Rafferty says, “There are usually three reasons for crime, right, Arthit? Love, money, and power. Love is a non-starter, and maybe, in this case, so is money.”
Nguyen shoots Rafferty a look and gets up, and the movement has so much energy coiled inside it that they all watch him cross the room to refill his mug, looking like someone walking an invisible line. He takes a sip and turns and leans against the counter. “Corruption is the infinite crime,” he says. “It’s the worst of all because there’s literally no limit to how far it can go. Every successful act of corruption brings more power and more money. And it also gives the corrupt official more to defend, and more weight to defend it with. It’s a terrible cycle. It’s the way an obscure country doctor, like Papa Doc or Idi Amin, given ten or twelve years and the right opportunities, turns into the kind of national leader whose policies are implemented with machetes. It’s the way some people pervert whole social and political structures to become rich. Everyone in this room has experience with corruption.” His eyes go to Thanom and slide past. “Some of us from both sides of the line. Me, for example. I’ve put up with, fought against, and taken advantage of corruption all my adult life. And I agree with you, Colonel. The money is nowhere near enough to attract the attention of a man like the one you describe.” He takes another sip. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not at the center of it.”
Rafferty tilts his head back and closes his eyes, and it feels like the room has just stopped spinning. “We’ve been looking at the whole thing upside-down,” he says.
Nguyen nods, but says, “What does that actually mean?”
“He didn’t profit financially from the murders, at least not via Sawat. He didn’t need the money. What he needed were the murders.”
Thanom says, “What he needed were—?”
“He put Sawat in business,” Rafferty says. He gets up, just needing to move a little. “I know, it sounds ridiculous, but look at it as a hypothesis. It explains everything: how Sawat chose his victims, how he was shielded for so long. Even how he kept living at that level after he was kicked out.”
Arthit says, “And it would explain why he and Thongchai were killed. Look what they might have been threatening.”
“Test it,” Thanom snaps. “You’re saying that a member of one of the richest families in the kingdom set up a police murder unit and chose its victims?”
Rafferty says, “That’s what I’m saying.”
Thanom shakes his head. “Test it. If you want to make a case, the first thing you need to do is establish motivation, and it would have to be massive motivation for someone like Ton to risk everything. And the phone, why would the phone—”
“Power,” Rafferty interrupts. “Advantage. Money in the long run, enormous sums of money. The kind of money that comes with eliminating the competition.” He’s pacing around the table now, Arthit’s head following his movement. “One of the most interesting things about the murders Sawat’s gang committed is that—”
“Is that no one really looked at motive,” Arthit says. “They convicted their murderer, the murderer had a plausible motive, usually robbery or getting even for something that was done to him or his family. And the case against Sawat never went to court. The department denied all of it, so none of the murders was reopened. All those motives are floating around out there.”
“Perfect murders,” Rafferty says, trying it on. “Committed for enormous stakes. Over a period of years. A long-term plan.”
Nguyen says, “We need someone who’s good with databases. We need to identify the possible motive for Ton killing each of these people.”
“I’ve got the person you need,” Arthit says. “I worked with her all day Friday. I’ll bring her in.”
“In here,” Nguyen says. “We’ve got space, machines, and encrypted lines.”
Rafferty says, “A cop?”
“And what a cop,” Arthit says.
“And you trust her.”
Arthit nods.
“Well, when she’s finished juggling all that data, we need to find a way to present it.” Suddenly he sees Andrew’s graphic of the short and tall students, and he almost laughs. “A circle,” he says. “I’d like her to come up with a nice, neat circle, really simple. A wheel with Ton at the center and spokes to each of the victims we know about, with a one- or two-sentence explanation of what he gained from the death.”
“Sounds good to me,” Arthit says.
“I stole it from Andrew,” Rafferty says, glancing at Nguyen.
