“We’ll be safe here.”
“With Happy Tom?”
“You need to trust me.”
Kate opened the metal door with a grating squeak and Michael was served his second look at the international backpacking scene. Happy Tom’s was a guest house, a hostel where travelers of all sorts put up for the night, and even at this late hour they were everywhere. A blonde Swede brushed her teeth while studying the notices tacked to a decaying corkboard; a black backpacker with bright red braids kicked back reading a Lonely Planet guidebook; and a waif of a girl who looked like she couldn’t have been more than sixteen pecked out an e-mail at an aging computer terminal.
Kate nudged Michael forward into the narrow hall leading out of the tiny common room. He passed a communal bathroom, followed by an open doorway. Inside Michael saw backpackers snoring on racks of floor to ceiling metal bunks. Kate continued forward another two steps and inserted a key into a door at the far end of the hall. Ensuring that no one was watching, she opened the door. It wasn’t a regular room at the hostel, that much was clear. Brooms and cleaning supplies lined the walls. But there was also a single metal cot complete with trundle bed. She shut the door and flipped on a light.
“We need to talk,” Kate said.
“Here?”
“You have a better idea?”
Michael drummed his fingers on a jug of bleach. “Yeah. We could go to the police. Tell them what happened.”
Kate almost laughed before lowering her voice to a whisper. “This isn’t America. There’s no innocent until proven guilty. There’s only guilty and more guilty and as far as I could tell, you had blood all over you.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“You fled the scene.”
“It was your idea to leave.”
“To save your ass.”
“And why would you do that?” Michael asked. “You don’t even know me.”
Kate took a seat on the drooping cot. “Call it a character flaw,” she said. “You were in trouble, I helped out. All I want in return is an explanation.”
Michael averted his eyes, glancing around the closet-sized space. “Look, it’s not you personally. I just don’t want to pull anybody else into this.”
“You don’t think it’s kind of late for that?”
It was true. She was involved now. Almost as involved as he was. “What do you want to know?”
“You accused Larry of murdering your father.”
Michael felt a lump grow in his throat. “Are you sure we’re good here?”
“For now.”
“Then here goes.” He dropped his pack, taking a seat on the far end of the drooping mattress. “My dad worked for a big athletic shoe company. The kind with lots of Madison Avenue marketing and product manufactured wherever it was cheapest to do it.”
“Nike? Adidas?”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is, he traveled a lot. While I was growing up, my dad spent a lot of time out of town. He was always there when we needed him, but work kept him away a lot of the time.”
“Somehow I don’t think two dead guys are about a lack of quality time with dear old dad.”
Michael rolled his tongue inside his mouth and said, “About six months ago, he didn’t come home at all. The official explanation was an automobile accident west of here in Guanxi Province. They say his car plummeted to the bottom of a river gorge. His body was never recovered.” Michael unzipped the top compartment of his backpack. “Larry was the last to see him alive.” Michael removed a letter-sized envelope. “Five days ago I got this in the mail.”
Opening the envelope, Michael pulled out a paper airline ticket for travel between Seattle and Hong Kong. Across the back of it was a simple message scrawled in a violent hand.
It read: “LARRY DID IT.”
Kate examined the envelope. “It’s postmarked Kowloon Central. No return address. You took this to mean that Larry murdered your father?”
“How would you take it?”
“Probably like that.” Kate considered the implications. “What do you think now?”
“Now I don’t know what to think.”
“So the backpacking bit, the route you were going to take?”
“In the event that Larry was a dead end,” Michael winced at his choice of words, “I knew my dad was last seen out here. I came to find out what happened to him.”
“So what are you waiting for?”
Kate reached into her daypack and without another word tossed him Larry’s bloody cell phone. It was an Android smartphone, probably less than a year old, and if you looked past the blood, barely used. After a moment’s hesitation, Michael woke the device from sleep mode. Then he hit play.
The first thing about the video clip Michael noticed was the room. It had stark concrete walls, almost like a cell. A battered metal door was visible in one corner. An incandescent bulb hung from the ceiling above a gray metal table. To the side of the table was a gray tubular metal chair. Michael’s father stood between the table and chair. He had several days’ growth of gray beard and his wispy hair was greasy, falling haphazardly over his forehead. From the video, he looked to be in his mid-sixties, though Michael knew him to be younger than that. His father’s eyes burnt like hot embers, despite his obvious fatigue. He wore a simple oxford shirt, the collar open. Michael paid special attention to his neck, because even in this medium shot, he recognized the pendant—three small stars offset in a silver ring—that his father wore.
“What’s he saying?”
Michael realized that the volume was still turned off on the phone. He turned it up.
“One, two, four, six, one, three, eight —”
“Start it from the beginning.”
Michael replayed the message, this time with the volume on.
“Eight, five, six —”
“It’s like he’s reading off the weekly lotto draw.”
His father finished uttering the digits, sixteen of them, all a number between zero and nine, and the screen went blank. That was it. Michael checked the phone, but there was little else. No outgoing calls, nothing in the address book, no cached web pages, no apps, no games, nothing except a record of a single incoming call.
“Either Larry’s really unpopular —”
“Or he purged the phone.”
Michael shared a glance with Kate and did the most expedient thing in the book. He tapped the redial button. There were the telltale tones of digits being dialed, followed by the sound of a connection being made, followed by nothing at all. Dead air.
“Who are you?” Michael asked.
The connection was cut. Michael immediately dialed again, but this time the call wouldn’t go through. He tried for a third time, but it was the same story. Frustrated, he tossed the phone to the bed. Even at this late hour, horns and traffic were audible outside the old building. To say Hong Kong never slept was a cliché. Hong Kong didn’t even slow down to catch its breath.
Michael watched as Kate picked up the phone. Maybe she thought she could find something else. Something he hadn’t seen. She hit the play icon again, watching his father’s video message one more time. Then, about halfway through, she paused it and hit another key. Then she just stared. As if she had seen something unexpected. Something impossible.