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  “It gives me chills just thinking about it.”

  “His family was on the plane?”

  “Yes,” Marilyn said fading away momentarily. “His wife was a Japanese lady named Miyuki. From the pictures I have seen, she was quite beautiful. And their son was just adorable. An eight-year-old Indiana Jones. Loved archeology. After the accident, Al moved out of his family’s house in Bethesda. There were just too many faces staring at him as he walked the halls, too many voices calling to him from the corners of the rooms. Too many memories. His brother moved into the house and Al moved into my apartment complex. I recognized him from meetings with your father years before, and we became friends. As it turns out, his move to the apartment was only a first step toward reclusion. One day he decided he had had enough. He left his apartment, fully furnished, and moved out to live on the streets. I used to come by and check on him, bring him clothes and food. So did his brother. But after a while he refused to accept things. Said he was getting by just fine and that there were plenty of others who needed help worse than he did.”

  “Pretty drastic.”

  “There was more to it than just a plane crash. He was supposed to be on the plane. He was called back to the office on his way to the airport. He put his wife and son on the plane by themselves and was going to catch a flight out the next morning. He was planning to take his son to see the Pyramids.”

  “Jesus,” Jake said.

  “Yeah, he felt responsible. Guilt does things to people that are hard to explain.” ***

  Chow Ying smoked his almond-flavored cigarettes and sipped his Tsingtao beer, close enough to smell Marilyn’s Liz Claiborne perfume. He hummed a traditional Chinese song he had heard the old man who ran the hotel sing the night before. Between verses, he listened to the conversation over his shoulder. The woman cried twice, for reasons God only knew. Chow Ying couldn’t care less. He was there for one purpose, to get closer to Peter Winthrop.

  “So what did Al say?” Marilyn asked as she finished her third apology in as many drinks, changing the subject back to a more comfortable and less personal topic.

  “He said he would look into it. Told me to come back in a couple of days.”

  “I am sure he will help.”

  “We shall see,” Jake replied. “The whole thing is crazy.”

  Chow Ying leaned back to hear the near-whispers of the two behind him. When the young man started ranting emphatically about helping a pregnant girl in Saipan, Chow Ying’s eyes bulged and he almost blew a load of beer on the table. The fun-loving, wise-cracking, opera-singing Chinese mountain swallowed his beer, threw his cigarette into the ashtray still lit, and flipped the switch on his mental mood to business mode. And the only business Chow Ying had on this trip to the States was filling coffins. He had everything but the price of the casket picked out for the two behind him.

  The waiter handed the check to Jake who paid for drinks against Marilyn’s weak protest. Employment did have its advantages, even if it was employment for your father under growing suspicion. He folded a fifty in the leather bound receipt holder and left it in the middle of the table.

  Jake walked with Marilyn until the subway station was across the street. He said good-bye at the light and raised his hand to flag a cab. Kate was supposed to meet him at his apartment at eleven after her shift of riding ambulances, a part-time job perfecting her emergency medical skills. The thought of Kate, perhaps still dressed in her doctor-like scrubs, was all the reason he needed to get home, and pronto. Their relationship was still torrid. They tore each other’s clothes off every chance they got, and he now had enough shirts and ties at her house to get to work without looking like he’d slept in the gutter.

  Jake unsuccessfully tried to hail two cabs before the third one, a handicap-accessible, Red Top minivan, stopped. Chow Ying was twenty yards away, peering into the reflection of the closed window fronts. He bought time by acting as if he were making a withdrawal at the ATM. He watched Jake get into the cab, and eyed Marilyn as she stood on the corner waiting for the light to change.

  They were splitting up.

  The light moved from red to green as Jake shut the sliding door on the cab. Marilyn stepped off the curb and the heel on her red Nine West shoes caught in the gutter grate, snapping like a twig. Miraculously, the heel remained attached to the shoe, dangling by a strip of leather.

