The Lake Ching Murders - A Mystery of Fire and Ice

by David Rotenberg

  The specialist looked at the photographer who nodded that he had completed his task. The specialist indicated that he wanted to be left alone. Once by himself he slowly memorized the room from east to west. Seven dead faceless Chinese men now frozen in their horror. “Or was it my horror?” the specialist asked himself.

  He slipped his hand out of his glove and leaned in close to one of the desecrated faces at the bar. He touched the edges of the wound. No raggedness on the forehead cut but a slight flap of skin where the chin ought to be. The upper edge of the cut was bevelled downward. Putting that together with the flap at the bottom seemed to imply that the cut came from top to bottom.

  He checked a second faceless man. This one had the same markings. Then he looked up at the figure that dangled from the chandelier. “To die is one thing. To be mutilated after death another. But to be carved up before you die — that’s a third,” he mouthed silently.

  He allowed himself to walk the space. In his inner self he heard their cries. Then he didn’t. These were Chinese men — from their suits, wealthy Chinese men. They wouldn’t have grovelled. An eerie silence would have greeted the presence of death in their midst.

  He heard the boards of the ship creak beneath his feet. Then he stepped in a partially frozen blood patch in the carpet. It crackled under his weight.

  How many men were needed to kill and rip the faces off seven Chinese men? He made a note for himself, “Check toxicology for sedatives.” How many men? At least three, no more than three hundred, he couldn’t even venture a guess. Men and implements . . . guns, knives and face removers.

  Then he stepped on something hard buried in the carpet. He leaned down and ran his hand over the rug. There. He pulled back the nap of the rug to reveal the object. It was a jade character on a medallion strung from a broken chain. No doubt the man who wore this would have a duplicate tattooed on his left breast. Triads were seldom subtle. He took a pencil from his pocket and prodded the piece. It shifted in the nap of the carpet. Using the pencil, he picked up the chain. He brought the broken link close to his face, frowned and signalled for the cameraman to shoot the piece. Then he got the man to carefully photograph the broken link on the chain. Four times.

  He put the medallion and chain into an evidence bag then took a closer look at the gunshot wounds on the two men at the bar. Clean holes. Old-style wounds with none of the lethal tearing of modern bullets. Before he could come to any conclusion about the wounds he spotted something else in the carpet — dead centre in the room. Two very old spent cartridges. Old-style wounds. Old-style cartridges. He bagged them then stuck his head out the door. Captain Chen hustled over to him. “Tag and take their clothes,” he wrote. He passed by Chen and stopped.

  Something had caught his eye. A brown splotch on the carpet. Near the door. He knelt down and pressed his palm against the stain. It wasn’t frozen as solid as the blood puddles. He had the photographer shoot the spot and record its location in the room. “Got it, sir,” said the cameraman.

  The man looked a little green. He was young. He’d get over it. The specialist nodded and motioned the man to follow him into the next room.

  The small room with the video monitor.

  The Koreans’ faces had been left alone but they were nonetheless dead. All three had been shot twice through the right armpit and thrown to the floor. Some marksman! Or else the men were being held still — very still — and then shot from a few feet away. The specialist got to his knees again and leaned in close to the wounds. His knowledge of forensics was encyclopedic but he’d been away from this for a while. As he poked at the dried lacerations, he recalled the telltale signs of a wound caused by a close-range gunshot —burnt hair from the gun-barrel gasses and burnt striations on the skin. Both were clear to see on all three bodies. There was no marksman here — just an executioner. Then he saw the ligature marks on the wrists. He picked up one stiff arm and looked more closely at the markings. Wire? He pushed at the man’s shoulder. The arm was loose in the socket. As if it had been pulled out while hanging by the arms. He looked up and there were the cut marks in the overhead beam. Wire-hung from the beam then shot through the armpits. It struck a chord. He looked about him for the wire the killers had used but found none. “Probably in the same place as the seven Chinese faces,” he thought.

