The Lake Ching Murders - A Mystery of Fire and Ice (5 page)

The specialist directed the shooting of the exterior of the boat starting with the 14K Triad markings on the hull. He was extremely specific about what he wanted in each shot. After over three-quarters of an hour in the brutal wind and bounding waves, during which time he’d had shots taken from all the cardinal directions, close-ups of the ice formations at the base of the boat, context shots taken of the portals and many, many different shots of the scorch marks on the starboard side, he ordered the photographer to follow him back onto the boat.

He started in the bar — with the Chinese. Seven bodies. All male. Each more rotund than most mainland Chinese. From the texture of the skin on their arms and their cuticles he guessed that they were all between fifty and seventy-five years old. From their personal effects that Chen had collected, he knew they were Chinese. He couldn’t use their faces to discern their ethnicity because none of the men had faces.

Their features had been carved off with some sort of wide-bladed sharp tool. Wide-bladed because the damage seemed to have been inflicted with one stroke. The specialist couldn’t even venture a guess at the implement’s name or normal use. A face remover. “I’d like two AK-47s, five banana clips and a face remover for good luck.” He didn’t laugh at the thought. It could happen in the New China.

He scanned the room. Where the facial skin and cartilage were now, he had no idea.

Three of the Chinese men had been shot from behind while they stood against the mirrored wall. The splatter lines were consistent with the pattern of a small weapon’s discharge.

The specialist took out a handkerchief and rubbed it across his face. He was freezing cold but the sweat on his face was hot and stank of dark places. “Have them start up the boat’s generator. I want the electricity on in here,” he wrote on the pad. Chen immediately relayed the orders.

The specialist took a deep breath. He began showing the photographer the pictures he wanted of these three faceless men. Straight on close-ups. Full body shots. Profile body shots. Wide-angle shots of each body taken from the cardinal points of the compass. Lastly, he ordered shots showing where the bodies were in relationship to each of the glass portals.

The overhead lights flickered on.

He had the bodies turned over and repeated the process. It took more than an hour to finish photographing these three. The position of the fourth dead figure drew his attention. This man had been stabbed with a knife while he was on his knees. The depressions on the carpet and the collection of blood around the depressions suggested that the man had been killed and then held in that kneeling position while . . . while what had been done to his face?

He instructed the photographer to repeat the process with the kneeling man and the two dead men on the barstools.

As the photographer did his methodical work, the specialist prepared himself then moved to what he believed was the oldest of the faceless figures. A knife had been used on him too but this time just to sever the tendons behind the ankles and knees. The man had been tied like a hog then lifted by a foot to dangle from the chandelier. Thickness in the rug beneath the dead man once again told the tale. The man had bled to death, but not from the knife wounds. There were no slashes or gunshot holes in his torso. Just the attempt to obscure, no, erase the face. He must have screamed through the curtain of blood or maybe he was lucky and fainted. The specialist stopped himself. He’d been away too long. Thoughts like that were senseless — worse — they were useless.

The specialist looked at the photographer who nodded that he had completed his task. The specialist indicated that he wanted to be left alone. Once by himself he slowly memorized the room from east to west. Seven dead faceless Chinese men now frozen in their horror. “Or was it my horror?” the specialist asked himself.

He slipped his hand out of his glove and leaned in close to one of the desecrated faces at the bar. He touched the edges of the wound. No raggedness on the forehead cut but a slight flap of skin where the chin ought to be. The upper edge of the cut was bevelled downward. Putting that together with the flap at the bottom seemed to imply that the cut came from top to bottom.

He checked a second faceless man. This one had the same markings. Then he looked up at the figure that dangled from the chandelier. “To die is one thing. To be mutilated after death another. But to be carved up before you die — that’s a third,” he mouthed silently.

He allowed himself to walk the space. In his inner self he heard their cries. Then he didn’t. These were Chinese men — from their suits, wealthy Chinese men. They wouldn’t have grovelled. An eerie silence would have greeted the presence of death in their midst.

He heard the boards of the ship creak beneath his feet. Then he stepped in a partially frozen blood patch in the carpet. It crackled under his weight.