  Jake watched out the back window of the cab as Marilyn limped her way across the street. The taxi driver cleared his throat and waited for directions from his fare. As Jake turned his head away from Marilyn and back toward the driver, he looked directly into the eyes of Chow Ying just outside the cab window. No more than ten feet away, Chow Ying stared at Jake with an intent that went beyond any casual glare. The eye lock lasted until Jake gave the driver his address and the cab pulled away from the curb and headed down the street.

  Marilyn limped her way to the Metro station, trying to walk with her weight forward on the balls of her feet. Chow Ying turned his attention from the cab, looked over at Marilyn, and smiled. Women are the same everywhere, he thought. Fashion over function. Any man would have just ripped the dangling heel off. Marilyn, single and heading downhill toward fifty, wiggled her body as if she were having spasms, all in an effort to hide the broken heel. It was an act wasted on an empty sidewalk.

  The McPherson Square Metro entrance disappears under the corner of a nameless glass and concrete office building with the roman letters MCXI written over the front door. Chow Ying, almost salivating, followed Marilyn across the street, closing on his prey. He looked in both directions as Marilyn approached the subway station entrance and then saw his opportunity. He took two large steps forward and as Marilyn turned to step onto the escalator, he shoved his hand under her armpit and sent her body upward and outward. Gravity did the rest. She bounced hard once on the moving steel stairs with a gruesome thud. Her body continued down in a mass of flailing arms and legs, the movement of the escalator keeping her in motion until the stairs flattened out two hundred feet below. The D.C. subway system boasts some of the longest escalators in the world, and Marilyn hit more than half of the three hundred steps on her way down. Her body lay at the bottom, the contents of her pocketbook and the dislodged broken left heel of her shoe spinning at the edge of the escalator like a boat caught in circular rapids near a dam. ***

  The call to the rescue squad came two minutes after Marilyn’s body reached its resting place. It took the genius station manager behind the security glass another full minute to make his way across the tile floor and push the emergency stop button on the escalator. Marilyn’s body was a medical school extra-credit project. Gross cuts mixed with deep gashes. Blood pooled on the floor and on the stairs of the escalator, creating a shiny, sticky ooze. Marilyn would never walk again. Never breathe. Never move.

  Detective Earl Wallace said goodnight to his wife on his cell phone and took his foot off the accelerator. His wife of thirty years wasn’t going to wait up, and he was in no hurry to play matchmaker between the living room sofa and his backside. One hand on the wheel of his black unmarked police cruiser, he fished in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, found his favorite vice, and shoved it between his lips.

  Detective Wallace had seen it all in his twenty-two years on the force. From the gangland slayings of the projects that were a weekend ritual, to the white-collar company employee who tried to kill his co-workers with doses of poison sprinkled on the powdered donuts. On any given night, Detective Wallace knew he would see the worst side of society, the dark side most people prefer to think exists only in movies and TV dramas. After a bad night, the real miracle came the next morning—when he woke up, got dressed, and prepared for another day of the same.

  His first case in the homicide and robbery division set the tone for a career that he lived, breathed, and somehow loved. They say the first kill is the hardest for soldiers, and Wallace was sure he would take to the grave the image of the victim in his first case.

  Twenty-two years later,
the case was as fresh as yesterday. At first, no one had noticed the sleeping passenger in the back seat. For two hours the double-door white Metrobus made its scheduled stops along Route 2B. At some point during an otherwise lovely autumn afternoon, an elderly passenger made his way up the aisle of the bus and whispered in the driver’s ear. The driver pulled over, walked to the back of the bus, and then turned to make a brief announcement. The uniformed driver spoke softly in an attempt to keep everyone calm. When he finished explaining the situation, the passengers flew from their seats and clawed their way off the vehicle, one on top of another. It was the natural human reaction to riding with a corpse.

  Detective Wallace arrived on the scene, made his way to the back of the bus, and swallowed hard at the painful expression frozen on the dead man’s face. An empty garbage bag lay crumpled at the feet of the slumping young man.

