The Canton Connection

by Fritz Galt

  He had to be there either way.

  “Just cut up the body and flush it down the toilet,” Jake said. The sarcasm helped relieve his pain.

  He looked up. Wu was staring at him.

  “Sorry,” Jake said. “I was just venting.”

  “No,” Wu said. “That’s brilliant.”

  Jake stared back, his face hurting too bad to show expression.

  “You’re looking at Simon Wu,” Wu said. “Serial killer.”

  Jake shook his head slowly. Why not?

  Wu helped him back to his bedroom and shut the door. As he carefully undressed for bed, Jake could hear the sound of a heavy plastic bag sliding across the floor, then bare feet flopping against the staircase.

  Before he turned off the light, Jake had a sudden thought. Had he been wrong about Simon Wu all along? Was he a serial killer?

  He locked the door before lowering himself into bed.

  Chapter 35

  It turned out that Simon Wu didn’t hack Oscar Walsh’s body to bits and flush it down the toilet.

  Walsh was discovered by a maid the next morning. He was lying naked in bed with a knife thrust into his chest precisely where Wu’s bullet had entered the body.

  The corpse had already begun to bloat from microbes at work in the gut. The face looked like a yellow balloon with painted-on eyes.

  Jake turned away from the scene. His own face felt stitched together from his face plant in the window the night before. Wu had removed the bandage from his head and Jake had carefully washed the blood out of his hair.

  Jake looked as good as new, but felt like he had just lost a demolition derby.

  Eric Li was upset by the murder in his house, but wasn’t about to inform the police or call in a coroner.

  Li had a long conversation with his security team, and none of them reported suspicious activity or forced entry.

  Breakfast was served late that morning, at ten o’clock.

  As Li and the Chinese girl chatted with Wu at the round breakfast table and the body was carried down the stairs to be buried in the garden, Jake turned to look out the window. Storm clouds gathered over the lake and the mountain opposite. He wondered if he was going to puke first or keel over from his migraine-sized headache.

  Did this sort of thing happen all the time at the Li residence?

  How could Simon Wu look so calm? Covering the bullet wound with a knife had been a creative way to hide the fact that there were guns in the house. Suspicion didn’t naturally fall on Jake and Wu, and Li appeared to absolve, or excuse, all at the table for having perpetrated the crime.

  “More egg and ginger soup?” Li asked Jake.

  Jake was still trying to figure out if he should swallow the entire slice of ginger in his mouth. He waved off the offer.

  He recognized the knife at his place setting. It was the same style of knife in Walsh’s body. Wu must have sneaked into the kitchen that night to steal it. It was curious how all the deaths in the past week had involved knives. He remembered the hunting knife in Chu’s body and how the knife in Jason Yang’s body in Charlottesville matched the cutlery at the DoubleTree hotel where Wu and Stacy were staying. And then the body in Louisville had been hacked to pieces and stuffed into a suitcase.

  Wu was chatting away in Chinese, and Jake had long since stopped trying to figure out the topic of their conversation.

  If Li were to study the knife found in Walsh’s body, he might find Simon’s fingerprints. Just like every other knife in the past three murders.

  Jake picked up his knife and rotated it in his hand so that he held it in a stabbing position. Only his index and smaller fingers touched the handle. His thumb never made contact.

  “About to commit hari-kari?” Wu asked from across the table.

  Jake tried to smile disarmingly, and all the fissures of his face seemed to split apart in pain.

  He put the knife back on the table.

  Wu resumed his Chinese conversation with their hosts on a whole new level of intimacy.

  What did Jake know about these people? He judged the heights of those around the table. Wu was as short as Li. The girl was taller than both.

  She smiled across at him and he tried to smile back.

  He looked at his soup. It was turning his stomach. The egg floated around in it like a distorted noodle.

  He stared at the knife. So there were no thumbprints on a knife if it was used as a murder weapon. How did the Department of Justice store their fingerprints?

