The Ambassador's Wife (3 page)

The woman lay spread-eagled on the room’s king-sized bed. Her head and shoulders were held upright by two pillows and her legs pointed to the doorway where Tay was standing. They were open at an unnatural angle. The woman’s face appeared to be looking straight at Tay, or it would have been if she had a face. It was crushed beyond recognition.

Tay breathed slowly in and out and tried desperately to bring himself under control. His mouth was drier than he could ever remember it. He tried to swallow, but couldn’t. A few more breaths, he told himself, just take a few more breaths, slow and deep. Gather the moisture in your throat. Roll it around. Take your time.

WHEN
he thought he might be ready to try again, little by little he moved his eyes back to the bed.

The woman was nude. Her body was slim and appeared to be fit and toned, but it looked as if she was still in the rigid stage of rigor mortis so it was difficult to be sure. Her skin might once have been tanned, but now it was gray, except around her hips and buttocks and at the bottom of her legs where Tay could see the dusky purple lividity where stagnated blood had accumulated. It struck Tay there was remarkably little blood anywhere around her on the bed.

Where the woman’s face had been there was nothing now but a dark mass of tissue spread out in a coagulated lump like a tray of ground meat in a supermarket display case. The light from the bedside lamp glistened off patches of white bone shining through raw flesh and her swollen tongue, bitten half through, hung from where Tay assumed her mouth must have once been. The woman’s hair had been deep brown or even black, and clumps of it were stuck into the matted tissue like soiled straw spread on a garage floor to mop up oil stains.

The body had been posed after the woman was murdered. There was no doubt of that. Her hands were neatly folded beneath her breasts and her legs were spread open at a freakish angle. Something between them flashed in the light and in spite of himself Tay looked more closely. There was a metallic object of some sort protruding from the darker mass of the woman’s pubic hair.

For a moment Tay did not know what it was; and then he did.

He was looking, he realized all at once, at the rear end of the barrel of a chrome-colored flashlight. The rest of the flashlight, at least six inches of it beginning with the lens, had been pushed up the woman’s vagina.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Tay heard Sergeant Kang whisper from behind him. “Shit, oh shit, shit, shit.”

Tay said nothing. He was fighting too hard to control his nausea.

INSPECTOR
Tay and Sergeant Kang were waiting outside in the corridor when the Forensic Management Branch arrived. There were three men, two wearing black vests over their sport shirts with
FORENSIC
on the back in white letters. The third man wore a short-sleeved white shirt with a dark striped tie. Each of them carried a small aluminum case and a black cloth duffel bag.

The man with the tie stopped in front of Tay. “Ready for us?”

Tay’s face was pale and he was leaning against the wall as if it were holding him upright. He just grunted and waved toward the open door. The man nodded and said nothing. One glance at Tay told him all he needed to know.

The three men organized their bags into a neat row just outside the door to the room. One of them produced paper shoe bags and a box of latex gloves, and Tay and Kang watched silently as all three slipped the protective coverings over their hands and feet. The shoe bags were white, but the gloves were bright red and they struck Tay as looking unreasonably cheery.

The man with the tie squatted just outside the open door and surveyed the room’s interior while the two men in black vests leaned over his shoulders and did the same thing. They stayed like that for quite a while, whispering a few words to each other now and then, but they kept their voices low and Tay and Kang couldn’t make out what they were saying. For his part, Tay was just as happy he couldn’t.

Tay had gone twenty-nine days without smoking a cigarette. That was his longest streak to date by a good bit, but he had no doubt it was over now. He had a headache and he would have given a month’s pay for a cigarette right that minute. Just one fucking cigarette. Was that too much to ask? He didn’t even care what brand it was. He’d take anything.

Kang didn’t smoke, so he wasn’t going to be any help, and leaving the crime scene to go and buy a pack of cigarettes was too unseemly an act to contemplate seriously. Or maybe it wasn’t.

Tay was still trying to decide when he saw the Officer in Charge of CID-SIS coming down the corridor. Deputy Superintendent of Police Goh Kim Leng stopped directly in front of Tay and looked him over carefully.

“Is it that bad?” he asked.

