For the Dead

by Timothy Hallinan

“Can’t he email it to you?”

  “He won’t. He doesn’t want it logged in on the bank’s email system.”

  “But he’ll release it physically to someone other than Thanom?”

  “If Thanom calls and gives a name, and the person who shows up has identification.”

  “Tell him I’ll be there in—” He stops because Nguyen, who is seated beside him in the backseat of the embassy car, has put his hand over the phone. Rafferty hands it to him.

  “This is Captain Nguyen,” he says. “I don’t want Mr. Rafferty to get out of the car again. We have company, and they want an excuse to grab him.”

  Rafferty pulls the phone toward him and says, “He’s right. And I don’t know what a snapshot is in bank jargon, but if one of us goes in there, Ton is going to know that he’s looking into that account, probably looking for the person who did the deposits and withdrawals. Suppose he makes that person disappear before we can get to him?”

  Nguyen says, “I should have thought of—”

  “Is there someone out here you can send, Arthit? If any of you leave the embassy, you’ll have followers.”

  “Anand,” Arthit says, Rafferty straining to hear him with the phone in Nguyen’s hand. “He hates princelings. I’ll get him over there. And we’re finding more links between the victims and Ton’s business deals. We’re four for seven now, and still looking.”

  “We’re building the box,” Nguyen says. “And, just to put a lock on it, Mr. Rafferty discovered that the man who took the pictures with that cursed phone is Ton’s son-in-law.”

  “His full name is Jaruk Pratchuwan,” Rafferty says, checking his notes. “Ask your database wizard to find out where he works.”

  “And lives,” Nguyen says. “Home address is essential.”

  “I’ll get Anand moving right now,” Arthit says. “Bank’s closing soon.”

  Rafferty disconnects, and they ride in silence for a minute or two, and then Nguyen says, “There’s something I need to say to you. Miaow saved my son twice. If she hadn’t gotten away from the man with the knife, he probably would have come after Anh Duong. And Anh Duong would have been … easier to kill than Miaow.”

  “I don’t know,” Rafferty says. “He’s quite a kid. I think he could surprise all of us.”

  41

  The Best Scene in the Play

  “GOOD LORD,” RAFFERTY says to Arthit. “That woman has the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.”

  “I have to agree,” Rose says. “Amazing.” Embassy or no embassy, she’s wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and red patent-leather sandals. It’s a little after five P.M., and they’re all gathered in what Rafferty thinks of as the Food Room. Arthit and Thanom have followed Rafferty in to find more cookies on the platters, soft drinks afloat in an ice tub, and a pungent fragrance coming from a restaurant-size coffee machine. In Rose’s honor, a jar of Nescafé squats beside the coffeemaker. One door away, in the adjacent room, Officer Clemente is at work on a computer with an enormous flatscreen monitor.

  Miaow comes in, heads for the cookies, grabs two, and turns to Rose. “Mama,” she says, in English, “am I pretty?”

  “Mama?” Rose says. “And I thought we’d settled that.”

  Arthit says, “You’re very pretty, Miaow, and you’re on the way to being beautiful.”

  Miaow, looking a little surprised, says, “Thank you, Arthit.” She breaks a cookie in half and says, “Who knew I was acting?”

  Rafferty says, “You’re always acting.”

  “That’s from Small Town,” Miaow says. “That’s Julie, the character I want to play. She gets to die.”

  “Everybody gets to die,” Rose says.

  “And she gets to come back.”

  “Everybody gets to come back,” Rose says.

  “Not like that, not like karma. She comes back as herself and gets to say goodbye to everyone and everything she loves. It’s the best scene in the play.”

  “When I played Ned,” Rafferty says, “I thought the part where she and Ned talk about the future was the best scene.”

  “It is, for Ned,” Miaow says. “Julie mops the floor with him.”

  Figuring the hell with it, Rafferty says, “Is Andrew going to try out for Ned?”

  Miaow breaks the other cookie and says, “Who cares?” She leaves the room, ostentatiously stepping aside for Andrew, who’s coming in. She gives him so much space he could be riding an elephant. He turns to watch her go and a moment later they hear her say, from halfway down the hall, “Oh, excuse me.”

