Eleanor quickly put her hand on his arm.
“No. They say any money you give them is taken by the triads at the end of the day.”
Bosch didn’t question it. He stayed focused on what was ahead of him. They walked another two blocks and then Bosch saw and heard another piece of the puzzle drop into place. Across the street was an entrance to the Mass Transit Railway. A glass enclosure leading to the escalators down to the underground subway.
“Wait,” Bosch said, stopping. “We’re close.”
“What is it?” Eleanor asked.
“The MTR. You could hear it on the video.”
As if on cue the growing whoosh of escaping air rose as a train came into the underground station. It sounded like a wave. Bosch looked down at the photo in his hand and then up at the buildings surrounding him.
“Let’s cross.”
“Can we just wait a minute for Sun Yee? I can’t tell him where to meet us if we keep moving.”
“Once we’re across.”
They hurried across the street on a flashing pedestrian signal. Bosch noticed several ragtag women begging for coins near the MTR entrance. More people were coming up out of the station than were going down. Kowloon was getting more and more crowded. The air was thick with humidity and Bosch could feel his shirt sticking to his back.
Bosch turned around and looked up. They were in an area of older construction. It was almost like having walked through first class to economy on a plane. The buildings on this block and heading further in were shorter-in the twenty-story range-and in poorer condition than those in the blocks closer to the harbor. Harry noticed many open windows and many individual air-conditioning boxes hanging from windows. He could feel the reservoir of adrenaline inside open up.
“Okay, this is it. She’s in one of these buildings.”
He started moving down the block to get away from the crowding and loud conversations surrounding the MTR entrance. He kept his eyes on the upper levels of the buildings surrounding him. He was in a concrete canyon and somewhere up there in one of the crevices was his missing daughter.
“Harry, stop! I just told Sun Yee to meet us at the MTR entrance.”
“You wait for him. I’ll be just down here.”
“No, I’m coming with you.”
Halfway down the block, Bosch stopped and referred to the photo again. But there was no final clue that helped him. He knew he was close but he had reached a point where he needed help or it would be a guessing game. He was surrounded by thousands of rooms and windows. It was beginning to dawn on him that the final part of his search was impossible. He had traveled more than seven thousand miles to find his daughter and he was about as helpless as the ragtag women begging coins from the pavement.
“Let me see the photo,” Eleanor said.
Bosch handed it to her.
“There’s nothing else,” he said. “All these buildings look the same.”
“Let me just look.”
She took her time and Bosch watched her regress two decades to the time she was an FBI agent. Her eyes narrowed and she analyzed the photo as an agent, not as the mother of a missing girl.
“Okay,” she said. “There’s got to be something here.”
“I thought it would be the air conditioners but they’re on every building around here.”
Eleanor nodded but kept her eyes on the photo. Just then Sun came up, his face flushed from the exertion of trying to track a moving target. Eleanor said nothing to him but slightly moved her arm to share the photo with him. They had reached a point in their relationship where words weren’t necessary.
Bosch turned and looked down the corridor of Nathan Road. Whether it was a conscious move or not, he didn’t want to see what he no longer had. From behind he heard Eleanor say, “Wait a minute. There’s a pattern here.”
Bosch turned back.
“What do you mean?”
“We can do this, Harry. There’s a pattern that will lead us right to that room.”
Bosch felt a ghost run down his spine. He moved in close to Eleanor so he could see the photo.
“Show it to me,” he said, urgency fueling each word.
Eleanor pointed to the photo and ran her fingernail along a line of air conditioners reflected in the window.
“Not every window has an air-conditioning unit in the building we are looking for. Some, like this room, have open windows. So there is a pattern. We only have part of it here because we don’t know where this room is in relation to the building.”
“It’s probably in the center. The audio analysis picked up muffled voices cut off by the elevator. The elevator is probably centrally located.”
“That’s good. That helps. Okay, so let’s say windows are dashes and AC boxes are dots. In this reflection we see a pattern for the floor she is on. You start with the room she is in-a dash-and then you go dot, dot, dash, dot, dash.”
She tapped her nail on each part of the pattern on the photo.
“So that’s our pattern,” she added. “Looking up at the building, we’d be looking for it going left to right.”
“Dash, dot, dot, dash, dot, dash,” Bosch repeated. “Windows are dashes.”
“Right,” Eleanor said. “Should we split up the buildings? We know because of the subway that we’re close.”
She turned and looked up at the wall of buildings that ran the entire length of the street. Bosch’s first thought was to not trust any of the buildings to anybody else. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he had scanned each building for the pattern himself. But he held back. Eleanor had found the pattern and made this break. He would ride her wave.
“Let’s start,” he said. “Which one should I take”
Pointing, she said, “You take that one, I’ll take this one and, Sun Yee, you check that one. If you get done, you leapfrog to the next building. We go till we find it. Start at the top. We know from the photo, the room is up high.”
She was right, Bosch realized. It would make the search faster than he’d anticipated. He stepped away and went to work on the building he was assigned. He started on the top floor and worked his way down, his eyes scanning back and forth floor by floor. Eleanor and Sun separated and did the same.
Thirty minutes later Bosch was halfway through scanning his third building when Eleanor called out.
“I’ve got it!”
Bosch headed back to her. She had her hand raised and was counting up the floors of the building directly across the street. Sun soon joined them.
“Fourteenth floor. The pattern starts just a little to the right of center. You were right about that, Harry.”
Bosch counted the floors, his eyes rising with his hopes. He got to the fourteenth level and identified the pattern. There were twelve windows across in all and the pattern fit the last six windows to the right.
“That’s it.”
“Wait a minute. This is only one incidence of the pattern. There could be others. We have to keep-”
“I’m not waiting. You keep looking. If you find another match for the pattern, call me.”
“No, we’re not splitting up.”
He zeroed in on the window that would have been the one that caught the reflection in the video. It was closed now.
He lowered his eyes to the building’s entrance. The first two levels of the building were retail and commercial use. A band of signage, including two large digital screens, wrapped the entire building. Above this the building’s name was affixed to the facade in gold letters and symbols:
CHUNGKING MANSIONS
The main entrance was as wide as a double-car garage door. Through the opening Bosch saw a short set of stairs leading to what looked like a crowded shopping bazaar.