Nine Dragons (37 page)

“I think it will be fine. I won’t record it as an official session.”

Bosch’s phone beeped again. This time he pulled it away from his ear to check the caller ID. It was Lieutenant Gandle.

“Okay, Doc,” Bosch replied. “Thank you for this.”

“It will be good to see you, too. Maybe you and I should have a conversation. I know your ex-wife still meant a lot to you.”

“Let’s take care of my daughter first. Then we can worry about me. I’ll drop her with you and then get out of the way, maybe walk over to Philippe’s or something.”

“See you then, Harry.”

He hung up and checked to see if Gandle had left a message. There was none. He headed back inside and saw that his daughter had already assembled the main structure of the desk.

“Wow, girl, you know what you’re doing.”

“It’s pretty easy.”

“Didn’t seem that way to me.”

He had just gotten back down on the floor when the landline started to ring from the kitchen. He got up and hustled to get it. It was an old wall-mounted phone with no caller ID screen.

“Bosch, what are you doing?”

It was Lieutenant Gandle.

“I told you I was taking a few days.”

“I need you to come in, and bring your daughter.”

Bosch was looking down into the empty sink.

“My daughter? Why, Lieutenant?”

“Because there are two guys from the Hong Kong Police Department sitting in Captain Dodds’s office and they want to talk to you. You didn’t tell me that your ex-wife is dead, Harry. You didn’t tell me about all the dead bodies they say you left in your wake over there.”

Bosch paused as he considered his options.

“Tell them I’ll see them at one-thirty,” he finally said.

Gandle’s response was sharp.

“One-thirty? What do you need three hours for? Get down here now.”

“I can’t, Lieutenant. I’ll see them at one-thirty.”

Bosch hung the phone up and then pulled his cell from his pocket. He had known that the Hong Kong cops would eventually come, and he had already made a plan for what to do.

The first call he made was to Sun Yee. He knew it was late in Hong Kong but he couldn’t wait. The phone rang eight times and then went to message.

“It’s Bosch. Call me when you get this.”

Bosch hung up and stared at his phone for a long moment. He was concerned. It was one-thirty in the morning in Hong Kong, not a time when he would have expected Sun Yee to be away from his phone. Unless it wasn’t by his choice.

He next scrolled through the contact list on his phone and found a number he had not used in at least a year.

He called the number now and this time got an immediate answer.

“Mickey Haller.”

“It’s Bosch.”

“Harry? I didn’t think I’d—”

“I think I need a lawyer.”

There was a pause.

“Okay, when?”

“Right now.”

42

G
andle came charging out of his office the moment he saw Bosch enter the squad room.

“Bosch, I told you to get in here forthwith. Why haven’t you been answering your—”

He stopped when he saw who entered behind Bosch. Mickey Haller was a well-known defense attorney. There wasn’t a detective in the RHD who didn’t know him on sight.

“This is your lawyer?” Gandle said with disgust. “I told you to bring your daughter, not your lawyer.”

“Lieutenant,” Bosch said, “let’s get something straight from the start. My daughter is not part of this equation. Mr. Haller is here to advise me and help me explain to the men from Hong Kong that I committed no crimes while I was in their city. Now, do you want to introduce me to them or should I do it myself?”

Gandle hesitated and then relented.

“This way.”

Gandle led them to the conference room off Captain Dodds’s office. Waiting there were the two men from Hong Kong. They stood up upon Bosch’s arrival and handed him business cards. Alfred Lo and Clifford Wu. They both were from HKPD’s Triad Bureau.

Bosch introduced Haller and handed the cards to him.

“Do we need a translator, gentlemen?” Haller asked.

“That is not necessary,” Wu said.

“Well, that’s a start,” Haller said. “Why don’t we sit down and hash this big old thing around.”

Everyone, including Gandle, took a seat around the conference table. Haller spoke first.

