THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3) (21 page)

AFTER HE GOT
home, Tay did what he always did when he needed to think. He made coffee and took it and his cigarettes out to the garden.

The haze was back, but it was wispy enough
to be tolerable. Tay
could even see the sky. Well… almost. He unclipped the .38 from his belt and put it and his telephone on the table. Then he sat down, lit a Marlboro, and propped his feet up in another chair.

Even when he wasn’t certain of the question, Tay had long ago learned the correct answer was always the same: coffee and cigarettes.

This was Friday, and on Tuesday morning he was supposed to return to CID. Tay understood full well that getting his job back was the
quid
for his
pro quo
in no longer making a nuisance of himself over the murders of Tyler Bartlett and Emma Lazar. It was a bribe. Simple as that.

But if he had already learned who had killed Tyler and Emma before Tuesday… well, what difference would the bribe make? He would be finished anyway, and a bribe wasn’t a bribe if he did nothing in return for it. At least, that was the moral bargain Tay had made with himself, and he was sticking to it.

The problem was what he would do if he
hadn’t
learned who killed Tyler and Emma before Tuesday. He really didn’t want to think about that, but perhaps he should since it was looking more and more like that was how the cards would come down. He might as well decide right now what he would do if he hadn’t broken the case by Tuesday. Go back to his job and try to work on the case secretly in his spare time? Keep his word to his boss and let it go? Or maybe he would just tell them to shove the job and do whatever he could to make the truth about the cover-up public.

He didn’t know what he would do. He really didn’t.

Tay had been confident he could make Goodnight-Jones angry enough to shake something out of him. He generally had no problem at all pissing people off so much they started speaking in tongues. He was gifted that way. But this time his ploy had gotten him exactly nowhere. Goodnight-Jones just smiled at all of Tay’s best efforts to provoke him and he learned next to nothing. Well… he supposed he
had
learned one thing. Goodnight-Jones was a supremely confident and utterly evil asshole who thought he was untouchable by someone as insignificant as Tay.

Then there was that strange conversation he’d had with Philip Goh. He had of course been surprised to learn that Goh was the one who had sucked him into all this in the first place, but he didn’t see what difference that made now. He had also learned that Goh also thought something about Goodnight-Jones and The Future smelled. Big freaking deal. How was that going to help him? Now he wasn’t the only one who thought something was wrong there. So what? What he needed was somebody who knew
what
was wrong there. He wasn’t looking for personal validation. He was looking for answers.

Tay’s phone began to buzz. He watched it dance toward him on the tabletop and caught it just before it slid over the side.

“Hello?”

“This is Julie, Inspector. I have something off that disk drive for you.”

Tay stubbe
d his cigarette out in the ashtray and smiled.

That was the way it generally went for him. At the very moment he decided he was at a dead end with whatever he was chasing, something always happened. He got a telephone call, a witness he was interviewing gave him an answer he didn’t expect, someone produced a lost piece of evidence. It came about in different ways, but
something
always happened and then he would be off again. It felt… well, downright mystical. Of course he steadfastly refused to think of it that way. It was bad enough to know that he had begun talking to his dead mother. Admitting that there was an element of mysticism in his work? Who knew where
that
would end up?

“I’ve finished with four of those files you flagged,” she said.

“That’s just great, Julie.”

“Not so fast. Maybe it’s not really all that great after all. I’m not absolutely sure the files are decrypted.”

“I don’t understand. Isn’t it obvious whether what you’re looking at is encrypted or not?”

“It’s only obvious if what you’re looking at is recognizable. Something like a photograph or a text document. These four files aren’t either of those things.”

“What are they?”

“Numbers, mostly. Just numbers. There’s recognizable computer code between most of the groups of numbers, but not enough to make any sense out of it. The code seems to be a series of commands, although I can’t tell you what the commands do.”

“Are all four documents the same?”

“The structure is the same, number groups with code commands between them, but the numbers are different and the commands are… well, they’re only slightly different and a few are simply repeated over and over.”

“And you have no idea what any of it means?”

“None. I couldn’t even speculate. For a computer programmer, it’s the way looking at a bunch of random words pulled out of a dictionary would be to a writer.”

Tay started wishing he hadn’t been so quick to stub out his cigarette.

“I think you need to look at these files for yourself,” Julie continued. “Give me your email address and I’ll send them to you.”

