For the Dead

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Don’t lean back,” the slender man says. “You’ve had that uniform on all day.”

  “Yes, sir.” Thanom indulges a brief mental image of leaping across the desk and twisting the other man’s head off his neck.

  “And, of course, those two objectives are related, aren’t they? Or perhaps tangled would be a better word.”

  Thanom has no intention of volunteering anything in response to this remark, so he says, “Sir?”

  “Our first objective,” the slender man says, raising his eyebrows in assumed surprise, “in the order you assigned them, was finding the people who killed Sawat and Thongchai, right?”

  “Yes. Sir.”

  He nods, waiting. When Thanom doesn’t continue, he says, “Let’s think this through together, shall we? Just who in your department do you trust to help you find those people?”

  Thanom weighs it for a moment. “Almost no one.”

  “There we are. Finally.” He slides the lamp a few inches closer to Thanom, as though to see him better. “You’re going to need to be more candid with me if we’re going to get anywhere together. To move things along, I’m going to speculate about the reason you don’t trust anyone.” He places two fingers against his cheek, his thumb beneath his chin. “Will that be all right?”

  “It will be fascinating.”

  “This is all hypothetical. It’s not as though I actually know anything. Are we clear on that?”

  Thanom shifts in the chair. His back is getting tired. “Yes, sir.”

  “All right. There are two groups of people who are most likely to have killed Sawat and Thongchai, aren’t there? The first are the friends or relatives of their victims.”

  “Yes,” Thanom ventures. “The things that were said on the video, the count of women and children killed. That says grudge murder.”

  “And the second group,” the slender man says, “are cops. High-ranking cops. We’ve all assumed since the beginning that Sawat had help from higher up and that he was sharing his very extravagant murder fees in exchange for that help. There was quite a lot of discussion about who that help might be, if you recall.”

  Thanom forces a smile. “I do.”

  “I’d be surprised if you didn’t, since, when the story originally came to the public’s attention, you were pretty directly in the line of fire.”

  Thanom feels a flare of anger in the center of his chest. He says, “Quite a few of us were.”

  The slender man ignores the response. “Fast forward to today. Both Sawat and Thongchai had expensive lifestyles. Security alone, for Sawat, cost tens of thousands of baht a month. And they were running out of money, or at least Sawat was; I hadn’t been paying attention to Thongchai. Assuming that the speculation was true, that higher-ups had been profiting from what Sawat was doing, those high-ranking cops would be the people Sawat would approach for money.”

  “Absolutely,” Thanom says.

  “Making it a difficult issue to probe in the department, since you have no way of knowing who, if anyone, it was.”

  Thanom says nothing.

  “Now, what’s the third possibility? It will make me very happy if you don’t disappoint me here.”

  “A combination,” Thanom says. “Sawat hit up his former superiors for money, and the former superiors pointed the survivors of a few of Sawat’s murder victims at him.”

  “So two out of three of our hypotheses involve someone—”

  “Or several someones,” Thanom says.

  The slender man puts one hand on top of the other, ostentatiously waiting to see whether Thanom has another interruption in mind. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he says. “If we find one, he will certainly give us the others. But now you know why I said our objectives were tangled: solving the crime may cause a new scandal in the department, making the stifling objective, as you termed it, impossible. The last thing anyone wants.”

  “The best thing,” Thanom says, volunteering the one thing he’s certain of, “would be to wrap this up very quickly, before the press and the politicians can build momentum.”

  “I’d say we’re forty-eight hours away from the first editorials and the first speeches calling for everything to be reopened. And it would be even less if this weren’t a weekend.”

  Thanom says, “That’s very much on my mind.”

  “I was sure it would be. But I don’t like to take things for granted.” The slender man turns his head slightly to the left, as though listening to the music, and Thanom hears the string quartet, too, and knows it isn’t Mozart.

  The man in white looks back to him, seeming almost surprised. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “No, thank you,” Thanom says. “I still have work to do.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. Coffee, then?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Fine,” he says. “We need to wrap this up quickly. First, catch the murderers of Sawat and Thongchai. That should be fairly easy, since they gave us details about the crimes they were avenging, and we’ve got their photos. I’d like you to handle that end of things.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Within the department—well, that’s more delicate. So now you’re going to learn why I took the camera and deleted the photographs you copied. When I asked you whether you saw anyone else in the pictures, you had a moment of doubt, didn’t you?”

  “I only got to look at them three times.”

  “Well, imagine how much doubt there will be among those who haven’t seen them. So I’m going to set up a trapdoor spider.”

  “Ahh,” Thanom says. He has no idea what a trapdoor spider is. “I’m putting the pictures on the department computer, behind a password. Beginning an hour from now, I’m going to give you lists of officers who were plausibly close to Sawat, five at a time. You’re going to circulate some sort of summary, on an eyes-only basis, of what’s going on—just the boy, the girl, the iPhone, things that are already scuttlebutt—and you’ll include the password somewhere in the document. If anyone is interested enough to log in to look at the pictures, the trapdoor will open and the spider will scuttle out and grab the identifying data from that computer.”

