung an elbow backwards into Bosch’s ribs. It was a direct impact and Bosch was knocked back into the sidewall of the pilothouse. The man then spun around and raised his hands to attack. Bosch prepared to cover but it was the man’s foot that came up first, kicking Bosch’s wrist and knocking the knife into the air.
The man didn’t bother tracking the flight of the knife. He quickly waded into Bosch with both fists, striking with short, powerful impacts to the midsection. Bosch felt the air explode out of his lungs just as another kick came up and hit him below the chin.
Bosch went down. He tried to shake off the impact but his eyesight started to close into tunnel vision. His attacker calmly stepped away and Bosch heard the switchblade scrape on the deck as he picked it up. Struggling for consciousness, Bosch reached behind his back for the gun.
As the attacker approached, he spoke in clear English.
“Can you swim, asshole?”
Bosch pulled the gun from behind his back and fired twice, the first shot only ticking the man’s shoulder as he narrowed his aim and the second catching him in the center left of the chest. He went down with a look of surprise on his face.
Harry slowly pulled himself up onto his hands and knees. He saw a line of blood and saliva dripping from his mouth to the deck. Using the wall of the pilothouse, he started to get to his feet. He knew he had to move quickly. The gunshots would have been heard by the men in the boat.
Just as he got to his feet, a riot of gunfire erupted from the direction of the bow. Bullets zinged over his head and ricocheted off the steel wall of the pilothouse. Bosch ducked around the corner and behind the pilothouse. He came up and found a line of sight through the windows of the structure. He saw a man on the bow advancing toward the stern with pistols in each hand. Behind him was the open hatch through which he had climbed out of the front hold.
Bosch knew he had six rounds left and had to assume the approaching gunman had started with full clips. Ammunition-wise, Harry was outnumbered. He needed to go on the offensive and take the gunman out quickly and efficiently.
He looked around for an idea and saw a row of rubber docking bumpers secured along the rear gunwale. He put the gun into his waistband and then grabbed one of the bumpers out of its receptacle. He edged back to the rear window of the pilothouse and looked through the structure again. The gunman had chosen the port side of the pilothouse and was preparing to move to the stern. Bosch stepped back, raised the three-foot-long bumper over his head with two hands, and hurled it high and over the top of the pilothouse. While it was still in the air he started moving down the starboard side, pulling his gun out as he moved.
He got to the front of the pilothouse just as the gunman was ducking away from the flying bumper. Bosch opened fire, hitting the man repeatedly until he went down on the deck without getting off a single shot.
Bosch moved in and made sure the man was dead. He then threw his empty.45 over the side and picked up the dead man’s -weapons-two more Black Star semiautomatics. He stepped back into the pilothouse.
The room was still empty. Bosch knew at least one more man was below in the hold with his daughter. He popped the magazines on both guns and counted eleven bullets between the two.
He stuck them in his belt and took the ladder down like a fireman, locking his feet around the vertical bars and sliding into the hull. At the bottom he dropped and rolled, pulling his weapons and expecting to be fired upon, but no more bullets came his way.
Bosch’s eyes adjusted to the dim light and he saw that he was in an empty bunk room that opened on a central passageway running the length of the hull. The only light came from the overhead hatch all the way down in the bow. Between Harry and that point were six compartment hatches-three on each side-going down the length of the passageway. The last hatch down on the left was standing wide open. Bosch got up and stuck one of the guns back in his belt so he would have a free hand. He started to move, the remaining gun up and ready.
Each hatch had a four-point locking system for storing and sealing the catch. Arrows stenciled on the rusting steel told Bosch which way to turn each handle to unlock and open the compartment. He moved down the passageway, checking the compartments one by one, finding each empty but obviously not used recently to haul fish. Steel-walled and windowless, each chamber was filled with a ground layer of detritus of cereal and other food boxes and empty gallon water containers. Wooden crates overflowed with other trash. Fishnets-refashioned as hammocks-hung on hooks bolted to the walls. There was a putrid smell in each compartment that had nothing to do with the catch the vessel once hauled. This boat carried human cargo.
What bothered Bosch most were the cereal boxes. They were all the same brand, and smiling from the front of the package was a cartoon panda bear standing on the brim of a bowl that held a treasure of rice puffs sparkling with sugar. It was cereal for kids.