  Jake remembered back to the UPS office in Louisville where he had asked Wu to press his thumbs in the inkpad so that they could make prints.

  The database had matched Wu’s thumbprints with those of Oscar Walsh. Just like the prints Jake had taken off of Stacy’s car. Were those all thumb prints?

  Under the table, he angled his wrist as if he were opening a car door. Sure enough, he only used his thumb.

  Jake looked more closely at Wu. Mostly silhouetted against the curtain of rain that had begun falling behind him, Wu was highly animated, engaging Li in steady conversation and laughing in an ingratiating way.

  Jake tried to dismiss the impossible from his mind. Simon Wu had been set up by his boss. If anything, it was poetic justice for Wu to kill Walsh.

  Unless it was the other way around.

  Unless Wu had committed the murders and, trained as a computer engineer, reprogrammed the thumbprints in the DOJ database to incriminate his boss.

  The only problem was that the thumbprints Jake had checked were switched to frame Walsh, but were the fingerprints ever switched, or were they indeed Wu’s?

  He took another sip of his soup. The warm and sour combination was triggering either some clearheaded logic or extreme creativity, along with the indigestion.

  He tried to follow the logic. Why had he suspected Wu in the first place? Wu was present at all of the crimes, whether in Arlington, Charlottesville or Louisville. And his fingerprints were on the baseball bat and knives.

  The only reason Jake had exonerated Wu was because his thumbprints came up as Oscar Walsh’s.

  Wu had been cool to Jake from the start. He had hustled Stacy away from him at Chu’s funeral. He avoided Jake in Charlottesville. And he dodged away from Jake at the Galt House in Louisville and tried to escape by car.

  Were those the actions of an innocent man?

  Jake was prepared to declare Wu a suspect, but needed to check the fingerprint database to confirm his suspicion. How could he get Bob Snow on the phone to check if the murder weapons had fingerprints rather than thumbprints and that the metadata on the files were Wu?

  Say Bob was able to confirm Wu’s guilt. Say Wu’s prints were on the weapons that killed the three Quantum employees. What did that mean?

  Jake was eating breakfast with a gangster and a serial killer.

  And if Wu was the assailant who had killed Chu, Stacy Stefansson would have recognized him at once.

  That raised a troubling discrepancy in her testimony.

  She had not identified the assailant as Wu.

  Furthermore, in their interview at the J. Edgar Hoover Building, she had described the assailant as tall, but the baseball bat bruise was located on Chu’s forehead indicating that the assailant was probably short.

  If it turned out that Stacy’s testimony was inaccurate, was it deliberately so?

  Jake had called her in to his office. He had lined up random photographs of young males including Wu. But she hadn’t picked him.

  He recalled the clarity in her eyes as she talked with him and her sound reasoning as she explained why she had hesitated at Wu’s photograph, but not selected it from the line-up.

  Her certainty told Jake that she wasn’t mistaken or remembering poorly. If it turned out that Wu was the killer, the only explanation was that she was lying.

  Her unexpected flight to China was incriminating in itself, but covering for Wu would be further proof of her guilt.

  Jake had yet to be sure.

  She
might have been deliberately obstructing justice, but did that mean she was part of some plot to take over the internet?

  “Do you want to try some dragon fruit?” Li asked across the table.

  Jake was jerked back to the present.

  Maybe it was the word “dragon” coming from Eric Li.

  A plate of assorted fruit sat in the middle of the table. “Which fruit are you talking about?” Jake asked.

  Li pointed at a fleshy white wedge embedded with black seeds. “Try some.”

  The Chinese girl stabbed the piece with her fork and held it up to Jake’s lips.

  He flashed a look around the table. It was against his instincts, but it was worth playing along for a while. He took a bite. It was watery with little taste, but a light tropical sweet smell.

  “Yum,” he said, and smiled at the girl, who grinned appreciatively.

