Munson?
Tay did not think that was a very difficult question to answer. He had seen Mrs. Munson’s brutalized body carefully posed on the bed in room 2608 of the Marriott and that left him with no doubt whatsoever. Whoever killed the American ambassador’s wife may have hated Americans, or they may have loved Americans, but he was absolutely certain they truly despised this particular American named Elizabeth Munson.
He stared at the photograph, trying to pull himself deeply enough into Elizabeth Munson’s dark eyes to reach the place behind them from where he could see what this woman had seen, the place where he would know what she had known. He often did that with a picture of someone who had died violently. He tried to reach in through their eyes to see what they had seen in the moments during which their life was slipping away. That he might someday manage to do it was poetic nonsense, he knew, but it was something that he thought should be true even if it was not. So he kept trying.
Fate was a serious business. To seek to understand it through the eyes of a stranger, particularly one whose fate had been so gruesome, caused Tay to tread cautiously. More often than not his explorations all ended the same way. He would stare for a long time into the eyes of a person who had suffered horribly and eventually he would indeed see something real and tangible there. But it was never the glimpse of the victim’s soul for which Tay had been searching. It was only the unmistakable gloom of his own soul peering back.
Tay had less than twenty-four hours before facing the Americans at their embassy. He was not sure what he would learn by interviewing the ambassador, perhaps nothing at all, but nevertheless it was beginning to look like a great deal would turn on their conversation anyway.
He could easily imagine how it would all play out. He would not be interviewing the ambassador alone. They would be in the ambassador’s office with the ambassador’s staff surrounding them. DeSouza would certainly be there and probably this woman from the State Department’s security service, whatever it was called. There would be other people, too. He was sure of that, even if he did not know yet who they might be.
That would be his chance to put some doubt into all their minds that Elizabeth Munson’s death had anything to do with terrorism. If he left the American embassy tomorrow without doing that, it would all be over. Interpol would communicate their identification of Elizabeth Munson, the OC would cede the investigation to the Americans, and he would be out of the case.
He didn’t want to be out of the case. He wasn’t sure why he cared so much, why he wanted so badly to stay in it, but he did.
So how was he going to plant that doubt in the Americans’ minds? Perhaps he could start out by saying something like, “Ambassador, do you think your wife was murdered by her female lover?” That would get everyone’s attention, of course, but somehow he couldn’t see it achieving much else. No, he needed a concrete place to start untangling Elizabeth Munson’s life on earth and all he had was this goddamned package of papers and some gossip from an old lover of his own. Not much. Not anything really.
He put Elizabeth Munson’s picture back in the file, closed it, and then pushed it away. The file slid across his nearly empty desk, teetered a moment at the edge, and then steadied. Tay stood up and walked over to the window. The rain clouds had thickened and spread. The entire city was now wrapped in a dull outlook that matched Tay’s own. He stared for a while at the Marriott’s preposterous-looking green and red roof off in the distance.
No, he had more than a package of papers. He had a place, a place that had witnessed every horror of Elizabeth Munson’s last moments on earth. He would go back to the Marriott and wring something out of it. He would beat on its goddamned walls and kick down its fucking doors until he found a way to make it give up what it knew.
He could make it speak to him. He was sure he could.
SIXTEEN
Sergeant Kang was driving when he and Tay left the Cantonment Complex fifteen minutes later.
As they crossed the Singapore River, Tay watched a small boat at the pier on Clarke Quay loading its customary cargo of camerawielding tourists. Why was it that tourists in Singapore were always so fat, he wondered? Did the skinny tourists all go somewhere else and leave Singapore with nothing but the fat ones? Or were all tourists everywhere fat? Tay had never really been anywhere as a tourist himself, so he couldn’t be sure. Nevertheless, the thought caused him to sit up a little straighter and suck in his own gut. He was going to have to get some exercise, he knew. Maybe lose a little weight. He really was.
“When do you expect to be finished with the surveillance tapes, Sergeant?”
“It won’t be much longer, sir. Tomorrow morning maybe. But I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”
“The woman must have walked into the hotel. She’s there somewhere.”
“There are two cameras at the front desk, but we know she didn’t register so those aren’t going to have anything. The other cameras in the lobby are all too high to identify anyone unless you already know how they’re dressed or unless you just get lucky and they look right up into a camera. The camera in the lift lobby would be our best bet since there’s only one set of lifts up to the tower, but it was cutting in and out. There’s not much there.”
“And that’s it? That’s all the surveillance the hotel has? Nothing at all up on the floors?”
“On some, sir, but not on others. Nothing on twenty-six. They say it’s an old system they’re replacing soon.”
Tay could only shake his head. “What about the interviews? Someone must have seen this woman coming into the hotel.”
“No one that we’ve found yet, sir. Like I said, if we get lucky…”
Kang stopped talking and gave a little half shrug.
“But you don’t think we’re going to get lucky.”
“No, sir. Nothing about this case looks like it’s going to bring anybody any luck, does it?”
They passed the old Hill Street police station just on the other side of the river. Tay had always thought it was a lovely structure, graceful and dignified. It stood only six floors high and the whole of its facade was decorated with banks of close-set wooden shutters painted in bright greens, golds, blues, and reds. The stories he had heard about the building were a lot less cheerful than the shutters. It had been the headquarters of the internal security forces during the communist insurgency campaigns of the fifties, the place where the interrogations were conducted. People had died there, a great many people if you believed the legends, and some said that in the night you could hear screams coming from deep inside the building. It wasn’t something he liked to dwell on.
“So,” Tay continued, “correct me if I’m wrong here. Elizabeth Munson was entirely invisible at the Marriott, both to the security cameras and the naked eye, until she turned up shot in the head, beaten, stripped, and posed on the king-sized bed in room 2608 last Tuesday afternoon. Have I got that right?”
“Yes, sir. Pretty much.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as absurd?”
“Not really, sir.” Kang shot Tay a quick glance to weigh his reaction. “She could have come into the hotel anytime after Monday morning since that was the last time housekeeping checked the room, and she wasn’t found until Tuesday afternoon. Do you know how many people go in and out of a hotel like that over a thirty-six hour period? Must be thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Like I said, we’d have to be lucky to find somebody who saw her andremembered her. She might even have gone in through the back and nobody would have seen her at all.”
“The back? The Marriott has a back entrance?”
“I meant the service lift, sir. She could have taken the service lift up the main tower and nobody would have seen her unless she just happened to have bumped into some member of the staff. There’s no camera in the service lift.”
“Why would she have done that?”
“Well, if you didn’t want to be seen, maybe-”
“Or if somebody else didn’t want you to be seen.”
Kang looked at Tay, the question of who might have wanted Elizabeth Munson to enter the hotel unseen hanging between them.