The last stop in the passageway was the open hatch. Bosch crouched low and moved into the compartment in one fluid stride.
It too was empty.
But it was different. There was no trash here. A battery-powered light hung from a wire attached to a hook on the ceiling. There was an upturned shipping crate stacked with unopened cereal boxes, packs of noodles and gallon jugs of water. Bosch looked for any indication that his daughter had been kept in the room, but there was no sign of her.
Bosch heard the hinges on the hatch behind him screech loudly. He turned just as the hatch banged shut. He saw the seal on the upper right corner turn into locked position and immediately saw that the internal handles had been removed. He was being locked in. He pulled the second gun and aimed both weapons at the hatch, waiting for the next lock to turn.
It was the lower right. The moment the bolt started to turn Bosch aimed and fired both guns repeatedly into the door, the bullets piercing metal wakened by years of rust. He heard someone call out as if surprised or hurt. He then heard a banging sound out in the hallway as a body hit the floor.
Bosch moved to the hatch and tried to turn the bolt on the upper right lock with his hand. It was too small for his fingers to find purchase. In desperation, he stepped back a pace and then threw his shoulder into the door, hoping to snap the lock assembly. But it didn’t budge and he knew by the feel of the impact on his shoulder that the door would not give way.
He was locked in.
He moved back close to the hatch and tilted his head to listen. There was only the sound of the engines running now. He banged the heel of one of the guns loudly on the metal hatch.
“Maddie?” he called out. “Maddie, are you here?”
There was no response. He banged again on the hatch, this time even louder.
“Give me a sign, baby. If you’re here, make some noise!”
Again there was no response. Bosch pulled his phone and opened it to call Sun. But he saw he had no signal. He tried the call anyway and got no response. He was in a metal-lined room and his cell phone was useless.
Bosch turned and banged one more time on the door and called out his daughter’s name.
There was no response. Harry leaned his sweating forehead against the rusty hatch in defeat. He was stuck in the metal box and trapped with the realization that his daughter wasn’t even on the boat. He had failed and had gotten what he deserved, what he had earned.
A physical pain shot across his chest, matching the pain in his mind. Sharp, deep and unrelenting. He started breathing heavily, and turned his back against the hatch. He opened his collar another button and slid down the rusting metal until he was sitting on the floor with his knees up. He realized he was in a place as claustrophobic as the tunnels he had once inhabited. The battery on the overhead light was dying and soon he would be left in darkness. Defeat and despair overtook him. He had failed his daughter and he had failed himself.
Bosch suddenly looked up from his contemplation of failure. He had heard something. Above the drone of the engines, he’d heard a banging sound. Not from above. It had come from down in the hull.
He jumped up and turned back to the hatch. He heard another banging sound and knew somebody was checking the compartments in the same way he had.
He pounded on the hatch with the heels of both guns. He yelled above the clanging echo of steel on steel.
“Sun Yee? Hey! Down here! Somebody! Down here!”
There was no response, but then the bolt of the upper right seal turned. The door was being unlocked. Bosch stepped back, wiped his face with his sleeves, and waited. The bottom left seal was turned next and then the hatch door slowly began to open. Bosch raised the guns, unsure how many bullets he had left to fire.
In the dim light of the passage he saw Sun’s face. Bosch moved forward and pushed the hatch all the way open.
“Where the fuck you been?”
“I was looking for a boat and-”
“I called you. I told you to come back.”
Once he was in the passageway, Bosch saw the Mercedes man lying facedown on the floor a few feet from the hatch. He quickly moved to him, hoping to find him still alive. Harry turned him over, rolling him into the slop of his own blood.
He was dead.
“Harry, where is Madeline?” Sun asked.
“I don’t know. Everybody’s dead and I don’t know!”
Unless…
One final plan began to work into Bosch’s brain. One final chance. The white Mercedes. Gleaming and new. The car would have all the extras, including a navigation system, and the first address in its stored data would be the Mercedes man’s home.
They would go there. They would go to the home of the Mercedes man and Bosch would do what was necessary to find his daughter. If he had to hold a gun to the head of that bored little boy he had seen at Geo, he would do it. And the wife would tell. She would give Bosch back his daughter.