  His face hurt, but he was learning to hide his emotions. And once again, he had the feeling that he was partaking of forbidden fruit.

  Chapter 36

  “Pocket billiards, anybody?” Eric Li asked those at the breakfast table.

  Jake looked at Wu, who seemed receptive to the proposal.

  The Chinese girl quietly left the breakfast room.

  “We need to kill time before your friend arrives,” Li said. “And this isn’t golfing weather.”

  Jake looked outside. The swimming pool had already overflowed and the lake was gray under the beating rain.

  “How about drinks over pool?” Li offered.

  Did all gangsters have such leisure time?

  “Sure,” Jake said. “Rack ’em up.”

  They walked through the living room and study until they reached an octagonal room thrust off a back wing of the house.

  Jake was relieved to see that the table wasn’t oversized and was set up the American way. The balls were stripes and solids.

  Before he grabbed a cue stick, he looked out the bay window and got a better look at the property. He studied the one-story buildings, just twenty yards from the house. They were down along the lake’s edge, but were clearly part of the overall compound. The most impressive feature of the buildings was the array of three enormous satellite dishes, each pointing in a different direction at the sky. A dozen cars were pulled up and lights burned inside.

  “Who lives down there?” he asked.

  Li joined him at the window. “That’s where all the work gets done. That’s my company.”

  “You work on Sundays?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t. They do. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I call them my mushrooms. My philosophy is that if you keep programmers working nonstop, they forget the time of day. Once they enter the office, they become mushrooms.”

  Jake didn’t like the philosophy, but hid it behind a smile. “What do they program?”

  “Internet stuff,” Li said cryptically. “Shall we play?”

  Wu may have been listening to the conversation, but he was busy lining up the cue ball to break. Which he did with an aggressive whack.

  No balls went into the pockets.

  Li went to a wet bar and set up some tumblers.

  “Mind if I take on Simon?” Jake asked.

  Li motioned for them to proceed.

  Jake had played pool in college and wanted to know the table rules. “Eight-ball?”

  “Sure,” Wu said.

  “Slop counts?”

  “Only call the eight ball.”

  “Take out the trash when you scratch?”

  Wu didn’t seem to understand the question.

  “Never mind. Let’s play.”

  He found a set of solids perfectly positioned for a nice little run, and proceeded to sink three balls, but gave himself a difficult leave. He kicked the cue ball off the cushion, but missed the four ball and left the table for Wu.

  He studied the young man with the agile body and swift movements. How could Jake get a call out to the CIA? He needed to reach his contact in Guangzhou with news of the programmers on the premises and to ask them to look into his theory about Wu’s fingerprints.

  Surely Li’s phones were bugged. Jake would have to take a chance with Wu’s cell phone again.

  Wu’s next shot went awry and he looked disappointed with himself.

  “Tom Collins?” Li asked.

  “Sure,” was the joint response.

  Jake had to check himself. He was getting way too comfortable with this lifestyle.

  He took one last glance out the window. More cars were pulling up to the offices.

  Then he bore down on the game. He pocketed three more balls, and Wu was looking deeply unhappy.

  Jake had a difficult angle and tried to sink his five ball with a bank shot, which didn’t work.

  “Oh well,” he said, and took the drink that Li was offering.

  Wu missed again on a long shot and cursed under his breath. Clearly this was not his sport.

  What was Wu’s sport anyway? For a computer engineer, Wu seemed surprisingly uninterested in the internet action next door. And for a deputy marshal, he seemed awfully chummy with the Triad member.

  Jake handed his cue stick to his host and took the drink. “You have a try,” Jake said.

  “You leave me in a good position,” Li said, and took the stick.

  Jake came back to the topic of the offices across the lawn. “Do you direct the programmers?” he asked.

  “I don’t understand it very much,” Li said, as if he couldn’t be bothered. Aiming for a fat orange ball seemed far more important. He struck the cue ball smoothly and still missed the orange ball. “But it makes a lot of money.”

