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"You ever see that movie Escape from New York?"  Knox said.  "Kurt Russell, John Carpenter...y'know that one?"

"I don't really see a lot of movies," I said.

"It's one of those post-apocalyptic deals.  New York’s a big prison.  Anyway, parts of that movie were filmed right along here."

I can't say I was surprised.  Post-apocalyptic was right.  We passed a block of abandoned buildings, collapsed structures, and burned wreckage.  The ‘Taste of Asia’ spa sat wedged between a strip club and a porn shop.  A pervert’s oasis.  It was a squat, shoebox-shaped building, decked out with neon and amateurish paintings of half-nude geisha girls on the door.  A painted sign on the side of the building proclaimed that, "This establishment is not responsible for damage to your property or person.  Enter at own risk."

We decided to risk it.  We went inside.

The place smelled like cheap cherry air freshener, but underneath was the stink of sweat, cigarette smoke, mildew and mothballs.  I recognized the madam despite her caked-on face paint.  She’d been in to see me a few times about her arthritis.  She spotted me with Knox, looked at the floor, clasped her hands, and bowed. 

In Cantonese, she said, "Doctor Lee?  What a surprise… what brings you?"

I told her.

She nodded, wiped an invisible tear from the corner of one pasty eye, and turned to walk away.  She gestured for us to follow. 

A few cops milled in and out of the various rooms.  I caught curious looks from some of them.  I felt the irrational urge to smile and wave, but I refrained. 

The madam led us to one of the back rooms.  The bitter tang of ammonia stung my nostrils.  I covered my nose with my hand - for all that helped - and followed Knox inside. 

"They took the body early this morning, but we’ve kept the rest of the scene the same."  He said.

The massage table, the only furniture in the small room, was covered with white silk.  The floor surrounding it was blanketed in single bills of Monopoly money.  Yellow scraps of paper painted with red ink hung from the walls.  I read the characters on several.  They were mostly insults, gross descriptions of bodily functions, that sort of thing.

Several small jars lay around the room.  I knelt by one and realized that the smell came from them: they were filled with piss. 

Lovely.

I wondered whose piss it was and whether there was a way to fingerprint waste products.  Then I realized that I was wasting time.  Sometimes I annoy even myself.

I called to the madam and asked what she knew about the scene.  Her observations weren’t much different from my own.  Her theory on the girl’s death, however, tripped me up momentarily.  I disagreed with her, but she kept on repeating herself.  I turned to Knox.

"Could I see the body?" I asked.

"No.  Why?"

I stared at him and blinked.

He shrugged uneasily and said, "Is it important?"

I kept on staring.

"You can stare at me all day, but that’s not going to get you in to see the body."

"What if I told you that I might be able to give you the cause of death?"

He shrugged again and said, "Alright, alright…Why the fuck not?  It’s all a clusterfuck anyway.  I’ll call ahead, make sure they know I’m bringing you."

We went outside.  I took a deep breath of the (relatively) fresh air.  We got in the car and headed for the morgue.

 Knox said, "What’d the madam say?  The point of you being here, y’know, is to translate.  So fucking translate."

I took a deep breath and said, "She didn’t have much to say.  Superstitious nonsense, mostly.  But listen, detective, whoever killed this girl set everything up like a mock funeral.  They did it as an insult.  Taoists believe that if a person isn’t properly buried then their soul cannot rest. Whoever did this… they didn’t just want her dead.  They wanted her damned."

3

Knox stopped me before we went inside.  I figured I was in for a lecture on police procedures, but that wasn’t it at all.  "Listen," he said.  "The thing you need to know is that this isn’t a real great area."

I looked across the street, to where somebody’d nailed a dead raccoon to a tree, and said, "Really?"

"My point is that this isn’t exactly a high-profile investigation.  And Childerson, well, he’s…" he searched for the right words for a minute, but ultimately decided to let me find out for myself.

I’d only been to one other morgue, but apparently they’re all more or less the same.  Sterile, yet somehow dingy.  Always that one fluorescent light that flickers away, threatening to go out.  The smell - not just the formaldehyde that gets in your skin and hair and clothes, but that other smell.  The one reminiscent of meat.

And the cold. You never forget that cold.  It gets in your bones, and you can’t shake it. 