Harry studied the body in front of him. He presumed he was looking at Dennis Ho, the man behind Northstar. He patted the dead man’s pockets, looking for car keys, but he found none and just as quickly as his plan had formed, Bosch began to feel it disappear. Where were the keys? He needed that computer to tell him where to go and how to find his way.
“Harry, what is it?”
“His keys! We need his keys or we-”
He suddenly stopped. He realized he had missed something. When he had made his run on the pier and ducked for cover behind the white Mercedes, he had heard and smelled the car’s diesel engine. The car had been left running.
At the time it meant little to Bosch because he was sure his daughter was on the crane boat. But now he knew different.
Bosch stood up and started moving down the passageway toward the ladder, his mind racing far ahead of him. He heard Sun following behind him.
There was only one reason why Dennis Ho would have left his car running. He intended to come back to it. Not with the girl, because she was not on the boat. But to get the girl once the storage compartment in the hull was ready and it was safe to transfer her.
Bosch charged out of the pilothouse and crossed the gangway to the pier. He ran to the driver’s door of the white Mercedes and flung it open. He checked the backseat and found it empty. He then studied the dashboard, looking for a button that would open the trunk.
Finding none, he turned the car off and grabbed the keys. – Moving to the back of the car, he pushed the trunk button on the ignition key.
The trunk lid lifted automatically. Bosch moved in, and there lying on a blanket inside the compartment was his daughter. She was blindfolded and gagged. Her arms were pinned to her body with several wrappings of duct tape. Her ankles were taped together as well. Bosch cried out at the sight of her.
“Maddie?”
He almost jumped into the trunk with her as he quickly pulled the blindfold up and went to work on the gag.
“It’s me, baby! It’s Dad!”
She opened her eyes and started blinking.
“You’re safe now, Maddie. You’re safe!”
As the gag came loose, the girl let out a shriek that pierced her father’s heart and would stay with him always. It was at once an exorcism of fear, a cry for help and the sound of relief and even joy.
“Daddy!”
She started to cry as Bosch reached in and lifted her out of the trunk. Sun was suddenly there and helping.
“It’s going to be okay now,” Bosch said. “It will all be okay.”
They stood the young girl up and then Bosch used the teeth of one of the keys to start cutting through the tape. He noticed that Madeline was still wearing her school uniform. The moment her arms and hands were free, she grabbed Bosch around the neck and squeezed with all her life.
“I knew you would come,” she said between gasping sobs.
Bosch didn’t know if he had ever heard words that meant more to him. He held her just as tightly in his own arms. He turned his face down to whisper in her ear.
“Maddie?”
“What, Dad?”
“Are you hurt, Maddie? I mean, physically hurt. If they hurt you we need to get you to-”
“No, I’m not hurt.”
He pushed back from her and put his hands on her shoulders as he studied her eyes.
“You sure? You can tell me.”
“I’m sure, Dad. I’m fine.”
“Okay. Then, we need to go.”
He turned to Sun.
“Can you get us to the airport?”
“No problem.”
“Then, let’s go.”
Bosch put his arm around his daughter and they started to follow Sun off the pier. She held on to him the whole way and it wasn’t until they got to the car that she seemed to acknowledge the meaning of Sun’s presence and asked the question Harry had been dreading.
“Dad?”
“What, Maddie?”
“Where’s Mom?”
Bosch didn’t answer her question directly. He simply told his daughter that her mother could not be with them at the moment but had packed a bag for her and that they needed to get to the airport to leave Hong Kong. Sun said nothing and picked up his pace, moving in front of them and removing himself from the discussion.
The explanation seemingly bought Harry some time to consider how and when he would give the answer that would alter the rest of his daughter’s life. When they got to the black Mercedes, he put her in the backseat before going to the trunk to grab the backpack. He didn’t want her to see the bag Eleanor had packed for herself. He checked the compartments of Eleanor’s bag and found his daughter’s passport. He put it in his pocket.
He got in the front passenger seat and handed the backpack to her. He told her to change out of her school uniform. He then checked his watch and gave Sun a nod.
“Let’s go. We’ve got a plane to catch.”
Sun started driving, proceeding out of the waterfront area at a brisk but not attention-getting pace.
“Is there a ferry or train you can drop us at that will get us there direct?” Bosch asked.
“No, they closed the ferry route and you would have to switch trains. It would be better if I take you. I wish to.”