“We need more than a bunch of hypothetical motives,” Thanom says. “We need a connection, something more than the possibility that he’s just doing his job, running the investigation in a way that will protect the department. We need something real, a link, either to the earlier murders or to the killing of Sawat and Thongchai. Something tangible.”
Nguyen looks at Rafferty, eyebrows raised in a question. Rafferty nods assent and says, “Andrew again. The kid’s practically running things.”
Nguyen says, “Please turn off the light nearest to you,” and goes to Andrew’s Mac Air. He brings the screen to life and the picture appears: the electronically enhanced image of a man holding an iPhone, reflected in a store window. “You want a connection,” he says to Thanom. “We might have one.”
37
I Don’t Care If It’s a Zebra
IT’S WELL AFTER three in the morning when Rafferty eases open the door to their room, but Rose says, “Here you are.”
He closes and locks the door, which, since there’s no window, reduces the room to almost total darkness. “What are you doing up?”
“Waiting for you, of course.”
“Keep talking,” he says, “so I can find you.”
“I’m just wasting away all by myself,” Rose says. “Wondering what I did wrong to be all alone in the middle of the night. Are you here yet?”
“The next touch you feel will be mine.” He works his way up the side of the bed and reaches gently toward the space where he thinks the pillow will be.
She nips his finger. “That will be nice,” she says. “But what I really really want is a cigarette.”
“Not on the menu.” He sits on the other bed and kicks off his shoes. “You’ve been doing so well.”
“I know,” she says. “Especially considering all that’s going on. A week ago I’d have been smoking with both hands.”
“We’re going to be fine,” he says with more confidence than he feels. “It’s hard to believe, but all this started on Friday, and this is only Monday night. But you know what? We’ve got a big jump on the other side. We’ll be all right.”
“Life with you is too exciting. Working in the bar was more restful.”
“This time, it isn’t my fault.”
“I’m just grumpy because I need nicotine. Aren’t you naked yet?”
“Working on it.” He undoes his belt and unzips his fly.
She says, “Do that again,” and he zips and unzips it once more.
“My favorite song,” Rose says. “I could get used to being here. You can’t turn up the air-con.”
“That’s okay,” Rafferty says, folding back the covers. “I’ve got this big ice cube to cuddle up to.”
He slides in, and she slips an arm under him and tugs lightly on the hair on the back of his head. “You want to know what happened with Miaow tonight? Why all the silence between her and Andrew?”
“Sure.”
“She talked to those kids for about thirty seconds about what it was like on the street, and of course, she was really talking to Andrew. And he walked out. Just turned his back on her and went out the door.”
“You know,” Poke says, “maybe he’s just not the right boy for her. But the kid really did a job with that picture tonight. You can totally see the guy’s face.”
“Your daughter,” Rose says.
“I’m thinking about my daughter. I’m thinking about the motherfucker who sent someone after her with a knife.”
&
nbsp; “Calm down.” She takes his hand and puts it on her stomach, just below the navel, where his approximate grasp of female anatomy tells him is probably as close to the baby as he can get. At the thought of the baby, at the warmth and smoothness of her belly, the anger inside him melts a little. “This is nice.”
She says, “Rub in small circles and don’t press down too much.”
“Press like this?”
“Just a little harder. It shouldn’t hurt, but it shouldn’t tickle, either.”
“What we all want from life. Not hard enough to hurt, not light enough to tickle.”
“This is going to be a valuable skill,” she says. She puts her hand on his and guides the circles, and he relaxes his arm and wrist and lets her take over. It’s so dark he can’t actually see her face, but he has no difficulty imagining it. “Slower,” she said. “Like that. Do you think he or she can feel that?”
“Oh, God,” Rafferty says, and there are suddenly tears in his eyes. “I hope so.”
“Me, too.” She edges herself closer to him. “He or she?”
“He or she what? You mean, which do I want, or which do you think it is?”
“Which you want.”
“Oh, Rose,” he says. “I don’t care if it’s a zebra. I’m going to love it whatever it is.”
