Code Name Komiko (2 page)

Big Wave rarely lived up to its name, but today there was a pronounced choppiness to the water. It was warm where it lapped against the sand but colder than Lian expected as she and Mingmei swam farther out, avoiding the surfers and wakeboarders who rode the crests until they broke.

Soon, Mingmei was pulling away. She was such a good swimmer, Lian was sure she had a mermaid somewhere in her ancestry. Before long, Lian could barely see her friend knifing across the roiling surface, angling against the swells to decrease resistance. As she watched, Mingmei climbed effortlessly to the peak of a wave and seemed to pause, suspended, for a long second before disappearing over its backside.

Lian stopped giving chase for a moment and found herself in the wave’s periphery, a brief sinking sensation capped with a short wet slap against her face. She blinked the salt water from her eyes and craned her neck; she was farther from the beach than she’d intended to go. A jaunt like this was nothing for Mingmei—who was nowhere to be seen now—but Lian wasn’t so confident, and the continued rise and fall of the swells was doing nothing to help settle her nerves.

The waves had looked blue and inviting back on the shore; once they’d lured her into their domain, they’d turned gray and aggressive. Lian felt herself lifted again and bit her lip against the inevitable plunge. The South China Sea seemed needlessly angry with her in it, and she would have been more than happy to get out if she could just take a second to get her bearings.

She bobbed to the crest of a wave, trying desperately to find Mingmei in the distance, but it was no good. As she began to sink, Lian called out again—but she doubted her friend heard her. She could barely hear herself over the roar of the surf.

In contrast, a sudden sharp, loud voice hit her ears like something physical: “Move! Get out of the way!” A male, ferocious and bellowing; Lian couldn’t tell where he was coming from until suddenly he was nearly on top of her, a fierce figure in an oil-black wet suit, riding a blood-red surfboard that scythed through the water inches from her face.

She twisted her body and jerked back her head in shock, just as the wave broke over her. Suddenly, the sea was everywhere, and she was nowhere. There was nothing to breathe but the cold leaden water.

Lian fought to the surface, her chest on fire, and spat out sea foam. It felt like the water had a hand around her neck; she coughed and sputtered, desperate to draw a single lungful of pure air. Her sense of direction had abandoned her as surely as Mingmei had, and through stinging eyes, she saw the next wave—larger and darker and coming straight for her. She was powerless in its shadow.

And then all at once there were two arms hooked under hers, and she was propelled out of harm’s way, arcing up and over the wave’s peak as Mingmei spoke close behind her.

“You got in a little too deep, huh?”

Lian had never been so grateful for their friendship. She took a few greedy breaths and then feebly admitted, “Yeah. Maybe.”

Mingmei kept an arm around Lian and kicked her legs like pistons, steering them both toward a cove. It hadn’t been that far away from her, Lian realized. She’d just been so panicked that she’d lost perspective.

“Lian, there’s never any shame in turning back around when it gets too rough. Sometimes you’ve got to know when it’s time to quit.”

Mingmei didn’t let go of her, even when they’d reached the shallows and could walk, rather than swim, up to the rocks at the water’s edge and climb out. A path meandered up from the cove, festooned with bamboo and shrubs; the terrain was much rockier here on the outskirts of the bay, and nobody was tanning this far from the sand. They took their time, Lian feeling stronger and steadier with each step on dry land.

“Okay,” she said at last, casting a wan look out at the water and the gray clouds slowly moving in from the south. “That sucked. I mean, that truly, madly, deeply sucked.”

“No doubt,” Mingmei said, pushing an overgrown bamboo stalk out of their way. “But you’re fine now, and if that’s the worst thing that happens to you today, then there’s nothing to worry about.”

Lian didn’t really hear her, though; she was distracted by a dark shape at the edge of the water, in the craggier rocks a little way down from where they had emerged.

“You see that?” she asked, directing Mingmei’s gaze. “What is that, a surfboard?”

She stepped off the path, moving the brush aside, and made her way back down to the sea. Whatever the thing was, it was bobbing in the rippling water, thudding against the rocks. It was too irregular in shape to be a board, she realized. Maybe a wet suit? Maybe some abandoned snorkeling gear? Or maybe—

Just behind her, Mingmei shrieked, and suddenly there was no “maybe” about it.

