The old woman still sat in stunned silence as they passed her. Jack scanned the room. It was very cold inside. The windows were wide open and lightweight curtains danced in the wind. Jack noticed an aquarium with eight Chinese goldfish floating belly up.
The floors were covered with off-white carpeting throughout.
The big room beyond, the open living room, was bathed in the dull gray morning light that flooded in through floor-to-ceiling windows, a flat wash that muted the few touches of color the room held. The modern, understated furniture consisted of a navy-blue L-shaped couch with a matching ottoman at one end, a wide-screen television, and a glass coffee table. One wall held a built-in shelf unit that displayed porcelain vases, terra-cotta figurines of Chinese men on horseback, and a miniature red, white, and blue flag of Taiwan. Everything was neat, like a deluxe hotel room after a maid had been through it. To one side was a kitchen area, set off by an island with a granite countertop that housed a sink and dishwasher. A stainless-steel refrigerator and matching cabinets lined the walls.
At the far end of a hall were the bedrooms.
Wong continued, “The son’s letter described some bad business deals, and told them he’d lost money in the stock market.”
Spread across the range top and the granite counters were an array of saucepans, and two small Chinese woks. There were ashes and charred lumps in all of them. Jack saw a box of wooden kitchen matches and a small can of lighter fluid. Someone had cooked up eight containers of charcoal briquettes on the range, dousing them up with lighter fluid to keep them all going.
“There’s an empty bag of charcoal behind the counter,” Wong said. “The son and his wife were depressed over their losses.” He continued, “The two children went to a fancy private school.”
Jack walked into the smaller bedroom.
“How old were the kids?” he asked.
“Five and six,” Wong said solemnly. “Two little boys.” He was disciplined enough to brief Jack with the factual information, but smart enough to keep his opinions and personal feelings to himself.
The boys’ room had twin beds with New York Yankees pillow shams and matching duvet covers. Between the two beds was a nightstand with a Mickey Mouse table lamp. A desk held a computer and over it were shelves full of children’s books. Stuffed animals were displayed on the dresser and a few large ones stood on the carpet: Pooh Bear and Tigger, Barney and Big Bird. Posters of Thomas the Tank’s adventures hung on the wall.
Jack felt his adrenaline building. He was thinking, Murder-suicide, bad enough, but why take the kids? Were they staying together for the next life? He took a deep breath, took the disposable camera out of his jacket pocket, and went toward the last room.
Heavy curtains were drawn back. The room was even colder than the rest of the apartment. The master bedroom was spacious enough so that the bodies didn’t seem to take up much room in it. A woman and two children lay on a large bed. A man was slumped over on a settee. Jack took a photo of the area, then three more individual shots as he approached the bed. He observed a bottle of NyQuil on one of the two night tables.
The Chinese woman lay on her right side, her left arm draped across the bodies of the two boys. They were supine, their arms at their sides, dressed in school uniforms. The three of them looked as if they were asleep.
In the far corner of the room were two large red ceramic bowls with dragon designs on them, strategically placed. Jack saw ashes in both. He leaned in closer and took some head shots of the victims.
The woman’s eyes were sunken and shadowed. She’d been crying for a long while. She’d dressed conservatively in slacks and sweater top. Jack guessed she was in her mid thirties. Over on the settee, the man was hunched, head down, his open eyes staring at the carpet. He had vomited. He appeared to be in his early forties.
The vomit was dark colored, and Jack guessed from the crust that had formed that it had dried for at least a day.
Opposite the body was a large Chinese armoire that blocked off a neat home-office area: desktop with computers, a printer, and a set of filing cabinets. On top of the cabinets was a stack of books. One was entitled The Day Trader’s Bible.
Jack used up the rest of his film, taking shots from different angles. He believed photos were a more efficient way to preserve his impressions than written notes and he wanted to take them himself before the crime scene became crowded with the coroner’s people and the crime-scene team.
When he was in Chinatown, Jack would drop the camera off at Ah Fook’s Thirty-Minute Photo, and Fook Jr. would develop his order first while he went next door to the Mei Wah, got a nai cha tea, and watched the gangboys roll by.
He dropped the disposable camera back into his pocket.
Outside the bedroom, Wong said, “Sarge notified the ME about twenty minutes ago. They’re en route in the meat wagon.”
“Okay,” Jack nodded. He knew Wong wasn’t being crude and insensitive. It was just cop talk, jargon they used to take some of the edge off of a traumatic event.
Wong moved toward the main door and the old woman, who was now weeping quietly. Jack went to the window wall of the living room. The view swept north toward the Empire State Building and the jumbled rooftops and billboards of the big city beyond.
The streets below were bustling, a tangle of pedestrian traffic crowding the intersection. The city was in a holiday season rush, and people poured out of the subways and buses, jamming the streets in every direction.
The world goes on, Jack thought. An entire family offered up to the gods, gods of greed and desire, and the world stops not one second for condolences. Too bad.
It wasn’t the first time Jack had seen dead children, but it was the first time he’d witnessed the end of an entire family. That they happened to be Chinese brought it closer to home, as he assumed it did for P.O. Wong. But as cops they instinctively protected themselves.
Cops got paid to sop up the daily horrors and bloody atrocities that the white-collar suits and ties didn’t want to deal with. Cops became hard-hearted, kept a professional distance from the victims, and worked in a way that didn’t affect them emotionally. Deeper involvement was a real danger that could lead to overzealousness. Frontline cops became numb to the daily onslaught of unspeakable crimes that crossed the desk blotter day and night. Fifty thousand arrests a year. In a city where teenage mothers disposed of their babies in the garbage, parents were known to kill their children and themselves out of anger, depression, desperation, very often in the grip of an alcohol-and-drug-induced rage.
The Taiwanese, like other Chinese, were obsessed with success and money. The present tragedy was the result of depression over the imminent loss of a certain lifestyle, but it was as much about shame, about losing face. Ma’s Buddhist beliefs came back to him: greed and desire. The Buddhists taught that wanting and having, the material world, could only lead to unhappiness. Life was suffering, and suffering came from desire, the desire for things, for hopes unfulfilled. Eliminate desire, and you will eliminate suffering.
Suicide was not uncommon in America, Jack knew. Most were men, and they shot themselves. Then there were drug overdoses, risks taken to disguise a death wish, and, finally, assisted suicide from those who believed in the right to die.
At the apartment door, Jack saw the ends of the packing tape that had been used to secure a quilt over the door so none of the carbon monoxide could escape.
Eliminate desire.
He left Wong at the scene and went down to get a statement from the building manager. He knew the follow-up paperwork at the precinct, plus the reports from the coroner’s office, the notification of next of kin, the certificates from the funeral parlor, everything, would take up his next few shifts.