“Couldn’t you just print them out and send them to me by courier?” he asked.

“Print? Why would you want the files printed?”

Now Tay
knew
he shouldn’t have stubbed out his cigarette. This was going to be embarrassing.

“I want them printed because…”

Tay hesitated. This was going to be
really
embarrassing.

“… I don’t have an email address,” he finished quickly.

Julie went silent for a long moment, then said, “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t use email.”

“You don’t use email?”

“No.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

In the silence that followed, Tay felt older than he had ever felt in his entire life, which was really saying something. Here he was talking to a young woman who was beautiful and smart, and the truth was he would very much like her to think well of him. Yet he had just admitted to her that he was such an old fart that he didn’t even use email. How humiliating.

“Okay,” Julie went on with a businesslike crispness in her voice, “here’s what we’ll do. I’ll load these four files to a spare laptop I’ve got here and get somebody to bring it to you. I’m also going to set you up with an email address on our server and I’ll email you the other files as I finish with them. How’s that?”

Relief and amazement washed over Tay in equal measures. Relief that Julie didn’t seem particularly put off by him not using email, and amazement that she hadn’t made any comment about him being an old fart. He
was
an old fart, of course, but it was still no fun when people reminded him of it.

“Thanks,” Tay said.

“You’re welcome,” Julie replied.

And that was all she said. Tay was pretty sure he could hear a smile in her voice. He liked that.

“Give me an address,” Julie went on, “a
street
address. I’ll have somebody there with the laptop in an hour.”

When he hung up, Tay suddenly felt hungry for the first time in days. Julie had said an hour, hadn’t she? And an hour was really all he needed to go out and grab a quick bite to eat.

He thought about leaving his .38 at home. After all, what were the chances that someone would come after him in the middle of the crowds
up on Orchard Road? But he knew if he did leave it at home, the next time his mother made an appearance she would complain that he never listened to her. It was easier to carry the damn thing than to argue with his mother. He clipped it on his belt, put his jacket back on to cover it, and headed for the Alley Bar.

The Alley Bar was no more than a hundred yards from Tay’s house. It wasn’t exactly in an alley, but the description was close enough. It was at the very bottom of Emerald Hill Road where the street was closed to automobiles so no traffic passed the bar’s open front other than people on foot. Late at night, the trendy and vacuous took over the place, but in the early evening hours the Alley Bar was less stylish, and Tay had always found it to be a pleasant place for a quick meal.

He particularly liked sitting at the black terrazzo bar in the long, narrow front room that was paneled like a library in dark, slightly scarred wood. The room felt both intimate and airy to him at the same time. It had a very high ceiling topped with skylights, and they were only slightly smudged by the excretions of the local bird population.

Tay thought the room would have been just about perfect if they still allowed smoking there, but he realized that was not a widely held point of view. He imagined it was illegal even to think about smoking in any bar in Singapore now. Actually taking out a pack of cigarettes and putting it down on the bar would probably become a capital offense almost any day now.

Tay settled himself at the end of the bar and ordered fish and chips and a Tiger draft. The beer came first and, while he sipped at it and waited for his food, he thought about what Julie had said. If the files she had decrypted didn’t make any sense to her, what good would it do him to look at them? Still, it was something, he supposed. When he looked at the decrypted files, he would be looking at the work Tyler had thought was important enough to save on his secret backup drive. All Tay had to do would be to figure out what the hell he was looking at. Sure, no problem. Piece of cake.

A movement beyond the open front of the Alley Bar caught Tay’s eye, and he glanced over in time to see two men walk quickly past heading in the direction of Emerald Hill Road. Because of the heat, people in Singapore generally walked at a pretty relaxed pace. People who walked fast had to be tourists. That was probably what had caught his attention.

But maybe not. Tay also had a sense there had been a third man in front of the two he had seen, and that he had recognized the man. He turned the feeling around in his mind for a while, but he couldn’t make it into a tangible thought. Soon it slipped away altogether.

A petite and attractive woman who was far too young delivered his fish and chips. Tay began to eat and allowed his thoughts to drift back to Tyler’s disk drive. Since the files meant nothing to Julie, perhaps he should show them to someone else. Robbie Kang was the only candidate he could come up with, so he thought he would do that. Maybe the files would mean something to Kang.

