Prayer of the Dragon (5 page)

Lokesh had begun writing a series of familiar Tibetan words on the cloth scraps. He was turning the miners’ equipment into a battery of prayer flags, erected in a defensive line between the miners and Drango village.

“Lha gyal lo,” Shan said.

The young Tibetan silently opened and shut his mouth, as though trying to remember how to speak the words. “Lha gyal lo,” he finally repeated in a voice that cracked with emotion, then stumbled down the slope to help inscribe more flags.

An hour later Yangke led them onto a long, wide shelf, one of the many tiers that rose like irregular steps for several miles before ending at the base of the jagged summit.

“One of the other shepherds discovered the bodies,” Yangke explained. “They had made camp by the trees,” he said, indicating several gnarled junipers and pines that grew by a small spring, beside a series of high outcroppings that would have shielded them from anyone higher up on the slope. “He did not know about one camp but one of the dogs starting growling as if a wolf was near and then he saw a backpack lying out in the open. He was going to skirt the camp but the dog went in and wouldn’t return.”

“Where is their equipment and bedding?” Shan asked as they approached the grove of trees. There was no sign that anyone had been there except for compacted soil under the trees.

“Gone. I came here two days later, as soon as I could without Chodron’s men seeing me. I found the cold ashes of a small campfire. Lots of dried blood. Boot marks all over. The miners watch each other. If one dies, any equipment that is not looted immediately is gathered up and auctioned to the others. They are like vultures.”

Shan paused and looked back at Yangke. “Do you mean miners have been killed too?”

“It’s a dangerous job,” Yangke said. “And the miners like to take care of their own problems. I hear things from the other shepherds. There was talk about a miner killed last year, another found dead last month. But the miners and I, we stay away from each other.” Exhausted from climbing while burdened by his canque, Yangke settled between two boulders, resting one end of the beam on each. He raised a weary arm to gesture toward a small mound of rocks not far from the trees. “Their campfire was there.”

Someone had tried to obscure the fire pit by stacking rocks over it to make it look like the base of one more cairn. Shan kneeled and rolled away the rocks, then examined the ashes, trying to recognize the mélange of scents released when he stirred them. He closed his eyes to focus on the smells. Burned feathers. Burned plastic. Rice and wild onions, scorched in a pot. Singed butter. Sifting the ashes, he produced a lump of hard blue material, three inches long, then another similar piece. The remains of water bottles or plastic cups or even remnants of a small nylon pack? The ashes yielded nothing else but pebbles, dozens of small gray pebbles. He sifted several onto his palm. They were identical, each less than half an inch long, with a dimple on one side and a corresponding convex curvature on the opposite side. He retrieved more of the little shards, placed one on a flat stone and smashed it with a larger rock. It dented but did not break. The pebbles were made of plastic.

At his side another hand reached into the pit and began retrieving more of them. Lokesh scooped them into a pile as Shan, still perplexed, tossed one in his palm and began pacing in ever-widening circles around the fire pit. The scavengers had been thorough. But on his first circuit he found the stub of a pencil, on his second a little red feather, and, pushed into the dirt by a heavy boot, a silver instrument, eight inches long, as thin as a pencil but ending in sharp curved points at the end. Another dental probe. On the third and fourth, a dozen slivers of wood, all tapered, all a uniform length. Toothpicks. He stepped under the trees, noting the pattern of the pressed earth and pine needles, the imprint of a sleeping bag. The soil beneath the trees was dry and loose. He raked his fingertips through the earth at the edge of the imprint. Pebbles turned up in the little furrows, then a white nugget, as hard as a pebble. Dried cheese, a traditional Tibetan food that, like buttered tea, appealed to few outsiders. But an outsider might have politely accepted the cheese and then discreetly buried it so as not to offend. He tried again, turning up a small stick, bits of quartz, a shard of old bone. It was a camp that had, no doubt, been used before. He rose then paused to pick up a little stick. Its bark had been peeled, a shallow groove cut in one end as if to indicate legs. He extracted the piece he had taken from the comatose stranger in the stable. The two pieces fit together, forming a crude figure that reminded him of the little clay images of saints traditional Tibetans used. This one, like those in the village, had had its body broken, perhaps by the killer.