Tay didn’t reply.

“Yes, sir,” Kang responded instead. “It is.”

Goh had a full head of thick, silver hair that men half his age regarded with envy, and he habitually wore dark, gold-rimmed sunglasses. He was of medium height, but looked shorter because of his broad shoulders, barrel chest, and thick, heavily muscled neck.

“You sure you’re okay, Sam?” he asked again.

“Yes, sir,” Tay nodded carefully, trying not to make his headache any worse. “I’m just great, sir.”

“You don’t look so great.”

“Thank you, Chief.”

The OC didn’t smoke or Tay would have goddamn well asked him for a cigarette. He doubted any policeman in the history of the Singapore Police Force had ever before asked a senior officer for a cigarette, but the truth of it was that he really didn’t give a rat’s ass right at that moment. Christ, was he the only man in Singapore who still smoked? Yes, he thought he probably was.

“I’d better have a look,” the OC said as he leaned into the hotel room and glanced around. “You coming, Sam?”

“I’ll be right out here, Chief,” Tay said.

Tay and Kang waited in the corridor while the OC went into room 2608. Kang chewed absentmindedly at a hangnail while Tay passed the time envisioning himself smoking a Marlboro. He sharpened his memory as much as he could and tried to conjure up the taste of the nicotine and the edge he felt as it entered hisbloodstream and rushed to his brain. It didn’t work.

Fuck this zen shit,
Tay thought. He didn’t care what anyone said. He was going downstairs to buy some cigarettes and he was going to do it right now.

But before Tay could will himself into motion, a grim-faced OC emerged from the room, leaned against the wall, and folded his arms.

“Do we know who she is?” he asked.

“Not yet.” Tay struggled to control his nicotine fit by studying the swirling patterns in the wine-red carpet. “The hotel doesn’t have anyone registered in the room. According to their records, it ought to be empty.”

The OC’s mouth tightened into a thin, hard line. “The FMB says they got clean prints. If she’s local, we’ll know who she is within a half-hour. If she’s not, we’ll compare the visitor entry records with the exits and see who’s unaccounted for. We should get an ID pretty quickly.”

Tay’s eyes shifted slightly at that and the OC caught it.

“What is it, Sam?”

“Somehow I have the feeling it isn’t going to be that easy, Chief.”

“No,” the OC shook his head slowly, “maybe it won’t be.”

Tay looked off to his left as if a repository of constructive thought lay somewhere down the corridor, but he didn’t say anything else.

“What about the security cameras?” the OC asked.

“I’ve asked for copies of the tapes from all the hotel’s cameras for the last three days,” Kang answered.

That was news to Tay, so he listened carefully.

“We’ll look at them,” Kang continued, “but I think finding anything useful is a long shot, sir. The state of the deceased leaves us without an identifiable face to look for, and there’s an international electronics trade fair going on now. The traffic in and out of the hotel would have been very heavy. Unless this woman really stands out for some reason, I doubt we’ll see anything that might help us.”

The OC let out a long, tired sigh. “I want you to stay with this until it’s done, Sam. It’s going to scare the hell out of a lot of people.”

“It certainly scares the hell out of me, Chief.”

“You and Sergeant Kang drop everything else until this case is cleared. Tell me what you need and you’ll get it. Just wrap it up and do it quickly.”

“What about the press, sir?” Kang asked.

The OC looked momentarily puzzled. “What press?”

“At least two hotel employees have seen the body. Rumors are probably spreading already.”

The OC looked at Tay. “What do you think, Sam?”

Tay made a vague movement with his head that could have meant anything. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “I’ll have a word with Public Affairs and get them to put out something vague. If they handle it right, we can probably keep
The Straits Times
out of it until we have something concrete.”

“What about the other papers?”

“They won’t be a problem,” Tay said. “They never are.”

Kang grunted and both the OC and Tay looked at him.

“You disagree, Sergeant?” the OC asked.

“Not exactly, sir. I was just thinking…well, what about the foreign press? It seems to me this is the kind of thing that could easily be blown out of proportion.”

