White Tiger (6 page)

Klein went on. “I’m estimating time of death at twelve-thirty, give or take sixty minutes. Blood loss would have killed him soon enough. But before it did, this happened.” He pointed a gloved finger to a dark spot directly above the dead man’s heart. “Stab wound. From above, straight down. Slipped between the ribs, smooth as silk, and into the heart. You might call it a surgical strike. Either the knifeman, or the knifewoman, was very lucky not to have the blade turned by a rib—or they knew exactly what they were doing.”

Ryker examined the chest and stomach. “Just one puncture?”

“That’s affirmative,” Klein said. “There’s severe bruising around the wound, caused by the hilt impacting the flesh. Bam! Like Travolta and Uma Thurman, you know? We only have to insert a measurement probe into the hole to discover the exact length of the blade.”

“Do that,” Ryker said. He looked for Chee Wei and found him standing over by a window, looking out across the sprawling city, his back to the crime scene. Ryker joined him. He rarely got to see San Francisco from such a vantage point. Sometimes he forgot just how beautiful his adopted city was.

“I assumed, you know, this was some bi or gay thing,” Chee Wei said. “I didn’t consider the possibility that his own semen might have found its way into his mouth from his penis.”

“Just adds to the charm, don’t it?” Ryker said. “What else do we know about him.”

“Got his name from the register. It’s Danny Lin.”

He couldn’t have surprised Ryker more if he’d put on a clown’s nose and started dancing around the room. Danny Lin, aka Lin Dan, aka the son of James Lin, multi millionaire Chinese industrialist and personal friend of at least two United States Senators.

Ryker looked closely at the dead man on the bed and finally recognized him. The pale, bloated features had fooled him.

“Thought that would get your attention,” Chee Wei said. “Didn’t you have some kind of
—
” He broke off in response to Ryker’s stare, and held up both hands, palms outward.

Klein came up behind them and said, “We’d put Kyung on the suspects list but she has a solid alibi, she was working last night.” He meant the Korean girl. She’d moved round to this side of the bed and was close enough to have heard Klein, but if she did then she gave no sign.

“You’ve used up your funny allowance for the month,” Ryker said, perhaps too sharply. “Have you found the weapon?”

Klein frowned, suddenly serious. “No, but I’ll tell you this. We’re talking a damn sharp blade. It went through the guy’s dick like a laser beam. Perfect cut, absolutely no tearing or bruising.” He made a horizontal chopping motion with his hand. “With knife wounds, usually you can tell if it’s left-to-right or right-to-left. Not this time. Cross-section’s the cleanest I’ve seen. A machine couldn’t have done a better job.”

“It couldn’t have been a machine,” Chee Wei said. “The Three Laws clearly state that a machine can’t harm your dick, or through inaction allow your dick to come to harm.”

Klein laughed but Ryker rolled his eyes at such intellectual humor, and went to speak with the Korean forensics girl. She’d taken shots from every possible angle. Now she displayed them in batches of 12 on her camera’s 3.5-inch LCD, tilting it so Ryker could see. “What resolution?” he asked.

“Twelve megapixels, and it’s got a ten-by zoom,” Kyung said. “Not to mention a whole range of light enhancement settings. Which is how come I noticed this.” She expanded one of the thumbnails and indicated the wall section behind and above the bed. The writing was barely visible to the naked eye because of the natural shadows cast by bright daylight falling onto the floor beside the bed.

“Can you read it?”

Kyung shook her head. “Nah, I’m an American. It’s probably Chinese.”

They both looked at Chee Wei. He joined them and Ryker indicated the camera, then the wall. Kyung manipulated controls with her thumb so the characters painted on the wall
in blood
expanded to fill the display. Chee Wei’s eyes widened.

“Are they Chinese?” Ryker prompted him.

“Is the Pope Catholic? Sure they’re Chinese.
Bu zhan bu he.
” He frowned, then repeated the sounds, “
Bu zhan bu he.
”

“Is that somebody’s name?”

“What? No, no, it’s something, I’m trying to remember where I might have heard it before. It means, eh, it means no war, no peace.
Bu zhan bu he.
No war, no peace.”

“Does that have any special meaning in Chinese?”

Chee Wei thought about. “Not that I know of.”

Ryker looked at Kyung, who shrugged and moved away to talk to the forensics guy with the toolbox. She glanced back over her shoulder and caught Ryker looking at her butt. He pretended to have something in his eye even though he knew he wasn’t fooling her for an instant. Feeling like a dumb schoolboy, he turned to Chee Wei.

“Okay. The victim lost his cherry around twelve-thirty. Who found him, and when?”

Chee Wei didn’t even consult his notebook. “Room service got here at eight-thirty, breakfast trolley and wake-up call rolled into one. Knocked on the door, didn’t get an answer, used his pass key. He called the day manager using the room phone, the manager called nine-one-one. Uniforms arrived at eight-forty-seven and sealed off the floor. The night manager is on his way back in, but when I talked to him on his cell phone he didn’t know a damn thing about this. The room service logbook doesn’t list this suite after nine p.m., at which time Mr. Lin called down to order breakfast from the Chinese menu, to be delivered this morning promptly at eight-thirty. If he had company with him, I guess they brought their own wine and food.”

“Or maybe he intended to order food after he had sex,” Ryker suggested. “Only he didn’t get that far.”

“Makes sense. Need to show you something.” Chee Wei headed for a door that led to a luxurious marble-tiled bathroom the size of Ryker’s apartment. The bath could have held a football team. Chee Wei indicated the wash basin. Ryker didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking for, but then the light caught something in the drain plughole. He bent down and moved over to the other side so he could see it more clearly.

