Murder in Vegas

THE KIDNAPPING OF XIANG FEI by Michael Collins

As we walked along the strip hunched in jackets to keep warm-Vegas can be damned cold in November-Kay said, “There’s a dark blue Lincoln following us.”

We were on our way back to the Mirage from one of those cheap all-you-can-eat dinners where gimlet-eyes watch for people who try to stash extra prime rib or cheesecake under their shirts or bras.

“I know.” I didn’t look back. “Don’t worry, but listen. That car’s going to pass us and stop at the curb up ahead. A man is going to tell me to get in. I’ll get in. If I haven’t called by midnight-”

“I’ll call the police. Dan, what-”

“Not the police. Call a lawyer named John Jeffries in L.A. His number’s in my Rolodex.” I slipped one of my business cards into her hand. “Tell him to call the numbers I’ve written on the card.”

I squeezed her hand, and we walked briskly on toward the hotel, but my mind was racing. It had taken me the better part of three days to smoke them out. Now they were here.

The call had come into my office in the back of the old hacienda where Kay and I live at 4:53 p.m. the previous Monday.

“Dan? Marty Gebhard. I need a favor.” Professor Martin Gebhard was once the pride of the UCSB political science department, and one of my Tuesday night poker game regulars. A year ago he’d taken the Tardash Chair of International Political Studies at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. I don’t know if UCSB misses him, but the poker regulars sure do.

“There’s a grad student here, Donald Lewis, who wants to hire a private detective.” I heard the hesitation. “It’s sort of a difficult and, ah, delicate matter.”

“You want me to drive to Vegas?”

“He’d prefer a flying carpet, but do it your way. He’ll pay whatever you ask.”

I. was alone in the office, but I think I cocked an eyebrow. “Whatever I ask?”

“Money isn’t his problem.”

“Will he pay for Kay too?”

“He’ll pay for the cat. Just come as soon as possible.”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

Marty always smiled when he lost big at poker, which was most of the time, and “difficult and delicate” always gets my interest. Besides, he hadn’t laughed when I pushed Kay into the deal, and he sounded worried.

I went into the kitchen. “Vegas tomorrow? Free, with expense account?”

“I can visit all my stores.” Her business is what pays for Santa Barbara.

After Barstow, the high desert stretches all the way to Vegas, and 1-15 is so straight it lulls drivers into a trance. Sin-Mecca beckons, feet get heavy on the gas, and people die.

Then there were the billboards.

As I drove in the cool late November sunlight, Kay chatting about the buyers she would call on, the billboards came to meet us long before the city or even Nevada was in sight, scars on the austere beauty of the arid land with its tough bushes, thorny cactus, and tougher, thornier animals.

The early Spaniards, the hungry prospectors, the settlers heading west to California found in a barren desert valley a tiny oasis of springs and green meadows. The Spaniards named it Las Vegas, “the meadows,” and the Yankee drifters and land seekers welcomed the brief respite. But the billboards do the welcoming now, proclaim a different kind of oasis, and the meadows have long since vanished with the cactus and the thorny lizards.

The first trumpet call of glitter appears at the border with a clutch of casino hotels one inch into Nevada, and soon the whole rhinestone symphony rises up on that distant horizon. Sprawled across the desert like a skin condition, the Strip looms first. Bugsy and the boys did not want the marks from L.A. to drive one extra mile, time was money.

I dropped Kay at the Mirage where she would shower, change into her own line of high fashion clothes, and call on her buyers, and drove on to the university that is tucked conveniently close behind the Strip on Maryland Avenue, between Flamingo and Tropicana. A large but relatively compact campus of ultramodern buildings, rectangular, round and domed, basically in pale sand colors, but with a lot of bright primaries. Mondrian in sand and stone.

I parked as near to the political science building as I could, and walked.

Marty Gebhard is a pleasant man of forty-odd who wears jeans and a sweatshirt, sports a scraggly black mustache, and, today, three-day’s stubble. He knew I had only one arm. Donald Lewis didn’t, and most people have some reaction when they first see me. Lewis had none.

Tall, pale, bone thin, and so agitated he all but lunged at me. “You’ve got to find Xiang Fei and arrest those men who kidnapped her!”

“Okay,” I said, and sat down in the only extra chair. “Now tell me who Xiang Fei is, and when she was kidnapped.”

Lewis wasn’t sitting, and was so intense and distracted he couldn’t seem to comprehend I didn’t know Xiang Fei, or when she had been kidnapped.

Gebhard rescued him. “She’s a Chinese graduate student on scholarship from her government, Dan. Donald insists she was kidnapped from the shopping mall on Tropicana a week ago.” Marty sounded more than a shade dubious.