  “You did it, Andrew,” Rafferty says, pulling the printout of the reflected man from his pocket.

  “Did I ever,” Andrew says glumly.

  “No, I mean, look—” Rafferty opens the picture and waves it at him. “You’re the best detective in the room. This guy? We know who he is now, and without you, we’d never have figured it out.”

  With the expression of someone who’s just located a match in the middle of an endless night, Andrew says, “Is it important?”

  He looks so hopeful Rafferty has to fight the impulse to hug him. “It’s the most important thing any of us has done. It might be what gets us all out of this.”

  Andrew says, “Will you tell Miaow?”

  “Don’t be a sap. Go tell her yourself.”

  “You saw. She won’t even stay in the same room with me.”

  “Well, as much as I hate to say this, that’s your problem. Go fix it.”

  Rose says, “You walked out when she was trying to tell you who she was. She was pretending to talk to those kids, but it was really for you, and it was one of the bravest things she’s ever done. And you turned your back and walked out.”

  “I had to,” Andrew says. He shoves his hands into his pockets, so hard his jeans sag. “She was talking about—eating out of trash cans and running away from men and not having shoes and—and I started to cry. I couldn’t let her see, but I couldn’t stop, either. She would have killed me.”

  “Oh, baby, come here,” Rose says, opening her arms. Andrew drags his feet and studies the carpet all the way across the room, but ultimately she’s got her arms wrapped around him, and the boy lowers his head and Rafferty, seeing the little knob at the top of his spine, wonders how it can possibly look that sad.

  “THIS IS ALMOST perfect,” Rafferty says.

  He’s at the table in the Food Room with Arthit, Thanom, and Kwai Clemente, whose glorious eyes are red and fried-looking from squinting at the computer screen all day. In front of each of them is a chart: a wheel with a photo of Ton in the middle, surrounded by small circular pictures of six of the victims of Sawat’s murder squads. Beneath each picture is the name of the victim and the dates of his birth and death. Spokes radiate out from the picture of Ton to connect him graphically to the victims.

  “What I’d like to see,” Rafferty says, “is the name of the victim’s company in between his name and the date. Just three lines of type: name, company, death date. You can lose the birth date, but before the date of death, put the words Murdered on. And then I want you to break the spoke between each one and Ton with a really quick summary, something like Competitor for cellular phone contract. Estimated gain for Ton: $100 million US annually.”

  Clemente says, “Easy.”

  “And I want you to make a second chart, exactly the same except you put Andrew’s picture of the son-in-law, Jaruk, in the circle with Ton. We have to think of the two of them as a single entity, because we’re not just after Ton for the murders all those years ago; we’re going to nail both of them for killing Sawat and Thongchai.”

  “And probably the men they hired to do it,” Arthit says. “It’s hard to believe he’d leave them alive.”

  Thanom says, sounding fretful, “Where’s the man you sent to my bank? He should be here by now.”

  “Don’t worry,” Arthit says. “You’re off the hook.”

  “You sound like Ton is just going to roll over,” Thanom says. “He’ll say, Oh, please, run over me, of
course, I did it all. He was born to power. He’s got resources we can’t even imagine.”

  Arthit is used to Thanom, but the look Clemente gives him makes it clear that her first impression isn’t a good one. Thanom glances at her and then looks back at the chart. He still has the tiny tremor in his head, but at least he’s shaved. He says to her, “Don’t you have something to do?”

  “She’s doing it,” Rafferty says.

  “I think I’ve got another one,” Clemente says. “It’s not quite as clear, because it didn’t happen while he was competing for a specific contract, but he and Ton had gone head-to-head for years.”

  “How long ago?” Arthit says.

  “Eight years.”

  “Look at the biggest deals Ton made in the two or three years after that death. See whether the dead man would have gone up against Ton on any of those.”

  Thanom says, “It’s hard to believe no one put this together before.”

