Snakehead

I

Deputy J. J. Jackson, known to his colleagues at the Walker County Sheriff’s Department simply as Jayjay, stuck another matchstick between his front teeth and began chewing on it. He unzippered his fly and issued a yellow stream into the dry bed of Bedias Creek. Steam rose from it in the cool morning air, and he made a bold effort to make sure that most of it crossed the county line into Madison. Somewhere to the north, beyond the trees that broke the monotony of the flat Texan landscape, prisoners were being called out of their cells at the Ferguson Unit to face another day of incarceration. And he was free to piss in the breeze, clocking off in just over half an hour, to bring to an end the long red-eye shift, and with it the prospect of an empty bed. He spat out the matchstick and regretted that he had ever given up smoking. He was sure to die of wood poisoning.

The Dixie Chicks played from the open door of his black and white. Strictly nonregulation, but hell, you had to have something to keep you awake. He squeezed his ample frame in behind the wheel and eased his patrol car out on to the deserted Highway 45. He was flying now, south, into the wild blue. Day was when Martha would have had hot pancakes and syrup, and a plate of grits on the table when he got home. But since she’d run off with that air-con salesman he’d taken to driving into Huntsville for breakfast at the Café Texan, opposite the county courthouse on Sam Houston Avenue. He always sat in the smoking room just so he could breathe in other people’s cigarettes. Nothing you could do about second-hand smoke he could tell the doc.

He sang along with the Chicks for a few bars.

Up off the highway on the right a Mexican fast food joint stood proud on the bluff. Much as he liked that beer with the slice of lime stuffed in the neck, Jayjay avoided Mexican food whenever possible. It gave him bad heartburn. But today he turned off and followed the bumpy road up to the parking lot, a big empty stretch of dusty tarmac. Empty, that is, except for a large refrigerated food container hooked up to a red, shiny trailer tractor. Not unusual. Truckers often pulled off to snatch a few moments shut-eye during an all-nighter. But the door on the driver’s side was lying wide open, and there was no sign of anyone around. There were no other vehicles in the lot, and the restaurant wouldn’t be open for hours yet.

Jayjay left his engine running and got out of the car. He had no idea why the truck had drawn his attention. Maybe it was because the driver had made no attempt to slot it anywhere between the faded white lines. Maybe it was just instinct. Jayjay held a lot of store by instinct. He had had an instinct that Martha was going to leave him at least two years before she finally got around to it. Although that might not have been so much instinct as wishful thinking. But, hell, there was something odd about this truck. It looked…abandoned. He pulled the brim of his Stetson down, stuck another matchstick in his mouth and clamped his open palms on his hips, the forefinger of his right hand touching the leather of his holster for comfort.

Slowly he approached the open door of the truck, glancing a touch nervously to left and right.

‘Hey y’all,’ he called. And when there was no response, ‘Anybody there?’ He stopped, staring up into the empty cab, working the matchstick from one corner of his mouth to the other. Then he pulled himself up into the cabin and checked in back where the driver would usually sleep. Empty.

He eased himself down on to the tarmac and looked around. Where the hell could he have gone? The Dixie Chicks were getting into some R&B back in the car. A slight breeze stirred the dust in the lot. Sun rising under early morning cloud dimpled it copper pink. Later, as the same sun rose, it would burn it off.

Jayjay walked the length of the trailer, past rows of tyres as tall as he was, painted black walls, treads he could almost get a fist into. GARCIA WHOLESALE, it said on the side. Fresh painted. New.

Round the back the tall doors of the trailer stood slightly ajar, and he began to get a bad feeling. He took his gun from his holster, crooking his arm and pointing the weapon at the sky. ‘Hey!’ he shouted again. ‘Is there anybody in there?’ He didn’t really expect a reply, but was disappointed to be right. He spat out the match and pulled the left-hand door wide. It was heavy and swung open slowly. He was immediately hit by the smell of something rotten. Whatever cargo this thing was carrying had been left unrefrigerated and was well past its sell-by. He could see boxes of produce piled high: tomatoes, eggplants, avocados, cucumbers. He grabbed a handle on the inside of the door and pulled himself up. The smell was almost overpowering now, thick and sour like vomit and faeces. Jayjay blenched. ‘Jesus…’ he hissed. Boxes had collapsed from either side and he had to pull them away to make any progress into the interior of the trailer. Tomatoes and cucumbers rattled away across the riveted steel floor, and a naked arm fell from between two boxes, an open palm seeming to beckon him in. Jayjay let out an involuntary yelp and felt goosebumps prickle across his scalp. He holstered his gun and started tearing at the cardboard. Another column of boxes toppled around him revealing that only the back quarter of the truck was carrying produce. It was too dark to see clearly into the space beyond, or the body lying at his feet. He was gagging now on the stench. He fumbled for the flashlight hanging on his belt. The beam that pierced the dark shot back through him like a frozen arrow. The scream stopped in his throat, too thick to squeeze past constricting airways. Bodies. Dozens of them trapped in the light, fixed in death. Arms and legs entwined, faces contorted terribly by some dreadful struggle to hold on to life. Vomit and blood and torn clothes. Ghostly pale Asian faces, wide-eyed and lifeless, like photographs he had seen of mass graves in concentration camps. Jayjay staggered backwards, stumbling over boxes, feet skidding away from him on the slime of burst and rotting tomatoes. He hit the floor with a force that knocked all the breath out of him. For a moment he lay still, wondering if he had slipped through a crack in the earth and fallen into the devil’s lair. And in the distance he heard the Dixie Chicks. I’ve seen ’em fall, some get nothing and, Lord, some get it all.