  Thanom says, “Some people might look just for curiosity’s sake.”

  “I know that,” the slender man says, and the sudden rigidity of his face reminds Thanom forcefully that he’s not accustomed to being questioned. “We’ll get some false bites,” he says. “But do you think anyone who actually was involved could resist it?”

  “Probably not.”

  “So those who do resist it—we’ll be able to eliminate them, won’t we?”

  “Yes, sir. Very clever, sir.”

  “But? I can hear the but.”

  Thanom takes a deep breath and dives in. “But even those who do look—it won’t prove anything.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Worst case? Half the department looks at the pictures, you catch the murderers, and they have no idea who hired them, they were hired through a go-between, and we’re at a dead end.” He leans back in his chair and folds his hands over his flat stomach, an oddly vulnerable position, Thanom thinks. “But here’s the bottom line, Colonel. No matter what happens we will solve this within seventy-two hours one way or the other, and if it proves to be the other, I need to know now that you’re with me.” He lowers his head and gazes at Thanom over the gray glasses, revealing eyes that look as though they’ve seen everything a thousand times, and with very little interest. “If we must, we will arrange a solution.”

  “We,” Thanom says, “meaning you and I.”

  “Is the department worth protecting?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Does it seem to you that working with me on this might actually be—helpful to your career?”

  Thanom isn’t sure he’ll survive the collaboration, much less benefit from it. “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Really. If that’s true, I’m dismayed. But now that I’ve raised it,
what do you think?”

  “A mentor is always helpful,” Thanom says neutrally. “But how could I assist you?”

  “There’s an odd bit of synchronicity here, isn’t there? One of the people who had the phone is the daughter of a good friend of an officer in your department. An officer who was positioned perfectly to have helped Sawat six years ago. An officer at whom some fingers were actually pointed back then. That’s the kind of thing I’d call interesting. And,” he says, the eyes over the top edge of the glasses fixed squarely on Thanom’s, “an officer who was able to manipulate the, um, department so that the lip-reader who saw the surveillance tapes was his, his—whatever she is to him. Quite a lot of synchronicity when you think about it.”

  Thanom feels an unexpected pang for Arthit. “I suppose it is. But people know how the little girl got involved—”

  “Details,” the slender man says. “Details are infinitely elastic. This officer was there when Sawat and Thongchai commissioned the original killings, he’s here now, and he has connections with the phone that could be made to look like more.” He spreads his hands, a man who is saying something that should be self-evident. “Certainly the best way for the department to deflect inquiries would be to offer up one of our own as a responsible party. Fall on our own swords, so to speak. The opposite of a cover-up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you think you’re likely to need more guidance?”

  “I know what to do. Try to find the men in the photos, circulate your memos and then stand back, if necessary.”

  “Good, then.” The slender man stands. “You’ll be wanting to get back to work now.”

  23

  Sunday

  ALL NIGHT LONG, as he tries to get to sleep, Rafferty hears Miaow.

  Hears her door open and close. Hears her footsteps. Hears the toilet flush, the water run. Hears the tinny voices of some cosplay drama she follows on YouTube.

  Keeps listening for the ringtone of her phone, Andrew sneaking a call in the dark.

  Just before he finally drops off, around four, he sees the hallway light go on, a yellow strip beneath the door. He holds his breath, hoping she’ll come in, but a moment later the light goes off again, and then he’s asleep.

  So by the time he gets up, about eight A.M., Sunday already seems a week long.

  He wraps himself in his ratty robe, laundered until it has holes in it, and goes to Miaow’s door to listen but hears nothing. There must be something he can say to her, something that won’t just be cosmetic. Cosmetic, he knows from five years’ experience with her, won’t fly. Moving lightly, he heads for the kitchen, where he tosses the Growing Younger Man’s box of goop in the trash and takes advantage of temporarily being able to find everything to make pancakes, which are the only things, other than an orange and a Diet Coke, Miaow will eat for breakfast. He creates an especially high stack, centers it on a plate, drenches it in syrup, goes down the hall, and knocks very lightly on her door.

  Miaow says, “I don’t want any.” She sounds sniffly.

  “Well,” he says. “You know. If you get hungry or anything.”

  “If I get hungry,” Miaow says through the door, “I’ll phone you.”

  “Okay,” he says. He’s halfway down the hall when he hears something hit the wall in her room.

  In their bedroom, Rose is deep in the special sleep that Thai women invented and own exclusively, a sleep so deep Rafferty believes he could change the sheets without disturbing her. He sneaks a kiss and goes back out into the living room, once again unaware that he’s sighing. The huge dark rectangle of the television screen dominates the room; it’s like waking up and finding a car parked in front of the couch. His little desk and chair seem to be hiding behind it, as though he’s been banished from his own living room. He briefly considers sulking at his desk, but instead he pulls out a stool at the kitchen counter and eats Miaow’s pancakes.

  The second time he fires up the coffee grinder, Rose pads out of the bedroom, her hair a tangle so glorious it suggests to Rafferty some new and alien mathematics governing physical reality. She says, in her unused morning baritone, “Is my water hot?”

