The Interior (Red Princess 2)

“Yes.”

“I’ve wanted to talk to you and apologize for how I acted at my brother’s funeral. I think anyone would have been upset. But when we heard the circumstances—that he’d been killed instead of you—well, I, we…”

David listened impatiently while Anne struggled with her apologies. He was chafing to go. Yet these few seconds gave him a chance to take stock. Where was Hulan? She’d been awfully quiet. His eyes scanned the room. Henry was still at the door, ready to bar it again if they tried to leave. Miss Quo was looking nervously out the window. And Hulan had sunk into a chair and appeared to be dozing. The skin on her neck and arms looked pale, while two bright blotches of color heightened her cheeks. A new and completely different wave of concern swept over him, but he tuned back into the phone call as he began registering Anne’s words.

“I thought he’d gone to you for help. I thought, now isn’t that bad karma? I mean, you go to someone for help and you end up getting killed. That’s why I was so rude.”

“He didn’t come to me for help,” David said. “I invited him to dinner. I wanted some information—”

“I know that now,” she said. “But at the time I was only going off what Keith had told me. He called me that day. We were very close, and whenever he had a problem he’d call. He was troubled. He said he was going to meet a friend, someone he could talk to. He had dinner with you, so I just assumed that…”

As on the day of the funeral, David felt that there was no reason to ruin the Baxter family’s memories of their son and brother. “We just had dinner—”

“I know, I know. All I’m saying is that when I saw you at the funeral, all I could think was that you hadn’t helped him. I’d told him before to go to the FBI. He’d laughed at my ignorance. He said he didn’t need the FBI; he needed the State Department. Then he told me that he had friends down at the U.S. Attorney’s Office who might put in a good word. But he didn’t go to you.”

No wonder Keith had acted so strangely that night. He was ready to throw away his career by going to the feds to rat on his client. “Was it about what was happening with the Knight deal?”

Even over the thousands of miles David heard Anne’s deep sigh. “It was about his girlfriend. She was Chinese. He wanted to bring her over here. He thought political asylum might work.”

David couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Anyway,” Anne continued, “that day at the funeral I was angry at you for not helping him, but actually it was someone else. I met him there.”

There was only one person at the funeral to whom Keith might have gone. “Rob Butler,” David surmised.

“That’s right. He came up and introduced himself. He said he’d tried to do what he could for my brother. Do you think he tried to help?” Anne asked.

David thought back to his last meeting with Rob and Madeleine. He’d asked them point blank what they thought about Keith’s death. They both said that they thought it had been a botched attempt by the triads to kill David. He’d also asked if Keith was under investigation. Again, both Madeleine and Rob had said no. Why hadn’t Rob mentioned Miaoshan? (It had to be Miaoshan.) If he thought she was eligible for political asylum, it must have been because Miaoshan could offer something—the proof of the Knight-Sun bribery. Would Rob have lied to David? And for what reason? Keith was dead. The girl was also dead, and her papers were in China. There was no case without evidence. Most important, had Keith used Miaoshan to circumvent getting in trouble himself? He offers up the girl, lets her hand over her information about Sun and Knight, and he walks away clean?

“Hello? Are you there?” Anne asked.

“I’m sorry,” David said. “I was thinking. I have so much to ask you, but…” He saw Miss Quo staring out the window. She didn’t seem to be panicking. “Things are a little crazy here.”

“That’s okay,” Anne said. “Before you ask me anything, let me explain the real reason I’m calling. My brother sent me some papers before he died. They were here when we got back to Russell. I don’t know what they are, but he put a note on them. ‘If something happens to me…’ Can you imagine what it’s like to get something like that in the mail? My brother was dead! It’s been like some horror movie, only we can’t turn it off or walk out of the theater.”

“What are they?” David asked, although he already suspected what they were.

“Pages and pages of numbers. They don’t mean a thing to me, but in the note he wrote that they were a key.”

A key? Miaoshan had her set. Sun had his. Now it appeared that Keith also had his own set. Could it possibly be a key?

“Anne”—he tried to put as much conviction into his voice as he could—” about the papers…”

“You’re going to tell me about the girl and how Keith wanted t

o marry her.”

No, he wasn’t, but he let it go for now.

“We’re from Kansas,” Anne went on. “We don’t see a lot of Asians where we live. But our feeling was that if Keith was in love, that was his business. We’d do our best to welcome this Meow-meow. Even her name was foreign to us. I mean, it wasn’t really Meow-meow, but it sure sounded like that to my dad, so that’s what we’ve been calling her around here. Anyway, you can see why we thought it was a good thing they’d be living in L.A. They have all sorts of people out there, and they wouldn’t have stood out so much.”

David and Hulan had known that Miaoshan was having an affair with an American. They’d thought it was Aaron Rodgers—and maybe she’d still had an affair with him—but Keith was who mattered. He must have met her during his regular pre-sale visits to Knight International. Keith and Miaoshan? Why hadn’t David seen that from the beginning? When Miles had said Keith’s girlfriend wasn’t from L.A., David had assumed that she’d been a hometown girl. That image fit with what he knew about Keith. Even now it was hard to imagine his friend, who was overweight and in his late thirties, with an eighteen-year-old Chinese factory worker. Of course, things like that did happen. It was called a mid-life crisis. The manipulative Miaoshan must have seen Keith as incredibly gullible. And she’d pushed at that gullibility by asking for and receiving all kinds of gifts—the fancy underwear, the jeans, the makeup, the…Suddenly he remembered the sickening sweet smell at the funeral and what Hulan had said about Miaoshan’s bunk.

“Do you wear White Shoulders?” David asked Anne.

“Yes, my mother and I both do,” she answered, surprised.

“Keith must have had it bad.” It slipped out before David could stop himself.