  “How much money?” Simon Wu asked, in a way that only a Chinese could ask another Chinese.

  “Several million dollars a month,” Li said. “Your turn.”

  Wu seemed unfazed by the amount and knocked in his first ball of the game.

  “Millions of dollars doing what?” Jake persisted.

  Li straightened up and regarded him. His features were small and fine and his bearing was proud. “I’m not a computer person. They don’t bother to tell me what they’re doing. But I provide them with high-speed internet access, a roof over their heads, and a share in the profits. How ever they earn it is up to them.”

  Jake was beginning to catch on to the scheme. Li’s willful ignorance allowed him plausible deniability. Meanwhile he gave the programmers all the equipment, protection and cover they needed to make their profits. If they were hackers, it was paradise.

  “But you’ve got a key internet programmer on her way here,” Jake pressed on. “Do you know how she will help?”

  It was Li’s turn to shoot, and he took his time to pocket a few balls.

  “Yeah,” Wu said. “What about her?”

  Li paused long enough to take a drink. “I was told that she knows a lot. And I like to hire the best experts in their field.”

  Jake couldn’t tell if Li was being evasive or if he truly didn’t know what his programmers did. Jake would find out eventually what went on in those buildings. If it had anything to do with hacking, then Stacy’s impending visit was troubling in the extreme.

  He raised a glass to Li. “To experts.”

  “To experts.” Li joined in the toast and gave a broad smile that lit up his eyes.

  He came over to Jake and took his arm as if they were great buddies.

  Li steered him to the window and faced him away from the programmers’ offices. The lake looked like a Monet painting, dreary in the diffused light of the clouds and rain.

  “Do you see that house?” Li said.

  How could Jake miss it? At the end of the lake, another chateau sat wedged between the lake and a steep mountain. It could have been a scene from the Alps.

  “That will be yours,” Li said.

  Jake took a moment to react. Had he heard Li correctly? Was there some error in translation?

  “Mine?”

  “I’ve set it aside for you and your girl,” he sa
id, his voice warm, his eyes moist.

  Jake looked for any hint of mischief, but Li seemed absolutely serious. Li truly believed somebody’s reports that Stacy was Jake’s girl. And Li must have deduced that as the reason Jake had come to China.

  It looked like Li intended to install Stacy permanently in China and set her up for life.

  “When the weather improves,” Li said, “I want you two to walk around the lake to that far point.” He showed Jake a high, flat area, presumably the dam at the end of the lake. “From there, you can hike into the mountains or turn toward your new house. I’m sure you’ll like it here.”

  Jake was flabbergasted. He looked to Wu for how to react.

  Wu had been listening closely, and he was trembling with rage.

  After a morning of billiards, Jake felt good about his game. He walked away from the table with bragging rights and a woozy feeling from the drinks.

  He and Wu retreated to their rooms to wash up and relax.

  They would sit tight and wait for Stacy’s arrival.

  Jake took the extra time in his bedroom to lie down and let the throbbing behind his eyeballs ease off. The air conditioning had failed to drive away the moisture, and sweat gathered in the seams of his shirt.

  He unbuttoned slightly and let the ceiling fan blow against his chest.

  Then he heard footsteps coming from the open bedroom door. The footfalls were slow and measured, barely audible on the carpeting.

  Jake whipped an arm over his chest and threw himself off the bed. He landed against a wall and jumped to his feet with his gun in his hand.

  “It’s payback time,” Wu said, approaching.

  Jake stared at him. A shiny object glinted in Wu’s hand.

  Jake blinked twice. It wasn’t a gun and it wasn’t a knife. It was a cell phone.

  Wu wasn’t about to make him murder victim number five.

  “Call in the cavalry,” Wu said, and handed him the phone.

  Jake slipped the gun back in its holster. “Don’t scare me like that.”

  “Take it easy,” Wu said. “Walsh is dead.”