How many men were needed to kill and rip the faces off seven Chinese men? He made a note for himself, “Check toxicology for sedatives.” How many men? At least three, no more than three hundred, he couldn’t even venture a guess. Men and implements . . . guns, knives and face removers.

Then he stepped on something hard buried in the carpet. He leaned down and ran his hand over the rug. There. He pulled back the nap of the rug to reveal the object. It was a jade character on a medallion strung from a broken chain. No doubt the man who wore this would have a duplicate tattooed on his left breast. Triads were seldom subtle. He took a pencil from his pocket and prodded the piece. It shifted in the nap of the carpet. Using the pencil, he picked up the chain. He brought the broken link close to his face, frowned and signalled for the cameraman to shoot the piece. Then he got the man to carefully photograph the broken link on the chain. Four times.

He put the medallion and chain into an evidence bag then took a closer look at the gunshot wounds on the two men at the bar. Clean holes. Old-style wounds with none of the lethal tearing of modern bullets. Before he could come to any conclusion about the wounds he spotted something else in the carpet — dead centre in the room. Two very old spent cartridges. Old-style wounds. Old-style cartridges. He bagged them then stuck his head out the door. Captain Chen hustled over to him. “Tag and take their clothes,” he wrote. He passed by Chen and stopped.

Something had caught his eye. A brown splotch on the carpet. Near the door. He knelt down and pressed his palm against the stain. It wasn’t frozen as solid as the blood puddles. He had the photographer shoot the spot and record its location in the room. “Got it, sir,” said the cameraman.

The man looked a little green. He was young. He’d get over it. The specialist nodded and motioned the man to follow him into the next room.

The small room with the video monitor.

The Koreans’ faces had been left alone but they were nonetheless dead. All three had been shot twice through the right armpit and thrown to the floor. Some marksman! Or else the men were being held still — very still — and then shot from a few feet away. The specialist got to his knees again and leaned in close to the wounds. His knowledge of forensics was encyclopedic but he’d been away from this for a while. As he poked at the dried lacerations, he recalled the telltale signs of a wound caused by a close-range gunshot —burnt hair from the gun-barrel gasses and burnt striations on the skin. Both were clear to see on all three bodies. There was no marksman here — just an executioner. Then he saw the ligature marks on the wrists. He picked up one stiff arm and looked more closely at the markings. Wire? He pushed at the man’s shoulder. The arm was loose in the socket. As if it had been pulled out while hanging by the arms. He looked up and there were the cut marks in the overhead beam. Wire-hung from the beam then shot through the armpits. It struck a chord. He looked about him for the wire the killers had used but found none. “Probably in the same place as the seven Chinese faces,” he thought.

He returned his attention to the cut marks on the beam. The men had been yanked up by wire; that was clear from the depth of the cuts in the beam. Then shot? But not hung. The cut marks were single lines. No enlarged gouges that would have been evident if the men had been hung and struggled. So they had been shot through the armpits then let down. Maybe the murderers were interrupted? By what?

As the photographer took shots of the dead Koreans, the specialist looked at the room. It was lavishly furnished. All the chairs pointed toward the monitor. A VCR sat beside the large screen. He looked at the machine. He had used one of these in the past, but this model was much newer. He punched the power button and watched the digital icons flicker into life. He didn’t know what most of them meant.

He pulled the knob on the television. Light came from the screen. Then he hit the play button on the VCR. It must have been on fast forward and he couldn’t stop it, but the specialist recognized the images. Hong Kong porno films. Blond European women servicing bespectacled Asian men. He punched another button. The image froze. The man’s member on the cheek of the blond girl. A glazed smile on her face.

An old twinge — more an ache — went through his groin.

He looked around. He didn’t want anyone seeing him looking at this stuff but he couldn’t figure out how to turn the machine off, so he unplugged it from the wall. When he looked up, Chen was there. Pointing at the VCR and monitor, he scratched on the pad, “Tag and take these too.”

He left the room and headed below decks. He was sweating again. This wasn’t a crime site, it was an abattoir. He wondered if these men had children. If they would be missed by their wives.