  “The murders were spread over years,” Rafferty says. “Someone was convicted for each of them. Ton made lots of other deals, and all the victims made lots of other deals. And who’s going to speculate publicly about Ton doing something like that, unless he’s got a hell of a case?”

  Arthit picks up the chart and flicks it with his index finger. “This is a pretty good case.”

  Thanom is shaking his head. “It’s not proof.”

  “We don’t need proof,” Rafferty says. “We’re not going to court.”

  “We’re not?” Thanom demands. “Then what are—”

  Homer comes into the room, followed by Anand.

  Anand is in his early thirties, with the slender body the police uniform was designed to show off: broad shoulders, narrow hips, flat stomach. Clemente looks up at him, rubs her eyes gently with her fingertips, and looks at him again.

  “Got it,” Anand says, waving a half-sheet of paper at them. “Oh, hello.”

  “Hello,” Clemente says.

  “Anand, this is Kwai Clemente,” Arthit says. “Officer Clemente, this is Anand. Now that you two know each other, what does it say?”

  “I don’t exactly know.” Anand pulls a chair out and sits, his eyes going to Officer Clemente again, and says, “Arundee was starting to explain it to me when someone told him he had a phone call. When he came back out, he was almost running, and I felt like it was a good time to leave.”

  “Ton?” Thanom says.

  “Probably.” Rafferty reaches for the paper. “Checking up after they saw us this afternoon. But that doesn’t mean he knows anything. Would you tell Ton that you’ve just given this away?” He looks down at it. “How far did he get with the explanation?”

  “Here.” Anand leans across the table and a big index finger lands on the page. “This symbol means transaction, and this means withdrawal. So, the transaction, on this date and at this time, was a withdrawal. This is the amount—”

  “One million five hundred thousand baht?” Rafferty says. “That’s fifty thousand US. This late in the game, why do I have the feeling Ton doesn’t know about it?”

  Thanom says, “Keep going, keep going. Where does it say who it was?”

  “Well, it doesn’t, not exactly. Here’s the teller’s name and her number, and this note means the money was withdrawn in cash.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?” Thanom says.

  “Well, it says it was you.”

  Thanom sits back so hard his chair squeaks.

  “But we know it wasn’t,” Anand says. “And this scramble at the end was what he was going to explain to me. It’s the information that got registered when they swiped the magnetic strip on the back of the ID the man presented.”

  “This number,” Clemente says, putting a tangerine-colored fingernail on the page, next to Anand’s brown finger. “This is—or could be—a badge number. Right number of digits, right place for the dash. If the man was pretending to be the Colonel, he would have presented a police ID card.”

  “Is that your number, Colonel?” Arthit asks.

  “Not even close.” Thanom swipes his nose with his index finger and sniffs. “Where’s the picture? These cards have pictures.”

  “Not encoded on the strip,” Clemente says. “But—”

  “Then what fucking good is it?” Thanom says.

  “But,” Clemente says, “I can access this on the police database, and the picture should be part of the record. They use those records to print the cards.”

  Thanom says, “You mean, you think the card is real?”

  “Sure, it is,” Rafferty says. “What could be easier for someone in Ton’s position? They probably changed one character in your name, or your birth date, and assigned the card an unused number. They knew the bank would run the strip to verify the card. If it bounced, there’d be no transaction.”

  “Shall I?” Clemente says. She gets up, and Arthit and Rafferty get up, too. After a moment, during which he seems to be translating what he’s just heard, Thanom pushes his chair back. He has to put a hand on the table to rise.

  Anand gets up, too. “Can I come?”

  Arthit says, “Could we stop you?”

  About three minutes later, Clemente says, “Here he is. This guy is everywhere.”

  In a nice, clear, recent photo, full face, Ton’s son-in-law, Jurak, looks out at them.

  Rafferty says to Arthit, “How would you feel about sending Anand, if he’s willing to go, and two or three other uniformed cops to pick Khun Jurak up and put him on ice somewhere? Some minor station where they can register him under a fictitious name for a few hours? Get him into an interrogation room, show him this picture and the shot from the phone. I don’t think he’ll have much fight in him.”

