Chapter Two
5 June 2019
An Chang’s apartment
Beijing, China
His dream of a girl with a flower in her hair was rudely interrupted by the insistent chirp of his cell phone’s alarm.
In the dream, he was in Shanghai with Kiara, wearing a button-down shirt and khakis, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He had found a daisy in the grass outside her mother’s estate and given it to her to put in her beautiful dark hair.
As the cell phone played an insistent beep, Inspector An Chang of Interpol dragged himself awake. He snagged the phone off the milk crate that passed for a nightstand, and made four attempts to run his finger across the display before the alarm actually stopped.
Tossing the battered blanket aside, he put the smartphone back on the crate and stared at his studio apartment.
One of these days, he was going to have to unpack all the boxes.
He thought about the dream. The basics were as he remembered them that day in 1989 that he’d visited Kiara right before her mother announced that they were moving back to the United States.
But he was younger then, with a dark crew cut rather than the unruly mop of salt-and-pepper hair that now sat messily atop his head. And the flower he had put in Kiara’s hair had been a viola, the same flower she had in her hair in the only picture he had left of her. And he’d picked that from a garden, not a field of grass.
Why did he dream a daisy in the grass?
He clumsily reached for his pack of cigarettes next to his phone, but the pack was empty.
Clambering off the wafer-thin futon on the rickety wooden frame, he navigated clumsily around the stacks of boxes and piles of paperwork that impeded his progress.
The kitchenette took up part of one wall of the dilapidated old apartment. It came equipped only with a sink that provided water of dubious quality and a range with an inconsistently functioning oven and only one working burner. To that, he’d added a mini fridge that he’d bought off a university student, a microwave that someone had thrown out that he’d fixed, and a washing machine that was a gift from the couple next door who had just had a baby and therefore required a larger one for themselves.
His first stop was the mini fridge. Having been denied his morning cigarette, he really needed some food in him before he tried to face another day at Interpol’s Beijing office.
All that greeted him inside the fridge were two cans of beer, a tomato that was half-covered in mold, and a takeout container.
He flipped open the takeout container at the same time that Xia Xue, his all-white Shih Tzu, lumbered over. Chang had gotten her from the same neighbors who were the source of the washing machine. The new child whose existence necessitated the bigger machine also didn’t get along with the dog. They had given the dog the rather obvious name of “Snow.” His attempt to rename her Meyli had failed utterly, as she only responded to Xia Xue.
She looked expectantly at Chang as he took the container out of the fridge. It contained the remains of the orange chicken he’d had for lunch over the weekend.
From the moment he’d taken her into his home, the dog had given Chang unconditional love. Chang had never been able to resist the pleas of those who loved him. As a result, from the moment Xia Xue fixed him with her big eyes and doleful expression, he had no choice but to put the container on the floor in front of her. She wolfed it down eagerly and happily.
Getting to his feet, and wincing as his knees cracked from the action, Chang went to the washing machine, into which he’d thrown his brown khaki pants before going to sleep the previous night. After wringing out the pants over the sink, he clambered back onto the bed, which sat right under the window to the fire escape—also the only window in the place.
Sliding the screen upward, he climbed out onto the fire escape where he had strung a clothesline. A pair of beige khaki pants hung from the line.
One of these days he would unpack the boxes, and then he’d finally find his other pairs of pants, but for right now, he had to alternate between the two pairs of khakis. Thank goodness he’d accidentally put them in the box with the kitchen implements, the only box he’d actually unpacked since moving to this place eight months ago.
For now, though, all he had were these two and the shorts that he wore over the weekends.
He squeezed himself into the shower stall that he could only turn around in if he pivoted firmly in place and did a quick rinse-down. That was usually enough for the morning grime. For a proper shower, he always used the locker room at headquarters after his shift ended. He found it much easier to get himself clean in a shower that enabled him to lift his arms.
Besides the futon, the only other furniture in the place was a bunch of milk crates Chang had salvaged from the sidewalks. One of them held his clean work shirts, which were all button-downs in either brown or beige, in roughly the same two shades as the khakis. Since he had the beige khakis today, he went with a brown shirt. This was about as complex as he was willing to make his sartorial decisions in the morning.
He grabbed a street snack and bought a fresh pack of cigarettes on his way from the subway station to the office. After eating the former, he stood outside the entry to headquarters smoking a cigarette from the latter.
By the time he reached his desk, his cognitive processes were starting to almost cohere.
Which was more than could be said for the surface of his desk, which was covered in folders, papers, photos, and empty takeout boxes. Maintenance was supposed to take care of the boxes, but the janitorial staff had all taken a collective vow not to touch Chang’s desk until he himself cleared it.
His rear end had barely touched the chair when his boss, Superintendent Zhou, walked over.
“Have you checked your e-mail?” he asked, then peered at his desk. “I assume not, since the team of archeologists has yet to unearth your keyboard.”
Chang had meant to check his e-mail on his phone, but the lack of food or nicotine at the apartment had kept him from remembering that. At least, that was today’s excuse.
“Not yet,” was all he muttered in reply.
“You’ve got plane reservations. You’re going to Los Angeles.”
“Why would you want me to do that?”
“Overnight we got two hits on murders involving animals and a man wearing a strange mask. One at an aquarium in San Diego, one in the suburbs of Los Angeles.”
Quickly, Chang sat up straight in his chair. Immediately, he cleared away the detritus that was covering his keyboard and tapped the space bar so it would come out of sleep mode. Yanking his reading glasses out of the desk drawer, he entered his password after the monitor went live, then checked his e-mail.