II

III

Dr. Margaret Campbell stood before a class of nearly twenty students in a lecture room at the George J. Beto Criminal Justice Center in Huntsville. The center stood on a hill overlooking the death house in the Walls Unit of Huntsville Prison, where George W. Bush had given all of fifteen minutes consideration to the case of each prisoner he had sent for execution there during his time as state governor.

The Criminal Justice Center was a part of Sam Houston State University, and another seventeen students were watching Margaret on closed-circuit television from a facility at The Woodlands, nearly thirty miles away down the highway toward Houston. Any one of them could hit a remote unit on the bench in front of them and have their picture and voice relayed to the lecturer. She, in turn, could direct the camera toward herself, or toward the screen at the front of the room on which she was at that moment projecting an image of a woman hanging by the neck from the ceiling of a garage.

‘When the officer failed to show up for his shift and they couldn’t raise him on the telephone, the desk sergeant sent a couple of patrolmen round to the house to see what was wrong. They knew his wife was away visiting her parents that weekend and thought maybe he was just sleeping off a night of excess.’ Margaret chuckled. ‘Well, excess was right, and the sleep was permanent. When they couldn’t raise anyone in the house, the patrolmen went round peering in the windows.’ She prodded the screen with a pointer. ‘And this is what they saw in the garage. What appeared to be a large, heavy woman hanging from a light fitting, her face obscured by long black hair hanging down over it.

‘Well, they figured they had probable cause, and they called for the paramedics and broke in. They discovered two things very quickly. The first that the woman was dead, the second that she wasn’t a woman. That she was, in fact, their friend and colleague, Jack Thomas Doobey, a three-times decorated police officer with more than twenty-five years service.’

A tiny snigger rippled around the lecture room. Margaret invariably found that her lectures on auto-erotic deaths both amused and fascinated her students. Something to do with the human condition, perhaps tapping into the latent fear that most people have of the dark side of their own sexuality.

‘He’d done a pretty good job of turning himself into a woman,’ Margaret said. ‘As you can see. Good enough to fool his fellow officers, at least until they got right up close.’ She segued through several other transparencies as she spoke, including close-ups of Officer Doobey’s carefully made-up face, his black wig, the glued-on fuschia-pink fingernails that adorned hairy fingers, the dress, the layers of padding beneath it to give him hips and breasts.

‘He had gagged himself.’ Red silk over pink lips. ‘And tied his hands behind his back.’

‘How’d he do that?’ a black girl on the front row asked.

‘Stand up,’ Margaret said.

The girl glanced at her fellow students self-consciously and got reluctantly to her feet.

‘Step out in front of the class and clasp your hands in front of you,’ Margaret ordered. The girl did as she was told. ‘Now bend forward, reaching for the floor, and without unclasping your hands, step through them.’ The girl struggled a little to follow the instructions while her classmates laughed. But with only a little difficulty, she managed to do what she had been asked and stood up with her hands now clasped behind her back.

‘You see? Easy.’

Another series of transparencies flashed on-screen to reveal how Officer Doobey had rigged up a pulley mechanism to raise and lower the hanging noose through a large hook sunk into the roof.

Margaret elucidated. ‘He controlled the pulley with a remote control unit he had adapted from a basic stereo system. So that made-up, dressed up, gagged and tied, he stood on a chair with the noose around his neck and the remote control in his hands behind him. That way he could raise the noose until it was tight around his neck and taking most of his weight, literally choking him. And then at the last moment lower himself back on to the chair.’

The class looked back at her in awed silence, clearly visualising the scenario. Then the face of a dark-haired young man from The Woodlands popped up on the monitor and his voice came across the speaker system. ‘But why, Dr. Campbell? I mean, why would he do that?’

Margaret said, ‘Good question.’ She paused, considering how to phrase her response. ‘We are led to understand that by starving oneself of oxygen, one is able to heighten the sexual experience.’ She registered the consternation on the faces of her students as they tried to imagine what was remotely sexual about dressing up as a member of the opposite sex and hanging yourself. Margaret smiled. ‘But I don’t recommend that you try it at home.’ Which brought the relief of laughter to the room.

