Nine Dragons (29 page)

“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.

33

B
osch 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.

“This all comes back to me, Sun Yee. I made the mistake that allowed all of this to happen.”

“Harry, there is no reason to—”

“No, wait. Just hear me out. You need to know all of this because you might see something I don’t.”

Sun said nothing and Bosch continued.

“It all starts with me. I was working a case with a triad suspect in L.A. I couldn’t get any answers, so I asked my daughter to translate the Chinese markings on a tattoo. I sent her a photo. I told her it was a triad case and she couldn’t show the tattoo or talk about it with anybody. But that was my mistake. Telling that to a thirteen-year-old was like announcing it to the world—her world. She’d been hanging out with Peng and his sister. They were from the other side of the tracks. She probably wanted to impress them. She told them about the tattoo and the case and that’s where this all started.”

He looked over at Sun but couldn’t read his face.

“What tracks?” he asked.

“Never mind, it’s just an expression. They weren’t from Happy Valley, that’s all that means. And like you said, Peng wasn’t part of any triad in Tuen Mun but maybe he knew people, maybe he wanted to get in. He was hanging out all the way across the harbor in Happy Valley. Maybe he knew somebody and thought this might be his ticket in. He told someone what he had heard. They put it together with L.A. and told him to grab the girl and send me the message. The video.”

Bosch stopped there for a moment as thoughts of his daughter’s situation distracted him again.

“But from there, something happened. Something changed. Peng took her to Tuen Mun. Maybe he offered her to the triad up here and they took her. Only they still didn’t take him. Instead, they killed him and his family.”

Sun shook his head slightly and finally spoke. There was something about Bosch’s storyline that didn’t make sense to him.

“But why would they do this? Kill his whole family.”

“Look at the timing, Sun Yee. The lady next door heard the voices through the wall in the late afternoon, right?”

“Yes.”

“By then I was on the plane. I was coming and they somehow knew it. They couldn’t risk that I would find Peng or his sister or mother. So they eliminated the threat and tied it off right there. If it wasn’t for the memory card Peng hid, where would we be? At a dead end.”

Sun incisively zeroed in on something Bosch had left out.

“How did they know you were coming on the plane?”

Bosch shook his head.

“Good question. From the start there’s been a leak in the investigation. But I thought I was at least a day ahead of it.”

“In Los Angeles?”

“Yeah, back in L.A. Somebody tipped the suspect that we were onto him and that made him try to split. That was why we had to arrest him before we were ready and why they grabbed Maddie.”

“You don’t know who?”

“Not for sure. But when I get back I’ll find out. And I’ll take care of it.”

Sun read more into that than Bosch had intended.

“Even if Maddie is safe?” he asked.

Before Bosch could respond, the phone in Sun’s hand vibrated. He had received a text. Bosch leaned over to look as Sun read. The message, in Chinese, was short.

“What’s it say?”

“Wrong number.”

“That’s it?”

“He did not accept the deke.”

“Shit.”

“What now?”

“Send another message. Tell him we meet or we go to the police.”

“Too dangerous. He might decide just to get rid of her.”

“Not if he has a buyer lined up. You said she’s valuable. Whether it was for sex or organs, she’s valuable. He won’t get rid of her. He might hurry up the deal and that’s the chance we take, but he won’t get rid of her.”

“We don’t know if this is even the right person. This is just a phone number on your daughter’s list.”

Bosch shook his head. He knew Sun was right. Shooting messages into the dark was too risky. His thoughts took him back to David Chu. The AGU detective might very well be the leak in the investigation that got Bosch’s daughter abducted. Did he risk calling him now?

“Sun Yee, do you have anybody in casino security who could run this number down and get us a name and billing address?”

Sun considered the question for a long moment and then shook his head.

“No, this is not possible with my associates. There will be an investigation because of Eleanor…”

Bosch understood. Sun had to do what he could to limit the blowback on his company and the casino. That tipped the scale toward Chu.

“Okay. I think I might know someone.”

Bosch opened his phone to go to his contact list but then realized the card from his daughter’s phone was still in place. He started through the process of replacing his own card and returning the phone to his settings and contacts.

“Who will you call?” Sun asked.

“A guy I was working with. He’s in the Asian Gang Unit and has contacts over here.”

“Is he the man you think could be the leak?”

Bosch nodded. Good question.

“I can’t rule him out. But it could have been anyone in his unit or another police department we were working with. At the moment, I don’t see where we have any choice.”

When he had the phone rebooted, he went to his contact list and found Chu’s cell number. He made the call and checked his watch. It was almost midnight Saturday night in Los Angeles.

Chu answered after one ring.

“Detective Chu.”

“David, it’s Bosch. Sorry to call so late.”

“Not late at all. I’m still working.”

Bosch was surprised.

“On the Li case? What’s happening?”

“Yes, I spent a good part of the evening with Robert Li. I am trying to convince him to cooperate with a prosecution of Chang for extortion.”

“Is he going to?”

There was a pause before Chu answered.

“So far no. But I have till Monday morning to work on him. You’re still in Hong Kong, right? Have you found your daughter?”

Chu’s voice picked up an urgent tone as he asked about Madeline.

“Not yet. But I have a line on her. That’s where I need your help. Can you run down a Hong Kong cell number for me?”

Another pause.

“Harry, the police there are much more capable of this than I am.”

“I know, but I am not working with the police on this.”

“You’re not.”

It wasn’t a question.

“I can’t risk the potential for a leak. I’m close. I’ve tracked her all day and it’s down to this number. I think it belongs to the man who has her. Can you help me?”

Chu didn’t respond for a long moment.

“If I help you, my source on this will be within the Hong Kong police, you know that, right?”

“But you don’t have to tell them the reason you need the information or who you are going to give it to.”

“But if things blow up over there, it could come back to me.”

Bosch began to lose his patience but tried to keep it out of his tone as he bluntly gave voice to the nightmare he knew was unfolding.