  Wallace searched the body for evidence and identification. There were no visible wounds to the man’s face or chest. The driver’s license in the wallet indicated the victim was only twenty-seven, youthful for a heart attack, but not impossibly young. Wallace patted down the body one last time and pulled out an identification badge from the victim’s shirt pocket that nearly made his own heart stop. According to the laminated blue ID with the victim’s photograph, the dead young man worked in the reptile house of the Washington Zoo. Detective Wallace, relying on intuition as much as real detective work, radioed to the dispatcher who in turn called the dead man’s employer. When Wallace heard the dispatcher’s response, he jumped off the floor of the bus and climbed on the top of the seats to the vehicle’s rear exit.

  Two Russell’s vipers, stolen from the zoo earlier in the day by the employee, had chosen the local transportation system to make their escape. The Russell’s vipers—referred to by Vietnam vets as “two-step” snakes due to the fact that once bitten, the victim took two steps and died—had sunk their fangs into the hand of their captor when he opened the bag to check on them. The young man died without the courtesy of his allotted two paces.

  It was a manhunt the likes of which had never been seen in the downtown area of a major city. A small family of Mongoose was released near the bus, as if the snake-killing rodent hunted its prey like a bloodhound. Poisons and traps were thrown around like rice at a wedding. In the end, the snakes were never found. To this day, Earl Wallace looked around his tiny back yard before letting his grandchildren run free. Twenty-two years and forty pounds ago. His short curly black hair was now heavy with gray, giving the detective a distinguished look to his black features. Twenty-two years.

  Cigarette in his mouth, he patted down his shirt and swerved as he ran his hand on the floor and in the crack of the passenger seat searching for a lighter. The radio crackled and Earl Wallace tuned in, catching every word of the seemingly secret language of police radio dispatchers. The radio ended with a statement that even the Sesame Street crowd could comprehend. “Police requested at McPherson Metro station. Body discovered.”

  Earl Wallace snatched the unlit cigarette from his mouth and threw it out the window. The Metro station was two blocks ahead. ***

  Two marked squad cars stopped beside Wallace as he pulled his increasingly heavy frame from the seat. Wallace paused at the top of the escalator and looked down at the scene below. He shook his head and walked down the stairs, his knees creaking the creak of an old athlete with new arthritis. The Metro Transit Authorities arrived ten minutes later and joined the EMTs as they made their way down the long escalators that were still powered off.

  “Does Metro Transit want this? It’s your jurisdiction if you call it,” Detective Wallace asked the two Metro Police officers who had yet to approach the body. Wallace already knew the answer. When it came to dead bodies, the Metro Transit Police deferred to the D.C. Police. The city cops had more “stiff” experience.

  “It’s all yours, detective,” came the reply.

  Detective Wallace nodded and forced his heavy frame down on his painful knees and got to work.

  The emergency personnel took up official positions at official distances around the scene. Detective Wallace gathered Marilyn’s personal belongings and put them into separate plastic bags. He grabbed the broken shoe and the heel that had hung from the bottom of the hooker-red footwear by a strip of leather. He looked at the break in the heel and rubbed it with his fingers through latex gloves.

  He looked up at the escalator and the steep angle at which it dove underground.

  “If I had to guess, I would say that she broke a heel and then fell,” Detective Wallace said, based purely on the evidence. “Or lost her balance as she broke her heel and then fell.”

  “No chance that the heel broke during her fall?” a white Metro Transit officer asked out of curiosity, as if the detective had all the answers.

  “Maybe. Maybe she just lost her balance. But looking at the shoe, one thing is certain. If she had been walking on the broken heel it would have been scratched or embedded with grime. The break is very clean,” Wallace said, putting the shoe into a plastic bag, the heel into another.

  Both officers looked up at the looming staircase and the long tunnel to the lights of the street above. “Ouch,” the white officer said. “A true fashion victim,” he added with the type of police humor that was a prerequisite to get fellow officers through the reality of the job.