‘When I got there,’ she went on, ‘I was able to determine pretty quickly that Officer Doobey had managed inadvertently to turn the remote control the wrong way around in his hands after setting the pulley in motion, and was unable to lower it again. You can picture the scene. There he is, hanging by the neck, choking on his own weight. The binding on his wrists that is loose when in front of him, is twisted and tight behind him. He has no flexibility of movement with his hands. He is fumbling desperately to turn the remote around to lower himself to safety. And then it slips from his fingers and smashes on the floor and he knows he is going to die. He struggles for a few moments, feet kicking, then gives up and succumbs to the screaming in his ears and the blackness that descends over him bringing, in the end, a very long silence.’

A silence filled the lecture room as these green freshmen conjured images of death they could never have imagined. Images, Margaret knew, with which they would become only too familiar when they graduated into the real and unpleasant world beyond this cloistered academic environment. The hum of the sound system seemed inordinately loud in the silence. Margaret caught a glimpse of herself on the monitor. Pale and freckled, fair hair tumbling carelessly over her shoulders. The CCTV cameras did her no favours. God, she looked old, she thought. Much older than her thirty-four years. Perhaps all those images of death she had had to deal with herself over the years had etched themselves into her face. What was it they called it…character?

A young man with close-cropped blond hair at the back of the room asked, ‘How could you know that for sure? Couldn’t someone have set it up just to look that way, and really it was murder?’

‘Yes, Mark, that’s possible,’ Margaret said. ‘But I was able to rule that out pretty much straight off.’

‘How?’

‘Because Officer Doobey not only liked hanging himself, he also liked watching himself do it. He had set up a camera, and the whole drama was there on video tape. Death by Hanging—at a cinema near you.’ Margaret grinned ruefully. ‘It would make life a lot easier if all my cases were available on video.’ She closed the folder on her desk. ‘That’s all for today, guys.’

In the corridor outside, the babble of excited student voices had already receded as they headed out for coffee and no doubt a few cigarettes. Margaret never ceased to be amazed at how many young people were smoking now. A whole generation had given up, but the kids apparently didn’t care about the health issues. It made Margaret think of her time in China where everyone, it seemed, smoked. Everywhere. But even the most fleeting thought of the Middle Kingdom, even after a year, touched raw nerves, and she immediately turned away from it. She pulled her leather jacket on under the turned-up collar of her blouse and stooped to take a mouthful of water from a stainless steel drinking fountain below a wall-mounted display case filled with the badges and stars of innumerable law agencies.

‘Ma’am? Can I have a word?’

She looked up and saw the boy with the cropped head of fair hair from the back of her class. He was grinning shyly, clutching his satchel to his chest, and her heart sank. He always managed to find something he could ask her about after class.

She stood up and thrust both hands in the pockets of her jeans. ‘Mark, I’ve told you before — it’s Doctor, or Margaret. Ma’am makes me sound like a…well, like a schoolmarm.’ And she immediately saw the irony in that. Because here she was, a teacher being cornered after class by a pupil with a crush on her. She smiled. ‘Just call me Margaret.’

But Mark clearly wasn’t comfortable with that. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot, Dr. Campbell, you know, after your classes and all, about what it is I really want to do.’

Margaret grinned and set off along the corridor. He loped after her. ‘And today you finally figured it out,’ she said.

He frowned. ‘What?’

‘Autoeroticism. Cross-dressing and oxygen starvation.’

He blushed to the roots of his hair. ‘No…I…I…didn’t mean…’ he stuttered. ‘I mean, what I meant was…I think I’d like to be a pathologist.’ And he added, unnecessarily, ‘You know, like you.’

They had reached the entrance hall, lights reflecting off red tile floors, flags representing all the foreign students at the college hanging limply above the stairwell. Margaret was losing patience. She turned on the young man, white sneakers squeaking on the glazed tiles. ‘If you want to be a pathologist, Mark, you should be at med school. But, frankly, I’m not sure you’d have what it takes.’ His face fell. But Margaret was unrelenting. ‘And, Mark…go chase someone your own age.’ She turned and hurried out past a photo portrait of the kindly looking silver-haired man after whom the college had been named. In the car park she paused for a moment, filled with regret. George J. Beto, she was sure, would not have spoken to a student like that. But Margaret had a propensity for harsh words. It was only too easy to hurt others when you were still hurting yourself.