Shan gripped the little figure, studying the ground, seeing no more signs, then sniffed at it. It had been cut only days earlier. He walked around each of the half dozen trees, and found four stubs oozing sap, then held the stick close to one of the stubs. It was a match, or close enough. Had there been four stick figures? But there had been only three people in the camp. Pocketing the sticks, he took a step, then looked back at the trees. There were many branches that might have served the purpose, but all of the sticks had been cut from the east side of the trees.

When he looked back he saw that Lokesh had laid the plastic pebbles in a row and was counting them in a low voice. As Shan approached he reached one hundred eight.

“Not for a rosary,” Shan said to his old friend. “Not for praying.” He picked up a handful and with a tentative expression began a second line parallel to the first. He laid out the double line for eighteen inches then held up two of the pebbles and showed Lokesh how each curvature fit into the dimple of the next. “A zipper,” he explained.

Lokesh gestured to the pile of gray shards. “But it would be four or five feet long.”

“Do you smell the ashes? A sleeping bag was burned. Nylon and feathers would be easily consumed by the flames. Though why someone would burn something so useful in the mountains I cannot say.”

Shan left the old Tibetan wearing a puzzled expression, continuing to assemble the charred teeth in tandem lines. He paced about the campsite again, noting now the broken twigs of several nearby bushes. He kneeled to study the way the slanting rays of the sun played on the ground. A vague line of shadow, the barest smudge of gray, ran from near the fire, around the outcropping, and up the slope. It was the vestige of a very old path, unused for many decades.

Two other paths were betrayed only by crushed plants and a few boot prints, recently made, going toward separate clusters of large boulders spaced a few hundred feet apart. Shan followed each, confirming that they led to makeshift latrines: two of them.

Finally he found a third path, or rather a track, where, judging from the bent stems, something heavy had been dragged. It led to a cluster of high boulders a hundred feet away.

Yangke rose and walked unsteadily toward Lokesh as Shan reached the entrance to the cluster of outcroppings, a narrow passage between two eight-foot-high flat-faced boulders. With a glance toward his companions Shan stepped between the rocks, then froze. Rope was strung waist-high around most of the small clearing, with squares of white paper taped to it at intervals. The papers held Chinese ideograms, inscribed with a ballpoint pen.

“What sort of prayer flags are these?” a raspy voice asked over his shoulder.

“Not prayer flags, Lokesh,” Shan said in a worried tone as he approached the rope. “Warnings.” As he read the words on the flags he shuddered.
Keep out
, the first said.
Danger
, said the second.
Special
Police
and
Murder Crime
, read two more. Then,
Night Lab Squad
.

Feet shuffled in the dirt behind them and Yangke appeared, squeezing sideways through the boulders. “Is this where . . . ,” he began.

There was no need to announce that this was where the two bodies had been discovered. On the ground before them, inside the rope, were white silhouettes. Two of them were ovals, three feet long. Another, wider, was nearly four feet long. A circle was less than two feet wide, beside a long irregular outline with two appendages that must have been legs, the shape of a human body sprawled on its side. Shan stepped over the rope and knelt at the first outline, the largest oval, rubbing a finger on the white powdery line. He touched it to his tongue. Flour. The discovery caused him to again gaze uneasily at the warning flags. Whoever had strung up the flags was from a place far away from the mountain. Someone who used bleached flour to draw on the earth came from a different world.

Still kneeling, he surveyed the bizarre scene, beginning to grasp that it was not one mystery he faced but several. Layers of riddles that began not with the killings but with the unknown identity of the victims and ended with the unknown hand that had created the facsimile of a criminal investigation scene. Patches of flour dotted the adjoining rocks. Four pieces of wadded-up tape lay scattered about the clearing, the nearest two feet from his knee. He unfolded it. The backing was covered with flour smudged with lines and grit from the rocks. Someone had been playacting, someone who did not fully understand forensic technique, did not know such rough stone was unlikely to give meaningful fingerprints but who knew enough to go through the motions of a forensic investigation.