“What do the FBI and the metros think?”

Donald paced and raged, “The police don’t believe there was a kidnapping! They don’t believe me or the witness. They refuse to even notify the FBI!”

This time I did arch an eyebrow. “Witness?”

Marty Gebhard said, “Donald found a man who was drinking coffee in the mall Starbucks.”

I looked from one of them to the other. “This man says he saw her kidnapped?”

Donald nodded eagerly. “He saw her talking to two men, and no one’s seen her since.”

Talking isn’t kidnapping. I could see from Gebhard’s carefully neutral expression that he knew it if Donald Lewis didn’t. “Why don’t the police believe the witness?”

“I don’t know,” Lewis was nearly wringing his hands.

“I take it no ransom notes, no contacts, no demands?”

Lewis said darkly, “Those aren’t the only reasons for kidnapping a woman.”

“No,” I said, “they’re not. All right, exactly what’s your relationship to Ms. Xiang, Mr. Lewis?”

“We’re going to be married.” A stubborn tone of defiance joined the distress in his voice.

That told me Xiang Fei might have a different slant on their relationship, and Gebhard knew it, hence the difficult and delicate part. He’d probably told Donald, as gently as he could, that Xiang Fei had simply gone off somewhere as college girls will, and the police had told him there was no evidence of a kidnapping. Donald refused to be convinced, and Gebhard hoped if a bonafide private detective backed him and the cops, Donald might finally believe and give up the idea.

I obliged. “I’ll be honest, Donald. The police take even a whiff of kidnapping seriously. They’re obviously not taking this kidnapping at all seriously. It looks to me like your girlfriendhas simply gone on a trip, and she’ll call when she’s ready. Marriage jitters, second thoughts, last fling, research, who knows? I get five hundred a day plus expenses and extras. This is going to cost you a large nut, and I don’t think you’ll get your money’s worth.”

Donald Lewis’s eyes flashed anger. “You’re wrong! I want her found! I want whoever kidnapped her caught! Money doesn’t matter.”

From the way he said it, there was a lot of money behind Donald. A privileged rich boy. It was there in the quick anger, the stubborn refusal to believe Xiang Fei could possibly have gone anywhere without him, the requests that were more like commands. The Metro cops must have loved him.

“She’s never been gone for a week before?”

“Not without telling me when and where and how long. We had a dinner and movie date for the day after she vanished. She’d never break it without letting me know why.”

Even if their relationship were nothing more than a college romance for a girl heady with the discovery of a different world, most college girls would have at least told him before they vanished for a week.

I asked Gebhard. “Is she missing classes?”

“She isn’t taking classes this quarter. She’s finishing her dissertation.”

“Does she need to do more research?”

“No, not really,” Gebhard admitted grudgingly.

So she should be at her computer. “You have a photo, Mr. Lewis?”

He dug into his wallet and handed me a small snapshot of the two of them in front of some building. Donald was easily six-three, and the top of the girl’s long, thick black hair came inches above his shoulder. Xiang Fei was tall by Chinese standards, probably five-ten. The oriental fold that gives Asian eyes the appearance of being slanted was barely there. She was lean, but not thin. Sturdy. Donald grinned in the picture like a schoolboy with a prized possession. Xiang Fei looked at the camera with a half-mocking smile.

That smile, and the photo, told me a great deal. Xiang Fei wasn’t a beautiful girl, she was a handsome woman. A woman who didn’t look the type to break a date or walk out on a manwithout explaining. It wasn’t much, but factor in the witness, and Donald Lewis’s anguish, and it rated a look.

I’ve learned to pay attention to emotions.

“Write a check for two days in advance. The bill comes later.”

Donald quickly wrote out a check for two thousand, more than I’d asked, gave me Xiang Fei’s address, and had to leave for a class. Marty Gebhard watched the closed door to his office as if he thought Lewis might still be standing outside with his ear pressed against it.

I asked, “How old is Xiang Fei?”

He nodded. He’d been waiting for the question. “She’s twenty-nine, has a master’s from Cambridge, and knows who she is. Donald’s twenty-four, has too much money, and no idea what he is or wants to be. She’s a strong woman. That’s powerfully attractive to some men, and Donald’s one of them. I don’t think-”

“Would you,” I interrupted, “be another, Marty?”

He thought about it. “I find her fascinating. The determined way she goes about everything. But I’m your standard quiet professor. A very nice wife, peace, and a routine low-stakes poker game suits me fine.”

“But not Donald?”

“Donald’s father is a self-made billionaire, and a powerful personality. His mother’s a gentle woman. I think Xiang Fei is the surrogate mother Donald always wanted to stand up against his dad for him.” He shrugged. “Sorry. Pop psychology. A simplified guess at a far more complex situation.”