Margaret’s house was on Avenue O at the top of the hill, a spit away from the university campus. It was built of red brick, like the college, and had a grey tile roof. Sprawling on one level, it was set in a lush green garden, screened from the road by trees. It had made sense at the time to take on the rental. The plan had been to settle for a quiet life of academic seclusion. Then, after only three months, the job in Harris County had fallen vacant. Chief medical examiner of the third largest county in the United States, taking in Houston, the fourth largest city. She had thought long and hard about it, and the dean had been very supportive, even encouraged her. She could always, he said, guest-lecture one morning a week. He had grinned and in his clipped New York accent told her it would be quite a feather in his cap to have the CME of Harris County lecturing at his college. She never knew how much influence the dean had had with the appointees, but one of them had told her later that the job had been hers from the moment she applied.

Margaret checked her watch as she drove up Seventeenth Street. There was just enough time to shower and change before heading back to her office in Houston, a good fifty minutes’ drive if the traffic on the freeway was moving smoothly. But her spirits dipped as she drew her Chevy in behind a bright red pick-up with oversized wheels parked outside her house. Her landlord was standing on the porch with his arms folded across his chest. A young man in overalls and a baseball cap crouched at the open front door, a bag of tools on the stoop beside him.

Margaret slammed the door of her car and strode up the path. ‘What do you think you’re doing, McKinley?’

The young man looked alarmed and got quickly to his feet. But McKinley stood his ground defiantly. He was a redneck with money. Owned several of the houses on the hill. ‘That ain’t very’ ladylike kinda language now,’ he drawled unpleasantly.

Margaret glared at him. He was a walking, talking cliché. Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, a checked shirt and a scuffed white Stetson pushed back on his head. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said.

The younger man glanced from one to the other. ‘Maybe I should go.’ He stooped to pick up his bag. Chisels and screwdrivers rattled inside it.

McKinley put out a hand to stop him. ‘You stay where you are, sonny.’ And to Margaret, ‘You changed the goddamn locks, lady.’

Margaret turned to the carpenter. ‘You want to know why?’ He looked like he’d rather eat his baseball cap. But she was going to tell him anyway. ‘Because when I was out he was going into my house and going through my stuff. Left his big oily fingermarks on the bras and panties in my underwear drawer.’

McKinley’s face reddened. ‘Now that ain’t true. You got no cause goin’ sayin’ stuff like that.’

The carpenter was examining his feet now with great interest.

‘You want to see the proof?’ Margaret asked McKinley. ‘Two hours of video footage from the camera I hid in the closet?’

It was a bluff, but it proved to be a winning hand. McKinley paled. Then his mouth tightened. ‘You changed the goddamn locks, lady. And that’s a contravention, plain and simple, of the terms of your lease. I want you outta here.’

Margaret’s cellphone rang and she fumbled in her purse to find it. ‘What,’ she barked into it.

‘Been trying to get you for the last hour.’ It was Lucy, her secretary, a God-fearing middle-aged Presbyterian lady who disapproved of Margaret.

‘I always turn off the cellphone when I’m lecturing, Lucy. You know that,’ Margaret said. ‘Why didn’t you try the college?’

‘I did. And missed you.’ She heard Lucy sigh at the other end. ‘Dr. Campbell, we got a call from the sheriff’s office in Walker County up there. They need your help out at a Tex-Mex eatery on Highway 45. Seems they got a truck full of ninety-some dead people.’

‘Jesus,’ Margaret said, and she could almost feel Lucy’s disapproval all the way down the line from Houston. ‘I’m on my way.’ She hung up and pushed past McKinley into the house. She always kept an emergency flight case at home packed with all the tools and accoutrements of her profession.

‘I mean it,’ McKinley shouted after her. ‘I want you outta here.’

‘Tell it to my lawyer,’ Margaret said and shut the door in his face.

IV

Margaret drove northwest on Interstate 45, past the Wynne and Holliday Units of the Huntsville prison complex, the tiny municipal airport that sat up on the right, the spur that took off west to Harper Cemetery. She passed several billboards advertising positions as correctional officers for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In Huntsville you either worked for the prison or the university. The warm October sun bleached all colour out of the sky and she could see the cluster of blue and red flashing lights in the distance identifying where the truck had been found. Strictly speaking, this was out of Margaret’s jurisdiction. But the Walker County Coroner simply wasn’t equipped to cope with something like this. Which was why the sheriff had called her office.

She turned on to the 190 and took a left on the access road to the Mexican diner. Three crows stood on a white picket fence gazing curiously across the scrub toward the parking lot where police officers moved, antlike, around its taped-off perimeter. More than a dozen vehicles choked the entrance to the lot and Margaret recognised a Pontiac driven by one of her investigators and a couple of white forensics trucks. The centre of all the activity was a huge refrigerated container, the door on the driver’s side of its tractor unit still lying open, just as Jayjay had found it. The Walker County sheriff crossed the crumbling asphalt to greet her. He was a big man in his late fifties, with a grey suit and a white Stetson. His badge was pinned to a breast pocket from which poked a red and yellow re-election flyer. His big hand enveloped hers and crushed it.