Then another idea occurred to Tay. John August was obviously plugged into the American intelligence establishment. Surely August would know someone who could interpret the files. But how long would that take? No doubt longer than Tay had if he was going to get this finished by Tuesday morning.

The more Tay thought about the files on Tyler’s disk drive, the less certain he became they were going to do him any good regardless of who looked at them. There were too many hurdles to clear just to read what was on the drive. Forget about figuring out what it meant once he could read it. That wasn’t a three-day job, and three days was all he had.

Thinking about that damned disk drive was giving him indigestion. Tay banished all thought of it from his mind and gave his full attention to his fish and chips.

TAY HAD JUST
left the Alley Bar when he glanced up Emerald Hill Road and saw the motorcycle parked by the curb a little way from his house.

Someone was sitting astride it, waiting, and as Tay came closer, the rider slowly rotated his helmeted head toward him. Tay’s hand crept underneath his jacket and settl
ed against his gun. W
hen the rider’s own hand disappeared into the messenger bag slung across his chest, Tay felt his stomach clench. His fingers closed on the butt of his .38 and he began to lift it out of its holster.

The rider’s hand emerged from the bag, but rather than holding a weapon it held a thin, silver-colored laptop computer. The rider flipped up the faceplate of his helmet and Tay saw the rider wasn’t a man at all. It was a woman who looked vaguely familiar. Tay relaxed his grip on the pistol and let it slip back into its holster.

“Inspector Tay,” the woman said. “Julie asked me to bring this laptop to you.”

Then Tay realized where he had seen her before. She had been working at one of the computer terminals in the front room of Julie’s office.

“I rang your bell,” the woman added, “but you didn’t answer.”

“I didn’t expect you so soon.”

“That’s okay. I didn’t mind waiting. It’s nice to get out of the office for a change.”

Tay took the laptop in both hands to guard against dropping it and was surprised to discover how light it was. It was no thicker than a pad of paper and didn’t weigh much more either.

“It’s a MacBook Air,” the woman said. “Do you want me to show you how to use it?”

“I’m sure I won’t have any problem,” Tay said.

He was pretty sure he
would
have a problem, but he was tired of admitting to women how technologically inept he was.

“Okay,” she said. “Julie asked me to tell you that she put all four of the files on the desktop.”

Tay nodded as if that made all the sense in the world. He knew he ought to scream,
what the hell is the desktop?
But he didn’t.

The woman flipped her faceplate down and kicked the bike into life. Then abruptly she lowered the idle to quiet the engine and flipped her faceplate back up again.

“I thought about leaving the laptop with your friends, but I figured Julie would want me to give it directly to you.”

“What friends?”

“The three men at your house.”

Tay’s expression must have made it plain that he had no idea what the woman was talking about, because she added, “They went into your house about a half hour ago. They had a key. At least it looked to me like they did. They just walked up to the gate, opened it, and went in. Weren’t you expecting them?”

Tay was sure the woman could see on his face that he wasn’t expecting anybody, or at least not quite in the way she meant, but he saw no reason to say it.

“Oh yes, I forgot,” he said instead. “Thanks for bringing the laptop. Tell Julie I’ll call her.”

The woman looked at Tay a bit strangely. He couldn’t blame her one bit. Then she apparently decided whatever he was hiding was none of her business, and she nodded, flipped down her faceplate, and rode away.

Tay stood there on the street and tried to decide what to do. Could Julie’s messenger have been mistaken? That seemed unlikely. She had seen what she had seen and, if she had seen three men go in through his front gate, then she had. And if she hadn’t seen them come back out again, then she hadn’t. He didn’t have a back door. If the three men hadn’t come out through the front gate,
they were still inside his house.

But who could they be? Burglars? Not likely since Tay knew burglars seldom came in sets of three. And then there was how they had gotten in. No one else had a key to his house so they must have picked both the gate lock and the front door lock, and they had done both locks so quickly Julie’s messenger thought they were using a key. If they could manage that, they weren’t junkies looking to steal a couple of television sets. They were professional break and enter guys.

Tay knew he ought to stay right where he was and call the police, but he didn’t want to raise an alarm until he had a better idea what was really going on. If he had to guess, and come to think of it he supposed he did have to guess, his best surmising would be that Zachery Goodnight-Jones had sent people around to search his house for Tyler’s disk drive. And that gave him an idea. If he was right about that and he caught them in the act, maybe he would have something he could use against Goodnight-Jones.

