The door was padlocked, but the latch was flimsy, coming apart with Dawson’s firm tug. The shed’s interior was musty and damp. Barely enough to fit one person, the space was filled with electronic waste: two old TVs, circuit boards, a couple of discarded laptops and desktop computers, keyboards, and the skeletons of three vintage flip phones-nothing like what Dawson had imagined when he first saw the shed.
Leaving the others clustered around the door, he stepped in and moved some of the clutter aside, stirring up a puff of dust. He sneezed twice as he sifted through the piles of discarded equipment on the floor. Nothing of any use there. He transferred his gaze upward to a listing shelf containing a ball of tangled copper wires, which he took down. Behind it was a padlocked, grayish-blue lockbox. It stood out because it was much newer than anything else in the shed and nowhere near as dusty.
Dawson took it down and tried the lid without success. “Whose is this?” he asked Wei. “Where is the key?”
Wei shrugged. “I don’ know.”
Dawson didn’t believe him. He examined the box, which had a simple lock on the top. The question was where the key was. A locksmith down the street could probably have this open in seconds, but there might be an even quicker way. Where had Dawson seen a bunch of keys? He remembered now.
“Go back inside the house,” he told Asase. “At the side of the door is a bowl with keys in it. Bring them all.”
While the constable was gone, Dawson stood and stared at Wei, who looked studiously away with his jaw clenching. Asase came back with the bowl, which contained five keys. One of them looked like the right size, and Dawson inserted it into the lock, which turned easily. He opened the box. On the top, he found Chinese and American currency, a large wad of cedi bills, and some receipts for purchases made at a warehouse.
At the very bottom, the box held two objects. The first was another key, this one bearing the CAT logo. Dawson held it up to Wei. “The spare key to one of Chuck Granger’s excavators. Am I right?”
Wei didn’t answer, but Dawson was perfectly sure that it was the one missing from the four hooks in Granger’s office.
The second object in the box was an electronic device of about four by one and a half inches, with a small screen at the top. Dawson picked it up at its edges and rested it on the lid. “Olympus digital voice recorder,” he read out. “Made in China, naturally.”
Dawson used the corner of his voter ID card to turn it on, and then alternated between the fwd and play buttons. No sound came forth, and Dawson could tell from the screen, that the recorder had had three erased recordings. The fourth, however, was still there. He glanced up at Wei and smiled. The Chinese man looked away. Dawson pressed play, turned up the volume, left the recorder where it was, came out of the shed, and shut the door behind him. From within came the sound of someone snoring.
“That’s what you left playing in your room at Mr. Feng’s house when you went to kill your brother,” Dawson said to Wei. “Feng heard it in the middle of the night and thought you were in the room sleeping, but by that time, you had already left the house through the window early enough to give yourself enough time to wait for your brother at the mining site and then to murder him.”
Wei stayed motionless and kept his gaze down.
“Chuck Granger gave you the key to the CAT excavator,” Dawson said. “He tied up your brother and you operated the excavator to bury him alive. Because you and Granger worked together, you had enough time to return to your room in Feng’s house before six o’clock when he came to wake you.”
No one actually saw Lian move. She did so with the swiftness of a cobra strike. Her hands cuffed in front of her, she came at Wei and hit him in the face with a double fist. He fell over with a grunt. She went down with him, screaming in Chinese while striking Wei repeatedly. Dawson and Asase pulled her off. Now, so weak from her emotions and physical exertions, she could only crumple to the ground weeping.
Asase helped Wei sit up. Blood was streaming down his face from a deep cut in his forehead where Lian had hit him. He turned to her, calling her name several times, trying to get her to look at him, and then saying something in Chinese in a tone that Dawson thought sounded anguished and pleading. But what exactly was Wei telling her? He grabbed the voice recorder from the shed, switched it on, and came close to Wei so that he got it all.
As Wei continued to address Lian, he broke down completely and sobbed.
“Bring something to stop the bleeding,” Dawson said to Asase, who ran to the jeep and returned with a not-so-clean rag, but it would have to do. Asase pressed it to his forehead and told him to hold it there.
Dawson knelt down beside Wei. “Why is she so angry with you?” he asked, rubbing his back gently. “What was she saying to you? Eh? Come on now, Wei. It’s time to tell me.”
“She never tell me to kill Bao,” Wei said, looking up at Dawson imploringly, “but I do it for her. I thought make her happy now she only have me, but now she say she like Bao for husband, make her feel safe. She like me too, but for lover only. She want us both.Why she say that, Inspector? She love me, she hate Bao, but now I kill him, she say want him back. Why she say that?”
Wei fell back, looked to the sky, and bellowed in the purest agony.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The Dawsons were dressing up for a Sunday afternoon outing.
“What I don’t understand,” Christine said, adjusting her earrings in the mirror, “is what you were looking for on Wei’s computers and all that.”
Dawson pulled on his socks. “You remember when Sly and Hosiah were joking around about the snoring hippo?”
“How could I forget?” Christine said dryly.
“It got me thinking how you can get almost any sound effect online, including someone snoring. I was searching for evidence in Wei Liu’s browser history that could show that’s what he did, but nothing was there. It never occurred to me that he could simply record himself snoring with a device and play it back. He tried three different times to get the recording just right and he erased them all. The fourth one was the best, and that’s the one he forgot to erase.”
“You say Wei claimed he killed Bao all for Lian,” Christine said. “He was lying, wasn’t he?”
“Maybe not a conscious lie,” Dawson said. “I think that’s how he rationalizes it to make it more acceptable to both himself and Lian. In the final analysis, though, Wei killed his brother for selfish reasons alone.”
Dawson called out to see if the kids were ready. They said yes, although Hosiah hesitated in his reply, meaning he probably was not.
“And Chuck Granger?” Christine said, stepping into her flats. “What about him?”
“He was Wei’s accomplice,” Dawson said, buttoning up his shirt. “He tied Bao up while Wei brought over the excavator to bury him. You see, Chuck wanted to annex Bao’s mine, but Bao was having nothing of that. Wei, on the other hand, wanted to join forces with Chuck and offered that in return for Chuck helping to kill Bao. But the real reason Wei wanted to kill Bao was that he wanted to have Lian all to himself. He loved her and felt he deserved her more than Bao did.”
“What about Commander Longdon?” Christine asked. “What’s going to happen to him?”
“DCOP Manu got a full confession from him,” Dawson answered. “He, Granger, and Tommy Thompson at PMMC were in league with each other. Thompson covered for Granger’s fake alibi. Granger sold illegal gold to Thompson. Thompson lied when he said Akua never came to PMMC to talk to him, and he also alerted Longdon that Akua was hot on the trail. When she went to see Longdon, that confirmed what Thompson had said, so Longdon had her killed.”