“I think I’d prefer a boy,” Rose says. She redirects his hand into a slow back-and-forth motion about six inches long. “Boys are important to families. They’re the tentpole.”
“You sound like Nguyen. The Asian sons syndrome.”
“If I’d had a couple of older brothers,” she says, “they would have been making money and my father probably wouldn’t have had to sell me.”
Rafferty says, “Ah.”
She stops his hand and pushes her stomach out. “Will you still love me when I have a huge belly?”
“I don’t know,” he says, blinking in the dark. “Will you still love me when I have a huge belly?”
She says, “Absolutely not,” and lifts her face to blow on the side of his neck.
And someone knocks on the door. “Mr. Rafferty? Mr. Rafferty?”
“Has to be Nguyen,” Poke says. “Not many people call me Mr. Rafferty.” He eases out of the bed and goes to the door, stark naked. Standing behind the door, he pulls it open a few inches and looks around the edge, but it’s not Nguyen. It’s Chinh.
“Sorry to bother you,” Chinh says, “but the older policeman—Thanom?”
“What about him?”
“He was on the way out of the embassy, going home, when his phone rang. It was a maid at his house. She said that six uniformed policemen had kicked the door in and were looking for him.”
Rafferty says, “I’ll be right there.”
He closes the door and says, “Looks like we haven’t got as much time as we thought.”
ONLY ONE LIGHT is on, but it’s bright enough for Rafferty to see Thanom sweat. He’s eating cookies without even looking at them, standing next to the food table. Nguyen, in a T-shirt, slacks, and white socks, is back at the coffee pot.
Rafferty says, “Arthit?”
“Coming back,” Nguyen says. “We got him on his cell.”
Thanom says, “They took my wife.”
“You said she’s from a good family,” Nguyen says. “They’ll let her go when you don’t show up for work tomorrow. They’re just holding everybody to keep them from tipping you off.”
“Where am I going to go?” Thanom looks down at the cookie in his hand and drops it onto the table as though it were red-hot.
“Nowhere.” Nguyen looks at Homer and flicks a finger at the coffeepot, and Homer trots over and picks it up. “You’ll stay here.”
Rafferty says, “How many people can you put up without causing a problem?”
“As many as I want,” Nguyen says. “I have a certain status here.”
Rafferty says, “I’ve been wondering about that.”
“Good,” Nguyen says. “It’ll give you something to do.” He calls something in Vietnamese after Homer. To Thanom, whose face had crumpled with suspicion at the sound of words he couldn’t understand, Nguyen says, “I told him to bring some tea, too.” He lifts both hands like a magician clearing his cuffs and says, “That’s all.”
There are voices in the hallway, and Arthit comes in. “Sooner than I thought,” he says to Rafferty.
“I was just saying the same thing. How early can you call your database cop?”
Arthit says, “Now. I offered her a job downtown, so she gave me her home phone so we could discuss it without everyone listening as I raid their talent.” He starts to punch up a number.
Nguyen says, “Wait. Write the number down and use my phone. Here, give me yours. All of you, turn off the cell phones. Pull out the batteries, if it’s even possible. We’ve got dozens of phones, all unregistered.” As Arthit goes into the hallway, Nguyen smiles at Thanom, not a very friendly smile. “The Thai government has big ears.”
“The man in that reflection,” Rafferty says. “He has to be close to Ton. I’m betting he’s related. He’s not going to trust anyone else. One thing on our side is that Ton’s family is still at the level where they get photographed for the newspapers. They haven’t quite made it into the stratosphere where no reporter would dare to point a camera at them. I’m going to spend the day at the Bangkok Sun, going through the social pages.”
“His family,” Nguyen says. “We need a chart of his family.”
“I can give you that,” Thanom says. “My wife—” He stops, staring at the center of the table. “My wife knows everything about those families. She’s—educated me.”