“And what would you say the proper proportion
is
, Sergeant?” Tay snapped before the OC could respond. “When you find a woman with her face beaten in who’s been stripped naked and had a flashlight jammed up her private parts, how would you fix the proper proportions for that, Sergeant? I’d really like to know.”

“What I meant, sir, was—”

“That murdered women in five-star hotels might damage the tourist trade?”

“No, sir.” Kang cleared his throat. “That something like this might damage the country’s image in general, sir. Foreigners being killed in luxury hotels here in Singapore and all. It makes us look like some Third World shithole.”

“Why do you think the woman’s a foreigner?”

“Well, because…”

Kang saw the trap he was falling into and trailed off into an embarrassed silence. He looked down at his hands as if he wanted to make certain that none of his fingers were missing.

“You didn’t mean to say foreigner at all, did you, Sergeant?”

Kang had hoped Tay would let it go. Clearly he wasn’t.

“You meant to say ‘white,’ didn’t you? You meant to say white people being killed in luxury hotels isn’t good for Singapore’s image, didn’t you, Sergeant?”

Kang shifted his weight and jammed his hands deep into his pockets. He didn’t even try to answer Tay’s question. He had said far too much already.

“Don’t worry about it, Sergeant,” the OC said after a few moments passed in an uncomfortable silence. “Go on downstairs and finish the interviews.”

Kang nodded and walked quickly away. The OC pushed himself off the wall.

“Fix this, Sam,” he said. “I’m depending on you.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll do my best.”

“Do better than that. Do whatever you have to. Just fucking fix it.”

FOUR

SERGEANT
Kang completed the interviews in less than half an hour because nobody had anything useful to add to what little he and Tay already knew. Kang left the hotel’s executive offices and found Tay waiting for him in the coffee shop.

Tay was at a table in the outside section at the front of the hotel, the part that was supposed to look like a Parisian sidewalk café but didn’t. On his table were a small box of aspirin, a water glass, an espresso cup, two packs of Marlboro Reds, a purple plastic disposable lighter, and an ashtray. The aspirin box was open, the espresso cup and water glass were empty, and Tay was just finishing a cigarette, clearly not his first from the look of the ashtray.

“Hotel shops are wonderful places, Sergeant. They sell nearly everything a man could possibly want.”

“Apparently, sir.”

Kang pulled out a chair and sat down. He pointed at the red Marlboro box.

“Thoe are the strong ones, aren’t they, sir?”

“Don’t start, Sergeant.”

“If you’re going to begin smoking again, sir, don’t you at least think the light ones would—”

“Are we all done here?” Tay interrupted. “Do they need us upstairs for anything else?”

Kang shook his head. “The FMB guys will be a while yet, but I don’t think there’s anything more for us to do. Not unless you want to have another look at the scene before they move the body.”

Tay gave Kang a long look.

“I didn’t think so,” Sergeant Kang said.

Tay shook another Marlboro out of the pack and lit it. He exhaled a thick cloud of smoke and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table.

“Do we have all the statements?”

“Statements from the manager, the security chief, and the maid—”

“You mean the housekeeping supervisor.”

“Right, sir, the housekeeping supervisor. I’ll type them up later and you can look at them all if you want, but I don’t think you’ll find anything in them.”

“What about the other guests on the floor?”

“Patrolmen have talked to three who were on the twenty-sixth floor last night, one who was on the twenty-seventh, and three who were on the twenty-fifth. We’re tracking the others down along with all of yesterday’s checkouts on those three floors, but so far no one seems to have heard anything unusual.”

“Somebody must have heard something. You can’t beat anybody that badly without making a hell of a lot of noise.”

“Unless she was tied up and gagged.”

Tay looked at Kang and raised his eyebrows.

“The FMB supervisor says there are marks on the woman’s wrists and ankles,” Kang went on. “He says he’s not sure yet, but they appear to be consistent with restraints of some kind.”

“Restraints?”

“You know, sir … ah, like she was—”

“Having kinky sex?”

“Yes, sir. Exactly.”

“Wonderful,” Tay muttered as he stubbed out his cigarette. “Sex and death. My favorite subjects.”

Two Japanese-looking men carrying black leather briefcases passed close to the table and Tay watched them until they were gone.