The M.E. was fat, jovial, yet a little sickly.  A little too cheerful, too smiley.  Yellowish teeth.  This was the infamous Childerson.  He clapped Knox and I on the shoulders and led us to a steel table in the center of the room.  Lights perched overhead like metallic buzzards; trays surrounding the table held numerous, wicked-looking instruments which shone dully in the cold, artificial light. 

Then there was the body.  Knox hadn’t been kidding.  The girl was really fucking blue.  Not the typical pale bluish cast that most corpses had.  She looked like a smurf. 

"Most dramatic case of cyanosis I’ve ever seen." Childerson said, seeming to read my thoughts, "Comes from a lack of oxygen in the blood."

I leaned in for a closer look.

The girl was young… maybe twenty.  She was fine-boned, with big eyes and full lips.  Delicate hands, long fingers.  She must’ve been quite beautiful in life.  I felt guilty looking at her.

"What’s her name?" I asked.

Childerson looked at me like I’d just asked him if I could have sex with her corpse.  He glanced over at Knox, who shrugged and waved a hand impatiently. 

"All we managed to get from Madame Chong was that she called herself ‘Mei Ling’.  I kinda don’t think that’s her real name, though."

Knox asked about the cause of death.  Childerson turned his considerable bulk toward the detective.  I took the liberty of grabbing a pair of rubber gloves from a box on one of the steel trays, and I slipped them on. 

"Early evidence would suggest asphyxiation."  Childerson said.  "From her skin tone and the state of her eyes, I’d say it’s looking like it’s probably from a crushed larynx.  Probably her pimp that did it.  Same old bullshit."

I put a thumb lightly on her closed eyelid and slid it upward, exposing her eye.  The pale green iris swam in a sea of red - every blood vessel had burst.

"I’d place the time of death at sometime early yesterday morning."  Childerson continued.  I had just opened her mouth to examine her tongue when he turned and screamed, "What the fuck do you think you’re doing?  Don’t fucking touch her - you’re fucking up the evidence, you asshole!"

I ignored him for the moment.  Mei Ling’s tongue was a bloated black slug that barely fit inside her mouth.  I pulled up her upper lip; her gums were the same – blackish, swollen almost to the point of bursting.

I stood and faced Childerson.  "Your evidence?  The astounding amount of evidence to suggest that she suffocated from a crushed throat?  That evidence?"

Childerson puffed up like an obese blowfish and got up in my face.  "That’s right."

I looked at Knox.  He watched us with a sort of detached interest.

"You asked for my help.  Do you care about how the girl really died, or are you content with this asshead’s throat crusher theory?"

Asshead protested.

"You got something he hasn’t got?"  Knox said skeptically.

"Yeah.  I’ve seen something like this before."

Childerson said, "Oh, bullshit."

I turned to him and said, "Did you actually examine her?  She’s been here since early this morning, and you don’t know anything about her, do you?"

"She's a fucking dead whore.  Case closed."

"She's somebody's daughter," I said.

He tried to stare me down, but a drop of sweat rolled into his eyes.  He blinked the sweat away and sighed loudly.  "Alright then, let’s hear your theory, fucko."

"Tell you what: I’ll lay it all out for you.  You do your tests.  Fifty bucks says I’m right and you’re an idiot."

Childerson crossed his huge arms and said, "You’re on, asshole."

I stepped to the other side of the table, allowing them access to the body as well.

"Knox, you said there were no marks on the body.  That’s not true.  And this is not cyanosis."

Childerson laughed.  "She’s fucking
blue
… what else could it be?  Too much time at Willy Wonka’s?"

"No.  She’s bruised.  From head to toe."

They looked at each other and Childerson laughed again.  I held up a latex-clad finger and said, "Let me explain."

Childerson sneered at me; Knox frowned but waved me on.

"I want you to press lightly inward," I said, "here and here." I pointed to the ribs directly beneath Mei Ling’s breasts.  Childerson reached out a hand, rolled his eyes at me, and pushed on the girl’s chest.  The color immediately drained from his face and his eyes widened.  Knox looked from the M.E. to me and back, and then felt her ribs for himself. 