But the bronze stains on the ground and patterns of stains on the rocks told Shan there had been nothing contrived about the objects outlined in flour. Someone dead, or dying, had been dragged into the little clearing. Someone else had died there, among the rocks, blood spurting in a fan pattern from at least two savage, puncturing blows. He glanced back at Lokesh, hoping that the old Tibetan did not grasp the truth that lay before them. Four silhouettes, two bodies. At least one of the victims had been dismembered.

“There were some vultures,” Yangke said. “I could smell the . . . I could smell what the vultures smelled.”

“Where did the bodies go?”

“I don’t know. The vultures frightened me. I didn’t know this was where . . .”

“Vultures don’t eat clothing. Vultures don’t eat bones.”

“Who would touch them?” Yangke asked. “Who would want to move bodies?”

It was, Shan realized, one more layer of mystery. “Are there
ragyapa
nearby?” he asked, referring to the fleshcutters who traditionally disposed of the Tibetan dead through sky burial.

“Not for thirty miles.”

“What happens when people die in the village?”

“The old ones want their bodies taken to the ragyapa. The bodies of the others are burned. We have lots of firewood. It’s a more efficient use of resources to burn them, Chodron says.”

Shan turned to Lokesh, recognizing the forlorn expression on his old friend’s gentle countenance. Those who died a violent death were seldom prepared, seldom in the peaceful, focused state of mind that would allow them to make the difficult transition to the next life. In Tibetan tradition such victims of murder often became angry ghosts who destroyed the harmony of the land they occupied.

Yangke seemed to sense something wrong with Lokesh and touched his elbow, gesturing back, toward the opening. The old Tibetan silently retreated.

“Why would they burn a sleeping bag?” Yangke asked as he followed Lokesh.

“Because it was soaked in blood. One of them was attacked in his sleep, then dragged here inside his bag.”

Shan watched his companions retreat with an unexpected ache in his heart. Then he went to work in the little clearing. He examined the bloodstains, tight patterns projecting from a broad, flat rock that had been laid close to a corner of the little alcove. The sprays of droplets had been made by limbs that still had blood pulsing in them. Soon he had collected eight more pieces of wadded tape. The tape itself had fine fibers woven into it, and had none of the blotchy adhesive or chemical smell of the cheap product sold in Tibetan markets. Along the rock walls were tracks with the patterns of expensive boots like those he had seen on the man in the stable. He stood and studied the little clearing, trying to reconstruct the events of the past few days. First had come the killer and his victims, later someone else who, in his own awkward way, seemed to be seeking the truth. What had that visitor learned? Had he taken away evidence? On a rock face on the opposite side Shan noticed strangely raised marks, partial fingerprints in a hard gray substance that seemed to have been extruded from the surface. Two feet away was a narrow V-shaped opening where two of the boulders came together. He probed it with his fingers, pulling out two long cotton swabs, a bent, exhausted tube of industrial glue, and a half-used tube of lip balm. Sexy Sheen, read the label in English and Chinese. He examined the swabs. They were on eight-inch-long sticks, the kind found in a well-stocked medical lab, something seldom seen in Tibetan towns.

When he finished, and emerged from the murder site, Lokesh was handing three sticks to Yangke, who had three more in his hand, all identical, all painted with three bands at the top, one blue then two red.

“I thought you said these people were not miners,” Shan said.

“These have been put here since I visited last. Lokesh found them, arranged to lay claim to this whole campsite and beyond.”

“Do you recognize the colors? Which miner’s are they?”

Yangke’s only reply was to insert the stakes into one of the iron hand straps of his collar, and snap them in half. He opened a small trough in the ground with his heel. Lokesh silently helped him bury the broken claim stakes.