Fuck this zen shit, Tay thought. He didn’t care what anyone said. He was going downstairs to buy some cigarettes and he was going to do it right now.
But before Tay could will himself into motion, a grim-faced OC emerged from the room, leaned against the wall, and folded his arms.
“Do we know who she is?” he asked.
“Not yet.” Tay struggled to control his nicotine fit by studying the swirling patterns in the wine-red carpet. “The hotel doesn’t have anyone registered in the room. According to their records, it ought to be empty.”
The OC’s mouth tightened into a thin, hard line. “The FMB says they got clean prints. If she’s local, we’ll know who she is within a half-hour. If she’s not, we’ll compare the visitor entry records with the exits and see who’s unaccounted for. We should get an ID pretty quickly.”
Tay’s eyes shifted slightly at that and the OC caught it.
“What is it, Sam?”
“Somehow I have the feeling it isn’t going to be that easy, Chief.”
“No,” the OC shook his head slowly, “maybe it won’t be.”
Tay looked off to his left as if a repository of constructive thought lay somewhere down the corridor, but he didn’t say anything else.
“What about the security cameras?” the OC asked.
“I’ve asked for copies of the tapes from all the hotel’s cameras for the last three days,” Kang answered.
That was news to Tay, so he listened carefully.
“We’ll look at them,” Kang continued, “but I think finding anything useful is a long shot, sir. The state of the deceased leaves us without an identifiable face to look for, and there’s an international electronics trade fair going on now. The traffic in and out of the hotel would have been very heavy. Unless this woman really stands out for some reason, I doubt we’ll see anything that might help us.”
The OC let out a long, tired sigh. “I want you to stay with this until it’s done, Sam. It’s going to scare the hell out of a lot of people.”
“It certainly scares the hell out of me, Chief.”
“You and Sergeant Kang drop everything else until this case is cleared. Tell me what you need and you’ll get it. Just wrap it up and do it quickly.”
“What about the press, sir?” Kang asked.
The OC looked momentarily puzzled. “What press?”
“At least two hotel employees have seen the body. Rumors are probably spreading already.”
The OC looked at Tay. “What do you think, Sam?”
Tay made a vague movement with his head that could have meant anything. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “I’ll have a word with Public Affairs and get them to put out something vague. If they handle it right, we can probably keep The Straits Times out of it until we have something concrete.”
“What about the other papers?”
“They won’t be a problem,” Tay said. “They never are.”
Kang grunted and both the OC and Tay looked at him.
“You disagree, Sergeant?” the OC asked.
“Not exactly, sir. I was just thinking…well, what about the foreign press? It seems to me this is the kind of thing that could easily be blown out of proportion.”
“And what would you say the proper proportion is, Sergeant?” Tay snapped before the OC could respond. “When you find a woman with her face beaten in who’s been stripped naked and had a flashlight jammed up her private parts, how would you fix the proper proportions for that, Sergeant? I’d really like to know.”
“What I meant, sir, was-”
“That murdered women in five-star hotels might damage the tourist trade?”
“No, sir.” Kang cleared his throat. “That something like this might damage the country’s image in general, sir. Foreigners being killed in luxury hotels here in Singapore and all. It makes us look like some Third World shithole.”
“Why do you think the woman’s a foreigner?”
“Well, because…”
Kang saw the trap he was falling into and trailed off into an embarrassed silence. He looked down at his hands as if he wanted to make certain that none of his fingers were missing.
“You didn’t mean to say foreigner at all, did you, Sergeant?”
Kang had hoped Tay would let it go. Clearly he wasn’t.
“You meant to say ‘white,’ didn’t you? You meant to say white people being killed in luxury hotels isn’t good for Singapore’s image, didn’t you, Sergeant?”
Kang shifted his weight and jammed his hands deep into his pockets. He didn’t even try to answer Tay’s question. He had said far too much already.
“Don’t worry about it, Sergeant,” the OC said after a few moments passed in an uncomfortable silence. “Go on downstairs and finish the interviews.”
Kang nodded and walked quickly away. The OC pushed himself off the wall.
“Fix this, Sam,” he said. “I’m depending on you.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll do my best.”
“Do better than that. Do whatever you have to. Just fucking fix it.”
FOUR
Sergeant Kang completed the interviews in less than half an hour because nobody had anything useful to add to what little he and Tay already knew. Kang left the hotel’s executive offices and found Tay waiting for him in the coffee shop.
Tay was at a table in the outside section at the front of the hotel, the part that was supposed to look like a Parisian sidewalk cafe but didn’t. On his table were a small box of aspirin, a water glass, an espresso cup, two packs of Marlboro Reds, a purple plastic disposable lighter, and an ashtray. The aspirin box was open, the espresso cup and water glass were empty, and Tay was just finishing a cigarette, clearly not his first from the look of the ashtray.
“Hotel shops are wonderful places, Sergeant. They sell nearly everything a man could possibly want.”
“Apparently, sir.”
Kang pulled out a chair and sat down. He pointed at the red Marlboro box.
“Thoe are the strong ones, aren’t they, sir?”
“Don’t start, Sergeant.”
“If you’re going to begin smoking again, sir, don’t you at least think the light ones would-”
“Are we all done here?” Tay interrupted. “Do they need us upstairs for anything else?”
Kang shook his head. “The FMB guys will be a while yet, but I don’t think there’s anything more for us to do. Not unless you want to have another look at the scene before they move the body.”
Tay gave Kang a long look.
“I didn’t think so,” Sergeant Kang said.
Tay shook another Marlboro out of the pack and lit it. He exhaled a thick cloud of smoke and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table.
“Do we have all the statements?”
“Statements from the manager, the security chief, and the maid-”
“You mean the housekeeping supervisor.”
“Right, sir, the housekeeping supervisor. I’ll type them up later and you can look at them all if you want, but I don’t think you’ll find anything in them.”
“What about the other guests on the floor?”
“Patrolmen have talked to three who were on the twenty-sixth floor last night, one who was on the twenty-seventh, and three who were on the twenty-fifth. We’re tracking the others down along with all of yesterday’s checkouts on those three floors, but so far no one seems to have heard anything unusual.”
“Somebody must have heard something. You can’t beat anybody that badly without making a hell of a lot of noise.”
“Unless she was tied up and gagged.”
Tay looked at Kang and raised his eyebrows.
“The FMB supervisor says there are marks on the woman’s wrists and ankles,” Kang went on. “He says he’s not sure yet, but they appear to be consistent with restraints of some kind.”
“Restraints?”
“You know, sir … ah, like she was-”