“Okay, Sun Yee.”
They drove for a few minutes of silence. Bosch wanted to turn and talk to his daughter, putting his eyes on her to make sure she was okay.
“Maddie, are you changed?”
She didn’t answer.
“Maddie?”
Bosch turned and glanced back at her. She had changed clothes. She was leaning against the door behind Sun, staring out through the window while hugging her pillow to her chest. There were tears on her cheeks. It did not appear that she had noticed the bullet hole through the pillow.
“Maddie, you all right”
Without answering or looking away from the window, she said, “She’s dead, isn’t she”
“What?”
Bosch knew exactly who and what she was talking about but was trying to stretch time, put off as long as possible the inevitable.
“I’m not stupid, you know. You’re here. Sun Yee’s here. She should be here. She would be here but something’s happened to her.”
Bosch felt an invisible punch hit him square in the chest. Madeline was still hugging the pillow in front of her and looking out the window with tear-filled eyes.
“Maddie, I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you but this wasn’t the right time?.”
“When is the right time?”
Bosch nodded.
“You’re right. Never.”
He reached back and put his hand on her knee but she immediately pushed it away. It was the first sign of the blame he would always carry.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I can say. When I landed this morning your mother was there at the airport, waiting for me. With Sun Yee. She only wanted one thing, Maddie. To get you home safe. She didn’t care about anything else, including herself.”
“What happened to her?”
Bosch hesitated but there was no other way to respond but with the truth.
“She got shot, baby. Somebody was shooting at me and she got hit. I don’t think she even felt it.”
Madeline put her hands over her eyes.
“It’s all my fault.”
Bosch shook his head, even though she wasn’t looking at him.
“Maddie, no. Listen to me. Don’t ever say that. Don’t even think that. It’s not your fault. It’s my fault. Everything here is my fault.”
She didn’t respond. She hugged the pillow closer and kept her eyes on the roadside as it passed by in a blur.
An hour later they were at the drop-off curb at the airport. Bosch helped his daughter out of the Mercedes and then turned to Sun. They had said little in the car. But now it was time to say good-bye and Bosch knew his daughter could not have been rescued without Sun’s help.
“Sun Yee, thank you for saving my daughter.”
“You saved her. Nothing could stop you, Harry Bosch.”
“What will you do? The police will come to you about Eleanor, if not everything else.”
“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.”
Bosch nodded.
“Good luck,” he said.
“Good luck to you, too.”
Bosch shook his hand and then stepped back. After another awkward pause, Madeline stepped forward and hugged Sun. Bosch saw the look on his face, even behind the disguise of the sunglasses. No matter their differences, Bosch knew Sun had found some sort of resolve in Madeline’s rescue. Maybe it allowed him to find refuge in himself.
“I am so sorry,” Madeline said.
Sun stepped back and broke the embrace.
“You go on now,” he said. “You have a happy life.”
They left him standing there and headed into the main terminal through the glass doors.
Bosch and his daughter found the first-class window at Cathay Pacific and Harry bought two tickets on the 11:40 p.m. flight to Los Angeles. He got a refund for his intended flight the next morning but still had to use two credit cards to cover the overall cost. But he didn’t care. He knew that first-class passengers were accorded special status that moved them quickly through security checks and first onto planes. Airport and airline staff and security were less likely to concern themselves with first-class travelers, even if they were a disheveled man with blood on his jacket and a thirteen-year-old girl who couldn’t seem to keep tears off her cheeks.
Bosch also understood that his daughter had been left traumatized by the past sixty hours of her life, and while he couldn’t begin to know how to care for her in this regard, he instinctively felt that any added comfort couldn’t hurt.
Noting Bosch’s unkempt appearance, the woman behind the counter mentioned to him that the first-class waiting lounge offered showering facilities to travelers. Bosch thanked her for the tip, took their boarding passes and then followed a first-class hostess to security. As expected, they breezed through the checkpoint on the power of their newfound status.
They had almost three hours to kill and though the previously mentioned shower facility was tempting, Bosch decided that food might be a more pressing need. He couldn’t remember when and what he had last eaten and he assumed his daughter had been equally deprived of nourishment.
“You hungry, Mads?”
“Not really.”
“They fed you?”
“No, uh-uh. I couldn’t eat, anyway.”
“When did you last eat something?”