  “How would I feel?” Arthit says. “I’d feel constructive. I’d feel decisive. I’d feel like a cop for the first time in days.”

  To Thanom, Rafferty says, “The case just got a lot stronger. And we still don’t need proof.”

  IN THE HALLWAY, he’s working his way through three or four possible ways to use the information to maximum effect and simultaneously congratulating himself on getting out of harm’s way everyone who could be used as a pressure point against him. And then he stops in the middle of the hall.

  There is a person out there who could be used as a pressure point: Treasure. The moment he has the thought, he relaxes because, he thinks, there’s no way for Ton or Ton’s men to know about her.

  And then he realizes who he hasn’t seen since he came back to the embassy.

  42

  A Different Magnitude of Darkness

  BEING JAMMED INTO the trunk of an Infiniti G-37 sports car is even less pleasant than he’d thought it would be. He’s bent so sharply, in so many places, he feels like a clothes hanger. The air is unpleasantly warm and as dark as a torturer’s soul.

  But it’s the smallest car in the embassy compound, and it seemed to him, during the brief and frantic time he had to think about it—after Boo failed to answer two panicked calls—that the trunk of a weensy car would be less suspicious than a big one. From the moment he learned that Anna had been driven to Klong Toey to the time they closed the trunk on him and the car wheeled through the gates and onto the street, it’s been less than twenty minutes, which makes it about 5:30.

  “We’ve got one,” the driver says. He and Rafferty are connected by cell phone.

  “Well, I’m glad. I’d feel like an idiot, going through all this with nobody following us. Let me know when the first stop is coming up.”

  “Just a minute or two. I’ll be turning into a soi to park.”

  “Got it.” The idea, if it even qualifies as an idea, is for the driver to run several very ordinary, very boring errands, leaving the car empty so the followers can get up close and confirm that no one is cowering in the backseat. The hope is that the followers will go away. If they don’t, two other cars wait behind the embassy gate, engines running, to supply a diversion.

  “Office supply store,” the driver announces, and
the car swerves into its turn. A moment later there’s a gristly grinding of gears as the driver botches the shift into reverse, and they stop. “They just went past,” he says, and the door opens, the car rises as the man gets out, and the door slams. The car makes the little boop that announces it’s locked.

  The driver’s shoes scuff the asphalt. Rafferty settles in and waits, doubting every decision he’s made in the past few hours. How could he have forgotten about Treasure? Why hadn’t he kept tabs on Anna?

  All the questions disappear as he hears the footsteps. Someone tries the driver’s door, and then there’s a line of light around the back of the fold-down seat he’ll use to get out of the trunk. Someone’s using a flashlight.

  “It’s empty,” a man says in Thai, probably into a phone. “Driver went into that Staples a kilometer from the embassy. Left the car at the curb.” There’s a pause, and the man says in response to someone, “Okay, whatever you want.” The footsteps recede and then stop abruptly, and Rafferty figures the man is standing there, watching the car, and then there are more footsteps, fading away this time.

  The next errand is a liquor store, and this time the footsteps stop some distance from the car, and Rafferty imagines the man hanging back and waiting to see whether anyone emerges from the trunk. The next thing he hears is the driver, coming back.

  “The one who just left was keeping an eye on the car,” the driver says as he starts the engine. “There’s another one driving.”

  “Well, let’s see what happens now.”

  “If this stop doesn’t do it,” the driver says, “nothing will.”

  They park relatively close to their destination, and Rafferty can smell hot fat and charred meat, smells that bring back Lancaster fast-food joints when he was a kid, spreading their plume of cooking oil through the clean desert air. Almost immediately after the driver leaves, there’s a scratching at the trunk, and a voice says, “Locked. And there’s no keyhole. You have to open it from inside.”

  Footsteps, and then another man says, “He’s getting takeout.”

  “Did you hear that?” the first man says. “He’s getting hamburgers. Got to be for the Americans back at the embassy. This is a waste of—” Then he says, in English, “Yeah, okay.”