“But you think their ‘marriage’ is mostly in Donald’s mind?”

“Oh, Xiang Fei seems to like him a lot. Why, I have no idea. But I don’t think he’s anywhere in her intended future, Dan.”

“You know what she intends her future to be?”

“I know it won’t include marriage to a spoiled American boy.”

“Not even for money?”

“That would be the last reason for Xiang Fei to do anything.”

“You’ve thought a lot about her,” I said.

He nodded. “She has that effect on people. She either fascinates them, or they’re afraid of her.”

I’d only seen a photo of Xiang Fei, but she was intriguing the hell out of me.

“Okay, she’s Chinese, smart, strong, and twenty-nine. What else? What did she do in China? Who are her parents?”

“She doesn’t talk about herself or her past. Or China, for that matter. Her records give only her parent’s names and occupations, and her academic transcript. Her father is Zhao Zhongwu, a minor civil servant, and her mother is Zhao Sooling. Xiang did her secondary school in Chongqing, her undergraduate in Beijing, and her M.Phil. at Cambridge.”

“Why isn’t her family name the same as her father’s?”

“I have no idea.”

After agreeing to get together with him and Carol at least for drinks, I left Marty staring into space as if seeing Xiang Fei, wherever she was.

Xiang Fei lived in a low-rise apartment building on a shaded back street near the university. The apartment she shared with two other girls was on the second floor facing the street. Her roommates were home, drinking beer and watching television. The police had talked to them. They weren’t too worried about Xiang Fei, but they were a little worried.

Sally Fanelli said, “Like, she still had laundry in the dryer. I mean, she was doing her laundry, and needed a coffee fix, you know?”

Nancy Devlin added. “We were out of coffee, so she went to the mall Starbucks. She was supposed to bring us back double lattes.”

“She didn’t?”

“She never came back.”

“What about Donald? Did she have a date with him the next day?”

Sally nodded. “He took her expensive places. She liked that, but, there was, like, you know, no spark.”

“It’s ‘cause she’s older,” Devlin explained with the wisdom of nineteen.

“Can I see her bedroom?”

“Sure,” Devlin said.

“You won’t find much,” Sally said. “The cops took most of her things.”

“Really?” If the Metro police didn’t believe in the kidnapping, why take her possessions?

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police have various geographical commands, sort of like super New York precincts. I drove to the downtown command where I knew one detective lieutenant. I’d only been to Vegas on the job twice before, both missing girls cases. (Girls tend to run to Vegas or Hollywood. Boys head for Mexico or Malibu. Both escape to New York. They’re the biggest dreamers.) I’d found one girl, and had worked with Chris Yost both times.

He grinned when I walked in, and waved me to a chair in his cluttered cubicle. “What’s her name this time, Fortune?”

“Xiang Fei. She’s a Chinese student-”

The grinned vanished abruptly. “I know who the hell she is. What’s your interest in her?”

“Hired by her fiancé.”

“Lewis?” Yost leaned back in his chair, shook his head. “Hell, I don’t believe for a damned second he’s anyone’s fiancé except in his dreams.”

“You also don’t believe the woman’s been kidnapped.”

He gave me a pitying look. “Don’t tell me you believe his fairy tale? No ransom note, no political demands, no damn contact at all? Come on, Fortune. The kid’s been dumped and doesn’t want to believe it.”

“The witness?”

Yost snorted in derision. “Some guy having a cappuccino inside Starbucks sees a woman who might have been Xiang Fei talking to a couple of guys. Talking, that’s all. No grabbing and shoving into a car, no struggle, not even an argument. He turns his attention to something else, and when he looks back all three are gone. How long he looked away, who knows? Damn it, Fortune, he didn’t know if the woman was Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, or Russian! He can’t even say what the two guys looked like except they were both white.”

“Then why pick up all her stuff?”

“You know damn well we have to act on any report of kidnapping. We talked to the Lewis kid, her roommates, and herprofessors. We hauled in her things looking for a motive. We talked to the alleged witness. We canvassed the scene. We came up empty. It never happened. She’s off somewhere on her own.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Lieutenant. She’s twenty-nine, a woman, not a girl. Everyone says she’s steady, responsible, serious. She stands up a guy she’s at least dating regularly. She leaves laundry she’s doing in the dryer. She’s supposed to bring coffee back to her roommates, and doesn’t. She’s been gone a week without telling anyone where or why. She talks to two guys, and hasn’t been seen since. I have questions.”

“We don’t. The so-called witness didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a kidnapping. Everything else suggests a spur-of-the-moment decision to go somewhere. Plus there’s no motive.”