She had to think.
“I had a piece of pizza at the mall on Friday. Before…”
“Okay, we’ve got to eat, then.”
They took an escalator up to an area where there were a variety of restaurants overlooking the duty-free shopping mecca. Bosch chose a sit-down restaurant in the center of the concourse that had good views of the shopping level. His daughter ordered chicken fingers and Bosch ordered a steak and french fries.
“You should never order a steak at an airport,” Madeline said.
“Why’s that?”
“You won’t get good quality.”
Bosch nodded. It was the first time she had said something more than one or two words in length since they had said good-bye to Sun. Harry had been watching her slowly collapse inward as the release of fear that followed her escape wore off and the reality of what she had been through and what had happened to her mother sank in. Bosch had feared she might be going into some form of shock. Her odd observation about the quality of steak in an airport seemed to indicate that she was in a dissociated state.
“Well, I guess I’ll find out.”
She then jumped the conversation to a new place.
“So am I going to live in L.A. with you now?”
“I think so.”
He studied her face for a reaction. It remained unchanged-blank stare over cheeks streaked with dried tears and sadness.
“I want you to,” Bosch said. “And last time you were over, you said you wanted to stay.”
“But not like this.”
“I know.”
“Will I ever go back to get my things and say good-bye to my friends”
Bosch thought for a moment before responding.
“I don’t think so,” he finally said. “I might be able to get your things sent. But you’re probably going to have to e-mail your friends, I guess. Or call them.”
“At least I’ll be able to say good-bye.”
Bosch nodded and was silent, noting the obvious reference to her lost mother. She soon spoke again, her mind like a balloon caught in the wind, touching down here and there on unpredictable currents.
“Are we, like, wanted by the police here?”
Bosch looked around to see if anyone sitting nearby had heard the question, then leaned forward to answer.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “We could be. I could be. But I don’t want to find out here. It will be better to deal with all of this from L.A.”
After a pause she asked another question and this one hit Bosch between the numbers.
“Dad, did you kill those men that had me? I heard a lot of shooting.”
Bosch thought about how he should answer-as a cop, as a father-but didn’t take too long.
“Let’s just say that they got what they deserved. And that whatever happened was brought on by their own actions. Okay?”
“Okay.”
When the food came they stopped talking and ate ravenously. Bosch had chosen the restaurant, the table and his seat so that he would have a good view of the shopping area and the security gate beyond. As he ate, he kept a vigilant watch for any unusual activity involving the airport’s security staff. Any movement of multiple personnel or search activity would cause him concern. He had no idea if he was even on any police radar yet but he had cut a deadly path across Hong Kong and had to remain alert to it catching up to him.
“Are you going to finish your french fries” Maddie asked.
Bosch turned his plate so she could reach the fries.
“Have at it.”
When she reached across the table her sleeve pulled back and Bosch saw the bandage in the crook of her elbow. He thought of the bloodstained tissue Eleanor had found in the wastebasket in the room at Chungking Mansions.
Bosch pointed at her arm.
“Maddie, how did you get that? Did they take your blood?”
She put her other hand over the wound as if that could stop all consideration of it.
“Do we have to talk about this now?”
“Can you just tell me one thing”
“Yes, Quick took my blood.”
“I was going to ask something else. Where were you before you were put in the trunk and taken to the boat?”
“I don’t know, some kind of hospital place. Like a doctor’s office. I was locked in a room the whole time. Please, Dad, I don’t want to talk about it. Not now.”
“Okay, sweetheart, we’ll talk about it when you want.”
After the meal, they headed down to the shopping area. Bosch bought a complete set of new clothes in a men’s store and a pair of jogging shoes and arm sweatbands in a sports shop. Maddie declined the offer of new clothing and said she’d stick with what was in her backpack.
Their next stop was a general store and Maddie picked out a stuffed panda bear she said she wanted to use as a pillow and a book called The Lightning Thief.
They then headed to the airline’s first-class lounge and signed up to use the shower facilities. Despite a long day’s buildup of blood, sweat and grime, Bosch showered quickly because he didn’t want to be separated from his daughter for very long. Before getting dressed he checked the wound on his arm. It was clotted and beginning to scab over. He used the armbands he had just bought as a double bandage over the wound.
