Frost thought about it, and he suspected that she was right. Denny hadn’t chosen Tabby by accident. He’d chosen her in part because of her connection to his old friend. It made him wonder again if Denny had been looking for a way to erase some of the sins of the past.
“Do you remember anything else?” he asked.
“He wanted a recommendation from me,” Tabby replied. “He said if I wasn’t available, who would I suggest? He was looking to bring in the best chef in the city for this job.”
“Did you give him a name?”
“I did. He wanted Asian, and for me, there was only one name. Mr. Jin.”
“Should I know who that is?” Frost asked.
Tabby smiled. “Not unless you’re in the culinary world. Mr. Jin owns a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Chinatown, but as far as everyone in the business is concerned, he’s the best in the city. He mostly does private parties, and he doesn’t even offer a fixed menu. Clients just trust him to pick things they’ll like. He’s that good.”
“How do I find him?” Frost asked.
“I can give you his address,” Tabby replied, “but I don’t think he’s there. You remember I told you I had a chef who canceled on a big gig for me? That was Mr. Jin. He called me last Wednesday and left a message. He said he was leaving town for a while. I haven’t been able to reach him since then. I called his restaurant, and they gave me the same story. Nobody knows where he is.”
16
The aromas of the street-level Chinese restaurant permeated the hallway in Mr. Jin’s building. Frost had a takeaway container of spicy Singapore noodles in one hand, and he ate them with wooden chopsticks as he made his way down the corridor. The carpet under his feet was worn and stained. Noise pummeled him through the thin apartment doors. He heard a birdlike serenade from a bamboo flute in one room and the sick beat of a Taylor Swift song across the hall. Through an open door, he saw four Chinese teenage boys playing liar’s dice as they lay sprawled on the floor.
Everyone in the hallway stared at him. They knew he was a stranger and probably guessed that he was a cop. A cluster of young girls giggled and whispered as he passed them. An old woman in a wheelchair gave him a toothless scowl. Two men in suits, talking at a rapid clip, clammed up and let him squeeze by in silence. He could feel their eyes on his back all the way to the end of the corridor.
Mr. Jin lived in the last apartment on the left. Frost stood outside the door and finished his noodles, and then he leaned in close and listened. There was no movement inside. He knocked sharply and called out Mr. Jin’s name, but no one answered.
Frost twisted the doorknob. The door was unlocked. He glanced down the hallway at the neighbors, gave them a flash of his badge, and then crept into Mr. Jin’s apartment and closed the door behind him. The air was cold and fresh, tinged by remnants of incense. He found a light switch that turned on a floor lamp. The window was open, with a white curtain dancing like a ghost as the wind blew. He went to the window and looked outside at the green balcony. The apartment was at the corner of the building, with busy traffic in the street five stories below him.
He studied the rest of the living area. If Mr. Jin had money, his lifestyle didn’t show it. The small room was clean, but the mismatched furniture was old and sparse. Even the kitchen appliances were dated, and the countertops were made of an ugly cream laminate. Obviously, Mr. Jin did his cooking elsewhere. It was a bare-bones place to live, mostly without luxury or ornament. The only personal touch in the apartment was half a dozen oversized posters of Niagara Falls hung in cheap brass frames on the white walls.
There was a round end table beside an old recliner. Frost spotted a white porcelain teacup with dried grounds in the bottom and a sandalwood candle beside it. The saucer underneath the cup was painted with hummingbirds. Next to the half-burnt candle, he saw several imported magazines, some in Chinese, some in English. When he picked up the magazines, he found a notepad of ruled green paper beneath them. The most recent page had been torn off, leaving scraps caught in the spiral wire.
Frost held the blank page of the notepad up to the light and could see faint indentations of Mr. Jin’s scribbling. Most of the characters were in Chinese, but at the bottom of the page, he could make out a single name that had been written in large letters:
FAWN
That was the alias of the high-priced escort on Denny’s call list. Frost frowned. Nothing in the rest of Mr. Jin’s life suggested that he was the kind of man who patronized high-end hookers.
He ripped off the page from the notepad and slipped it into his pocket.
Then he continued searching the apartment. In the kitchen, there was a cordless phone next to an answering machine that probably dated to the 1990s. A red light flashed, indicating that Mr. Jin had messages. Frost pushed the button, and the first voice he heard belonged to Tabby. Her message had been left on Wednesday morning.
“Mr. Jin, this is Tabby Blaine. I’m so disappointed about the event on the twenty-eighth. I know you’re out of town right now, but I’d love to see if we can work this out. We still have time, and I’m happy to make arrangements for supplies while you’re away. Can you call me when you get this?”
There were other messages in a similar vein. Mr. Jin was in demand, but the messages rolled on, date stamped on each of the days since the Tuesday-night party, and there was no indication that he’d received or responded to any of them. He’d obviously canceled multiple jobs on his way out of town.
When Frost listened to the next message, he heard another familiar voice, and he pressed pause on the playback.
He’d literally heard only one word from that voice in ten years, but he recognized it immediately. It was Denny. He played the whole message, and then he played it over again.
“Mr. Jin, we have a problem. I need to talk to you right away. I’m coming over, but if you’re there and you get this, get out of your apartment immediately. Go to your restaurant and wait for me there.”
The date stamp was on Friday night. Denny must have left the message not even two hours before he arrived on Frost’s doorstep. He’d obviously used a different phone, because there was no record of the call on his mobile number.
We have a problem.
That meant Denny had known something was wrong before he was killed. He’d already realized that he was being hunted.
And so was Mr. Jin.
Frost heard a noise behind him and spun around. He saw one door, mostly closed, leading toward what he assumed was Mr. Jin’s bedroom. He tried to remember if the angle on the door was the same as when he’d entered the apartment, but he couldn’t be sure. He crossed the room and nudged the door with his shoe. The only light was from the side window overlooking the roof of the next building, which was enough for him to make out a platform bed barely a foot high. The bed was neatly made with white linen. He felt for a light switch on the wall, but when he flicked it up, nothing happened. The bedroom stayed dark.
He took two more steps into the center of the room.
Without warning, a hard kick from behind him swept both of his feet off the ground. He dropped like a stone, landing on his back. He was dizzied for only a second, but that was enough for someone to land on top of him and put the steel point of a knife to his throat.
Frost squinted. In the shadows, he recognized the face looming over him. It was the Asian teenager he’d met on the Roughing It. The boy who’d been looking for his father and who’d dumped him in the bay.
“You,” the boy exclaimed, recognizing him, too.