“Except the reason more women are grabbed than money or politics.”

Yost sighed. “Come on. In a shopping mall, with people all around, rapists grab and run. The victim fights, screams. No one saw anything like that. And any other motive means ransom or hostage, and there would be phone calls.”

He was right, but I owed Marty at least my best shot. “You have the witness’s name and address?”

Yost was interested in the ceiling of his cubicle. He hesitated far longer than I thought normal. “Sure. Frank Goss.” He wrote down the address.

It turned out to be a house buried in vegetation less than half a mile from the mall. When I got there I found an empty garage, and a recessed door with tall plants on both sides that no one opened. I waited in my car, but when Goss still hadn’t come home by 6:00 p.m., I climbed back out and gave the front doorbell one last push. Nothing.

It was growing dark, and I decided to pack it in for the day. It looked more and more like Xiang Fei was off somewhere having fun, and the bad news for Donald could wait until tomorrow.

Still, why had Lieutenant Yost hesitated so long before giving me the name and address of a witness he said had been useless?

In Kay’s new dark blue S-type Jag I’d reached the corner of Frank Goss’s house when a red Mercedes 560SL pulled away from the curb across the street. It had not been there when I arrived, or while I waited, so had to have parked while I was giving the bell that one last ring. Coincidence or a tail?

I placed my SIG-Sauer 9mm on the seat beside me, and led the 560 on a chase along the rapidly darkening back streets, not too fast and not too slow. I found the mall where Xiang Fei had gone for coffee, parked in front of the Starbucks, and went in. I ordered a decaf latte, and sat at a table near the window.

The 560SL was parked three cars up from Kay’s Jag. I carried my latte out to the Jag without looking at the car, and opened the passenger side door. I bent in low out of sight of the Mercedes as if placing the latte into a coffee holder on the floor. Leaving the coffee on the floor and door open, I stayed low and circled to the 560.

Donald Lewis sat in the driver’s seat. When he saw me, he rolled down the window. “Have you found her?”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“I expected a call by now.”

“Did you?” I went around, opened the passenger door, and sat beside him.

For the first time he noticed my missing arm. “Does that make it harder to do your work?”

“It makes everything harder.”

“How-?”

“A crocodile bit it off,” I told him. “Now listen closely. I’ll do your job. From what I’ve learned so far you’re not going to like the result, but you let me handle it, or I quit. No hovering, no tailing, no calling every ten minutes.”

He heard nothing except that he wouldn’t like the result. “You’re the same as all the rest. You don’t believe me.”

“I believe you think she’s been kidnapped, and I believe you’re worried. The police don’t, and so far neither do I. But I’ll work on it until I’m sure. Now go home. When I have something, I’ll call.”

He glared at me as I climbed back out, but when I reached my car I heard the Mercedes start and screech off. An impatient young man who liked his own way.

I drove to the Mirage, and went up to our room. Kay was propped on the bed, shoes off, legs stretched out, a Newcastle Brown in her hand, looking tired.

“How’d the calls go?” I said, sitting in the armchair facing her.

“Sold five gowns, six suits-skirts and pants-and accessories.”

“Good,” I said. “You can play the rest of the time we’re here.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Dinner, a good one on the first night. A show. Back to the room. Not necessarily in that order. Or are you too tired?”

She drained her Newcastle, and smiled. “Not that tired.”

Next morning at 8:00 a.m. I stood on Frank Goss’s doorstep.

“I told the police what I saw. They said it was meaningless.”

“I’m not the police. Tell me.”

“Why the hell should I?”

“Because I’m working for the woman.”

He stared hard at me, then stepped back. We went into a large living room with a cathedral ceiling and good modern furniture. He pointed to a chrome and fabric couch, sat in a matching arm chair. “I’ll tell you exactly what I told them. I saw this tall woman in a long brown skirt, brown boots, and tan jacket. When she got out of her car, these two guys walked up and talked to her.”

So they either knew she was going to Starbucks and were waiting, or they had tailed her. “What kind of car? What did the two guys look like?”

“An old, light blue Dodge Aries. I didn’t get a good look at them. Two white guys like everyone else you see in a mall.”

“Tall or short? Light or dark hair. Formal clothes or casual?”

“Sort of tall, maybe six-feet even. Both of them. One dark-haired. The other wore a baseball cap. Mall clothes. You know, windbreakers, chino slacks, jeans.”

“They didn’t touch the woman? Or argue? She wasn’t alarmed?”

“Not when I saw them. My attention was caught by something else, and when I looked back they’d all left.”

“Her car was gone too?”

“No. It was still there. I remember wondering where she’d gone.”

