by Jake Needham
Susan Hoi wore a blue, three-button blazer with a pink shirt that was open at the neck. Doctors simply dressed better than cops, Tay decided.
“What took you so long?” she asked after Tay took a seat in one of the straight chairs facing her desk.
“Phone calls,” Tay mumbled.
Dr. Hoi looked skeptical. He didn’t blame her. It was a lame excuse, but it was the best he could do at the moment.
“You don’t much like coming to my office, do you, Sam?”
“Not very much, no.”
“I hope it’s not because of me.”
“It’s not. It’s because…” Tay trailed off and settled for waving one hand vaguely indicating the area outside of Dr. Hoi’s office.
“I see,” she said. “I think.”
Tay wanted to get away from the whole subject of his squeamishness around dead bodies as quickly as he could. He cleared his throat.
“What was it you wanted to show me?” he asked.
Dr. Hoi plucked a small plastic box off her desk with one hand and pushed a stainless steel tray toward Tay with the other. She dumped the contents of the box onto the tray and what looked like a dozen or so tiny yellow and white pebbles bounced across it making little clicking sounds against the metal. Tay bent toward the tray and peered at the pebbles. When he suddenly realized they weren’t pebbles, he recoiled.
“Are those teeth?” he asked.
“From our corpse,” Dr. Hoi nodded.
“I assumed they weren’t yours,” Tay muttered.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Dr. Hoi looked at Tay for a moment, but he didn’t say anything else so she went on.
“The upper jaw was substantially destroyed by the gunshot. I found these teeth in his throat when I probed it.”
Tay looked away and nodded, concentrating on controlling the bile rising into his throat.
Dr. Hoi reached out and stirred the teeth around with her forefinger until she found the one she wanted. She scooped it up and thrust it toward Tay.
“What do you see?” she demanded.
“A reminder of the reason I’m not the tooth fairy.”
“What?”
“Never mind again.”
This time Dr. Hoi smiled and shook her head.
“Look at the dental work, Sam.”
Tay saw a spot on the bottom surface of the tooth Dr. Hoi was holding out. It was dark gray and irregularly shaped. Was that what she was talking about?
“Is that a filling?” Tay asked.
Dr. Hoi nodded.
“I don’t know anything about dental work,” Tay said.
“I don’t know much either, but I can tell you one thing. This work certainly wasn’t done here.”
“So you’re saying our corpse was a visitor to Singapore?”
“Or an immigrant.”
“Or a local who gets his dental work done in Malaysia because it’s cheaper,” Tay added.
“I doubt it. From the alloy used for the filling and the way it’s applied, my guess is this work was done in Indonesia.”
Indonesia?
Tay felt his stomach clench.
An Indonesian shot in the head in Singapore a couple of days before Suparman, another Indonesian, was shot by his sister who was also Indonesian? He didn’t think he had ever dealt with the death of an Indonesian in Singapore before, and now suddenly he was up to his ass in violent and deceased Indonesians. Was that just a coincidence? Or had his mother been on to something?
“It’s pretty thin, I know,” Dr. Hoi said.
Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything.
“That’s it,” Dr. Hoi shrugged. “You asked me if I had anything that might point to an ID. This is what I’ve got. It’s more than you had before, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” Tay nodded. “By the way, have you done the autopsy on Robbie Kang yet?”
“I’ve had a quick look, but the full work-up won’t be done for another day or two.”
“Any preliminary thoughts?”
“What are you asking me, Sam?”
“What was Robbie shot with?”
“A handgun. Almost certainly a nine millimeter.”
“Exactly like the floater.”
Dr. Hoi cocked her head and peered at Tay. “What are you saying, Sam? That you think there’s a connection between the floater and Robbie?”
Tay said nothing, and Dr. Hoi eventually produced a half smile.
“Maybe we can talk about it some other time,” she said.
“Maybe we can,” Tay replied as he stood up to leave.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
WHEN TAY LEFT Block Nine, he lit a cigarette as soon as he could. From the moment he entered the building the unmistakable odor of death had tormented him. He could taste it in his throat and feel the burn in his nostrils. How could Dr. Hoi breathe air all day that was infused with death and putrefaction? All he wanted now was to clean out his mouth and nose. A cigarette would accomplish that quite nicely.
As he walked back to the Cantonment Complex smoking his cigarette, he thought about what Dr. Hoi had told him. What if the floater was an Indonesian? That didn’t necessarily mean a connection existed between the floater and Suparman. There were a few hundred million Indonesians. Just because two of them got shot in Singapore within a few days of each other he wasn’t going to jump to the conclusion the shootings were related. And certainly not because his mother claimed they were.
Who was he kidding? He knew in his gut they were connected someway, even if he couldn’t see exactly how. At least not yet.
When Tay got back to the Cantonment Complex, he dumped his cigarette butt into one of the big ashtrays outside the glass doors and took the elevator upstairs to his office.