  “Half a minute,” he says, turning on the burner and feeling useful at last.

  There are mornings, Rafferty thinks, that Rose is actually still asleep for the first ten or fifteen minutes she’s moving around. This seems to be one of them. She rests one hand on the counter, dead center in a spill of maple syrup, her eyes half closed, just staring at the teapot. As he measures out the Nescafé, he sees her lift her hand from the counter, look down at it, sniff her fingers, and then lick the syrup off them.

  “Pancakes?” he says.

  She says, “Coffee.”

  “Got it.” He pours water in, gives it the approved triple-stir, and hands it to her.

  She says, “Miaow?”

  “In her room.”

  “Mmmmm,” she says, but it’s in response to the taste of the coffee. She blinks a couple of times, swallows again, and says, “She’ll come out.”

  “Women are harder on women than men are.”

  “I won’t argue with that.” She looks down into the cup, says, “More, please,” and drains it. When he’s taken the cup from her hand, she trails an index finger through the spill of syrup, licks it again, and says, “I’m going to whisper now.”

  “Hang on.” He’s scooping the spoon through the Nescafé again. “Either that or come over here and whisper.”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  “You sure you don’t want to try my coffee?”

  “How long have we been together?”

  “Five years? Six?”

  “Have I ever wanted to try your coffee?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” she says, “thank you for thinking I’m capable of changing.”

  He hands her the cup. She takes a long pull, squinting at him through the steam, and whispers, “We need to get a bigger apartment.”

  “For whom? Is your mother coming? I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  “Not for my mother. For—” She pats her belly.

  He says, “That’s nine months—wait. Are you seriously telling me you’re going to sleep in a different room from—you know, the, ummm—” He puts a palm on her stomach, and she covers it with her hand and presses it gently against her, and his knees go a little rubbery. Her skin always seems to him to be a different temperature than anyone else’s.

  “No,” she says. “But you may want to.”

  “I’m probably flattering myself,” Rafferty says, sliding his hand over the smooth plane of her belly, “but I think we’re in this together.”

  “And then, later,” Rose says. She takes his hand and lifts it to her face and presses her cheek against his palm. “We’re not going to put the baby into Miaow’s room.”

  “That’s two years from now.”

  “And we have all this money,” Rose says. She nips the tip of his little finger with a sleepy amusement in her eyes that suggests they might be a moment or two away from going back to bed.

  He’s leaning forward to kiss her when Miaow comes out of the hallway, glances at them the way Rafferty might locate something he doesn’t want to trip over, and opens the refrigerator.

  “And,” Rose says in a normal tone of voice, “the television is too big for this apartment.”

  Watching Miaow’s rigid back as she pulls out a can of Diet Coke, Rafferty says, “Then let’s get rid of the television.”

  Miaow leaves the kitchen with the refrigerator door wide open. Her bedroom door closes.

  Rose gives the refrigerator door a push and says, “She’s definitely going to want her own room.”

  Rafferty’s cell phone rings on the counter. A man’s voice says, “This is Nguyen. We need to talk.”

  ANNA IS MASSAGING Arthit’s back on the bed, using her left elbow to torment one of the muscles that’s in spasm, when the phone rings. Grateful for the interruption, he starts to get up.

 
“Where are you going?” she asks.

  “My phone.”

  “Let it ring.”

  “It might be something important.”

  “Your back is important,” she says.

  “It’ll wait.” The phone is on the dresser, and the display says THANOM.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sorry to bother you on the weekend,” Thanom says.

  The new Thanom, equipped with apologies and what seems like a genuinely uncertain tone, makes Arthit uneasy. “Not a problem.”

  “I need to put you on identifying the killers. The men on the phone.”

  “I haven’t seen the men on the phone.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I want you to work back from the victims.”

  Arthit says, “Which victims?”

  “The victims the killer described in the video. The ones he was avenging.”

  Arthit allows himself to grin at the phone. “I don’t know what he said.”

  “You don’t? You mean Dr.— Dr.—”

  “Chaibancha.”

  “Yes, thank you. Dr. Chaibancha didn’t tell you what he said?”

  “You ordered her not to.”

  Arthit can almost see his boss glaring at the phone, chewing on his lower lip and weighing the probability that he’s being made fun of. “I order people to do a lot of things,” Thanom finally says. “That doesn’t mean they do them.”

  “Well,” Arthit lies, “she did.”

  “What he said to Sawat was ‘Two women, three children.’ And the second time, to Thongchai, he said, ‘One woman, two children.’ ”

  “Women and children. Got it.”

  “I want you to find those murders in the database. There can’t be many with that precise victim count. You’ll probably know them when you see them. They’ll have something in common, something that points at Sawat.”

  “Right.” Anna, who has been smoothing the covers on the bed, makes a rolling gesture with her hand that means hurry up.

  Arthit holds up a hand. On the other end of the line, Thanom hasn’t even paused. “I’m arranging for you to use the computers at a station outside Bangkok. It’s a few hours’ drive, but no one will be looking over your shoulder. I’ll email you the information.”