Ryker understood only too well that humor at a grisly crime scene was essential. A well-timed joke could often stop a stomach from heaving and spilling its contents, adding to the disgust. He found himself chuckling and welcomed the emotional release, even if it was the diametrical opposite of what he felt at that exact moment.
The other forensics guy had his toolbox-cum-chemical lab open on a table. He saw he had Ryker’s attention and said, “There’s semen trace on his stomach. Looks like he came just before his assailant cut it off. And there’s trace in his mouth, too.”
“Is the semen in his mouth his own, or someone else’s?” Ryker asked, even as his brain, paralyzed by the sight of a dead man apparently eating his own penis, told him it was too soon for results to be available.
“Samples are on their way to the lab by courier.”
“Too bad it happened last night,” Klein said. “If we’d gotten here within 30 minutes of ejaculation we could have put the two semen groups together on a slide. That would have told us whether they were exclusive.” He bent his arms at the elbows and made the motions of flapping wings, grinning all the while.
Ryker nodded; he’d seen the training film, dubbed “Cock Fighting” by the forensics fraternity. He knew the case’s history. A female student had been attacked on her way back to her dorm and raped by two men. When semen samples were examined under the microscope they were found to be very much alive-and fighting each other like crazy. Until then Ryker had assumed that semen had one purpose in life and one purpose only, to swim toward and fertilize the female’s egg. But, put those feisty little tadpoles in along with semen from another man and half of them would stop swimming and fight a rearguard action to prevent the egg being fertilized by the competitor.
Klein went on. “I’m estimating time of death at twelve-thirty, give or take sixty minutes. Blood loss would have killed him soon enough. But before it did, this happened.” He pointed a gloved finger to a dark spot directly above the dead man’s heart. “Stab wound. From above, straight down. Slipped between the ribs, smooth as silk, and into the heart. You might call it a surgical strike. Either the knifeman, or the knifewoman, was very lucky not to have the blade turned by a rib-or they knew exactly what they were doing.”
Ryker examined the chest and stomach. “Just one puncture?”
“That’s affirmative,” Klein said. “There’s severe bruising around the wound, caused by the hilt impacting the flesh. Bam! Like Travolta and Uma Thurman, you know? We only have to insert a measurement probe into the hole to discover the exact length of the blade.”
“Do that,” Ryker said. He looked for Chee Wei and found him standing over by a window, looking out across the sprawling city, his back to the crime scene. Ryker joined him. He rarely got to see San Francisco from such a vantage point. Sometimes he forgot just how beautiful his adopted city was.
“I assumed, you know, this was some bi or gay thing,” Chee Wei said. “I didn’t consider the possibility that his own semen might have found its way into his mouth from his penis.”
“Just adds to the charm, don’t it?” Ryker said. “What else do we know about him.”
“Got his name from the register. It’s Danny Lin.”
He couldn’t have surprised Ryker more if he’d put on a clown’s nose and started dancing around the room. Danny Lin, aka Lin Dan, aka the son of James Lin, multi millionaire Chinese industrialist and personal friend of at least two United States Senators.
Ryker looked closely at the dead man on the bed and finally recognized him. The pale, bloated features had fooled him.
“Thought that would get your attention,” Chee Wei said. “Didn’t you have some kind of-” He broke off in response to Ryker’s stare, and held up both hands, palms outward.
Klein came up behind them and said, “We’d put Kyung on the suspects list but she has a solid alibi, she was working last night.” He meant the Korean girl. She’d moved round to this side of the bed and was close enough to have heard Klein, but if she did then she gave no sign.
“You’ve used up your funny allowance for the month,” Ryker said, perhaps too sharply. “Have you found the weapon?”