  He returned his attention to the cut marks on the beam. The men had been yanked up by wire; that was clear from the depth of the cuts in the beam. Then shot? But not hung. The cut marks were single lines. No enlarged gouges that would have been evident if the men had been hung and struggled. So they had been shot through the armpits then let down. Maybe the murderers were interrupted? By what?

  As the photographer took shots of the dead Koreans, the specialist looked at the room. It was lavishly furnished. All the chairs pointed toward the monitor. A VCR sat beside the large screen. He looked at the machine. He had used one of these in the past, but this model was much newer. He punched the power button and watched the digital icons flicker into life. He didn’t know what most of them meant.

  He pulled the knob on the television. Light came from the screen. Then he hit the play button on the VCR. It must have been on fast forward and he couldn’t stop it, but the specialist recognized the images. Hong Kong porno films. Blond European women servicing bespectacled Asian men. He punched another button. The image froze. The man’s member on the cheek of the blond girl. A glazed smile on her face.

  An old twinge — more an ache — went through his groin.

  He looked around. He didn’t want anyone seeing him looking at this stuff but he couldn’t figure out how to turn the machine off, so he unplugged it from the wall. When he looked up, Chen was there. Pointing at the VCR and monitor, he scratched on the pad, “Tag and take these too.”

  He left the room and headed below decks. He was sweating again. This wasn’t a crime site, it was an abattoir. He wondered if these men had children. If they would be missed by their wives.

  Below deck, he found the five Japanese bodies in a room that had curtains at one end of a small raised runway. All were tied to their chairs — two on one side, three on the other and an empty chair at the foot of the runway. Two had expensive cameras at their feet. All had been cut from just beneath their chins to their navels. Their entrails had been dumped in their laps and then cut so a single strand of intestine dangled down their fronts like a raw purple tail. One man had an expensive pair of Parisian glasses still perched on his face.

  On closer examination, it became clear that the spectacles had fallen off and been replaced. No one wore one eyeglass arm behind the ear and one in front. “After the photographer is finished, dust these glasses for prints,” he wrote. Chen nodded and scratched a note for himself. “Why would they bother with the glasses?” he wondered.

  The photographer began his documenting as the specialist walked around the room. He parted the curtain and found a sound system. He powered it up and hit the play button on the CD player. An American rock band. The music was loud. He turned it off and ejected the disc. He wondered who the group was.

  He signalled to Chen. On his pad he wrote, “Take these back too.” As Chen began to dismantle the CD player, the specialist stepped through the curtain out onto the stage.

  There was dirt or mud or some kind of thick earth on the runway in patches all the way from backstage to the centre of the platform. He knelt, touched it and brought his finger to his nose. There was no smell. The cold. Thank heavens for the cold or the whole place would have reeked. He signalled Chen for an evidence bag into which he scraped the material. He sealed the bag and handed it back to Chen who took it with him to add to the rest of the collection.

  When the specialist stood up, he found himself alone on the runway. The disembowelled men strapped to their chairs seemed to be staring up at him. Ghastly purple penises hanging in front of them. And an empty chair at the end of the runway.

  From the small stage, the meaning of the tableau was clear even if the reasoning
behind it was not. A thought occurred to him. He carefully stepped off the runway and approached one of the Japanese men. With a pencil he pushed aside the frozen purple grizzle then took out a knife and cut open the man’s pants.

  Where a penis should have been only a frozen black blotch remained. He stepped back. Chen noticed. “Sir?” All he did was point at the rip in the man’s pants. Chen crossed to the dead man as the specialist made his way to the door.

  The soldier entered the party man’s boat.

  “Done, soldier?” he asked holding the cell phone against his chest.

  “I put your suitcase where you told me to, sir.”

  “Good,” he said and raised the cell phone to his lips. The soldier stayed for a moment hoping for more than a job-well-done smile. But that was all he got for putting the party man’s metal case in the bowels of the boat.

