separate clusters of large boulders spaced a few hundred feet apart. Shan followed each, confirming that they led to makeshift latrines: two of them.
Finally he found a third path, or rather a track, where, judging from the bent stems, something heavy had been dragged. It led to a cluster of high boulders a hundred feet away.
Yangke rose and walked unsteadily toward Lokesh as Shan reached the entrance to the cluster of outcroppings, a narrow passage between two eight-foot-high flat-faced boulders. With a glance toward his companions Shan stepped between the rocks, then froze. Rope was strung waist-high around most of the small clearing, with squares of white paper taped to it at intervals. The papers held Chinese ideograms, inscribed with a ballpoint pen.
“What sort of prayer flags are these?” a raspy voice asked over his shoulder.
“Not prayer flags, Lokesh,” Shan said in a worried tone as he approached the rope. “Warnings.” As he read the words on the flags he shuddered.
Feet shuffled in the dirt behind them and Yangke appeared, squeezing sideways through the boulders. “Is this where. .,” he began.
There was no need to announce that this was where the two bodies had been discovered. On the ground before them, inside the rope, were white silhouettes. Two of them were ovals, three feet long. Another, wider, was nearly four feet long. A circle was less than two feet wide, beside a long irregular outline with two appendages that must have been legs, the shape of a human body sprawled on its side. Shan stepped over the rope and knelt at the first outline, the largest oval, rubbing a finger on the white powdery line. He touched it to his tongue. Flour. The discovery caused him to again gaze uneasily at the warning flags. Whoever had strung up the flags was from a place far away from the mountain. Someone who used bleached flour to draw on the earth came from a different world.
Still kneeling, he surveyed the bizarre scene, beginning to grasp that it was not one mystery he faced but several. Layers of riddles that began not with the killings but with the unknown identity of the victims and ended with the unknown hand that had created the facsimile of a criminal investigation scene. Patches of flour dotted the adjoining rocks. Four pieces of wadded-up tape lay scattered about the clearing, the nearest two feet from his knee. He unfolded it. The backing was covered with flour smudged with lines and grit from the rocks. Someone had been playacting, someone who did not fully understand forensic technique, did not know such rough stone was unlikely to give meaningful fingerprints but who knew enough to go through the motions of a forensic investigation.
But the bronze stains on the ground and patterns of stains on the rocks told Shan there had been nothing contrived about the objects outlined in flour. Someone dead, or dying, had been dragged into the little clearing. Someone else had died there, among the rocks, blood spurting in a fan pattern from at least two savage, puncturing blows. He glanced back at Lokesh, hoping that the old Tibetan did not grasp the truth that lay before them. Four silhouettes, two bodies. At least one of the victims had been dismembered.
“There were some vultures,” Yangke said. “I could smell the. . I could smell what the vultures smelled.”
“Where did the bodies go?”
“I don’t know. The vultures frightened me. I didn’t know this was where. .”
“Vultures don’t eat clothing. Vultures don’t eat bones.”
“Who would touch them?” Yangke asked. “Who would want to move bodies?”
It was, Shan realized, one more layer of mystery. “Are there
“Not for thirty miles.”
“What happens when people die in the village?”
“The old ones want their bodies taken to the ragyapa. The bodies of the others are burned. We have lots of firewood. It’s a more efficient use of resources to burn them, Chodron says.”
Shan turned to Lokesh, recognizing the forlorn expression on his old friend’s gentle countenance. Those who died a violent death were seldom prepared, seldom in the peaceful, focused state of mind that would allow them to make the difficult transition to the next life. In Tibetan tradition such victims of murder often became angry ghosts who destroyed the harmony of the land they occupied.
Yangke seemed to sense something wrong with Lokesh and touched his elbow, gesturing back, toward the opening. The old Tibetan silently retreated.
“Why would they burn a sleeping bag?” Yangke asked as he followed Lokesh.
“Because it was soaked in blood. One of them was attacked in his sleep, then dragged here inside his bag.”
Shan watched his companions retreat with an unexpected ache in his heart. Then he went to work in the little clearing. He examined the bloodstains, tight patterns projecting from a broad, flat rock that had been laid close to a corner of the little alcove. The sprays of droplets had been made by limbs that still had blood pulsing in them. Soon he had collected eight more pieces of wadded tape. The tape itself had fine fibers woven into it, and had none of the blotchy adhesive or chemical smell of the cheap product sold in Tibetan markets. Along the rock walls were tracks with the patterns of expensive boots like those he had seen on the man in the stable. He stood and studied the little clearing, trying to reconstruct the events of the past few days. First had come the killer and his victims, later someone else who, in his own awkward way, seemed to be seeking the truth. What had that visitor learned? Had he taken away evidence? On a rock face on the opposite side Shan noticed strangely raised marks, partial fingerprints in a hard gray substance that seemed to have been extruded from the surface. Two feet away was a narrow V-shaped opening where two of the boulders came together. He probed it with his fingers, pulling out two long cotton swabs, a bent, exhausted tube of industrial glue, and a half-used tube of lip balm. Sexy Sheen, read the label in English and Chinese. He examined the swabs. They were on eight-inch-long sticks, the kind found in a well- stocked medical lab, something seldom seen in Tibetan towns.
When he finished, and emerged from the murder site, Lokesh was handing three sticks to Yangke, who had three more in his hand, all identical, all painted with three bands at the top, one blue then two red.
“I thought you said these people were not miners,” Shan said.
“These have been put here since I visited last. Lokesh found them, arranged to lay claim to this whole campsite and beyond.”
“Do you recognize the colors? Which miner’s are they?”
Yangke’s only reply was to insert the stakes into one of the iron hand straps of his collar, and snap them in half. He opened a small trough in the ground with his heel. Lokesh silently helped him bury the broken claim stakes.
Shan gestured toward the high spine of rock that rose toward the summit, dividing the mountain into eastern and western halves. “I know how hard it is to reach this side of the mountain from below,” Shan said. “But what about from the east side?”
“Toward the summit it gets very dangerous,” Yangke explained. “Lightning frequently strikes there without warning.”
“Lightning?” Lokesh asked, suddenly interested. Earth deities often expressed themselves through lightning.
“In the spring and summer, if there is storm anywhere near, lightning will strike there. Sometimes lightning strikes the summit even without a storm.”
“It’s the tallest mountain for dozens of miles,” Shan pointed out. Neither of the Tibetans responded. “Are there farms on the other side?”
“Just that Chinese place, miles away.”
“You called it a secret base.”
“It has a high wire fence around it. Some white buildings. Very quiet. Few are aware of its existence. Even in Beijing it’s a secret, they say.”
“Not an army base?”
“When I was young I used to slip over the top to look around.
My aunts said it was a Chinese base, full of death. The headman said it was full of poison.”
“Chodron?”
“No, that was his father. I would sit in a shadow on the eastern slope for hours, watching. There were a few