Klein frowned, suddenly serious. “No, but I’ll tell you this. We’re talking a damn sharp blade. It went through the guy’s dick like a laser beam. Perfect cut, absolutely no tearing or bruising.” He made a horizontal chopping motion with his hand. “With knife wounds, usually you can tell if it’s left-to-right or right-to-left. Not this time. Cross-section’s the cleanest I’ve seen. A machine couldn’t have done a better job.”
“It couldn’t have been a machine,” Chee Wei said. “The Three Laws clearly state that a machine can’t harm your dick, or through inaction allow your dick to come to harm.”
Klein laughed but Ryker rolled his eyes at such intellectual humor, and went to speak with the Korean forensics girl. She’d taken shots from every possible angle. Now she displayed them in batches of 12 on her camera’s 3.5-inch LCD, tilting it so Ryker could see. “What resolution?” he asked.
“Twelve megapixels, and it’s got a ten-by zoom,” Kyung said. “Not to mention a whole range of light enhancement settings. Which is how come I noticed this.” She expanded one of the thumbnails and indicated the wall section behind and above the bed. The writing was barely visible to the naked eye because of the natural shadows cast by bright daylight falling onto the floor beside the bed.
“Can you read it?”
Kyung shook her head. “Nah, I’m an American. It’s probably Chinese.”
They both looked at Chee Wei. He joined them and Ryker indicated the camera, then the wall. Kyung manipulated controls with her thumb so the characters painted on the wall
“Are they Chinese?” Ryker prompted him.
“Is the Pope Catholic? Sure they’re Chinese.
“Is that somebody’s name?”
“What? No, no, it’s something, I’m trying to remember where I might have heard it before. It means, eh, it means no war, no peace.
“Does that have any special meaning in Chinese?”
Chee Wei thought about. “Not that I know of.”
Ryker looked at Kyung, who shrugged and moved away to talk to the forensics guy with the toolbox. She glanced back over her shoulder and caught Ryker looking at her butt. He pretended to have something in his eye even though he knew he wasn’t fooling her for an instant. Feeling like a dumb schoolboy, he turned to Chee Wei.
“Okay. The victim lost his cherry around twelve-thirty. Who found him, and when?”
Chee Wei didn’t even consult his notebook. “Room service got here at eight-thirty, breakfast trolley and wake-up call rolled into one. Knocked on the door, didn’t get an answer, used his pass key. He called the day manager using the room phone, the manager called nine-one-one. Uniforms arrived at eight-forty-seven and sealed off the floor. The night manager is on his way back in, but when I talked to him on his cell phone he didn’t know a damn thing about this. The room service logbook doesn’t list this suite after nine p.m., at which time Mr. Lin called down to order breakfast from the Chinese menu, to be delivered this morning promptly at eight-thirty. If he had company with him, I guess they brought their own wine and food.”
“Or maybe he intended to order food after he had sex,” Ryker suggested. “Only he didn’t get that far.”
“Makes sense. Need to show you something.” Chee Wei headed for a door that led to a luxurious marble-tiled bathroom the size of Ryker’s apartment. The bath could have held a football team. Chee Wei indicated the wash basin. Ryker didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking for, but then the light caught something in the drain plughole. He bent down and moved over to the other side so he could see it more clearly.
“We need a plumber,” Ryker said.
“On his way. I’ll have him take out the pipe and put a bucket underneath. We’ll flush it down.”
Ryker straightened and nodded; Chee Wei had everything covered, as usual. Feeling superfluous and twenty years too old, Ryker said, “You know, I miss the good old days. You’re too young to remember, but once upon a time the only people who wore earrings, were women.” He wanted to rip the sink apart and get his hands on whatever was down there. It looked like a stud diamond set in silver but maybe he wasn’t seeing all of it.
“Whoever dropped it didn’t stick around to call a plumber, that’s for sure. They were in a hurry.” Chee Wei frowned. “Now, if it belongs to the murderer, he or she would have tried to retrieve it, or flush it away so no one would ever find what might be a telling piece of evidence. But… and forgive my presumption… if the owner wasn’t