"Jesus Christ…what the hell happened to her?" he said, pulling his hand back quickly.  Human chests shouldn’t be squishy.

"Certain martial arts have very specialized, almost legendary, strikes.  As Mei Ling here realized what her client really wanted, she would have inhaled to scream for help.  The killer then struck," I extended both of my palms slowly outward in a pushing gesture, "both sides of the ribs, simultaneously.  With sufficient internal energy and body coordination, this compresses and shatters the ribs.  The lungs pop like balloons and crush the heart.  The blood - with no place else to go - shoots outward, and temporarily soaks into the muscles and tissues.  This girl died within an hour of being discovered; by tomorrow morning the blood will already start pooling on the underside of her body."

I slid the gloves from my hands and tossed them in the trash.  Reaching in my pocket, I took out my wallet, slid a business card out of it, and handed it to Childerson.

"Business hours are on there.  Feel free to drop off my fifty bucks any time."

I headed for the door.

When I realized Knox wasn’t following, I checked my watch and said, "My first appointment’s in twenty minutes.  I gotta go."

Knox nodded absentmindedly.

"I rode with you, man." I said, hoping to jog his memory.

He looked up at me as if he’d just woken up.

"Let’s. Go. Please." I said.

As we headed out, I looked over my shoulder at Childerson.  He was still staring at my card.

‘Fucko,’ indeed.

4

Once we were in the car, Knox said, "How the hell did you do that?"

"What?" I said.  Coy as a schoolgirl, that’s me.

"How did you know all that?"

"It’s part of my job.  Knowing things.  It’s what separates me from somebody like Childerson.  There are other things I
think
I know, but I wasn’t positive…and I wanted my fifty bucks…" I was mostly guessing about all of it, but there was no way I was admitting that to Knox, and certainly not to Childerson.

"What other things?" he asked.

I slipped a plastic bag from my pocket, drew a decent-sized slice of ginseng from it, and popped it in my mouth.  The root tasted earthy, slightly bitter, and a little sweet. 

"Well," I said, "I’m pretty sure Mei Ling was pregnant, for one thing."

"No shit?"

"If  Childerson would get on with the exam, we’d know soon enough.  Also, I think it’s pretty clear this wasn’t a random thing…"

"Right.  This was planned… an assassination?"

"Seems so.  Which would suggest certain things." I said, "Bad, bad things."
He was silent for a minute.  I kept on chewing.

"Okay, I give up." he said.

"What?"

"What things?  What did you mean?"

"You’ve got a dead Chinese girl, a hooker.  Probably a contract killing.  The killer is proficient in martial arts, specifically, a Chinese martial art.  Are you seeing a pattern?"

Knox slipped a cigarette in his mouth and muttered, "It’s all way fucking Chinese…"

"True.  So you’ve got prostitution and murder for hire.  Who’s likely to be involved?"

Knox’s face lit up.  I half expected him to raise his hand and say, "Oh! Oh! Me! Pick me!"

"Triads," is what he did say.    Give the man a cookie.

"But look," he said, "this is St. Louis...there’s very little Triad activity around, and they’ve always kept things quiet, always handled things themselves.  So why attract all the unwanted attention over some hooker?"

He parked in front of my shop and turned to look at me.

I chewed the ginseng some more and said, "That's an excellent question.  I'll leave that to you to figure out.  I get paid to poke people with needles, so this is all way above my pay grade.  But this was all very interesting, and I’m glad I could help out.  See you around, Detective."

I got out of the car and fished my keys out of my pocket.

Knox rolled down his window and said, "Hey, Lee… you busy tomorrow?"

"Why?"

"Might need some more translating." He said.

"I’ll be around." I said.

5

The girl sucked air through her teeth and hissed, "Ow!" 

"Tender?" I said.

She squirmed on the table and said, "Uh, yeah."

"What happened?"

She lifted her head to look at me and said, "Let’s just say that platform boots and cobblestone streets don’t mix."

My hands slid from her swollen knee down her smooth, shapely calf to her ankle.  I moved her foot gently.

"Sore?" I asked.

"Yeah, but nothing like the knee… I landed right on it when I fell."

"The good news is that it’s not that bad.  The bad news is--"

She winced and said, "You’re gonna turn me into a pincushion?"