Michael Connelly - 9 Dragons

“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 T s. 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.