‘Ma’am, thanks for coming,’ he said, and Margaret remembered her cruel words to her young student. The sheriff looked grim. ‘We got a shitload of trouble here.’

Another man had followed him over. A year or two younger, perhaps. In his middle fifties. He had grey receding hair, neatly cut and thinning on top, and a world-weary face. He was medium height and chunkily built, spreading at the waist. ‘Thank you, Sheriff,’ he said. Clearly a dismissal. ‘You guys are doing a great job here.’ The sheriff nodded to Margaret and moved away, and the other man turned to her. ‘You the ME?’

Margaret held out her hand and said coolly, ‘Dr. Margaret Campbell.’

‘Agent Michael Hrycyk.’ He pronounced it Rychick. His palm was clammy hot. He flipped open a leather wallet to reveal his badge. ‘INS.’

Margaret frowned. ‘What interest does Immigration have in this?’

‘You mean apart from the fact there’s ninety-eight dead Chinese in there?’ He flicked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the truck.

Margaret’s stomach flipped over. ‘Chinese?’

‘Well, Asian. But probably Chinese. Almost certainly illegal. Which’ll make ’em ours.’

‘It won’t make them anybody’s, except mine, if they’re dead.’

‘You know what I mean.’ He took out a pack of cigarettes.

‘Don’t light that here,’ Margaret said. ‘This is a crime scene.’

‘I doubt it,’ he said.

In the distance Margaret saw the first of the TV trucks arriving. It hadn’t taken long. Ninety-eight dead Chinese in the back of a truck — the local stations would make a killing selling it to the networks. ‘Why?’ she asked.

He took her arm and started walking her toward the truck. ‘There are anything up to a hundred thousand Chinese EWIs arriving in the States every year,’ he said. ‘Most of them nowadays coming across the border from Mexico.’

‘EWI?’ She removed her arm from his grip.

‘Entry without Inspection. An EWI’s what we call an illegal immigrant. And in this case, an OTM as well.’ He grinned a humourless grin. ‘That’s Other Than Mexican.’

‘You have some interesting terminology,’ Margaret observed dryly.

‘Oh, it gets a whole lot more interesting than that, Doc. We used to call the Mexicans wetbacks ’cos they always came dripping out the Rio Grande. But that ain’t politically correct no more. Except it’s what the Mexicans call themselves. Mojados. And I don’t see no reason to call them anything they don’t call themselves. Except maybe spics.’

Margaret glanced at him with dislike. ‘And your point is?’

Hrycyk didn’t like her tone and bristled. ‘My point is, Dr. Campbell, these illegal Chinese are worth big money. Up to sixty grand a head these days. Which by my crude reckoning means that there’s nearly six million dollars worth of dead meat in that container. And no one in their right mind is going to waste six million bucks.’

At the back of the truck a bunch of police officers was standing about watching two forensic investigators moving around inside the container. The investigators were wearing protective white, zippered, Tivek suits with built-in booties and hoods. Their faces were covered with surgical masks and they wore latex gloves. A photographer, similarly clad, was photographing the horror with a business-like detachment, alternating between video and stills. His lights illuminated a ghastly scene, and as the heat increased so the smell grew riper.

Hrycyk was unaffected. He said, ‘Way I see it? The truck probably came up the 77 from Brownsville, or maybe the 281, or even the 59 from Laredo. They’re the standard routes.’

‘Headed where?’

‘Houston.’

Margaret frowned. ‘But we’re sixty miles north of Houston here.’

Hrycyk shrugged. ‘So they took a detour to avoid spot checks on the highway. But Houston’s where they were headed.’

‘Why? What is there in Houston for illegal Chinese immigrants?’

‘A population of three hundred thousand Chinese for a start. The fourth biggest Chinatown in the country.’

‘I had no idea,’ Margaret said.

‘Most people don’t. The Chinese like to keep to themselves. They built a new Chinatown down in the southwest of the city and hardly ever leave it.’ He began to take out his cigarettes again, then caught Margaret’s eye and slipped them back in his pocket. ‘Houston also has the third largest community of consuls in the US. Seventy at the last count. And that means papers — proof of identity, country of origin. You got papers you’re halfway to becoming a legal resident. There’s big business in papers.’ He scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Course, most of ’em don’t stay. New York’s the final destination. The Jinshan, the Mountain of Gold they’re all looking for. But in the meantime, they’ll hide out in safe houses and work sixteen, seventeen hours a day in sweatshops and restaurants and whorehouses to pay off the money they owe the shetou.’

‘Shir-toe?’ Margaret repeated the Mandarin word with the familiarity of someone who has spent time in Beijing.

‘Snakeheads. People smugglers. The fixers who arrange everything: transport, safe houses, papers. Usually Chinese. Mean bastards.’