Or maybe they would just kill him like they probably did Tyler and Emma.

Tay slid his hand under his jacket and felt for his gun. It gave him some comfort to have it, but not a great deal. A five shot revolver with a two-inch barrel wasn’t going to be much help in confronting three men, was it?

And how was he going to go about doing that confronting anyway? Walk right in through his front door? That didn’t seem like a very good idea. Surely they would be smart enough to have an eye out for him to return. At three against one, his little revolver wasn’t going to do much to even the odds.

Okay
, Tay told himself,
this is silly. You should just call the police and be done with it.

Yes, of course, you should,
Tay answered himself,
but that’s not what you’re going to do, is it?

Instead of walking up Emerald Hill Road to his front gate, Tay turned left into a narrow lane that ran along the side of Number 5. The tables out front were filled with drinkers as they usually were and Tay’s eyes lingered for a moment on the table where he and Emma sat one evening not so long ago. It seemed now like that must have been years ago, but it hadn’t been. He could count the number of days that had passed since then on his fingers. If he wanted to. Which he didn’t.

Behind Number 5, Tay turned right and worked his way through a succession of narrow streets and alleyways until he came to the house that backed up to his. He didn’t know his back neighbors very well. He hardly knew them at all really, but he had left his house through their garden on more than one occasion when he didn’t want to be seen going out through his own front door, so he knew the gate from his neighbor’s back garden to the street was always unlocked. He also remembered several large rubber garbage bins stored just inside it.

Tay let himself in through the gate, picked up one of the bins, and carried it to the end of the garden where he placed it up against the fence. It was awkward carrying the trash bin and the laptop at the same time, but what else was he going to do? Bury the laptop somewhere? If his neighbors came out and asked him what he was doing there, he would just tell them he had forgotten his keys and locked himself out. It was a stupid story, and worse it sounded stupid, but what were they going to do? Call the cops and tell them their neighbor was crawling over his own garden wall?

Tay hoisted himself up on the garbage bin and paused for a moment to be sure it would take his weight. It did.

He raised his head very slowly until his eyes cleared the top of the fence and he could see into his garden. It was quiet and dark so he straightened up, swung first one leg and then the other over the fence, and balanced for a moment on top. Then he turned loose and dropped down behind the thick crape myrtle bushes that lined the wall at the back of his garden.

He remained completely still, straining his ears for any hint that someone had come into the garden to investigate the sound of him crawling over the wall. But he hadn’t made very much noise, and no one came out.

When Tay was sure he was alone, he slipped between two of the crape myrtles and crept toward the glass-paned French doors that led to his living room. He paused at the table where he had breakfast most morning, laid the laptop on one of the chairs, and pushed the chair all the way in so the laptop wouldn’t be visible unless the chair was pulled out again. It wasn’t much of a hiding place, but it would have to do.

He could see no sign of light or movement on the other side of the French doors and he felt safe enough to creep right up to the wall beside them. Moving his head very slowly, he peered inside.

His living room was empty.

So where were the three men?

Could Julie’s messenger have been wrong after all? Could she have seen people going into another house and only thought it was his? No, that seemed unlikely. Tay had no doubt the men were searching through his house for Tyler’s disk drive so they were all probably upstairs now. When people hid things, they usually hid them near what they thought of as private spaces like their bedroom. It was just human nature. That was the first place he would look, too.

Tay often left the French doors unlocked since he went into his garden so frequently, but he couldn’t remember whether they were unlocked now or not. If they weren’t, he was pretty much screwed. What was he going to do? Knock and ask the men searching his house to let him in?

He placed his hand on the handle and applied gentle pressure. The handle traveled all the way down and retracted the bolt. Sure enough, the doors were unlocked. He pulled very slowly and the door swung silently outward.

Tay slipped inside his living room, closed the door behind him, and squatted behind the brown leather loveseat. Very slowly he raised his eyes above its back.

Nothing. The room was empty.

That was when Tay heard the footsteps on the stairs.

One set. Coming down. Moving quickly.

Tay crouched until he was sure he was completely concealed behind the loveseat. He slid his hand under his jacket, drew the .38, and waited.