“Perfect prints from all ten fingers? Nobody will believe that, sir.”
“Just do it that way and let’s see what happens.”
Kang shrugged. “Right, sir.”
“What about Forensic Management Branch? When are we going to get their report?”
“Tomorrow, probably late, but it won’t say much.”
“FMB didn’t get anything?”
“There wasn’t much to get. They’re running the samples from the vacuum and the wipe-downs now, but they say they’d be surprised to find anything. The killer cleaned up pretty thoroughly. It almost looks like he knew exactly what he was doing.”
“No prints either?”
“A few partials from the back of the headboard and a couple of other places, but nothing good enough to return a match.”
Tay nodded at that and returned his attention to the IP on his desk. Kang took that as a signal that he was dismissed and closed the door quietly behind him.
Tay started back to work on the IP. Then, suddenly remembering the mail Kang had brought in, he put the file down, pulled his in-tray across the desk, and peered into it. There wouldn’t be anything but junk, of course; there never was. Still, each time he flipped through a new mail delivery, some combination of curiosity and hope always flared within him.
To his surprise, right on top of the pile there appeared to be an actual letter. He picked it up curiously and took a closer look. It was an airmail envelope with a metered stamp that carried the return address of a law firm in New York City. He checked to make certain the letter was actually addressed to him. It was.
Tay held the envelope for a moment without opening it. Perhaps he was being sued. He had never been sued and didn’t know what he would do if he was. But surely that couldn’t be what the letter was about. If he were going to be sued for something, it certainly wouldn’t be by anyone in New York. He had never even been in New York.
Eventually Tay opened the envelope and took out the letter. It was only a single sheet of paper. He read it, and then, not quite believing what he had just read, he read it again from the beginning.
The letter was from a man named Rosenthal whom Tay had never heard of. He said he was a lawyer representing Tay’s mother and wanted to notify Tay that his mother had had a stroke and was in Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. She was expected to recover, but the prognosis was uncertain as to whether she might have permanent brain damage. That was all the letter said. Nothing else at all.
“My God,” Tay murmured to himself.
He had not spoken to his mother in…Tay thought about it, but he couldn’t remember for sure. Three years? Perhaps four?
There wasn’t any significance to that, not really. They certainly weren’t angry at each other. They had just somehow slipped out of each other’s lives. His mother had lived in New York for nearly twenty-five years now. She was married to someone he had met only a couple of times. Their lives no longer had anything to do with each other. It was just that simple. Was it really possible for someone to actually lose track of his own mother? He knew the answer to that. It was very possible indeed. It was one of those things that happened in life when you weren’t paying attention.
Tay looked at his watch. What time was it in New York now? He tried to work it out, but he wasn’t certain. And what was he going to do anyway? Telephone his mother and ask how she was? That didn’t seem like a very good idea. If she had had a stroke, perhaps her speech had been affected. He briefly considered calling her husband, but he hardly knew the man and hadn’t talked to him in ten years. He supposed he could always call this fellow Rosenthal who had written the letter, but what would be the point of that? Presumably he had already told Tay all he knew.
Maybe he should just go to New York and find out what the hell was going on, but that was out of the question, too, wasn’t it? He was responsible for finding the killer of a dead woman who had been viciously brutalized. Murder investigations didn’t wait around until you found a convenient time to fit them into your schedule. Tay would have to transfer the case to someone else if he went to New York. He didn’t really want to do that and, besides, flying halfway around the world on the basis of a half-page letter from someone he didn’t even know really made no sense at all.
Tay leaned back in his chair, swung his feet onto the desk, and shifted his gaze out the window. From his office on the fifteenth floor of the Cantonment Complex, he had a glorious view of the city. Straight ahead across the Singapore River lay the green patch of Fort Canning Park and off to the right were the glass and steel towers of the financial district. If Tay stood up and walked to the window and looked off to the left, he could even see the Marriott somewhere in the middle of the long line of luxury hotels scattered along Orchard Road. But then he wasn’t about to do that.
Tay made a pocket of air in one cheek, shifted it to the other, and then blew it out in one long stream. A feeling about this case was taking root within him and, as he threaded it back and forth through his mind, examining it first from one direction and then from the other, he saw at least one thing with unmistakable clarity. This case was going to turn into a real son of a bitch, a shit storm of the first order.
He didn’t know how he knew that, he just did. And now there was this, too. His mother was in a hospital in New York and there was a letter on his desk from somebody he didn’t know telling him she might have brain damage. Well, goddamn it all to hell, what in Christ’s name was he supposed to do about that? Was he supposed to drop everything and fly to New York and sit there holding his mother’s hand until they found out? His mother hadn’t held his hand for forty years. For all he knew she had
Tay had no life other than his job, a job his mother had always hated, and now she was trying to ruin it for him. At the precise moment when he was needed the most, she wanted to take him away from his job. Or maybe she didn’t. If she’d had a stroke and was now suffering brain damage, then she probably didn’t know what she wanted, did she?
Tay knew he was going around in circles and not making a great deal of sense, not even to himself. He tried to stop thinking about any of it and clear his mind altogether, but he couldn’t.
It might be a few days before they could even get an ID on the murdered woman, he thought. All he was doing right now was waiting. Waiting for the immigration list to be checked; waiting for Interpol to respond to the fingerprint request; waiting for the FMB report; waiting for the autopsy. None of that was going to happen for a few days. Maybe he could make a quick trip to New York and get back before any of it did happen, he thought to himself. But even as he did, he knew that was complete nonsense.
What he was actually waiting for was something else altogether, and he knew perfectly well what it was.
He was waiting for this whole fucking case to swoop down and take a humongous dump all over his sorry ass. In every fiber of his body he could sense it circling above him, and he would be goddamned if he would be sitting in a half-darkened hospital room in New York doing absolutely nothing useful for anyone when it finally let loose.
Yesterday he had so little to do he was spending his lunch hour browsing through the paperbacks at Sunny’s. Today there was a bloody goddamned maelstrom howling around him and his mother was in a hospital room halfway around the world with possible brain damage.
SIX
On Thursday morning Inspector Tay tried to telephone the number on the letter from New York and got no answer. After thinking about it for a few minutes and counting back and forth on his fingers, Tay realized that he had miscalculated the time change. The International Date Line was a real bastard. He would have to call at night, Singapore time, in order to get through during business hours in New York, so he made a mental note to try again when he got home that evening.