From the fifteenth floor of the Cantonment Complex, Tay had a glorious view of Singapore. Straight ahead across the Singapore River was the green patch of Fort Canning Park and off to the right were the glass and steel towers of the financial district. If he stood up and walked to the window, he could see all the way north to the long ranks of luxury hotels and shopping malls that walled both sides of Orchard Road. But he wasn’t going to stand up and walk to the window. He didn’t much like looking at Orchard Road these days.
The ruined façades of the Hyatt, the Marriott, and the Hilton were still under repair from the bombings that had nearly destroyed them. His memories of the chaos and destruction were both raw and personal. Above everything else, he remembered the smell of the dead and dying all around him. He would never forget that smell.
Until the bombings, Singapore had seemed charmed. Life was comparatively placid here in his little corner of Southeast Asia. There was some crime, of course, but Singapore was largely untroubled by the upheavals which regularly swept the rest of the world. Perhaps Singapore was simply too boring for upheavals, but whatever the reason the suffering endured by the rest of the world was only something Singaporeans watched on television.
Then the three American big hotels in the heart of the city were reduced to smoking ruins, and the thousands of dead and dying had not been on television. In that one instant of thunder and blood, Singapore had been transformed. Perhaps, Tay thought, he had been transformed, too.
The question of exactly what Singapore had become, however, was hard to answer. And Tay was even less sure of what he himself might have become.
When Sergeant Lee knocked, Tay was still staring out the window. He said nothing, but she opened the door anyway.
“Can I get you some coffee, sir?”
Tay shook his head. He didn’t invite her in.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
“Because you might not be.”
“I’ve been a homicide investigator almost as long as you’ve been walking. I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies.”
“But I’ll bet none of them were friends of yours.”
Tay went back to his desk and sat do
wn. Without being invited, Sergeant Lee closed the door and took one of the chairs across from him.
“I want to help, sir.”
“In a moment I’m going to go up and see the SAC. He’s going to tell me I can’t have any part in investigating Sergeant Kang’s murder.”
“And you’re going to nod and say you understand, and then you’re going to go out and do it anyway. That’s what the SAC will expect, and he won’t do anything to stop you. Tell me I’m wrong about that.”
Tay said nothing.
“I want to help, sir,” Lee repeated. “Please let me help you.”
“Why do you want to do that?”
“I feel responsible.”
“You’re not.”
Lee looked away. “I know how I feel. I don’t want to argue with you, sir.”
“Did you know Robbie’s wife is pregnant?” Tay asked.
Lee shook her head, but she didn’t say anything.
“Robbie asked me to be the godfather just yesterday morning.”
Lee closed her eyes and looked down. “That’s awful, sir. I don’t know what to say.”
Tay nodded and fell silent.
“Do you believe what that ISD guy said, sir? That the sister shot Suparman and then Suparman shot Sergeant Kang?”
“Somebody shot Suparman and I don’t think it was ISD. I guess that doesn’t leave anybody else other than the woman they say was his sister.”
“But why would she shoot her own brother?”
Tay thought back to the man who met Suparman’s sister in the alley behind the Temple Street Inn and decided not to tell Sergeant Lee about following him to the Australian High Commission. He couldn’t make any sense out of that and didn’t want to talk about it until he could.
“And what about that guy claiming Suparman shot Robbie?” she went on when Tay didn’t respond. “That seems a little too neat for me. Maybe Robbie didn’t identify himself and came out of the staircase with his gun out. Maybe ISD fired on him by reflex.”
“They didn’t fire on us when we came out of the same staircase, and you had your gun out.”
Lee nodded, but she didn’t say anything else.
“Remember, Sergeant, Robbie was shot in the back of the head. My guess is he came out of the door from the stairs, saw Suparman and those five ISD guys, and turned to jump back into the stairwell.”
“And that’s when somebody shot him.”
Tay nodded.
“But not ISD.”
“Whatever else I think of ISD,” Tay said, “that’s not how they would react. They wouldn’t have shot him in the back of the head.”
“So that leaves Suparman.”
“Yes,” Tay said, “it appears it does.”
Lee took a deep breath and let it out again. “I don’t really understand what’s going on here, sir.”
“Neither do I, Sergeant, but I’m damn well going to find out. And I’d be happy to have your help. Give me a little time. Then we’ll sit down and talk.”
“Right, sir,” Lee said, standing up to leave.
“One other thing, Sergeant.”
Lee stopped. “Yes, sir?”
“Can you cook?”
The next few days passed in a blur for Tay. He went to see the SAC, who told him exactly what Tay knew he would. He gave a statement to the detectives assigned to the case, who repeated the same admonitions. He even went to Kang’s funeral and he never went to funerals, but he sat in the back and left just as it ended so he wouldn’t have to speak to anyone.
Tay didn’t like funerals. Funerals were for the living, not for the dead. And mostly they had the purpose of reminding the living they would soon be dead, too. Tay didn’t need reminding. Hardly a day passed without the thought occurring to him.