“We need a plumber,” Ryker said.

“On his way. I’ll have him take out the pipe and put a bucket underneath. We’ll flush it down.”

Ryker straightened and nodded; Chee Wei had everything covered, as usual. Feeling superfluous and twenty years too old, Ryker said, “You know, I miss the good old days. You’re too young to remember, but once upon a time the only people who wore earrings, were women.” He wanted to rip the sink apart and get his hands on whatever was down there. It looked like a stud diamond set in silver but maybe he wasn’t seeing all of it.

“Whoever dropped it didn’t stick around to call a plumber, that’s for sure. They were in a hurry.” Chee Wei frowned. “Now, if it belongs to the murderer, he or she would have tried to retrieve it, or flush it away so no one would ever find what might be a telling piece of evidence. But... and forgive my presumption... if the owner wasn’t concerned with leaving trace and hoped she might be able to return at some time in the future to pick it up...?”

Ryker noticed how Chee Wei had assigned the unknown earring owner a sex, following Ryker’s thoughts exactly. “Take it one step further. How would she get access to this place?”

“Hotel staff. Cleaning staff. Maintenance.”

“If our plumber turns out to be a girl, slap cuffs on her and hold her on suspicion.”

They both looked back over their shoulders as a huge shadow filled the doorway. The guy wore coveralls and carried a toolbox and a plunger. He must have weighed 300 pounds. He looked from Ryker to Chee Wei and said, “Someone report a blocked sink?”

###

Chee Wei negotiated the mid-morning traffic in silence, giving Ryker a chance to think about the Lin family and in particular James Lin, father of the deceased. James Lin owned shipping, electronics, real estate. He had ties with several influential U.S. Senators eager to broaden profitable trade links with China, the growing economic and industrial giant that was gearing up to take over the world. Ryker had also heard through the private grapevine that James Lin had ties to various criminal figures, both in the U.S. and Asia. That didn’t concern Ryker. What did concern him, and still irritated him greatly, were the events of six months ago.

An actress named Shannon Young had died at a party thrown by Danny Lin for some big shot friends of his up from L.A. for the weekend. The strikingly beautiful blonde had the bad manners to overdose in her host’s bathroom. The coroner’s report said the heroin she’d injected into her veins was almost pure, which suggested that someone who didn’t know what the hell they were doing had supplied the gear. The finger of suspicion didn’t just point at Danny Lin, it shoved itself all the way up his ass and tickled his prostate.

Ryker had disliked Lin instantly, not because of his father’s wealth or even because of his unconcealed arrogance and his general contempt for Westerners, which was simply part of the Chinese makeup. No, it was because Danny Lin regarded Shannon Young as nothing more than an unpleasant smell that was stinking up his bathroom. He didn’t care that she’d died, he just wanted her removed and the place cleaned up so his party could continue. For this reason alone Ryker had intended to make things as unpleasant for Danny Lin as possible, starting with a very public arrest, and not forgetting his partying friends, not a single one of whom claimed to know the dead girl.

But suddenly the order had come down from above like a blazing meteor, commanding all concerned to regard Sharon Young’s death as an accidental misadventure, with no one to blame except herself. As if that wasn’t bad enough, twenty-four hours later Ryker had been bewildered to read an addendum to the crime scene report detailing how substance traces had been found in her purse and in her Mercedes, intimating that she had brought her own heroin to the party. When Ryker queried this anomaly his own captain told him bluntly to stop asking damn fool questions and let it go, the case was closed. It was obvious as all hell that James Lin had used his power to derail the investigation. Equally obvious was the fact that no one could do a damn thing about it.

Which brought them to the present. What steps would James Lin take to cover up the manner in which his son had died? Ryker could well imagine. A single phone call to the mayor’s office, or perhaps even the governor’s office, and Ryker and his people would be pulled off this case too. A special team would be brought in, part investigator, part diplomatic mission.
For Christ’s sake don’t piss off the mega-rich Chinese businessman.
What could Ryker do about it? Absolutely nothing, but until he received the order to abandon ship he intended to operate the pumps to the best of his ability. And if his actions somehow pissed James Lin off just a little bit then he felt he would have earned this month’s pay. Which was why he and Chee Wei had passed Japantown and Pacific Heights and were heading along California Street on their way to the Sea Cliff District, to Danny Lin’s house overlooking the beach and the Pacific Ocean. A subtle telephone inquiry had confirmed that Mrs. Valerie Lin was home. Not only had she agreed to see Ryker, she had also accepted his unwillingness to discuss the matter in detail over the phone, which Ryker thought must make her the most incurious woman in the city. He intended to find out why.

His cell phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number but accepted the call. “Ryker.”

“This is Sandra Raymond.” It took Ryker all of three seconds to remember the detective working hotel reception so she could keep an eye on everyone coming and going. Whose idea was that anyway, hers? He wondered whether her bed skills matched her cleverness. “You wanted to know about an earring?” She sounded uncertain, probably because Ryker was taking so long to respond.

“Yes. What about it?” The plumber had removed the wash basin pipe and caught the diamond stud as it fell out. It was on its way to the forensics lab together with other evidence from the Taipan Suite, but first Ryker had showed it to a jeweler in the hotel mall who’d given the single piece a four-figure value, and estimated the matching pair would have cost no less than thirty thousand dollars. The jeweler had similar merchandise but was certain these earrings hadn’t come from his store.

“Kyung printed a picture,” Sandra Raymond said. “We’ve been showing it round. Bingo, one of the room maids remembered seeing earrings just like these.”