“Why don’t you make a list?” Nguyen says, and Rafferty is surprised at the gentleness in his voice. “I’ll get you some paper. Do a family tree. And tomorrow, you can call your wife and review it with her over the phone. And we’ll figure out where everybody is in the family’s businesses.” He looks at Rafferty as Arthit comes back in, phone extended to Nguyen. “That might tell us quite a bit.”
Arthit says, “She’ll be here at ten. Her name is Kwai, last name is Clemente. Her father’s a Filipino. And I just called home.”
At the word “home,” Rafferty remembers his question about why Anna had been at Boo’s place, but he can’t think of any way to ask it. Arthit has picked up something, though, and his eyes come to Rafferty’s face.
“Was Anna at your house?” Rafferty says, just to ask something. “Everything okay?”
“No problem,” Arthit says. He turns to Nguyen. “Got room for one more?”
Nguyen says, “Does she prefer coffee or tea?”
38
It’ll Have Holes Worn in It in Twenty-four Hours
FOUR HOURS AFTER he finally climbed into bed, Rafferty sleepily follows Rose to the meeting room where they’d first gathered, and finds Arthit, Anna, Thanom, and Andrew sitting around the table, silently eating breakfast. The embassy kitchen has put out Thai and Western food, plus bowls of steaming pho.
Eight places have been set, and at each of them, positioned beside the knife and spoon, is a generic cell phone and a shiny Ziploc bag.
Rose goes straight to Anna and starts talking as though she’s resuming a conversation that was interrupted only minutes ago. Anna keeps her eyes on Rose’s mouth. At the coffee pot, Rafferty takes advantage of the conversation to look for some evidence of nervousness in Anna, but she seems occupied in following the stream of Rose’s chatter. Thanom is eating rice with an egg broken on it, and the hand with the spoon is shaking so badly he’s scattered grains of rice all around the bowl and on the front of his uniform. He seems to have aged ten years overnight; he’s unshaven and his head trembles very slightly as he raises the spoon to his mouth.
Andrew continues to stare at the doorway after Rose and Rafferty have come in, and Rafferty says, “She’s asleep, Andrew. She’s not much on breakfast.” To Arthit, he says, “Look at this spread. Our host has some clout.”
“Optay eyespay,” Arth
it says with his mouth full.
“Gesundheit.”
“He’s using Pig Latin,” Andrew says, just barely not curling his lip. “So I don’t know he’s calling my father the top spy in the embassy.”
“Is he really a spy?” Rafferty says. “That could come in handy.”
Arthit says, “Caught by a mere child.” He smiles. “You’re very impressive, Andrew.”
Andrew says, “Me, impressive? I’m a jerk,” and then he gets up and stalks out of the room. His napkin clings to his jeans until he’s at the door, and since Rafferty’s standing, he goes after the boy and picks it up.
“He is kind of a jerk,” Rafferty says, refolding the napkin without knowing he’s doing it. “Or at least, he was last night, at Boo’s place.”
Thanom says, “We—we need to get started. We need to do something.”
“Kwai will be here in an hour,” Arthit says.
“And we have a room set up for her.” Nguyen comes in, wearing a dark, beautifully tailored suit. He looks like he slept ten hours. “After what you told us last night, I gave her a window.”
“She’ll like that,” Arthit says.
“Colonel Thanom, your wife is still with the police, but they’ve begun to release the servants, so it shouldn’t be long. Unless they hold her to threaten you.”
Thanom spills some rice, and he glares down at it and then releases an enormous sigh.
“I don’t think they will,” Nguyen says, watching him. “Not with her family background. What else, what else? Oh. Each of you should take the phone next to your silverware, and that’s the only one you can use. If you need to download phone numbers or other data from your own phone, let Homer or Chinh know, and they’ll take you into a shielded room, where the signal can’t be detected. Otherwise, please put your own phone into the Ziploc bag and drop the whole thing into the basket on the table. The police already know most of you are here, but let’s not keep notifying them.”
Thanom says, “But what if someone calls us? There could be important calls from—from—”
For the Dead Page 26