That caught my attention. “She didn’t come into Starbucks?”

“Starbucks? No, of course not. I’d have known if she was Chinese, or Japanese, or possibly Vietnamese if she had.”

Supposedly, Xiang Fei had gone to the mall for coffee and nothing more. So where had she gone?

“You told the police all that?”

“Damn sure did.”

“Was the Aries gone when you left the mall?”

“Almost. After Starbucks, I had to buy some books and CDs at Border’s, and when I came out they were towing it.”

“Towing it?” No one had mentioned towing. “The police were towing it?”

“I don’t think it was the police. Just a regular tow truck. I suppose the car had broken down or wouldn’t start.”

“The woman was with it?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t see her.”

To say Goss had painted a vastly different picture wouldn’t be true. But the picture was different. More detailed, with a woman who did not do what she had gone to the mall to do, and a towed car. I remembered Yost’s hesitation before he gave me Goss’s name. The police were lying. Why?

In my car I dialed the number of the roommates.

“Mr. Fortune? Hi, it’s Nancy.”

“What car does Xiang Fei drive, and what was she wearing?”

“An ’87 Dodge Aries, pale blue. She had on her nice calf-length brown cord skirt, cordovan boots, dark brown man-tailored blouse, and her beige jacket.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Are any of her clothes missing besides those?”

“Gosh, we wouldn’t know. The cops took everything.”

I sat in the car for a time. All right, the police were lying, probably about more than I knew, and I didn’t think they were going to fill me in any time soon. Where did I go next? If Xiang Fei had been kidnapped, why did they have it under wraps?What was special about Xiang Fei? I could only think of one place to ask that.

I drove to Las Vegas International, and bought a round trip to San Francisco. First class.

Relations with China had changed dramatically since 1983. What had been a Chinese mission in San Francisco then, was a consulate now, and the man who talked to me was the consul. He wore an impeccably tailored business suit complete with white shirt and conservative tie.

“What is your interest in Xiang Fei,” he glanced at my card, “Mr. Fortune?”

“Her fiancé hired me to investigate what happened to her.”

He didn’t ask who her fiancé was. “What has happened to her?”

Some things never change. He was as inscrutable as his counterpart in 1983. It had nothing to do with being Oriental, only with being a bureaucrat in a foreign country. I enlightened him with what Frank Goss told me, especially the towed car.

He never changed expression. “It is essentially what I have been informed by your authorities. What seems to be your problem?”

“If her car was towed, how could she have gone away in it?”

“Most probably the car was repaired, and she then went on her trip. She could even have taken a bus. Or flown.”

“She could have levitated,” I said.

He smiled a thin smile. “Amusing. But I’m told the police have found no motive, and I can think of none. I don’t understand your concern, Mr. Fortune.”

Someone had filled him in thoroughly about Xiang Fei.

“I don’t understand your lack of concern. In my experience, Chinese officials raise holy hell when there’s even a hint of danger to one of your citizens abroad.”

This produced a faint narrowing of his eyes. “I am confident Xiang Fei is in no danger. I have full trust in your fine police.”

“Even though they’ve lied to me?”

“Possibly the police do not feel obliged to tell you everything. Do your job for you, as it were.”

“You’re taking our State Department’s word for all of it?”

A furrow appeared between his narrowed eyes. “Since their word fits all the facts, I am. Might I suggest you do the same, Mr. Fortune?”

“Is that what you’d advise if we were in China?”

“In China your profession does not exist.”

I stood. “Now that you’re going capitalist, it will.”

“China is not going capitalist. That is a mistake many in the West make. We are a socialist nation adapting to the free market world beyond our borders, which, at the moment, we cannot change.” He almost smiled. “Have a good day, Mr. Fortune.”

I drove south back to San Francisco International, thinking hard. A Chinese consul should be howling his head off to have Xiang Fei located, wherever she was. The police were lying. Or, at least, not telling me everything they knew. Something was wrong. A piece was missing. I mulled it over all the way to the airport, and by the time I arrived by the bay a possible explanation had dawned in my mind.

I looked hard at her photo again.

Then I switched flights to Santa Barbara. It was Donald’s money.

Jan Brouwer came out of his darkroom with the enlarged negative of the snapshot Donald Lewis had given me. Or part of the snapshot. The part I hoped would confirm the bells ringing in my mind.

“The guy used a damned expensive 35mm SLR. A Leica M6 TTL or better. It took a hell of a blowup before it grained out. Now let’s print the sucker.”