Below deck, he found the five Japanese bodies in a room that had curtains at one end of a small raised runway. All were tied to their chairs — two on one side, three on the other and an empty chair at the foot of the runway. Two had expensive cameras at their feet. All had been cut from just beneath their chins to their navels. Their entrails had been dumped in their laps and then cut so a single strand of intestine dangled down their fronts like a raw purple tail. One man had an expensive pair of Parisian glasses still perched on his face.

On closer examination, it became clear that the spectacles had fallen off and been replaced. No one wore one eyeglass arm behind the ear and one in front. “After the photographer is finished, dust these glasses for prints,” he wrote. Chen nodded and scratched a note for himself. “Why would they bother with the glasses?” he wondered.

The photographer began his documenting as the specialist walked around the room. He parted the curtain and found a sound system. He powered it up and hit the play button on the CD player. An American rock band. The music was loud. He turned it off and ejected the disc. He wondered who the group was.

He signalled to Chen. On his pad he wrote, “Take these back too.” As Chen began to dismantle the CD player, the specialist stepped through the curtain out onto the stage.

There was dirt or mud or some kind of thick earth on the runway in patches all the way from backstage to the centre of the platform. He knelt, touched it and brought his finger to his nose. There was no smell. The cold. Thank heavens for the cold or the whole place would have reeked. He signalled Chen for an evidence bag into which he scraped the material. He sealed the bag and handed it back to Chen who took it with him to add to the rest of the collection.

When the specialist stood up, he found himself alone on the runway. The disembowelled men strapped to their chairs seemed to be staring up at him. Ghastly purple penises hanging in front of them. And an empty chair at the end of the runway.

From the small stage, the meaning of the tableau was clear even if the reasoning behind it was not. A thought occurred to him. He carefully stepped off the runway and approached one of the Japanese men. With a pencil he pushed aside the frozen purple grizzle then took out a knife and cut open the man’s pants.

Where a penis should have been only a frozen black blotch remained. He stepped back. Chen noticed. “Sir?” All he did was point at the rip in the man’s pants. Chen crossed to the dead man as the specialist made his way to the door.

The soldier entered the party man’s boat.

“Done, soldier?” he asked holding the cell phone against his chest.

“I put your suitcase where you told me to, sir.”

“Good,” he said and raised the cell phone to his lips. The soldier stayed for a moment hoping for more than a job-well-done smile. But that was all he got for putting the party man’s metal case in the bowels of the boat.

The last room held the Americans. Two men. Both elderly, although he found it hard to be sure of Caucasians’ ages. These men looked as if they were lying on their backs on the large, plush bed so they could admire their reflection in the ornate mirror that hung from the ceiling. But on closer examination the specialist saw the cut line on their necks between the Adam’s apple and the clavicle. He reached over one of the bodies and put his hands into the man’s hair.

The frozen blood resisted him. So he pulled harder.

The head came free of the torso with a sickening plop. He felt his gorge rise and he stumbled back against the far wall. He sank to his knees, his head in his hands. He concentrated and tried to slow his breathing. To collect himself. Then he felt the hair in his hand and looked through his fingers. The dead man’s eyes were open and looking right into his.

He dropped the head and looked up. There, on the mirror over the dead Americans’ bed in bold red paint, were slashed the characters of the feared 14K Triad. Beneath the name was their motto which had first appeared in the Opium Wars:
Foreign Devils and Traitors Die.

Up on deck, the specialist leaned over the ice-coated rail. The shoreline wasn’t that far away. The sun was setting over the city of Ching. A large cultivated island was far off to one side. It all seemed so peaceful. So . . . so romantic. Yeah, sure. Seventeen dead men — romantic.

A single bird dropped from the sky and plunged through a hole in the ice. Moments later it appeared with a fish in its beak. It stretched its long neck and tilted backward. The fish must have been positioned badly because the bird tossed the wriggling thing into the air. The fish arched as it glinted in the sun. Then the bird grabbed it again — this time by the head. The bird’s dinner, still squirming, was pulled in by the bird’s throat muscles, then down into the stillness of its belly.