Once he was dressed he took the top off the trash can that was next to the sink in the shower room. He bundled his old clothes and shoes together and buried them under the paper towels and other debris in the can. He didn’t want anyone to spot his belongings and retrieve them, especially the shoes in which he had trod across the bloody tiles in Tuen Mun.
Feeling somewhat refreshed and ready for the long flight ahead, he stepped out and looked around for his daughter. He didn’t see her anywhere in the lounge and went back to wait for her near the entrance to the women’s shower room. After fifteen minutes and no sign of Madeline, he started getting worried. He waited another five and then went to the reception desk and asked the woman behind the counter to send an employee into the shower room to check on his daughter.
The woman said she would do it herself. Bosch followed and then waited when she went into the shower room. He heard the shower running when the door was opened. He then heard voices and soon the woman from the front desk stepped out.
“She’s still in the shower and she said everything is fine. She said she was going to be a while longer.”
“Okay, thanks.”
The woman went back to her position and Bosch checked his watch. The boarding of their flight would not start for at least a half hour. There was time. He went back to the lounge and sat in a chair nearest to the hallway leading to the showers. He kept watch the whole time.
He couldn’t imagine where Madeline’s thoughts were. He knew she needed help and that he was completely unequipped to provide it. His governing thought was simply to get her back to Los Angeles and to go from there. He already had in mind who he would call in to counsel Maddie once he got her there.
Just as the boarding of their flight was announced in the lounge, Madeline came down the hallway, her dark hair slicked back and wet. She was wearing the same clothes she had changed into in the car but had added a hooded sweatshirt. Somehow she was cold.
“Are you all right?” Bosch asked.
She didn’t answer. She just stopped in front of Bosch with her head down.
“I know, stupid question,” Harry said. “But are you ready to fly? They just called our flight. We need to go.”
“I’m ready. I just wanted a long, hot shower.”
“I understand.”
They left the lounge and made their way to the gate, and while approaching, Bosch saw no more than the usual gathering of security. Their tickets were taken, their passports checked and they were allowed to board.
The plane was a large double-decker with the cockpit on the upper level and the first-class cabin right below in the nose of the craft. A flight attendant informed them that they were the only ones flying first class and that they could pick their seats. They took the two seats in the front row and it felt like they had the plane to themselves. Bosch wasn’t planning on taking his eyes off his daughter until they were in Los Angeles.
As the loading of the plane neared completion, the pilot came on the speaker and announced that they would spend thirteen hours in the air. That was shorter than the flight over because the winds would be with them. However, they would be flying back against the grain of time. They would land in Los Angeles at 9:30 Sunday night, two hours before they had taken off in Hong Kong.
Bosch did the math and knew that it would add up to a thirty-nine-hour day before it was over. The longest day of his life.
Eventually, the big plane was cleared for an on-time takeoff and it trundled down the runway, picked up speed and climbed loudly into the dark sky. Bosch breathed a little easier as he looked out the window and saw the lights of Hong Kong disappear below the clouds. He hoped never to be back again.
His daughter reached across the space between their seats and grabbed his hand. He looked over and held her eyes. She had started to cry again. Bosch squeezed her hand and nodded.
“It’s going to be all right, Maddie.”
She nodded back and held on.
After the plane leveled off, the flight attendant came around and offered them food and drink but both Bosch and his daughter declined. Madeline watched a movie about teenage vampires and then folded her seat down flat-one of the perks of first class-and went to sleep.
Soon she was soundly asleep and he envisioned some sort of internal healing process taking place. The armies of sleep charging through her brain and attacking the bad memories.
He bent down and kissed her lightly on the cheek. As the seconds, minutes and hours moved backwards, he watched her sleep and wished for the impossible, that time would move backwards far enough for him to begin the whole day again. That was the fantasy. The reality was that his life was almost as significantly altered as hers was. She was with him now. And he knew that no matter what he had done or caused to happen until this point in his life, she would be his ticket to redemption.
If he could protect and serve her, he had the chance to make up for everything. For all of it.
His plan was to keep watch on her through the night. But his exhaustion eventually defeated him and he closed his eyes as well. Soon he dreamed of a place by a river. There was an outdoor table with a white tablecloth ruffled by the wind. He sat across the table from both Eleanor and Madeline and they smiled at him. It was a dream of a place that had never been and would never be.