‘So if these people in the truck really are illegal immigrants they would still have owed their smuggling fees to their snakeheads?’

‘Hey, now you’re catching on, Doc.’ Hrycyk’s smile was patronising. ‘Their families back home in China will have paid a small deposit. Once they’re here, they have to pay off the rest themselves. A precious cargo. So there ain’t no motive for killing ’em.’ He flicked his head toward the truck. ‘Way I see it? Someone shut the air vent in the refrigerated unit by accident, or maybe forgot to open it. The driver stops here in the middle of the night to let them out for a piss and finds them all dead. Suffocated. He panics, takes off.’ He chuckled. ‘Saving the INS a whole lot of trouble in the process.’

‘I’m sure their families will be gratified to hear that,’ Margaret said coldly. The prospect of having to process ninety-eight bodies was bad enough without having to deal with a racist immigration officer as well.

Hrycyk bridled. ‘Hey! Don’t go feeling sorry for these little runts. They bring a lot of crime into this country. Carry in drugs to help pay off their fees, get involved in illegal gambling and prostitution. When they get caught they claim political asylum, get given C-8 immigration cards so they can be legally employed, then disappear again when the court throws out their case.’ He stopped for just a moment to draw breath. ‘Far as I’m concerned, the only good Chinese is a dead Chinese.’

‘Well, as far as I am concerned, Agent Hrycyk,’ Margaret said firmly, ‘these poor people are entitled, like anyone else, to my full and undivided professional attention in determining how and why they died — regardless of race, creed, colour or nationality.’

There were now three TV trucks queuing up on the 190 at the end of the access road, and at least half a dozen other press vehicles drawn in behind. A group of journalists was standing debating rights of access with two of the sheriff’s men where the crows had earlier sat on the white picket fence. The crows were gone. The vultures had arrived.

‘Margaret…’ One of the forensic investigators was standing in the doorway of the container. ‘Stuff up here you might want to take a look at.’

‘Give me two minutes,’ Margaret said. She ran back to her car, opened the trunk, slipped off her jacket and shoes and pulled on a Tivek body suit, zipping it up and dragging the hood over her head before snapping on her face mask and gloves. Then she walked back to the truck, clumsy in her booties, carrying a small bag of tools. The investigator gave her a hand up and she stood unsteadily for a moment surveying the scene in front of her. A monstrous heap of arms and legs and bleak, dead faces crammed into the front half of the container. There was something infinitely sad in those pale, frail Chinese figures whose American dream had come to such an abrupt end. The investigator handed her what looked like a small notebook in a plastic evidence bag. Margaret took it out and thumbed carefully through it. Its pages were covered with a frantic scrawl of indecipherable Chinese characters.

‘Found it lying on the chest of one of the bodies,’ the investigator said. ‘Pencil was still in his hand.’

‘What is it?’ Hrycyk called from below, craning to see what she was holding. He was clearly frustrated not to be closer to the action.

‘It’s a notebook.’

‘Anything in it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, what? What does it say?’ His patience was wearing thin.

‘I don’t know about you,’ Margaret said caustically, ‘but my Chinese isn’t that good.’

Hrycyk cursed. ‘Well, at least the Chinese guy they’re gonna send from Washington might come in useful for something, then.’

‘What Chinese guy?’ Margaret asked, a sudden thickening in her throat.

‘The criminal justice liaison at the Chinese Embassy. This whole thing’s already going political.’

She turned away, anxious that Hrycyk should have no sense of her distress. To him the criminal justice liaison at the Chinese Embassy in Washington was just another Chinese. She knew him better as Li Yan, Deputy Section Chief, Section One of the Criminal Investigation Department of Beijing Municipal Police. A man whose intimate touch she knew only too well. A touch that pained her now to remember. She moved into the back of the truck, more ready to face the horrors it contained than the feelings she had spent a year trying to sublimate, feelings of love and betrayal turning slowly to anger and maybe more. ‘Where’s the body you took this from?’ she asked the investigator brittlely.

They picked their way through two dozen corpses, men and women who had clawed in despair at the walls of the container, even at their own clothing. It was a pitiful sight. A man in jeans and sneakers was half propped against the left side wall. He had shreds of thinning hair brushed back from an unusually dark face, a sparse moustache barely covering his upper lip. Margaret noticed the nicotine stains on the fingers that still held the pencil with which he had scrawled his last desperate words.

V

VI

Li Yan freewheeled down the hill past dark stone mansions lurking in dappled shadow behind gnarled old trees. They had strange, Scottish-sounding names like Dumbarton House and Anderson House, painted placards on wrought-iron gates. He left Georgetown’s grid of tree-lined narrow streets behind him and swung his bicycle toward the bridge over Rock Creek. Sheridan Circle was thick with traffic, and he turned uphill into a maze of residental streets that took him over the rise and down again toward Connecticut Avenue.