  The last room held the Americans. Two men. Both elderly, although he found it hard to be sure of Caucasians’ ages. These men looked as if they were lying on their backs on the large, plush bed so they could admire their reflection in the ornate mirror that hung from the ceiling. But on closer examination the specialist saw the cut line on their necks between the Adam’s apple and the clavicle. He reached over one of the bodies and put his hands into the man’s hair.

  The frozen blood resisted him. So he pulled harder.

  The head came free of the torso with a sickening plop. He felt his gorge rise and he stumbled back against the far wall. He sank to his knees, his head in his hands. He concentrated and tried to slow his breathing. To collect himself. Then he felt the hair in his hand and looked through his fingers. The dead man’s eyes were open and looking right into his.

  He dropped the head and looked up. There, on the mirror over the dead Americans’ bed in bold red paint, were slashed the characters of the feared 14K Triad. Beneath the name was their motto which had first appeared in the Opium Wars: Foreign Devils and Traitors Die.

  Up on deck, the specialist leaned over the ice-coated rail. The shoreline wasn’t that far away. The sun was setting over the city of Ching. A large cultivated island was far off to one side. It all seemed so peaceful. So . . . so romantic. Yeah, sure. Seventeen dead men — romantic.

  A single bird dropped from the sky and plunged through a hole in the ice. Moments later it appeared with a fish in its beak. It stretched its long neck and tilted backward. The fish must have been positioned badly because the bird tossed the wriggling thing into the air. The fish arched as it glinted in the sun. Then the bird grabbed it again — this time by the head. The bird’s dinner, still squirming, was pulled in by the bird’s throat muscles, then down into the stillness of its belly.

  So alive. Then suddenly so dead.

  The specialist turned back to the boat. No doubt there had been a lot of activity on board before the murderers arrived. A celebration perhaps. A party. For what? A celebration then sudden swooping death.

  Chen’s men were busily tagging garments and evidence bags as the specialist carefully descended the ladder and left the ship. Moments later a muffled sound came from the belly of the boat — no more than a cough in the blowing wind — and the boat began to list. Chen and his men got off the vessel quickly. Shortly afterward, it began to sink beneath the lake’s icy surface.

  The specialist watched the boat enter the nothingness. And he shivered. Then he stopped and began to plan. He knew what Beijing wanted. He also knew what he wanted, no, needed. Slowly, as he watched the last parts of the boat disappear beneath the dark waters of the lake, a plan came into focus.

  In Beijing the speaker phone announced the sinking of the boat. The tallish Han Chinese man smiled. But only briefly. This was far from over and he knew it.

  Three hours later, at the Ching police station, Chen showed the specialist the documents that had been taken from the men.

  One of the Taiwanese had a ship pilot’s licence. “Well, that settled one question. Only five thousand left,” he thought.

  Another document showed a receipt for the boat rental. The specialist circled the name of the boat operator. In another wallet the specialist found a receipt for a large amount of prepared food. The specialist circled the name and address of the restaurant in Ching.

  Much of the rest of the material was in languages the specialist didn’t understand. He pushed them aside and looked at Chen.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Tell me about the local 14K Triad activity,” he scratched on his pad.

  Chen did.

  “So they’re big enough and strong enough to do this sort of thing?” the specialist inquired.

  “I guess, sir. Shall I arrange to bring in their leaders?”

  The specialist put down his pen and stared at his ancient hands. He closed his eyes and forced himself to mentally retrace his steps through the death rooms on the boat, ending with the 14K Triad insignia on the mirror. He sighed and opened his eyes.

  Chen awaited his orders.

  The specialist snatched up his pen and slashed at the pages, “Make sure the Triad leaders don’t go anywhere. Tell them they are to stay put until we find out who murdered the seventeen foreigners on the boat. You can do that tomorrow. Right now bring me some suspects, Captain Chen. I have a plane to catch and I need to make an arrest.”