“Let me start things off here by saying that my client, Detective Bosch, is not waiving any of his constitutionally guaranteed rights at this time. We are on American soil here and that means he doesn’t have to speak to you gentlemen. However, he is also a detective and he knows what you two men are up against on a daily basis. Against my advice he is willing to talk to you. So the way we will work this is that you can ask him questions and he’ll try to answer them if I think he should. There will be no recording of this session but you can take notes if you like. We hope to end this conversation with you two fellows leaving with a greater understanding of the events of this past weekend in Hong Kong. But one thing that is for certain is that you will not be leaving with Detective Bosch. His cooperation in this matter ends when this meeting ends.”

Haller punctuated his opening salvo with a smile.

Before coming into the PAB, Bosch had met with Haller for nearly an hour in the back of Haller’s Lincoln Town Car. They were parked at the dog park near Franklin Canyon and were able to watch Harry’s daughter walk around and pet the sociable dogs while they talked. After they were finished, they took Maddie to her meeting with Dr. Hinojos and then drove over to the PAB.

They were not operating in complete agreement but had forged a strategy. A quick Internet search on Haller’s laptop had even provided some backup material. They had come in ready to make Bosch’s case to the men from Hong Kong.

Being a detective, Bosch was walking a thin line. He wanted his colleagues from across the Pacific to know what had happened, but he wasn’t going to put himself, his daughter or Sun Yee in jeopardy. He believed that all his actions in Hong Kong were justified. He told Haller he had been in kill-or-be-killed situations initiated by others. And that included his encounter with the hotel manager at Chung-king Mansions. In each case he had emerged victorious. There was no crime in that. Not in his book.

Lo took out a pen and notebook and Wu asked the first question, revealing that he was the lead man.

“First, we would ask, why did you go to Hong Kong on such short trip?”

Bosch shrugged like the answer was obvious.

“To get my daughter and bring her back here.”

“On Saturday morning your former wife, she report the daughter missing to police,” Wu said.

Bosch stared at him for a long moment.

“Is that a question?”

“Was she missing?”

“My understanding is that she was indeed missing but on Saturday morning I was thirty-five thousand feet over the Pacific. I can’t speak to what my ex-wife was doing then.”

“We believe your daughter was taken by someone named Peng Qingcai. Do you know him?”

“Never met him.”

“Peng is dead,” Lo said.

Bosch nodded.

“That doesn’t make me unhappy.”

“Mr. Peng’s neighbor, Mrs. Fengyi Mai, she recall speaking with you at her home Sunday,” Wu said. “You and Mr. Sun Yee.”

“Yes, we knocked on her door. She wasn’t much help.”

“Why is this?”

“I guess because she didn’t know anything. She didn’t know where Peng was.”

Wu leaned forward, his body language easy to read. He thought he was zeroing in on Bosch.

“Did you go to Peng’s apartment?”

“We knocked on the door but nobody answered. After a while we left.”

Wu leaned back, disappointed.

“You acknowledge that you were with Sun Yee?” he asked.

“Sure. I was with him.”

“How do you know this man?”

“Through my ex-wife. They met me at the airport Sunday morning and informed me that they were looking for my daughter because the police department there did not believe she had been abducted.”

Bosch studied the two men for a moment before continuing.

“You see, your police department dropped the ball. I hope you will include that in your reports. Because if I’m dragged into this, I certainly will. I’ll call every newspaper in Hong Kong—doesn’t matter what language—and tell them my story.”

The plan was to use the threat of international embarrassment to the HKPD to make the detectives move cautiously.

“Are you aware,” Wu said, “that your ex-wife, Eleanor Wish, died of gunshot wound to the head on fifteenth floor of Chungking Mansions, Kowloon?”

“Yes, I am aware of that.”

“Were you present when this happened?”

Bosch looked at Haller and the attorney nodded.

“I was there. I saw it happen.”

“Can you tell us how?”

“We were looking for our daughter. We didn’t find her. We were in the hallway about to leave and two men started to fire at us. Eleanor was hit and she…got killed. And the two men were hit, too. It was self-defense.”

Wu leaned forward.

“Who shot these men?”

“I think you know that.”

“You tell us, please.”

Bosch thought of the gun he had put into Eleanor’s dead hand. He was about to tell the lie when Haller leaned forward.