The Embassy had taken over the old Windsor Hotel, two seven-storey blocks set at right angles, backing onto another loop in the erratic meanderings of the slick that was Rock Creek, almost due north from where its mean little mouth oozed into the slow-moving body of the Potomac. Only a ten-minute cycle from the White House.

They had offered him a car, and he had declined it. He had spent all his adult life cycling between the offices of Section One in the Dongzhimen district of Beijing and the police apartment he had shared with his uncle in the old embassy quarter, not far from Tiananmen. An hour’s cycle. By comparison, the twenty minutes from his townhouse in Georgetown was easy, although it had taken him time to get used to the gradients. Besides, he knew he needed that regular daily exercise to get the blood flowing through his veins, carrying oxygen to his brain, sharpening his senses — and to counter the effects of the thirty cigarettes a day he had been smoking until very recently.

His neighbours had got used to seeing him this past year, pedal-pushing up O Street in all weathers, turning north and disappearing toward the cemeteries at the top of the hill, sweat streaming in rivulets down his strong-boned face in the summer heat, dragon breath billowing about his head in the winter frost. Today, as he drifted down to Connecticut off Kalorama Heights, he was in shirt sleeves and slacks, the warm fall air flowing past his cheeks like soft silk, gently raking the fine, square-cut bristle of black hair that covered his scalp. There was the threat of rain in a changing sky, and he carried a waterproof cape in his satchel. It had been, nominally, his day off, and he had made plans for that afternoon. Until the call on his cellphone, and the crisp summons to the Embassy. A matter not to be discussed on the telephone.

He took long, loping strides across the red-carpeted expanse of what had once been the lobby of the Windsor, and climbed the staircase two at a time. The first secretary was waiting for him in a spacious office on the second floor, windows opening out on to the small circle of tree-shaded green below. He dropped an airline ticket on his desk, slanting sunlight burning out across its polished surface, and said, ‘You haven’t been to Houston before, have you, Li?’

Li felt a stab of apprehension. ‘No, First Secretary.’

‘Your flight is first thing tomorrow. The ambassador himself will brief you this evening.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Nearly one hundred renshe found dead in the back of a truck by the local police. Given all our promises to try to stamp out the flow of illegals from China, Beijing is acutely embarrassed. A severe loss of mianzi. Yours will be an exercise in damage limitation.’

For a moment, all that Li could think of was that there was a chance he might have to face Margaret. And he had a distinct sense of foreboding.

From the stand-alone redbrick block of the Joseph A. Jachimczyk Forensic Center for Harris County, on the corner of William C. Harvin Boulevard and Old Spanish Trail, Margaret gazed out of her office window toward Medicine City and tried to push thoughts of Li from her mind. She focused instead on the spectacular skyline of shining glass tower blocks and skyscrapers in the heart of Houston, a city within a city. The Texas Medical Center. Forty-two medical institutions serving five million patients a year in a hundred buildings spread over seven hundred acres and twelve miles of road. With an annual operating budget of more than four billion dollars and research grants of more than two billion, medicine city employed fifty thousand people, attracted ten thousand volunteers and one hundred thousand students. Like everything else in Texas, it had ambitions to be the biggest and the best. And probably was. Although not quite big enough to displace Li entirely from her mind.

Margaret’s little empire was on the southern fringes of this medical metropolis, in parking lot territory. On quiet days she could gaze from her window at the shuttle buses that took employees back into the heart of the city from the acres of parking lot that surrounded her building. But this was not a quiet day. And it was not about to get any quieter. Lucy buzzed through from the outer office. ‘That’s them now, Dr. Campbell.’

‘Thank you, Lucy, show them in.’

FBI Agent Sam Fuller was younger than she had expected, about her own age. He was quite good-looking, in a bland, inoffensive sort of way. Well-defined features, a good strong jaw, soft brown eyes that met hers very directly, a fine, full head of hair. His handshake was firm and dry.

‘This is Major Steve Cardiff,’ he said, turning to the young man in the dark blue uniform who stood beside him, peaked hat lodged firmly under his left arm. Margaret looked at him for the first time. He was younger than she was. Thirty, perhaps. He was broad-built with a square head, dark hair cropped to Air Force regulation length, and he had a slightly pockmarked complexion, as if he might have suffered acne as a teenager. She realised with a tiny stab that he looked very much like Li Yan, or at least a Western version of him. It brought a lot of conflicting emotions bubbling to the surface, and she had to work hard to keep them from showing.

‘How do you do?’ She shook his hand. It was cool and strong.

He grinned, and his orange-flecked green eyes sparkled. ‘Just call me Steve,’ he said. ‘Even my exwife does. Though she usually prefaces it with you bastard.’ And in spite of all her tension, Margaret found herself smiling.