They were looking at a dead body.

The first detail Lian noticed was the saccharine Sanrio pink fingernail polish. Then her eyes focused and she saw that the corpse’s left forearm was pinned between two rocks, mooring the body in the shallow water. The hand was small and feminine, slightly bloated, and an ugly goose-pimpled blue-gray hue. Against it, the nail polish stood out in sharp relief.

Lian stayed focused on that bright pink as she made her way down to the rocks at the water’s edge, stumbling and skidding a little on the patchy terrain. She dimly heard Mingmei’s voice behind her, calling out for Lian not to get too close.

But there was no way Lian could keep away.

The body was floating facedown, the arm trapped at an awkward angle. Midway between wrist and elbow, a silvery charm bracelet hung, the skin swollen on either side of it. Hardly daring to breathe, Lian drew up close, braced her foot in a crevice, and peered over the rocks for a better look.

The dead girl was about Lian’s size and, she guessed, roughly her age. She wore a smart white blouse, a charcoal-gray pencil skirt, two socks, one shoe—which meant that she most likely was not planning on going to the beach when she set out on what she did not know would be the last day of her life.

Lian straightened, shielded her eyes, and shouted up to Mingmei. “Go! Get our phones, call the police, tell the lifeguards!”

Mingmei half shrugged and held out her arms, shaking her head. She was communicating that she couldn’t hear what Lian had said.

Lian flashed nine fingers, three times, and then held her hand to her ear like a phone.

Mingmei stood stock still for a moment longer, and then finally seemed to understand. She took off like a shot for the beach. Lian was alone with a floating girl and a growing list of questions.

An hour later, the flashing blue lights from the police vans were turning everyone’s skin the same color as the corpse’s. The police had cordoned off the immediate area with an efficient, brusque manner, but a junior officer had been kind enough to offer Lian a blanket as she sat shivering on the rocky slope. Behind her, the sunbathers on Big Wave were being ushered off the beach, directed around the closed section of the Dragon’s Back, and kept at a respectable distance from the crime scene.

“I promise, I’m fine, Mum,” Lian said into her phone in the most reassuring tone she could muster. “Mingmei, too. We were both a little freaked out, but everything’s okay.”

“I can’t even imagine,” her mother said. “To be the one to stumble across. . . . I can’t even imagine.” Her voice was shaky, on the edge of tears.

“I’ll be home soon, okay? The police have already taken my statement. I’m just waiting for them to finish with Mingmei.”

There was a pause in which Lian felt certain her mother was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. Her mom was a world-class worrier. “Just . . . be careful,” she said at last, as if Lian were in any danger with all the cops around. “We’ll see you soon. I love you, little panda.”

Lian blushed. She generally wished that her parents would stop using the nickname, even when they only did so in private. This time, though, she was grateful for the warmth that the embarrassment brought to her cheeks. She said good-bye and hung up, wiping her phone’s screen with the corner of the blanket. Her hair was still wet, and she pushed it back from her eyes as she cast her gaze back down to the sea.

A police boat had anchored a little way out from the shore. Two divers had gingerly freed the dead girl’s arm from the crag and loaded her onto a floating gurney. Even from up here, Lian could still see that bold pink polish; it was a fun color, a young color, totally absurd as decoration for a now-lifeless hand.

On a nearly empty beach, under gathering clouds, Lian’s mind had nothing to do but wonder about the girl. Who was she? What sort of person had she been; what sort of daughter, student, friend? What choices had she made in her short life that had led her here?

Had she taken her own life . . . or had it been taken from her?

An ashen hand fell on Lian’s shoulder, and she tensed. But it was only Mingmei, finished with her statement and more than ready to leave the beach. The carefully regimented sunbathing had all been in vain, Lian thought as she stood; her friend was twice as pale as when they’d arrived at Big Wave.

Lian folded the blanket into a tidy square as the junior officer approached them. He was a baby-faced young man, maybe only a year or two out of training school, Lian guessed. “Oh, you’re welcome to keep it,” he said as Lian offered the blanket back to him.

She smiled slightly. “I’m declining on my mother’s behalf. I don’t think she’d be thrilled to have a souvenir from today in the house.”