  At Chen’s shocked look, the specialist turned to the window. How very different this small city was from his home. He sighed silently. How very different his life had become since the night he was shot in the Pudong industrial area, across the Huangpo River from Shanghai.

  Chen held out an arrest warrant.

  The specialist took it and signed the bottom — Inspector Wang.

  CHAPTER SIX

  PHOTOS, PEASANTS, ANKLETS

  Fong drank in China’s heartland as it sped past. He wished he could open the window but wasn’t about to give the thug and the politico the joy of hearing him ask.

  He was slowly piecing together where they were going. They’d been travelling southeast for two days. This area of China, either in Shanxi or Shaanxi province — he couldn’t tell which yet — was far from his stomping grounds in Shanghai, but he was a lot closer to home than he had been a mere three days ago. At least he was on the right side of the wall and blessedly far from the windswept loess plateau on which “his” village in the west stood.

  Then he saw the first of the road signs. Five hundred kilometres to Xian — the ancient imperial capital of the Qin Dynasty. Fong stared at the sign with its shadowed image of the terra-cotta warriors. For a second he couldn’t figure out what was bothering him about it. Then he got it. It was in English. Of course, Xian was a major tourist destination.

  Good.

  He sat back in his seat and allowed his eyes to shut. The growing heat and the rumble of the car engine lulled sleep out of his bones. And in this sleep there were visions. Visions so sweet he dreaded that on his waking they would make him cry out to sleep again.

  That night they parked him in another jail cell. This one was older than the previous night’s and gratefully, as far as Fong was concerned, empty.

  Fong caught an image of himself in the polished steel mirror that was set deep in the cell’s brickwork. For the first time in a very long while he allowed himself to examine his appearance closely. The hardness of his features surprised him. His skin, as if somehow rougher, no longer accented the delicate bones of his face. He removed his Mao jacket and dropped it to the floor. The rustle of the Shakespeare texts he’d hidden there was reassuring. He pulled his shirt and undershirt over his head. The assassin’s wound stood out in high relief on his side, an ugly reminder of a near ending. He turned sideways. His body was undeniably thickening. “I’m no longer young,” he thought, “no longer able to . . .” He didn’t bother completing the thought. He turned from the mirror and put on his clothes. He’d already had two great loves in his life, Fu Tsong and the American, Amanda Pitman. He expected no more. Two loves were unusual largess from the Great God Irony, who rules unopposed in the
hearts of the Chinese. Fong knew that to be true.

  He looked down at his hands. On the night of his exile from Shanghai, a train porter had slammed the carriage door on his left hand. It had snapped a small bone and broken a blood vessel under the nail of the ring finger. The snapped bone he had ignored, but the broken blood vessel had forced a small pool of blood to form at the very base of the cuticle between the nail and the skin. The pain caused by the pressure took four days to pass, three days before the hard-seat journey to the west ended.

  The purple stain rose as the nail grew. It was now, more than two years later, all but gone. “Like much of my life,” he thought as he walked around the cell consciously avoiding looking into the polished steel mirror a second time.

  Late that night he awoke. The cell’s mesh-covered overhead bulb flooded the cell with a garish green light. Fong had no idea of the time, but he knew it was late because of the silence in the place. Jails are noisy, except in the dead of the night. Then he saw three large manilla packets on the floor of the cell.

  They were the same as the one he’d seen in the car. He knelt down and opened one. There were over a hundred 3 1/2” X 3 1/2” photographs. The second contained a few less. The third a few more. The top of each photo had a hole punched in it.

  He tossed the packets aside — but not through the bars.

  He knew they wanted him to look at the pictures — to be lured into analyzing them. Despite that. Despite knowing that, he picked up a packet. Once he looked at the first photo he was hooked. Suddenly he was back in Shanghai. A real police officer again. The head of Special Investigations. For, if ever there was a case for special investigations — a crime against foreigners — this was it.