But Agent Fuller wasn’t playing the game. He remained studiously serious. ‘You probably know, Dr. Campbell, that the Bureau has a memorandum of understanding with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Effectively, they are our pathologists. We call them in when we need expert advice. Major Cardiff here is from the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, part of the AFIP set-up. He’ll be leading the pathology team on this case.’

Margaret’s smile faded. Nobody liked the FBI. They took everything and gave nothing. Besides which, they were the organisation that investigated irregularities in all the other agencies. So they were born to be unpopular. ‘Well,’ she said, more calmly than she felt, ‘I appreciate the offer of help, gentlemen, but we are quite able to cope on our own, thank you.’ Which was a lie. She had just spent the two hours after lunch phoning around the pathology departments in medicine city trying to round up a team capable of coping with ninety-eight autopsies. But she wasn’t going to have the FBI walk in and trample all over her.

‘I don’t think you understand, Dr. Campbell,’ Fuller said evenly. ‘Washington is anxious that we deal with this as quickly and efficiently as possible.’ He paused. ‘We’re not offering you our help. We’re taking over the case.’

‘Well, I have news for you, Agent Fuller.’ Margaret placed her fingertips at full stretch on the desk in front of her to keep herself steady. ‘This is not Washington, DC. This is the Lone Star State. And in Harris County I have absolute jurisdiction over the bodies in my care.’

‘The bodies were found in Walker County. You have no jurisdiction there.’

‘The bodies are now in Harris County, at Ellington Air Force Base, where I had them moved just over an hour ago. They’re mine.’

Steve raised a finger, like a schoolboy in class. ‘Excuse me.’ They both turned to look at him. ‘I don’t mean to get involved in the argument, but these are people we’re talking about here, right? They don’t belong to anyone — except maybe the relatives who might want to give them a half-decent burial.’

Margaret blushed immediately. Of course, he was right. They were fighting over these bodies like vultures at a feeding frenzy. But the FBI man was not about to be deflected.

‘How the hell did you manage to move ninety-eight bodies in…’ he checked his watch, ‘…just over four hours?’

Margaret said, ‘Quite easily, actually. I figured it was going to take most of the day to get a fleet of refrigerated semi-trailers kitted out and sent up there. Never mind the time it would take to then label and bag the bodies. So I got the local police to rent a single tractor unit. We hooked the trailer up to that and took it straight down to Ellington Field with the bodies still on board.’

Steve waved his finger at her now and grinned. ‘Hey, that was smart thinking, Doctor.’ Fuller glared at him.

Margaret said, ‘My office has an MOU with NASA, for the rental of one of their hangars down there in the event of a major disaster, like an aircrash. It was my view that this fell into that category. And we have a company here in Houston, Kenyon International, that specialises in providing sophisticated facilities for conducting mass autopsies anywhere in the world. I have already engaged their services. They are setting up in the NASA hangar as we speak.’

‘Fine,’ Fuller said tightly. ‘You’ve done a good job, Dr. Campbell. But we’ll take it from here.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Margaret said. And with an apologetic glance at Steve, ‘You want to challenge my jurisdiction in the courts, that’s okay by me. But by the time you get a ruling it’s going to be a whole helluva lot harder for us to tell how these poor folk died.’

‘Hey listen, folks,’ Steve said. ‘Jurisdiction’s a big word, right? I always had trouble with big words. That’s why I got a Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary. But since I don’t happen to have it on me — it won’t exactly fit in my coat pocket — why don’t we agree to put our interpretation on hold until we have a chance to consult it. I mean, how can we worry about whose jurisdiction it is when we don’t even know what it means?’ Margaret and Fuller looked at him as though he were insane. He grinned. ‘That way we just pool our resources and get on with the job.’ He raised his eyebrows, still smiling. ‘What do you say?’

Margaret realised Steve was offering a compromise — a way out of the impasse that saved face on both sides. Mianzi. How very Chinese of him, she thought. She glanced at Fuller and could see that he was still undecided.

Steve said, ‘Sam, you wheel in your fingerprint go-team. I’ll fly down a couple of investigators and some of my pathologists and put them at Margaret’s disposal — you don’t mind if I call you Margaret, do you?’ Margaret thought, how could she mind? But he didn’t give her the chance to respond. ‘Now, you can’t tell me you haven’t been having problems getting enough knife-jockeys for the job?’

She couldn’t resist his smile. ‘I’ll be happy to accept your offer of help, Major.’

‘Steve.’ He beamed, and turned to Fuller. ‘Sam?’

Fuller nodded reluctantly.

‘Good.’ Steve pulled on his hat, then pulled it off again quickly. ‘Aw, shit, sorry. Not supposed to put it on till I get outside.’ He waggled his eyebrows again. ‘Regulations. Always forget. You got a phone I can use?’