This was Zara’s and Fawn’s room all in one, but he had no idea who either woman was. She was more than her possessions, but her possessions were all she’d left behind. There were no photographs, no diaries, no computer, no phone, nothing to give a clue about any of the other compartments of her life.
“I hurt you. You’re still bleeding.”
Frost looked up. Prisha stood inside the room, looking uncomfortable. Her hands were knit together in front of her. He touched his cheek and realized she was right.
“It’s nothing,” he said. He waved a hand around the room. “There’s no real person here. All I see is the disguise of a woman.”
“Well, yes, that’s Zara,” Prisha said. “She kept secrets even from me. There’s a lot I don’t know about her life.”
“You said she had a boyfriend. You saw pictures of Denny Clark on the news, didn’t you? Had you ever seen him before? Is it possible he could have been involved with Zara?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t recognize him, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
Frost took another look at Zara’s bedroom. Where Prisha was standing, he saw the corner of a wooden picture frame on the wall behind the open door. He went over to look at it and saw a charcoal sketch of Zara’s face and bare shoulders. The painting was signed only with the artist’s initials, but it was dated with the current year, so it had been done in the past three months. It was all black and white, except for a few streaks of deep red color sketched into Zara’s lush black hair. This portrait of her was very different from the photograph he’d seen. She was unforgettably beautiful, but she wasn’t acting or putting on a role for a client in this sketch. She was being herself. Her dark eyes had a fierce intelligence. Her mouth was turned upward in a Mona Lisa smile, inscrutable but happy.
“Do you know where she had this done?” Frost asked.
“The Cannery, I think. One of the street artists down there did it for her.”
“Was her hair really tinted like this? With red highlights?”
Prisha nodded. “That was a recent thing. It was lovely.”
The painting didn’t tell him anything, but he used his phone’s camera to take a picture of it anyway. He found it hard to look away from Zara’s face. There was a strange magnetism about it.
“I should go,” he said.
“Yes, of course,” Prisha replied. “Again, forgive me for striking you like that. I’ve always been very protective of my sister. I would do absolutely anything to save her.”
“I know how that feels,” he told her.
He didn’t mention that he’d failed to save his own sister.
Frost took one last long look at the portrait of Zara Anand on the wall. Her beauty was in her bare skin; her courage was in her eyes. When he stared at her enigmatic smile again, he knew that Prisha was right. Zara was a woman who kept secrets, but whatever she’d been hiding was buried now under the unforgiving ocean waters.
The only one who knew what really happened was Mr. Jin.
34
Darkness caught up with Frost as he headed across the city toward Chinatown. Traffic crawled from red light to red light. Up and down the hills, the neighborhoods changed. First there were painted ladies among the houses, and then there were painted ladies on the streets. Neon lit up the storefronts, glowing on leather and fishnets on the sidewalks. He passed Fillmore, which was young and hip and rocking with music. He rolled on through Nob Hill, where the rose window of Grace Cathedral glowed like a blue star and the smell of money oozed from the Mark Hopkins, the Stanford Court, and the Fairmont hotels.
At Stockton, he turned north and crossed into Mr. Jin’s world.
His favorite Chinatown restaurant was on Washington Street only two blocks from Mr. Jin’s apartment. He pulled his Suburban into the tow-away zone outside the brightly lit door. The owner was a tiny Chinese woman who knew him well. She could have been anywhere from fifty to four hundred years old. She saw him and waved, and five minutes later, one of her daughters brought a brown paper bag out to his truck. He paid and gave the girl a large tip, and then he divvied up the order between himself and Shack. Frost ate stir-fried beef and baby bok choy with an order of barbecued pork. Shack ate shrimp fried rice and a fortune cookie.
The paper fortune that Frost took out of the cookie felt ominous. Someone close to you is not your friend.
He tried calling the number that Fox had given him, but the boy’s cell phone was turned off, so the call went straight to voice mail. He left a message. When he was done with dinner, he hiked uphill. The street was lined with gift shops, dragon murals, pagoda facades, and second-floor acupuncture clinics. Paper lanterns glowed like cherries under the awnings, and car headlights swept the walls. Every other doorway was a bakery or restaurant, and he found Mr. Jin’s hole-in-the-wall dim-sum house on the ground floor of the building adjacent to the chef’s apartment.
The restaurant itself was simply called Jin. It was nothing to look at outside, but inside, the handful of tables were covered with white tablecloths and surrounded by black lacquered chairs carved with Chinese characters. The clientele was all Asian, and there wasn’t an empty seat anywhere. Waiters in starched white uniforms pushed dim-sum carts from table to table Hong Kong style, and he saw steaming bamboo pots of har gow and shu mei. He noticed that the framed posters decorating the wall were not Chinese cityscapes from Kowloon or Shanghai but were all pictures of Niagara Falls, just like in Mr. Jin’s apartment.
He asked to see the manager, who was younger than Frost expected. He didn’t look old enough to drink. He was dressed in a tuxedo, and his black hair was oiled and lay flat on his head. He bowed when Frost showed him his badge.
“How may I help you?” he asked politely.
“I need to find Mr. Jin,” Frost replied. “Has he been in here lately?”
“Mr. Jin? Oh no, he rarely comes here. He hires me to run his restaurant. Best dim sum in Chinatown. You want a table? I always find a table for a police officer. You keep us safe.”
“Thank you, but no. It’s very important that I find Mr. Jin quickly. He isn’t in his apartment, and he’s not in his restaurant. Where should I look for him?”
The young man’s face wrinkled unhappily. “I’m very sorry. If Mr. Jin is not at home, then he must be cooking somewhere. I have never known him to do anything else.”
“How does he get around? Does he have a car?”
“No, mostly he walks,” the manager told him.
“He walks?”
“Oh yes. Mr. Jin does not believe in modern things. Sometimes he will take the bus, but more often than not, he walks.”
“What about friends or family? Is there anyone local he might stay with?”
“His only family is his son. The rest of his family is in China. As for friends, I don’t know of any. Mr. Jin is a very private person. When he is not working, I believe he is usually by himself.”
Frost couldn’t help but think that he and Mr. Jin had been cut from the same cloth. If the chef had a cat, it would have been uncanny. The good and the bad of Mr. Jin being an elusive loner was that he was hard to find. If Frost didn’t know how to track him down, neither did Lombard.
“Has his son been in here recently?” Frost asked. “Do you know where he is?”
“No, I haven’t seen Fox in nearly a week.”