Flower Net (Red Princess 1)

“Jesus, the body!” David turned his attention to Gardner. “How’s my body? Better yet, who’s my body? Hey! And weren’t you supposed to stay with him?”

“Don’t worry,” Gardner soothed. “He’s locked up in the morgue down in Long Beach. He isn’t going anywhere.”

“Gardner gave him the full FBI treatment,” Campbell boasted.

Gardner beamed. “I only told the M.E. that this was a federal matter of life and

death. He agreed to do the autopsy right away, but I can’t take any credit for that. Our John Doe has been dead for some time. It behooved the M.E. to get the body into cold storage as quickly as possible.”

“And?”

Gardner flipped open his notebook and began to read with mathematical exactness. “The victim is a male, early twenties, weighing a hundred and twenty pounds. The hair tells us that he’s Chinese.” Gardner and the coroner agreed with David’s assumption that the victim wasn’t one of the immigrants or one of the crewmen. “Our guy’s had some pretty expensive dental work done, although the coroner couldn’t explain the present condition of the teeth, which were…”

“Black, I remember.”

“And then there’s the Rolex,” Gardner went on. “It was real.”

“What killed him?”

“That’s where it gets interesting. You know that thing with the hands and feet? The skin comes off like gloves and socks if a body’s been submerged in water for a long time. I can also tell you that our John Doe was tortured before death.”

“Tortured?”

“Even with the decomposition, the coroner found deep burns on the victim’s arms and neck. Either he was tortured or he had a very strange way of putting out cigarettes.”

“Did he drown?”

“The fluid in his lungs is purely postmortem.”

“Where did he die?” David queried.

“I think a better question might be, when did he die?” Gardner rejoined.

“Okay, then, when?”

“Let me jump in here for a minute,” said Campbell. “The captain left the Peony so fast that he forgot his log. We found out that the ship left the port of Tianjin on January third. We faxed authorities in Tianjin, and they sent us back copies of the Peony’s bills of lading. I’m sure it will come as no surprise that immigrants were not listed on the manifest. What is a surprise is that a ship of this sort would leave Tianjin at all. Usually these ships leave from Fujian, Zhejiang, or Guangdong Province.”

“Where is Tianjin?”

“I didn’t know either, but it’s in the north near Beijing. It’s China’s third-largest city.”

“And what was on the manifest?”

“The Peony was supposed to carry needlepoint and Aubusson-style rugs, electronic gadgets, and ceramics from the interior.”

“So why have an immigrant ship leave Tianjin?”

“We don’t know. What we do know is that the victim has probably been dead since January third,” Campbell said.

“So back to my question. If it’s not death by drowning, what killed him?”

“You told me to stay with the body and I did,” said Gardner. “I’m telling you, Stark, you owe me big time. The pathologist cut that guy open from stem to stern. I don’t know what I was looking at. I don’t want to know. But the whole time the pathologist is talking, narrating. Our guy’s liver had gone to mush. His kidneys…” The FBI agent cringed at the memory. “His large and small intestines were eaten up with sores. His mucous membranes—I’m talking about inside his mouth and down his throat—were covered in blisters. Whatever killed him entered his body through his mouth and lungs, then systemically destroyed every single organ.”

David and Campbell looked at each other, then waited as Gardner took a sip from his coffee.

“The pathologist ran a toxicology scan. But let’s face it, Long Beach doesn’t have the most sophisticated equipment. A city pathologist isn’t going to be able to sort this out. This thing is weird.”

“What do you mean?”