Other than that, Tay mostly stayed in his office. He drank a lot of coffee, made regular trips down the elevator to step outside and smoke a cigarette, and shuffled papers. Among the papers Tay shuffled was Dr. Hoi’s preliminary autopsy report on the floater. He hoped the report might contain something pointing to the identity of the corpse other than her speculation about its dental work, but it didn’t. The cause of death, Dr. Hoi concluded, was a single shot to the head with a nine millimeter handgun. Tay already knew that.
He also read Dr. Hoi’s preliminary autopsy report on Robbie Kang. He didn’t want to, but he did. The cause of death, she concluded, was a single gunshot wound. The entrance was seven inches below the top of the head. It penetrated the skull in the left occipital lobe of the brain and was recovered in the left cerebral hemisphere. The track of the wound was back to front, slightly left to right, and at a twenty-three degree upward angle. As if a seated man had fired at one who was standing. And the shooter had used a nine.
Not only didn’t that help, it pulled Tay straight down a rabbit hole that felt bottomless.
The floater Dr. Hoi thought might be Indonesian was killed by a shot to the back of the head with a nine. Robbie Kang was killed, presumably by Abu Suparman, with a shot to the back of the head with a nine. On top of that, Suparman, a notorious Indonesian terrorist, had been shot by his sister, another Indonesian, although Tay had no idea what kind of weapon she had used.
Nine millimeter handguns were common enough almost everywhere in the world, that was true, but no handguns were common in Singapore. Gunshot deaths in Singapore were extremely rare. Could these two killings in the same time period using the same caliber of weapon and both involving Indonesians be a coincidence? And if they weren’t a coincidence, exactly how were they connected?
Tay knew who shot Suparman. At least he knew if he believed Bruce Willis and he supposed he did. But Tay wasn’t prepared to believe Suparman’s sister also shot the floater and dumped his body in the Singapore River, and he knew she hadn’t shot Robbie Kang because by then she was lying dead in Serangoon Road.
So that meant it was all a coincidence, didn’t it? It meant the shootings weren’t all connected.
Who was he kidding? He didn’t buy that either.
He just wasn’t at all sure where that left him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
TAY WAS OUT of cigarettes. He had just made up his mind that running out of cigarettes more than justified going home early when there was a perfunctory knock on his office door and the SAC let himself in.
“We need to talk, Sam,” the SAC said as he sat down in front of Tay’s desk.
Tay was fairly certain no one had ever said anything he wanted to hear after beginning a conversation with the phrase, we need to talk. He folded his arms and waited.
“Have you ever considered retirement, Sam?”
Whatever he might have been expecting the SAC to say, it certainly hadn’t been that.
“This is a young man’s game,” the SAC went on without meeting Tay’s stare. “I know you’re well-off. You don’t need the job. You could just toss it in. Particularly after losing Sergeant Kang the way you did, I think you ought to consider doing that.”
Tay cleared his throat, but he didn’t quite trust himself to speak.
“Or if that doesn’t appeal to you, Sam, there’s a Deputy Superintendent position opening up in a couple of months. It’s an administrative position, of course, but I believe you would be well suited for it. It’s a double promotion, but I can swing it for you.”
Tay didn’t have a lot of friends in the Singapore Police Department. He never had. He understood he could be immensely annoying, but he did his job well and in spite of a few bumps here and there over the years he had mostly been left alone to do it. Some senior officers who didn’t like him had made a run at him once. They tried to use a shooting incident in which he had been involved to get rid of him, but it hadn’t worked. In the end, CID needed him enough that officers even more senior had overruled his enemies and brought him back.
But now this.
“Why are you asking me this today, sir?”
The SAC shifted in his chair. He looked away and rubbed at his face with one hand. His
discomfort was obvious.
“I have a problem with the story you told me about Suparman.”
“What kind of problem, sir?”
“We can’t find any evidence things happened the way you say they did.”
“Has anyone spoken to ISD?”
The SAC nodded. “I did. They deny it.”
“They’re claiming the sister didn’t shoot Suparman, or claiming Suparman didn’t shoot Sergeant Kang?”
“They’re saying they don’t know anything about any of that because no one from ISD was at the Fortuna Hotel when Sergeant Kang was killed.”
“They’re saying they didn’t bring Suparman to the Fortuna Hotel to meet his sister?”
“No.”
“Then how did he get there? How did she get there?”
“ISD is saying they have no idea. They had the sister staked out at the Temple Street Inn, but she apparently slipped away and they lost her.”
“And Suparman?”
“They say they don’t have any idea where he is. Either he never came to Singapore after all, or they missed him.”
“They didn’t miss him. They had him surrounded by five armed men. I saw it. I was there.”
“That’s what you say, Sam, but you seem to be forgetting something. You weren’t supposed to be there. You were assigned to the Santa Grande Hotel in Chinatown to await instructions from ISD.”
“That’s true, sir, but—”
“And entirely on your own, without informing anyone, you went somewhere else, and you took two sergeants with you. Now one of them is dead.”
It was Tay’s turn to shift uncomfortably in his chair.
“What’s that supposed to mean, sir?”
“I’m just stating facts, Sam. It’s going to be up to someone well above me to decide what they mean.”
“It sounds like you’re blaming me for Robbie’s murder.”