Minutes later he dropped an eight by ten glossy on his desk in front of me. A head shot of Xiang Fei and her sardonic smile. I studied it. The thick black hair was coarse. The aquiline nose, prominent cheekbones, and pale brown skin color of the long face leaped out at me. A lean face already slightly weathered at twenty-nine. Her large dark eyes were round, and had the squint creases of a land of strong sun and stronger winds. It was a face that dropped into place like the final move in a chess match.

I called Donald Lewis on my cell phone. “How much will your father back you with money to get Xiang Fei back?”

He could barely speak with excitement. “They’ve asked for a ransom? Who are they?”

“Answer my question.”

“As much as I ask him to when he knows what it’s for. Who-”

“I’ll get back to you.” I rang off. Fortunately, he didn’t have my cell phone number, or our room number in Vegas.

The next call went to Los Angeles and the law offices of John Jeffries.

“Dan Fortune,” I told the receptionist. “I need to speak to him.”

It wasn’t long before the voice that made prosecutors and judges grind their teeth came on the line. “Dan, my boy. It’s been a long time.”

I explained the bare facts of what I suspected. “How’s your time frame?”

“How’s your money frame?”

“Promising.”

“Then I have time. Details?”

“For now, this is a heads up.”

My final call was to The Los Angeles Times. Larry Norris was a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist. I told him more of what I suspected than I had Jeffries.

Then I headed for the airport again.

At the reception desk of the Metro police when I asked for Lieutenant Yost, I got Captain Bruccoli. His office had two windows and a real door. “Don’t sit down, Fortune. What I have to say won’t take that long.”

“What I have to say might.”

“You don’t get to talk. You listen. You’re interfering with an ongoing police investigation. You’re meddling in matters that don’t concern you, and that could land you in serious trouble. I’m telling you stop whatever you think you’re doing. Now.”

I smiled. That annoys petty tyrants more than anything else. “You finished?”

“Yes, and so are you. Get out of here.”

I opened my manila envelope, and dropped the enlarged faceof Xiang Fei on his desk in front of him. “I suggest you look at this because it tells the whole story. Maybe you don’t know enough, but believe me, this photo at the top of an L.A. Times feature story is going to make a lot of people unhappy.”

He pulled the photo to him. As I expected, it meant nothing. But I had his attention. “What feature story?”

“The one that will explain who those two men who talked to Xiang Fei were, and who towed Xiang Fei’s car. Or whatever her other name is.”

“Other name? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Just tell the sheriff I want to meet with those guys before I put the story in motion and hire the best lawyer Donald Lewis’s father’s money can buy.”

Bruccoli wasn’t exactly sputtering when I left, but I hadn’t made a friend.

If I were right, I didn’t give a damn.

Now, as Kay and I walked home along cold and windy Las Vegas Boulevard, the midnight blue sedan pulled to the side of the road in front of us. The rear door opened. “He’ll talk to you. Get in.”

I gave Kay a kiss, and climbed into the sedan. The man closed the door, the driver squealed away.

The John Lawrence Bailey Federal Building in Las Vegas is at 700 East Charleston Boulevard. The man I faced this time across his desk was tall and wore the mandatory dark suit. Except his suit was a custom-made charcoal gray, and his office was a large corner one. He pushed my business card around his desk with one finger as if playing with a small animal.

“What do you think you want, Mr. Fortune?”

“I want to talk to her.”

“Why?”

“To hear what she has to say before I go to a lawyer and the L.A. Times.”

“You can’t see her, and neither can your lawyer or the L.A. Times.”

I sat watching his finger toy with my card. “Exactly who is she terrorizing?”

“That’s classified.” The Mister was gone. He gave me a cold stare Captain Bruccoli couldn’t begin to match.

“You like what you’re doing?”

“What am I doing?”

“Throwing a woman into a cell alone and incommunicado, when she’s done nothing in this country, or against this country. No lawyer, no judge, no visitors, no charges, no telephone call, no civil or human rights. No admission you’re even holding her. She disappears. Exactly like Chile or Argentina.”

“Chile and Argentina were political civil wars. Our war against terrorism is international. We’ve been attacked. We’re defending ourselves.”

I took an interest in the darkness outside his windows. We were high enough, and facing in the right direction, to see the dark even in Las Vegas. “Don’t you get a sense of déjà vu? That we’ve all been here before?”

“If you’re talking about the McCarthy era, there’s no resemblance.”

“Actually, I was thinking of the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Congress and President John Adams in 1798.”

“Never heard of them, but I expect Adams knew what he was doing.”

No one knows history anymore, not even our own.

“Ben Franklin didn’t think so: ‘They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ Tom Jefferson rescinded those laws as soon as he became president.”

“Ben Franklin and Tom Jefferson lived in different times, without terrorists who target civilians and strike without warning, nuclear bombs in satchels, and biological weapons that can be carried in a pocket.”