“I don’t think I’m going to allow Detective Bosch to get into who-shot-whom theories,” he said. “I am sure your fine police department has tremendous forensic capabilities and has already been able to determine through firearm and ballistic analysis the answer to that question.”

Wu moved on.

“Was Sun Yee on the fifteenth floor?”

“Not at that time.”

“Can you give us more detail?”

“About the shooting? No. But I can tell you something about the room where my daughter was held. We found tissue with blood on it. Her blood had been drawn.”

Bosch studied them to see if they reacted to this information. They showed nothing.

There was a file on the table in front of the men from Hong Kong. Wu opened it and took out a document with a paper clip on it. He slid it across the table to Bosch.

“This is statement from Sun Yee. It has been translated into English. Please read and acknowledge for accuracy.”

Haller leaned in next to Bosch and they read the two-page document together. Bosch immediately recognized it as a prop. It was their investigative theory disguised as a statement from Sun. About half of it was correct. The rest was assumption based on interviews and evidence. It attributed the murders of the Peng family to Bosch and Sun Yee.

Harry knew they were either trying to bluff him into telling what really happened or had arrested Sun and forced him to sign his name to the story they preferred, namely that Bosch had been responsible for a bloody rampage across Hong Kong. It would be the best way to explain nine violent deaths on one Sunday. The American did it.

But Bosch remembered what Sun had said to him at the airport.
I will handle these things and make no mention of you. This is my promise. No matter what happens, I will leave you and your daughter out of it.

“Gentlemen,” Haller said, completing his read of the document first. “This document is—”

“Total bullshit,” Bosch finished.

He slid the document back across the table. It hit Wu in the chest.

“No, no,” Wu said quickly. “This is very real. This is signed by Sun Yee.”

“Maybe if you held a gun to his head. Is that how you do it over there in Hong Kong?”

“Detective Bosch!” Wu exclaimed. “You will come to Hong Kong and answer these charges.”

“I’m not going anywhere near Hong Kong ever again.”

“You have killed many people. You have used firearms. You placed your daughter above all Chinese citizens and—”

“They were blood-typing her!” Bosch said angrily. “They took her blood. You know when they do that? When they’re trying to match organs.”

He paused and watched the growing discomfort on Wu’s face. Bosch didn’t care about Lo. Wu was the power and if Bosch got to him, he would be safe. Haller had been right. In the back of the Lincoln, he had set the subtle strategy for the interview. Rather than focus on defending Bosch’s actions as self-defense, make clear to the men from Hong Kong what would be brought to the international media stage should they pursue any sort of case against Bosch.

Now was the time to make that play and Haller took over and calmly moved in for the kill.

“Gentlemen, you can hang on to your signed statement there,” he said, a seemingly permanent smile playing on his face. “Let me summarize the facts that are supported by the actual evidence. A thirteen-year-old American girl was abducted in your city. Her mother dutifully called the police to report this crime. The police declined to investigate the crime and then—”

“The girl had run away before,” Lo interjected. “There was no reas—”

Haller held up a finger to cut him off.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, now a tone of contained outrage in his voice and the smile gone. “Your department was told an American girl was missing and chose,
for whatever reason,
to ignore the report. This forced the girl’s mother to look for her daughter herself. And the first thing she did was call in the girl’s father from Los Angeles.”

Haller gestured to Bosch.

“Detective Bosch arrived and together with his ex-wife and a friend of the family, Mr. Sun Yee, they began the search that the Hong Kong police had determined they would not be involved in. On their own, what they found was evidence that she had been kidnapped for her organs. This American girl, they were going to sell her for her organs!”

His outrage was growing and Bosch believed it was not an act. For a few moments Haller let it float over the table like a thundercloud before continuing.

“Now, as you gentlemen know, people got killed. My client isn’t going to get into the details with you about all of that. Suffice it to say that, left alone in Hong Kong without any help from the government and police, this mother and father trying to find their daughter encountered some very bad people and there were kill-or-be-killed situations. There was
provocation!
”