The Fear Artist

“Twenty K.”

Rafferty says, “Well, well.”

“I played on his guilt,” she says, grabbing the spoon again and sorting through a mound of pad thai as though she’s counting the shrimp. “He does feel guilty, you know.”

“I’m sure it’s eating him alive. But the money is welcome. Where are you staying?”

Her eyebrows vault toward her hairline. “With you.”

“But where’s your stuff?”

She pats the big purse. “In here.” She pulls out a couple of folded shirts, a pair of jeans, and a little bag of sample-size soap and shampoo and puts them on the table. “Tourist cover,” she says, and she shows him a small silver digital camera and a spiral notebook. The notebook says MY TRAVEL JOURNAL in bright yellow letters. “Smile,” she says, and takes his picture. “Got a little computer and everything.”

“Ming Li,” he says, trying to see through the black hole in his vision where the flash went off. “When did you land in Bangkok?”

A shrug, the same shrug Miaow does to indicate a question not worth answering. She’s putting things back into the bag. “I don’t know. Three hours ago?”

“Well, turn around and go back. This isn’t going to work. The people who are looking for me don’t play nicely.”

“That’s exactly why you need me.” She offers him a dripping spoon, and he shakes his head. “An extra pair of eyes, a messenger no one’s ever seen before, someone who can do one thing while you’re doing something else, a trained surveillance artist who could follow a flea across a dog, a trained surveillance spotter who’ll pick up on a watcher way before you do.…”

“No.”

“And someone who instantly turns you into half of a couple, not a creepy-looking solo guy with dark makeup and a hairstyle even Hugh Grant gave up on years ago.”

“I know,” he says. “I know about the hair-”

She drops the spoon in the pad thai. “And the other thing about me is that I look like everybody here. Someone arrests you, I just take a step back and they won’t even see me.”

“No.”

“And I’ve got computer skills that make you look like someone who’s just learning to work a calculator.”

“All right,” he says, gratified by the surprise in her face. “Computer skills I can use. For the moment anyway. Have you finished eating?”

“I eat when you want me to,” Ming Li says, pushing the plate away and standing up. “Let’s go save your butt, older brother.”

He’s not even halfway through his coffee before Ming Li says, “Whoa.”

While he was still ordering, she had pulled a little MacBook Air out of her bag and logged into Coffee World’s router, and from that point on she’d been lost to him. He’d put down her tea and sweet rolls and stood there, feeling large and aimless, as she ignored him. A couple of young men looked at her and then at him, and he could almost see them dismissing him as competition: Guy thinks he looks like Hugh Grant. He finally said, “Well, just call if you need anything else,” and went to sit facing the window as the dusk wrapped itself around the drizzle and lights popped on. And then she’d said, “Whoa.”

“Whoa what?”

“Whoa the Wyoming Eagle Tribune. You need to read this.” She gets up, grabs one of the rolls, takes out half of it with a single bite, and then passes him the computer one-handed. It’s even lighter than his netbook, back in the hotel room.

He’s looking at a headline that reads CHEYENNE WOMAN KILLED.

He’d known it, he’d known it almost all along. That phone was ringing in a bad house. He opens his eyes, which he hadn’t realized he’d squeezed shut, and goes back to the screen.

Helen Eckersley had been discovered in her living room by her maid. Eckersley had, the local sheriff said, “been beaten repeatedly over a period of twenty-four hours or more with a poker from her own fireplace set.”

“They hurt her for a whole day,” Ming Li says, leaning over his shoulder. “They had questions.”

According to a department spokesperson, the paper says, the killers broke all the bones in her arms and legs, as well as her collarbones, before shattering her skull. Some of the injuries were almost a full day older than others. The newspaper’s description of the murder is “merciless, prolonged, and brutal.”

“I’m glad they tell us it was brutal,” Ming Li says. “We might have missed it.”

Rafferty can feel the pulse thumping inside his left wrist as he finishes reading. “Any updates?”

“Not on this site. I’m going to look in a few other places.”

Reading, Rafferty says, “And good luck to him.”

“Who?”

“The mayor, who’s the usual local gasbag. Says the killers will ‘be pursued tirelessly.’ They have no idea what just hit them.”

Ming Li is running her fingernail lightly down the screen as she reads the end of the story. “What did?”

“The same thing that’s after me right now. Notice what’s not here?”

She leans closer, as if he’s challenged her to spot something very small. “No. What?”

“Her age. Her family. Her marital status. Anything that indicates that she didn’t just materialize unnoticed in Cheyenne from some other dimension. None of the inevitable neighbors seem to have come forward to say the things they always say: ‘She kept to herself.’ ‘I never thought anything like this could happen here.’ She seems-I don’t know-disconnected. There’s no background information: ‘A native of Purdue, Indiana, Ms. Eckersley worked at the Cheyenne Public Library, and raised hydrangeas’-that kind of stuff.”

“Maybe she wasn’t from there.”

Rafferty remembers the little curlicues in the way she spoke. “I’m pretty sure she wasn’t.”

Ming Li says, “Nobody deserves to die like that.”

Rafferty says, “A lot of people have died like that.”

A long, cold cup of coffee later, it’s 9:30 P.M. and Rafferty’s reached the point where the caffeine is actually making him sleepier when Ming Li says, “Nothing much more. I’ve been through everything I can find, and they’re still looking for whoever did it, and the sheriff is still saying they’ll get him.”

“What time is it?”

“You have a watch.”

“What time is it in Wyoming?”

She looks at her own watch and bangs the keys for a second. “About eight-thirty A.M.”

“Well, I suppose morgues open early.”

She cocks her head to one side, waiting for the rest of it.

He takes out his newest cell phone, the one he hasn’t used, and hands it to her. “Get the phone number for the morgue in Cheyenne, or call the sheriff’s office if you can’t find the morgue and ask them for it.”

“I’ll find the morgue.”

“Give yourself an accent. You’re calling from Bangkok to see whether Helen Eckersley’s body has been claimed. If they ask who you are, you say something like, ‘I’m calling on behalf of the family of a woman from here, a Thai woman who called herself Helen, who ran away from her husband in America several years ago and took a new last name, which the family doesn’t know. The last anyone heard, she was in Wyoming. They’re worried because she hasn’t called them or returned calls for ten days or so. If someone has claimed Ms. Eckersley’s body, or if she’s not Asian, then she’s not the woman we’re looking for.’ ”

“ ‘And if no one has, and if she’s Asian,’ ” Ming Li says in a businesslike voice, reading a number off the screen and pushing the buttons on the phone, “ ‘maybe we can help you identify her.’ ”

“Good.”

She looks up at him, waiting for the phone on the other end to ring. “You need me,” she says. Then she says, “Hello?” and goes into her pitch.

Listening to her voice without even hearing the words, he realizes again what their father has turned her into. Living in China, at the mercy of the Triad he worked for, Frank Rafferty had transformed his half-Chinese daughter