“They lived in times of Indians who targeted civilians and struck without warning on a thousand mile frontier. A time of two superpowers who encouraged and armed the Indians against us, and were ready to attack us at any time. And a far more dangerous and vulnerable homeland.”

“Then President Adams knew what he was doing after all.” It was his turn to look out at the dark. “You’re wasting your time and mine. The woman isn’t a citizen. She’s Chinese.”

“I don’t think she is.”

His eyes were suddenly cautious. “You don’t think she’s what?”

“Chinese. And legal resident aliens who have done nothing are supposed to have rights here. That’s what America is about.”

He sat there staring down at my card as if trying to understand something. He either gave up, or decided he didn’t care. “We’re in a war against terrorism. She belongs to a terrorist organization on our list. It’s national security. Period.”

I said, “Whose national security? Ours or China’s?”

This time he only stared at me. “Go home, let us do our job.”

I shook my head. “For twenty years we’ve been pressuring Beijing to improve their human and civil rights record. Three years ago we would have been loudly demanding Xiang Fei’s rights and freedoms. Shouting for democracy. Now, she’s done nothing against us, but we arrest her without charge and throw her into a cell without trial.”

“Things have changed.”

“Not for her, not for China, and not for me,” I told him. “I’m going to John Jeffries, I expect you know who he is. I’m going to report to my client. His father is very rich, and that means connections as well as the money to pay Jeffries. I’ve already talked to Larry Norris at the Times. He loves the Chinese spin on this story.”

“The Times won’t print it.”

“Norris will write it, and someone will print it. It’s too good a story. That’s America too. At the very least it’ll embarrass your bosses. Everything is spin these days, and a lot of their supporters won’t like this spin.”

He thought about that. “I could stop you.”

“Not with lawyers and feature writers already knowing exactly what I’m doing. Too big a kettle of fish. Very bad PR. I’ll make the same deal I came to make. I’ll talk to her before I do anything else. It could change my mind.”

He hesitated longer than Lieutenant Yost had three days ago. Then shook his head. “It’s not going to happen.”

I stood. “You’ll hear from Jeffries. Do I get a ride home?”

He reached for his phone. “Drive Fortune back to his hotel.”

I didn’t look back as I left. I didn’t have to. By the time I was in the midnight blue sedan down in the garage he’d be on thephone to the director in D.C. The director would call the attorney general. In the car, I watched the lights of Vegas, bright and busy at any hour. Traffic was still heavy. We’re a busy people, too busy most of the time to think about yesterday or tomorrow.

I heard the car phone ring. The conversation in the front seat was muted.

Then the agent in the passenger seat turned and said, “We’re going back.”

I took out my cell, called Kay. I knew she wouldn’t be asleep. “It’s okay. Go to bed. I’ll be in the hotel by morning if not earlier.”

They had Xiang Fei in an isolation cell. She lay on the bottom bunk reading a book, still wearing the clothes she’d disappeared in.

“I’m Dan Fortune, a private investigator hired by Donald Lewis to find you.” I held out my card. “He thinks he’s your fiancé.”

She lowered her book. “He’s a nice boy.”

“What’s your non-Chinese name, and which Central Asian ethnic group are you? Kazakh? Kirghiz? Uighur? Uzbek? Maybe Tajik?”

She closed the book. “Why have they let you talk to me?”

“Let’s say you’re a special case, I have connections, and Donald has money.”

She stood, and walked to the window. Taller than I’d thought from the snapshot, leaner and sturdier. A woman who could ride a horse all day with a baby on her back and a rifle over her shoulder. None of which would help her here. She looked out at the shining glitz of Las Vegas. “My name is Aimur Imin. I’m a Uighur from Kashgar.”

“Yet the Chinese sent you abroad for an education. Isn’t that unusual?”

She turned. “What do you know about the Uighurs?”

“You’re a Turkic people of Central Asia, mostly in China, and you’re Muslims.”

“An ancient Turkic people long before we were Muslims. We rode with Ghengis Khan and Timur, perhaps with the Huns.Nomadic warriors and sheepherders who have mostly settled down and become farmers. The Han Chinese want to destroy our ethnic identity and our culture. The Han don’t recognize anyone else on earth as people, and they want to assimilate us.”

“Like the Borg in the Star Trek television show?”

She smiled. “There is a similarity. One of China’s ways is to offer a Han and Western education to special Uighurs who will then teach Han and Western culture to Uighur children. I am half Han, so I was the perfect candidate.”

“But to yourself you’re all Uighur, have no intention of helping the Han, and somehow they found out.”

“It would seem so.”

