She resented needing him. To ask for his help was to invite him to join her, and she did not want that.
The phone he’d given her vibrated in her pants pocket. She made no effort to retrieve it. She didn’t need his cynicism and sarcasm.
She spotted a pile of discarded cinder blocks. Ingenuity, she thought. Focus. Commitment. Her army training returned effortlessly.
Minutes later, she heaved once again on her pry bar and simultaneously shoved a cinder block into the gap with her foot.
She lay flat and crawled through the narrow space, elated that Knox would never have made it.
She was inside.
Perched on the exoskeleton of the conveyor’s steeply angled arm, Knox willed Grace to answer the damn phone. He’d lost a pair of headlights coming up River Road from the direction of Chongming. Of the many explanations he considered, the most likely was that the vehicle had pulled off the road and switched off its lights-a pair of teenagers seeking back-seat romance; a cop settling into a speed trap; or something much worse.
As if to confirm her independence, she wouldn’t answer her goddamned phone. Never mind that he’d been impressed by the ingenuity of her entering the building, he’d have gone after her if he’d thought he might squeeze under those doors as she had. But there was no way.
Instead, he concentrated on locating the vehicle belonging to the missing headlights. A minute passed. Two. Three. Nothing.
Maybe it had been lovers after all.
Using the phone’s screen as a flashlight, Grace followed the bluish glow deeper into the tannery. She passed steel carts fixed to tracks laid in the concrete floor. Giant metal vats lined the aisle on either side of her. A tangle of plumbing. The stench of bleach and chemicals over which hung the unmistakable fetid odor of decay.
Her eyes adjusted, allowing her to navigate by the phone’s glow more easily. She passed beneath an elaborate network of catwalks, tracks and winches. A pair of forklifts sat like tusked animals alongside a central doublewide trailer. An array of dozens of stacked fifty-five-gallon steel drums.
Only as the buzzing of bluebottle flies rose like a chorus and the decomposition choked her did she sense what had happened. Rounding the corner of the doublewide, she faced a line of steel-framed, butcher-block dressing tables beneath a set of fluorescent tube lights. The dressing tables had their own sets of knives and cutting tools. Drains and PVC tubing ran to grates set into the floor. She turned and retched. The table nearest her had been cleaned too hastily. Flies clustered around bits of bone and flesh. Blood coagulated along the edges and the drains.
But it was the shredded pieces of bloodstained clothing that caught her eye. Frayed cotton and bits of denim. A human slaughter, not cattle for tanning.
Yao Xuolong’s death had appeared to be a hit-and-run, not a butchering.
Instinctively, she backed away from the crime scene. Her shoes caught and she tripped, reaching out for purchase. She grabbed at a hanging chain, but let go immediately, the chain sticky with what she was certain was blood.
She brought the phone’s screen close. Not red, or black, but a leather-colored brown goo. Whatever it was came from overhead as a steady drip to the floor, where it collected in a syrupy puddle by a drain.
She wiped her hand on a butcher’s apron hanging within reach. Her fingers began to warm. Then, sting. Then feel as if they were rotting off her.
She hurried through the maze of floor machinery, left, right, down a narrow aisle in search of a sink. She reached an emergency chemical wash station, placed her hands under the sunflower showerhead and bumped the lever with her knee. Nothing.
She hurried along the wall, half-blind, knocking tools and cans to the floor. She found a wall sink, turned the faucet and plunged both hands beneath the spit of water just as her phone rang.
The pain was too great to remove her hands. She would call him back as soon as she got the chemical off her skin.
She grabbed a worn bar of soap and worked up lather. Slowly-too slowly-the pain subsided. Her palms were raw and close to bleeding.
She connected her burns with Knox’s. From handling the surveyor’s shoes. She wanted to tell Knox what she’d found, but as she withdrew her hands from the water, they hurt so badly she doused them again.
Her phone buzzed for a third time. She braved the pain and reached for it, stuffing it into the crook of her shoulder and thrusting her free hand back into the water.
She awkwardly worked the phone, shoulder to ear. The device slipped and squirted out, landing with a clunk and the sound of shattered plastic. Its screen went black.
38
6:40 P.M.
CHONGMING ISLAND
An imposing figure took long strides toward the tannery and made no attempt to conceal himself. A cop. He was large-headed but not wide-shouldered enough to be the Mongolian. Not tall enough for Kozlowski.
Knox called Grace for a second and third time. The phone jumped to Chinese voice mail-the building’s superstructure defeating the reception, he thought.
He kept track of the cop as he backed down the conveyor arm, fearful he was silhouetted against the sky.
The cop turned once he made it through the yard’s front gate, carrying something at his side. A gun? A tire iron?
Chinese police were not permitted to carry handguns, although People’s Armed Police officers were. Could this possibly be Kozlowski’s guy?
Knox paused as the man angled toward him, then continued down the rock conveyor as the intruder turned toward the tannery’s doors.
A moment later, a pair of loud metallic pops pierced the air.
Knox vaulted one wall, then the next. He pulled himself up and held his head over the wall of the compound.
The man had pried the lock off the doors.
He was headed inside.
With the loud sounds at the doors, Grace shut off the water and ran for cover. Only as the pulleys whined did she realize it had been the doors coming open. She cowered within the equipment as footfalls-Knox?-moved deeper into the building.
Not Knox. The man trained a small flashlight on the floor. She caught punctuated glimpses of his dark silhouette walking past the vats. Not as tall as Knox, but thick-necked with a head like a caveman.
The Mongolian? she wondered. Police? Security?
She slowed her breathing in an attempt to squelch her adrenaline rush. She used the shifting light to plot her own course out of the building.
Staying low, she inched her way down the aisle, dodging the boxes and tools she’d spilled. Halfway to her freedom, her curiosity got the better of her.
She turned and followed him. Like her, he seemed to be taking inventory of the place-hardly the actions of a man returning to a crime scene or a security man who knew his beat. She knew better than to stay, but was drawn to him. He reached the dressing tables and, like her, studied them long and hard.
A cop, judging by his confidence and his methodical nature.
His flashlight swept the tables and the cutting tools, the drain in the floor. It found the chain and followed the dripping goo to the puddle, then up to the drums.
He removed his leather coat and hung it carefully over a valve, stepping incredibly close to where she hid. She could see a well-worn leather shoulder holster beneath his left arm.
If he was a cop, then maybe he was an officer of the People’s Armed Police. Kozlowski’s Iron Hand?
The man ran a faucet and got a stream of water going from a hose she hadn’t seen. He washed down the soiled dressing table.
She choked back her surprise: he was destroying the very evidence that Kozlowski had told Knox both men wanted. Why not preserve evidence that might work against the Mongolian?
The answer seemed obvious: because there was no Mongolian.
His mobile phone pealed Metallica. He returned to his coat and answered the call, speaking curtly.
Knox hung from the compound wall, peering inside. He didn’t want to jeopardize Grace if she’d managed to hide or escape. He didn’t want to leave her if she’d been discovered and abducted.