Dragon Bones (Red Princess 3)

“What about the gate to the outside?”

“Let me show you.” The woman hobbled a few steps to the door, stopped, and looked back at Hulan. “Come!” Hulan joined her. “Go ahead. You open it.”

Hulan tried the handle. The sound was awful, but the door didn’t open.

“You hear that noise? Terrible! My grandson says he will oil it for me. I tell him he’s a stupid turtle.” She said this with pride and obvious affection. “You can’t open the door without my key, which I keep in my pocket.”

“And you watch this gate all day and all night,” Hulan verified.

“We have a changeover between five-fifty and six every morning and every evening. Once that time is past, I lock the gate. If we have a delivery, they knock and I let them in.”

“Are there any other circumstances that someone could enter or leave through here?”

The caretaker thought before answering. “Maybe a worker gets sick. Maybe a worker’s child gets sick. But otherwise no. You want to work here, you follow the rules. If you are late, I don’t let you in. You lose a day’s pay. If you try to enter through the lobby, you’re fired on the spot.”

“Tough rules.”

“Tough life. Not my fault.”

“Could you open the door for me?”

“For you, yes.” She pulled out her key and put it in the lock. The hinges creaked and groaned even worse than the handle.

Hulan stepped through and looked both ways down the alley. She opened her umbrella and turned back to the woman. “I’ll walk back around to the front.”

“Just don’t come back here. I won’t let you in!” The old woman cackled again, enjoying herself immensely, then she closed and locked the door.

No one could get past that old woman unless she let them.

Hulan turned right, walked to the intersection of another alley, and saw dead ends in both directions. Still, she went right and followed the wall of the compound to the east gate. She examined the rusted keyhole and determined that no one had tried to tamper with this side either. As she retraced her steps, she looked up and saw glass shards embedded on top of the compound’s protective wall. She also studied the places where the interior buildings intersected with the wall. The steep roofs were composed of porcelain tiles glazed to a shiny green finish. Only an expert martial arts practitioner would have been able to scale the wall and the roofs. Three men carrying a dead body and a bucket of blood would have had an impossible time of it.

Hulan went back to the north gate, continued on to the corner, and turned left to go back around to the front of the hotel. While not a large thoroughfare, this was a busy enough street that Hulan doubted even under cover of darkness three men with their gruesome burdens could have passed unnoticed. And even if they had somehow escaped the eye of a wakeful villager, how could they have come through the alley without leaving behind some forensic evidence? Hulan was back to the question that had prompted her to go on this quest: How did a trio of what she presumed to be men get Lily back into her room without being seen either inside or outside the compound and leaving only the most minimal traces behind?

DR. MA WAS NEXT ON HULAN’S TO-DO LIST, BUT WHEN SHE ASKED the day clerk to arrange transportation to Site 518, he answered that he’d be honored to find a car and driver, but she wouldn’t find the archaeologist because he’d gone to Hong Kong. Again Hulan cursed herself for being sloppy—first Lily’s papers, now Ma. Hulan had her suspicions about him, but it hadn’t remotely occurred to her that he’d go to Hong Kong.

She asked for and received directions to the Public Security Bureau. Hulan went back outside and opened her umbrella. It was Saturday afternoon and pouring rain, but people were out and about. On one corner a woman sold fresh bean curd. Nearby a man was having a tooth pulled. On the square above the dock a free market bustled. From its second-floor location, the Public Security Bureau kept an eye on all these activities.

The bureau was small—a single room with a counter and four desks flanked by two offices set off by glass partitions. The usual posters promoting the one-child policy had been pinned to a bulletin board, while a population resettlement schedule for Bashan covered another wall and was accompanied by encouraging slogans: DEVELOP LAND TO RESETTLE RELOCATEES and GAINING BENEFITS FROM INUNDATION.

Captain Hom sat behind a desk in one of the private offices. Hulan lifted a section of the counter and made her way to his office. Opening the door, she was engulfed by the blue haze of cigarette smoke.

“You’ve returned from the dam, I see,” he said.

“Everyone seems to know everyone’s comings and goings in Bashan.”

“For VIPers.”

She put a hand on the back of a chair. “May I?”

His face visibly fell. She sat down, and he leaned back in his chair with a deep, rattling sigh.

“I read your report on Brian McCarthy’s death,” she began. “It was very thorough, but I have a couple of questions if you don’t mind.”

When he said, “Whatever I can do to help,” she knew he was putting a smiling face on a bad situation.

“I’d like you to go back to the day Dr. Ma contacted you about Brian. What happened exactly?”

“He came in like you did just now. He said that one of his foreign guests had gone missing.” Hom used the end of his cigarette to light another one, then stubbed out his first in an ashtray overflowing with butts. “I wasn’t worried. We’d gotten numerous reports from peasants back in the hills about McCarthy. Was it all right for him to be there? Would they get in trouble if he slept on their land? All natural concerns because not many foreigners get very far from the river. Tourist boats have never stopped here, so we simply didn’t have foreigners until the Cultural Relics Bureau designated Site 518 as one of the most important digs along the river.”