“What’s the name of your ‘terrorist’ organization?”

“Uighurstan Liberation Organization.”

“Which is now on our attorney general’s list of terrorist groups.”

She shrugged. “We have never acted against anyone but the Han, never attacked civilians, never acted outside Central Asia, but your government wants China as an ally in your war on terrorism, so we are now terrorists.”

I said, “I look at you, and I see a highly educated, sophisticated, independent woman. Someone ethnicity should sit lightly on, if it sits at all, and who knows as well as anyone that Uighurstan is a remote dream in today’s world.”

She sat down again on the edge of her bunk. “Do you know Kashgar?” She caressed the word, Kashgar, as if it were the name of a lover.

“I know it’s a city on the Silk Road.”

“We call the ancient trade route the Golden Road. The Golden Road to Kashgar, to Samarkand, to India, to ancient Rome, to the entire world. Kashgar lies between the deserts to the east, and twenty-thousand foot mountains to the west. The Chinese arrived to claim us in your first century A.D. Kashgar had already been a trading center of the known world for over a thousand years. Marco Polo came and rediscovered Kashgar for Europe in 1274, when it was over two thousand years old.” Her intense eyes could see the deserts and the mountains and the two thousand years. “We’ve been governed by Ghengis Khan’s Mongols, Timur himself, many Turkic empires, and, from time to time, by the Chinese who never controlled us forlong. The last Turkic kingdom was that of the great Yakub Beg, who was not Turkic but a Tajik general who made Kashgar the center of a kingdom in 1865, and remained there, opening ties with Britain, until 1876 when the Chinese came again. In 1930 my grandfather and a Chinese Muslim general declared a Republic of East Turkestan, but the Chinese came once more. The Chinese always come.”

She could see the Chinese. “I will tell you two stories. In Kashgar, the tomb of Abakh Hoja, an Islamic prophet who died in 1639, is a great hall with a dome of brilliant green tiles. Also in the hall is the tomb of his granddaughter, Iparhan. She was captured by one more Chinese army in the mid-eighteenth century, and taken to the Forbidden City to be concubine to the Qing emperor. But she cried every day for her desert home, and rejected all his advances. Some legends say she refused him for twenty-five years, others that she survived less than a year, but in the end she killed herself. The devastated emperor sent her in death on the three-year return journey to Kashgar. She is known in Chinese history as Xiang Fei, the Fragrant Concubine. When I disowned my Han father, I changed my Han name to Xiang Fei.”

She began to pace the tiny cell. “The second is modern. In 1953 the Chinese sent a thousand soldiers into the desert of our remote Xinjiang, and told them to build a city. There were wolves, heat, little water, and they lived in holes in the ground, as many of your own early pioneers did. They used cannon as plows, machine guns to mark furrows, and they built Shihezi that is now a city of six hundred thousand. It has movie theaters, visiting music and dance groups from eastern China, a Mandarin radio and TV station that broadcasts only within Shihezi, and the population is ninety percent Han. There are no minorities in Shihezi, and nearby villagers are not allowed to enter.”

She let the silence in the cell stretch for a full minute. “In their eyes, the Han are your westward pioneers in a thousand Hollywood movies. We are the Indians.”

By noon the next day I was in L.A. in Jeffries’s office. I told him everything I knew, and everything Aimur Imin had said.

Jeffries radiated outrage. “She’s no threat to the U.S.! For God’s sake, she’s one of the people for whom we demand democracy. You get Norris to write the story, and I’ll get her into court.”

I wasn’t as optimistic. In anxious times of fear, crisis and hysteria-real, imagined, or invented-standing up against the tide is not the way to get ahead. “Norris will write the story, but the bureau chief is right. There’s a good chance the Times won’t publish it, and judges aren’t in a human rights mood these days.”

“You find out all you can about these Uighurs and the Chinese, and I’ll find a federal judge who doesn’t believe in suspending the constitution for any reason.”

I said, “Maybe you won’t want to, John. When I reported to my client, he wasn’t all that pleased to have been right. He’s suddenly not certain his father’s going to foot your bill, and he’s not so sure he wants him to. He doesn’t seem as enamored of Aimur Imin as he was of Xiang Fei. Maybe because taking an unpopular position won’t help his father sell a lot of widgets.”

“Yeah,” Jeffries said with disgust. “So this one I do pro bono. I never really wanted to be rich. She’ll be back in class in a month, trust me.”

I wanted to believe him, but Aimur Imin and her Uighurs were the Indians, and it’s not only in revolutions that eggs are broken. Deserts and oases vanish, small animals become extinct, societies are destroyed, and people disappear and die in the march of progress, the building of empires.