The officer nodded and accepted the blanket. “Of course, of course. Not a pleasant thing to be reminded of.”

“Have you seen many cases like this?” Lian asked him, trying to keep her tone casual but keen to garner any insight she could into the case. The shock of discovering the corpse was wearing off—now her mind was going to work in the way that she had long ago trained it to.

The young officer sighed. “More than I care for. There are a couple thousand suicides a year in Hong Kong. The currents bring ones like this right back into our laps.”

“So, you think this was a suicide?” Lian asked, wincing at the eagerness in her voice.

The officer gave her a curt smile, as if he’d already said too much. “We’ll have to see what the coroner says,” he told her. “You’ve both been very helpful, thank you. Can we offer you a lift home?”

Again, that courteous efficiency; it sounded like a kind offer, Lian thought, but it was really a way to hurry the girls off the beach now that their usefulness had expired.

“Thank you, but no,” she said, reaching out to take Mingmei’s clammy hand. “We don’t want to be any trouble. We’ll just take the bus back.”

The junior officer nodded again and stepped aside so they could continue up the rocky slope to the trail. Lian didn’t relish the hike back over to Shek O to wait for the bus, but a ride home in the back of the police van would have been more frustrating. She didn’t trust herself not to pester the officers with questions, and she knew they wouldn’t be forthcoming with any real answers. Besides, Mingmei looked like she could use a walk in the fresh air to get a little color back in her cheeks.

“You okay?” Lian asked.

Mingmei blinked a couple of times, and then said, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m all right. It’s just . . . I’ve never been that close to a . . . a
dead body
. It freaked me out.” She stopped in her tracks and looked at Lian. “Didn’t it freak you out, too?”

“Of course it did,” Lian said, giving her friend’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “I didn’t know what to think.”

“You, uh, you handled it a lot better than I did. Staying down there, with that poor girl. I don’t think I could have done that.”

Lian cast one last look down at the rocks where she’d kept her lonesome vigil. The girl was on dry land now, the crime scene officers already swarming with their evidence bags in hand. A rising hum drew her eyes out past the body and to the bay, where a speedboat pulled in with a flourish. It didn’t have police markings, but those were definitely Hong Kong Police Force uniforms on the men on board.

All but one of them, at any rate. Squinting, Lian could see a paunchy man in a blue tracksuit on the speedboat’s deck, barking orders at the cops. With his aviator sunglasses, jowls, and potbelly, he didn’t cut an immediately imposing figure, but the men all snapped to attention at his commands and set about their business.

Maybe a plainclothes detective, Lian guessed. A man with a plan, an expert at these kinds of scenes.

Lian realized that she and Mingmei had paused for too long on the hillside. A couple of the officers looked up at them, and Lian quickly dropped to one knee.

“What are you doing?” Mingmei asked her.

“Pretending to tie my shoes,” Lian said, sliding her cell phone out from the towel in which it was bundled.

“But you’re wearing flip-flops,” Mingmei protested.

“Hence the ‘
pretending
.’”

Lian propped her phone against her ankle and brushed its screen with her fingertip, scrolling to the camera icon.

“Come on, Lian. We’re going to miss our bus.”

“Just give me two seconds,” Lian insisted, zooming in as close as she could to the man in the tracksuit. She clicked the shutter three times in rapid succession, then twice more as the man turned and she could capture his profile.

“You’re being a weirdo again,” Mingmei said, nudging her gently with her sandal.

“Maybe,” Lian said, thumbing off the phone and slipping it back into the towel. She couldn’t have articulated it, but something about the man had struck her as vaguely suspicious.

As they headed toward the roped-off section of the Dragon’s Back, Mingmei hugged herself and shivered. Lian suddenly wished for her friend’s sake that she’d kept the police blanket after all.

But the photos would have to serve as her sole keepsake of their strange, sad afternoon at the beach.

5:53 PM HKT —
Komiko has logged on

Komiko:
Sorry I’m late, guys. I promise I have a good reason.

Crowbar:
Dont worry, youre not late, its not 6 yet!

Torch:
We agreed to 15 min, just us three, before the newbie signed in. So yes, Komiko *IS* late.