Standing rigidly at attention, the rookie cop waited for Fong to finish reading his report. Fong put down the file and looked at the young man in front of him. He was twenty-two years old, square-shouldered with large usually rounded eyes and short spiky hair. There was some Mongolian in his blood lines somewhere. His name was Ling Che.
“Did you speak to anyone after you left the coroner’s office?”
“Yes, as you instructed I contacted the consulates.” The papers could have gotten their information from one of the consulates, Fong knew, but he doubted the leak would happen quickly enough to make the morning press. “You phoned them?”
“Yes, sir. Wasn’t that how I was supposed to do it?
Those who had no operators working late, I faxed. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, it’s right, Ling Che, it’s right.”
There was a long pause, there was something here that was escaping Fong.
“May I go now, sir?”
Fong sat perfectly still for several seconds. Ling Che didn’t know what to do. Then Fong stirred. “Did you use a cellular phone to make your calls to the embassies?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Cellular phones aren’t secure! Anyone could intercept your call. You’re supposed to use the precinct phones!” Fong shouted.
The young man, completely cowed, bowed his head and mumbled, “I was at my girlfriend’s place, her parents were in the country for one night. It was the first time in three years that we-”
Fong held up his hand for him to stop. Privacy, in a city where housing was a major problem even for the well connected and the wealthy, was nonexistent on a young policeman’s salary. If you wanted to scratch your ass in Shanghai, you had better be prepared for someone to be watching while you did it. And if the watcher is Shanghanese he will probably offer advice on a better way to go about your task.
He dismissed Ling Che with a nod. He hoped to hell that the young cop wasn’t lying to him. He made a note to check.
The light on his phone came up. “Who?”
“The coroner.”
After a moment the coroner’s smoke-tired voice came on the line. “You’d better come over. I’ve got some frozen viscera here that you ought to see.”
The parcel that arrived at the Jiang Jing Hotel had been left with the concierge. It had not been brought by a courier. In fact the concierge had been away from the desk when it arrived. The parcel had a room number and a guest’s name on it. The concierge called up to the room and informed the guest that there was a parcel for him. The guest asked that a bellboy bring it up, knock on the door, and leave it outside.
The bellboy took the small parcel up to room 2430 and knocked politely on the door. Then he placed the parcel, as instructed, on the floor and returned to the lobby.
A full five minutes after the bellboy’s knock, the door to the room opened and the parcel was taken inside. Forty-five seconds after that, obscenities in various languages and the clear sound of someone throwing up his lunch on the expensive broadloom came from room 2430 of the Jiang Jing Hotel.
“It’s a part of a heart,” said Fong.
The coroner nodded at the object in his plastic-gloved hand. “Part of Richard Fallon’s heart.”
“Where’s the rest?”
“There’s a good question.” The coroner pointed toward a large table on which the pieces of Richard Fallon had been laid out. If there was an order to the pieces, it escaped Fong. The coroner explained: “The body is divided into those things male and those things female, yin and yang if you will. Those that cause heat and those that cause cold. Those that are of fire, those of air, those of water.” As he spoke he pointed to different sections of viscera and organs. Then he picked up the heart again. “Only the heart, of all the body’s parts, belongs to both yin and yang, both heat and cold, and all of fire, air, and water. That is, when it is whole.” He looked at the cleft heart that he held.
“The crime scene unit didn’t find the other part?”
“If they did, they didn’t bring it to the morgue.”
“And nothing else is missing?”
“A cleaver or a knife or whatever was used would have nicked off small bits, which were probably left in the alley, but everything else is here. This one knows how the body is put together, and he attacked it at its weakest places.” “But how did the heart get cut in half?”
After a moment the coroner sighed. “It didn’t get cut in half, if you mean by that that somehow in the process of eviscerating Richard Fallon something happened to cut his heart in two. That didn’t happen. That couldn’t happen. Once Richard Fallon was cut open his heart was cut out of him. Then the heart was cut in two. One half I hold in my hand. The other half is god knows where.” Before he could stop himself Fong found himself thinking, “It’s part of the message.” But even as he did he reached over and touched the frozen item in the coroner’s hand. He ran his finger along the cut edge. The cut was razor smooth for most of its length but near the top there was a jaggedness.
“Did his knife slip here?” asked Fong with his finger on the spot.
“No, I don’t think so,” replied the coroner with a cold smile. The coroner then put the organ down on the morgue table and removed the plastic glove from his right hand. Before Fong could ask him what he was doing, the old man reached into his mouth and with a tug pulled out a complete set of dentures. With the dentures in his right hand he picked up the heart with his left. Slowly he moved the dentures toward the jagged section of the heart. The jaggedness exactly matched the bite mark that would have been made by the ripping action of the top four front and canine teeth and the bottom six with the eye teeth at either end.
“He chewed it and spat it out. I saw it in the photo,” said Fong.
“You saw that in a crime scene snapshot?”
“In one of them but not the others.”
The coroner put down the heart and reinserted his dentures.
Fong could hear the fluorescent lights buzzing and just for a moment their greenish cast made him feel a little wobbly on his feet.
“You all right?”
Fong nodded.
“This guy’s got a hell of an MO.”
“Personal style brought to new heights.”
The coroner grunted a laugh.
“Not a word of this to anyone. If by any chance this ends up in the papers, I will have your head, old man.”
“More threats of the young? The Cultural Revolution’s over or haven’t you heard?”
“I’ve heard. I want your report on my desk by week’s end, okay?”
“Sure.” The coroner paused and was about to say something, then decided against it and began bundling his gruesome charge back into a large green plastic bag.
When the State Department official handed Amanda Fallon back her passport he flipped it open to show her the forty-day, single-entry visa to China. To him, Red China.
“The State Department picked up the forty-dollar charge for the visa.”
Amanda was going to say thank you but she couldn’t quite think what for, then said it anyway. He smiled at her and mumbled further condolences for her loss and wished her an easy flight to Shanghai.
When she left the State Department office on Canal Street she turned left and headed toward the Quarter. The intensity of New Orleans’s summer had not yet arrived but in the bright sunshine of mid-April it was hanging in the corners of the Quarter’s old buildings, waiting to fill five full months with heat and humidity, sweat and loving as only ol’N’orl’ns can. Although she was from the north, she had lived in New Orleans since she was seventeen and a student at All Fun U, known to the world as Tulane University. She had been accepted by the women’s college on campus but upon arriving had decided that the men’s side offered more opportunities for study in her area of greatest concern. Men. After going through the undergraduate male population in alphabetical order, she decided that forays into the realm of the faculty merited her attention. And despite the published university policy of a total ban on student/faculty “fraternization,” Amanda found few who could resist her casual offer of a drink down in the Quarter.