though she thought it had been cleared out.
The wind waved the palm fronds and shreds of rain clouds scudded overhead as we drove up to St. Louis Heights. We had the flaps rolled down on the Wrangler, and I kept the intermittent wipers on. It was a cruddy day, and that matched the way I felt.
Across the street from the building Treasure had told us about, a demolition company was razing the remains of the shopping center, and I felt a pang of loss. It was my dad’s first commercial project, and he’d recruited all of us to help. I was only six or seven, but on the weekends, I carried supplies around, bringing my dad and brothers water, taking away trash.
Lui and Haoa were teenagers and they complained about having to spend their weekends working, but even my mother helped, spackling holes in the drywall, painting, and washing the glass storefronts.
“Remember that law student?” Ray asked, bringing me out of my reverie.
“The one who called 911?”
“That’s the one. He said he was having sex across the street, right? You think this is the place?”
I shrugged. “I can ask him.”
The building was two stories tall, with a staircase at each end and a balcony that ran across the front. There was no lobby; each office opened to the street. Most of the doors advertised some kind of import or export business, though there was an insurance agency, an acupuncturist, and a law office on the ground floor.
We walked up to the second floor, where the salt air had pitted the concrete banisters along the front rail. Chunks were missing, showing the rebar underneath. We found the door marked Wah Shing, with a Realtor’s box hanging from the lock. A combination lock through a hasp kept the box closed.
Just in case there was evidence somewhere, we both put on plastic gloves. I read Ray the combination Treasure had given us, and the lock dropped open. He pulled out the key and unlocked the office door.
I wasn’t expecting much, and I wasn’t disappointed. The place was nearly as barren as the acupuncture clinic. A beat-up, puke green couch sat along one wall, where I figured the law student had gotten his ass plowed the night of the fire. Across from it was a metal desk with a single drawer and a cheap swivel chair.
There wasn’t a picture on the wall, or a piece of paper on the desk. The plastic waste basket was empty. “We could always dust for prints,” Ray said.
“To prove what? This isn’t a crime scene.”
The space had been divided in two by a wall with a door set in it, and I walked through to another barren room. At least there was a poster on the wall there, a photo of a Chinese landscape taken in Gansu Province, where the travel agent had said Jingtao was from.
Carefully I pried the poster from the wall. There was some Chinese writing on the back, which I couldn’t decipher. Ray came in the room and I showed it to him.
“You know anybody who can read that?” he asked.
“My godmother. She doesn’t live far from here. We’ll swing past her house on our way back to the station.” I shrugged. “It probably doesn’t mean shit, but there isn’t anything else here.”
There was a metal desk like the one in the outer office, a slightly more comfortable chair on casters, and an empty file cabinet. “Phone jack,” Ray said, pointing to the wall. “Maybe we can get a number and trace the calls.”
“That project has your name written all over it, partner.”
We left a few minutes later, after satisfying ourselves that whoever had cleaned the place out had done a great job. I called Aunt Mei-Mei and asked if we could stop by, and she said, “You out early, Kimo. I make you breakfast.”
“No, Aunt Mei-Mei. Don’t go to any trouble.”
“No trouble.”
When she greeted us at her front door, wearing her apron once again, I introduced Ray to her, and she served us scrambled eggs with unidentifiable little bits in it, which were delicious. “I still make big meals,” she said. “Lots of leftovers.”
She ate like a bird, picking a small piece of egg with her chopsticks, then rolling it in sticky rice. Ray loved the food and was effusive with his praise. Aunt Mei-Mei blushed.
After we finished, I put a fresh pair of gloves on and showed her the poster, which I unrolled on the kitchen table when the plates had been cleared.
“Is name and address,” she said. “In China.”
“Can you write it in English?” I asked.
She found a pad from a Chinese store, and wrote, in careful letters, the name Guo Yeng-Shen, with an address below it. “Gansu. That’s the place where the picture was taken?”
“Yes.” She looked at me with a keen interest in her dark eyes. “This help you find who burn down your father’s shopping center?”
“I hope so.” I kissed her cheek and thanked her for her help. As we drove back down to the station, Ray said, “That woman should open a restaurant.”
“You guys need to get out more. Don’t get me wrong, Aunt Mei-Mei’s a great cook. But I can show you places in Chinatown that make her look like an amateur.”
“Maybe we’ll double date sometime. Me and Julie, and you and the fireman.”
I remembered the dinner Mike and I had with Terri and Levi Hirsch on Saturday night. It was fun, despite all the angst over our relationship that had arisen in the truck on the way there and home.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll do that sometime.”
NOBODY DIES IN CHINATOWN
I e-mailed the law student and asked him about the office he’d visited. Then I called a guy I knew in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a freckled, red-headed haole from the mainland named Frank O’Connor, and arranged to meet him at the Kope Bean near his office on Ala Moana Boulevard. Ray stayed at the station to work on getting phone records from the office across from the shopping center.
The first time I met Frank I mistook him for an intern, but I was assured he was a Stanford grad who’d distinguished himself in the San Francisco office before being posted to Honolulu. We had worked together a year before, when an illegal immigrant had turned up dead in the lobby of a downtown office building.
“What’s up?” he asked, settling into one of the big armchairs in the window of the coffee shop.
“You know anything about smuggling illegals in from China for prostitution?”
“Big topic. What specifically do you want to know?
“How do they get in? Boat?”
“Pretty long sail. Sometimes, yeah, they come up from the Marianas that way, but mostly they fly into Honolulu on tourist visas, then they disappear. There’s a saying, you know. Nobody dies in Chinatown. Somebody dies, somebody new comes in and takes over the identity.”
“One ring behind everything, or multiple?”
“Multiple. You’re from Homicide. You have a dead girl?”
“Two girls, two guys. Three of them might be from Gansu Province.”
Frank nodded. “Somebody’s been bringing people in from Gansu, promising them a better life in the U.S. But they’re so much in debt from the travel that they don’t have any choice but to work it off.”
I gave Frank the information we had on the acupuncture clinic and the other places that had burned, and he said he’d see if they had any leads. Then I remembered the poster we’d found at the abandoned office. “You recognize this?” I asked, showing him the name and address as Aunt Mei-Mei had written it.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked, immediately on alert.
“It was on the back of a poster.” I explained where we’d found it.
“I recognize the name-a guy we’ve been looking at, on the ground in Gansu. He recruits the prostitutes and sends them here.”
He drained the last of his coffee. “The new China’s a tough place. Especially in a province like Gansu, where there are few resources. Lots of girls, and some boys, too, get recruited to go into prostitution. Most of them end up
