Jake Needham - The Ambassador's wife

“Right, sir, the housekeeping supervisor. I’ll type them up later and you can look at them all if you want, but I don’t think you’ll find anything in them.”

“What about the other guests on the floor?”

“Patrolmen have talked to three who were on the twenty-sixth floor last night, one who was on the twenty-seventh, and three who were on the twenty-fifth. We’re tracking the others down along with all of yesterday’s checkouts on those three floors, but so far no one seems to have heard anything unusual.”

“Somebody must have heard something. You can’t beat anybody that badly without making a hell of a lot of noise.”

“Unless she was tied up and gagged.”

Tay looked at Kang and raised his eyebrows.

“The FMB supervisor says there are marks on the woman’s wrists and ankles,” Kang went on. “He says he’s not sure yet, but they appear to be consistent with restraints of some kind.”

“Restraints?”

“You know, sir … ah, like she was-”

“Having kinky sex?”

“Yes, sir. Exactly.”

“Wonderful,” Tay muttered as he stubbed out his cigarette. “Sex and death. My favorite subjects.”

Two Japanese-looking men carrying black leather briefcases passed close to the table and Tay watched them until they were gone.

“Is there any evidence the woman had intercourse before she died?” he asked when the men were out of earshot.

“We won’t know for sure until the autopsy.”

Tay grunted.

“Even then,” Kang went on, “if it was normal vaginal intercourse, it may be difficult to tell for sure whether it was forced.”

“Why would it be difficult … oh, the flashlight.”

“Yes, sir. The flashlight.”

“Maybe we can at least find out where that came from.”

“We already know, sir.”

“We do?”

“There’s one in every room. The hotel has them in the closet for emergencies.”

Tay picked up the empty espresso cup and slipped his forefinger through the handle. Letting the cup drop, he watched it swing back and forth.

“What did they find in the room?” Tay asked after the cup stopped swinging.

“That’s what’s strange, sir. It’s not what they found; it’s what they didn’t find. No suitcases, no toilet articles, no clothing. She certainly wasn’t staying there.”

“What about the clothes she was wearing?”

“Nothing, sir.”

Tay blinked at that. “Her clothes were gone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, even if there is an electronics trade fair in town, she sure as hell didn’t walk into the Marriott completely naked.”

“No, sir. Probably not.”

“What about her jewelry? Rings? A watch?”

“No, sir. Nothing like that. Both her hands show marks from rings, but they’re gone now.”

“Somebody cleaned up. And they made a thorough job of it.”

“Yes, sir. A guy takes everything, packs it into a suitcase or maybe a laundry bag, and walks out. Who notices a man walking out of a hotel with a bag?”

Tay leaned back, knitted his fingers together behind his head, and thought for a moment.

“What makes you think it was a man?” he asked.

“Oh come on, sir. No woman could have done that.”

“Why not?”

“A woman just couldn’t do something like that, sir.”

“Don’t be naive, Sergeant. You need to get out more.”

“Well, sir, at the very least you have to admit no woman’s strong enough to beat another woman that badly.”

“Really? You obviously haven’t met any of the women my friends have been fixing me up with recently.”

Tay thought about what Kang had just told him for a second, maybe two.

“There won’t be any prints in the room,” he said. “Not the woman’s. Not the killer’s. He was too careful for that.”

“Probably not, sir. FMB says the whole room’s been wiped down. But they’re still checking everything anyway. Maybe there’s something that didn’t get wiped.”

“Have they found anything at all that would help identify her?”

“No, sir.”

“Do they know what was used to beat her face in?”

“Not yet.”

“Can they tell if the beating was the cause of death?”

“They’re not sure.”

“Are they at least certain she’s dead?”

“Pardon me, sir?”

“Never mind.”

Tay drummed his fingers on the table. He picked up the half empty box of Marlboros and then put it down again.

“Have our esteemed colleagues even managed to come up with a time of death?” he asked.

“They say she’s still in rigor, but the air conditioning was turned down so much it might have delayed the time it took her to reach it. They’re just guessing, but they figure it was something like twelve to twenty-four hours ago.”

Tay looked at his watch. He already knew more or less what the time was, but he looked at his watch anyway.

“Then she was probably killed between noon and midnight on Monday,” he said.

Kang nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Tay stopped, thought a moment, and then asked, “What do you make of the curtains?”

“The curtains, sir?”

“They were open in the living room, but closed in the bedroom. Don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

Kang didn’t really, so he wasn’t entirely sure what to say.

“Look, Sergeant, if they were in the room during the day, they might leave the drapes open, but at night they’d have them closed. Why leave them one way in the living room and the other in the bedroom?”

“Maybe they came into the room during the day and then moved into the bedroom after dark.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Tay said. “Which would make the time of death somewhere in the range of six to seven o’clock, wouldn’t it?”

“That makes sense, sir.”

Tay sat for a while after that with his face perfectly still. He reached for the open box of Marlboros again and shook out another cigarette.

“Her killer posed her, Sergeant. He posed her after he was done with her and stripped away her dignity. He wanted to degrade her. He wanted to tell us just how worthless she is.”

Tay picked up the lighter and flipped it open. He watched the flame burn, but he didn’t touch it to his cigarette.

“How about a drink, Robbie?”

“I’m afraid I can’t, sir. My wife and I are going out tonight. She organized something with this friend of hers and if I show up late she’ll murder me.” Sergeant Kang paused and looked down at his hands. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean any disrespect to-”

“I know you didn’t, Sergeant. Go on home. We’ll see where we are tomorrow morning. At least we ought to have the preliminary-report from FMB and maybe we’ll even have an ID on the body by then.”

“I hope so. Thank you, sir. Good night.”

After Sergeant Kang had gone, Inspector Tay lit the Marlboro and sat smoking it in silence. He watched the street and the crowds passing on the sidewalk and he wondered not for the first time what the hell he was doing there with a police warrant card in his pocket and the stink of death on his clothes.

The only child of an American-born Chinese man and a Singaporean-born Chinese woman, Tay had lived the whole of his life in Singapore. His father had been an accountant, a careful man who insisted that his family live modestly. When he died suddenly of a heart attack, Tay’s mother was shocked to discover she and her son had inherited a small fortune in real estate. She hadn’t even known her husband had been buying properties for two decades, let alone that his investments would leave her and her son quite comfortably off for the rest of their lives.

Regardless, she had quickly adjusted to the concept. Within a year, she moved to New York and acquired what she described to Tay as a Park Avenue duplex, although Tay noticed her address was actually on East Ninety-Third Street. When his mother married a widowed American investment banker who was a senior partner at some investment firm the name of which Tay could never quite remember, Tay was at the National University. He didn’t go to New York for the wedding. Actually, he couldn’t quite recall having been invited to New York for the wedding, but he supposed that was beside the point. He told himself he would have stayed in Singapore even if he had been invited.