Michael Connelly - 9 Dragons

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.