Most of his new messages were the usual nonsense, but there were four of note. One was a forwarded e-mail from Zhou with the files on the two cases in California that might have been his masked killer.
Was wondering when you’d strike again.
Chang had built a strong case against the animal-mask killer. He had been less successful in actually identifying him. What little physical evidence had been left behind provided no clue as to his identity, and while there was a smattering of biological evidence, he had yet to match it against anyone in any database.
The other three e-mails included an exchange between Zhou and the chief of the Monrovia Police requesting and receiving permission for Chang to consult on the case, on which Chang had been cc’d, and one from the travel office, who had put him on Vista Atlantic Flight 22 leaving Beijing Capital at nine o’clock that evening. It would arrive at LAX twelve hours later, which would be six in the evening local time. There was also a hotel reservation at a Doubletree.
At that, he looked up with disgust at Zhou. “I’m flying on an American airline?”
Zhou shrugged. “It was the first available flight to Los Angeles.”
“What about San Diego?”
Shaking his head, Zhou said, “I’ve sent a request, but you know how American police are, especially in big cities. Even if the San Diego police accept the request, they will not welcome you with open arms. But the other murder took place in a suburb where they have very few murders and, as you saw, they acceded to our request almost immediately.” Zhou put a hand on Chang’s shoulder. “It’s been more than twenty years, An. Time we got him, don’t you think?”
“Past time,” Chang said. “I shall need more than two pairs of pants.”
The chief flight attendant made the announcement in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese that it was safe to use electronic equipment. As soon as she did, Chang pulled out his laptop, put down the tray table in front of his aisle seat, and opened the laptop, plugging his headphones in.
It was probably pointless to go over the files and the footage again. He had it all memorized at this point, and it was an open question whether or not he even registered what he was watching so much as he remembered watching it all the other times.
First things were first, however. He had spent all day trying to find his Travel Document in the mess on his desk. Serving as both passport and visa, it allowed Interpol officers to travel and work freely in all member countries. After he had located it, he had to sign off on several pieces of paperwork that had to get done before he left, go home, pack—which included finally finding the box that had all his other pants—arrange for the neighbors to take care of Xia Xue while he was gone, and get to the airport. As a result, he had not actually had the chance to look at the files that Zhou had e-mailed him.
Among those files was a video that included news reports from CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and local San Diego television on the murder at SeaLand.
No one had been able to identify the murderer, nor was either the name of the victim or the manner of death released. The killer was dressed as a security guard, with a ballcap obscuring his features, and one person who’d gotten a good look at him saw a mask of a whale covering the man’s face.
He picked one of the news reports at random and watched it, seeing a moderately attractive woman in a dark red suit holding a microphone while standing in front of the entrance to an amusement park. “The opening of the new Arjun Keshav Arena at San Diego’s SeaLand was marred by rumors of a body part in the mouths of one of the amusement park’s prized orcas. Now those rumors have gone into overdrive with the news that a body has been found. Neither SeaLand nor the San Diego Police Department has released a formal statement as of yet, except to confirm that a body was found. A spokeswoman for SeaLand also said that, despite their nickname of ‘killer whales,’ orcas would not harm a person and are not responsible. We’ll have more on this story as it develops.”
After watching several other news reports and not finding anything new in any of them, he opened the file on the murders in Monrovia.
That file was much smaller: a PDF of the preliminary report by a detective named Michelle Halls.
Zhou’s instincts had been right. The report Chang read was that of someone not accustomed to writing reports on murders. There was a great deal of unnecessary detail, the sign of a neophyte not certain what was important and what was not, and going well beyond what was necessary to include.
For all that, there was precious little by way of detail, because they didn’t know very much. Chang hoped that his information with regard to previous like killings would be welcomed by Detective Halls. With luck, they could present a united front to the San Diego detective—J.D. Skolnick, according to the file, was the primary on the case for SDPD.
Once he was done with the new cases, he called up all the other files that he had on his laptop in the folder that he’d simply labeled mask.
His first stop was the sub-folder labeled elephant which was full of picture and video files and PDFs of police reports and newspaper articles of the most recent mask killer case, which involved five victims on three continents. First were pictures of the event that had incited the killer’s wrath: elephants that had been butchered, their tusks removed. After that, video of three men in Chad who’d been butchered in much the same manner, their teeth all yanked out; a copy of the article from a Sudanese newspaper, the headline of which translated to, “Elephant poachers found de-tusked”; pictures of a Chinese man impaled by an ivory tusk that came from one of those elephants; and a copy of the article from a San Francisco newspaper about an ivory importer found stabbed through the nose by an ivory-handled letter opener.
He was about to open the sub-folder called tiger when he felt a tap on his left shoulder.
Looking up and behind him, he saw a small American boy, who was standing on the seat directly behind him. “What happened to those elephants, mister?”
For a second, Chang just stared at him.
The boy’s mother was in the window seat, and her head popped up next to the boy’s. “Arthur, don’t be so rude!”
“But Mommy, they—”
While Chang was fluent in English—as well as French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic, not to mention his native Cantonese and Mandarin—he decided to simply let out a stream of babble in Cantonese to make it look like he didn’t understand the child.
“Arthur, sit down,” the mother said. Then she added a badly pronounced apology in Mandarin.
Chang grunted in reply and closed the laptop.
There wasn’t any point in going over it again anyhow. He knew it all backwards and forwards.
He plugged his headphones into the jack on the arm of his aisle seat and turned on the monitor in the seat back in front of him.
The first channel he checked was CNN. Unsurprisingly, they were doing a story about the SeaLand murder.
Quickly, he changed the channel.