  Detective Wallace didn’t reply to the comment. He was still on the job. He asked the commuter who found the body a few questions, got his name and number, and then released him. He dragged his former-college-football-star body up the escalator stairs and checked the top of the landing for clues. Seemingly a mile below, the uniformed police entourage watched as the body was put on a stretcher. Detective Wallace stayed until the crime scene was officially closed. He took one last look down the stairs, rubbed his chin, and went back to the police station to fill out the paperwork for an accidental death. ***

  Chow Ying, refreshed from the kill, walked the fifteen blocks to his home-away-from-home at the Peking Palace in Chinatown. The old man who ran the hotel was watching an old circa Seventies black and white TV. When Chow Ying walked in, the TV went off.

  “Mahjong?” the old man asked, inviting Chow Ying into his living room at the back of the house-turned-hotel.

  “And beer?” the old man added with a gappy smile.

  Chow Ying, as politely as he could, asked him if he had anything stronger.

  The old man nodded, walked to the kitchen, and pulled out a bottle of label-less liquor from a cabinet.

  “Are you sure your wife won’t mind?” Chow Ying asked as the host poured a glass of the nameless high-octane brew for each of them.

  “No. It’s almost midnight. She has been asleep for hours. And at our age, she isn’t waiting up for a roll in the hay,” the old man said with a straight face.

  “I suppose not,” Chow Ying answered, not knowing what else to say.

  The hotel owner broke into a laugh that only old men can produce—old men who have seen things, been there, lived it. Three hours of drinking and mahjong later, the old man pushed a pillow under the head of the sleeping giant and covered him with a blanket. The sofa was empty, but Chow Ying was too heavy to move. The old man would have needed a forklift to get him off the floor.

  “Sleep well, nian qing ren,” the old man said, using a Chinese term of endearment meaning ‘young man.’

  In the morning, the old man’s wife stepped over Chow Ying on her way to make breakfast. She left the house on errands before the Mountain of Shanghai awoke, and by the time she returned, he was back in his room sleeping off the effects of the old man’s gasoline in a bottle. ***

  On her fourteenth day of confinement, Wei Ling took the situation into her own hands. After her morning tears—which accompanied the realization that sleep was only a temporary break from reality—her head cleared to an epiphany. Lee Chang wasn’t going to help her. The doctor was never coming back. The compassion of the Chang servant who served her breakfast, lunch, an
d dinner began and ended with a smile. Peter Winthrop, the one man powerful enough to help her from her predicament, was a thousand miles away, either not knowing her predicament or not caring. It had been a week, maybe more, since Shi Shi Wong had paid her a visit. Her roommate had promised to come back to see her when she could, but Wei Ling knew the girls were in lockdown. No communication with the outside world. No TV. No radio. Just work. It happened occasionally, usually when one of the girls escaped the premises or took off on her company sponsored chaperone while on a trip in the city. The missing girls always showed up. There was no Chinese consulate on Saipan. There was nowhere to run. Sometimes the girls made it to the police, who turned them back over to Lee Chang, who in turn, donated to the monthly “police assistance” plan. Wei Ling was trapped. If she was going to get help, it was going to have to start with her.

  Breakfast came and Wei Ling feigned a stomachache. She asked for something hot to drink. The Chang servant smiled, removed the food, and returned with a perfectly blended cup of green tea. Wei Ling thanked her and put the earthenware on the side table. Humans can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food.

  Wei Ling wasn’t trying to kill herself, just the baby.

  Chapter 19

  The three feet of freedom that Wei Ling had were now gone. She was tied to the bed, shackled at both the wrist and ankles. Her left arm was in a makeshift splint, bones sandwiched so tightly between two small boards that the skin was pinched flat against the grain of the wood. The intravenous drip in her immobilized arm was pumping the good stuff, a mixture of medication and vitamins. Something to take the edge off and keep her healthy. The tube running down her nose provided fifteen hundred calories a day.

  The doctor from Beijing who replaced the dead American doctor had the bedside manner of Joseph Mengele. The dead doctor, while a part-time puppet for Lee Chang, had a glimmer of humanity when you looked in his eyes. He did what he was paid to do, even when it was wrong, but he did it with compassion.