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Hulan assumed that the killer had known that they were coming, that he had gotten so involved with the creation of his artwork that he hadn’t had time to remove evidence. She opened drawers and found bankbooks and a passport. She peeked in the refrigerator and found only a few Giant Panda Brand herbal remedies; she checked the closet and found a box of tourist T-shirts made by the Glorious Cotton Company. David tried to look at the scene as his FBI agent friends had told him to. The MO was certainly different from the other murders, but a stage had clearly been set. As Noel Gardner had predicted, the murderer was flaunting not only his own work but also his knowledge of David and Hulan’s movements.
They met in the kitchen. “Take a look at these, David,” she said, handing him the passport and bankbooks she’d found. As he opened the passport, she said, “He was traveling to L.A. about once a month.”
“Just like Henglai.”
“That’s right,” she said. “And look at those bankbooks. I don’t have Henglai’s with me, but aren’t these deposits in the same amounts as his?”
David leafed through the pages and thought she was right. “Why is all this money in L.A.?”
She looked around. The others were in the living room with the body. “There’s so much uncertainty in the government,” she said in a low voice. “People like to keep their money safe.”
“But how do we know this money is coming from China? This could all be U.S. money.”
“If that’s the case, where’s that money coming from?”
“That’s the question,” he said. He took her elbow. “Come and look at this.” He led her to the door of the living room. A couple of investigators dusted for fingerprints. Pathologist Fong was hunched over the body. “What makes this murder different from the others?”
She looked at the guts on the floor and the arterial arc against the wall. “It’s bloody?” she ventured.
“It’s more than bloody,” he said. “It’s flamboyant.”
“We still don’t know what killed Billy and Henglai,” she cautioned. “For all we know, their murders were flamboyant, too.”
David considered that possibility. “Yes, the blackened teeth, the dissolved innards. Neither of our pathologists could determine what killed those boys, though. Is there some poison your people haven’t thought of? I’m talking about something esoteric, something uniquely Chinese, something flamboyant.”
“There’s Chinese herbal medicine,” she said doubtfully. “But it is medicine.”
“Medicine can be toxic if used incorrectly.”
“David, you could be right!” She grabbed his arm. “Come on. There’s someone we should see.”
She left orders with the other investigators, said a few last words to Pathologist Fong, rounded up Peter, then took one last look at the scene to commit the details to memory. In the elevator, she told Peter they’d be going to the Beijing Chinese Herbal Medicine Institute. “My parents are great believers in traditional Chinese medicine,” she explained to David. “My father says that Dr. Du is the seventh-best Chinese herbal medicine practitioner in the whole country.”
Like most older buildings in China, the six-story institute had no heat. The floors were swept but hadn’t been washed perhaps ever. The walls had been painted a long time ago and were marred by fingerprints, gashes, liquid stains, and who knew what else. The building itself was made from cast concrete, and David, being from Southern California, hoped that there wouldn’t be an earthquake. This was just the kind of structure that would sandwich in on itself at about six on the Richter scale.
There were no directories or signs. David and Hulan walked down one corridor and saw no one. They turned down another corridor and all of the doors were shut. Finally Hulan poked her head into a couple of patients’ rooms to ask for Dr. Du. In these moments, David saw the differences between Chinese and American concepts of convalescence. At the institute, the rooms were outfitted with simple steel-frame beds. The sheets looked clean but old and soft from repeated use. The down quilts—with their faded colors and patched areas—looked like they’d been used for decades. In room after room, relatives gathered around the sickbeds, talking, laughing, and eating from steaming bowls filled with noodles or rice and vegetables. Guests and patients wore sweaters or padded jackets to guard against the brisk temperature of the hospital.
At last David and Hulan found a nurse who told them that the doctor was in his office on the top floor. The elevator didn’t work, so they walked up the six flights. Up there were the consultation offices, and in each of these a doctor sat behind a desk. Some appeared to be taking the pulse of a patient, others just sat with their hands folded in front of them, waiting for customers. Hulan and David reached the office of Dr. Du, where diagrams of the human body outlining its acupuncture meridians covered the walls. The curtains on the windows were torn and faded.
Dr. Du, a round little man, stood to greet them. His full cheeks were made more so by sideburns that came down almost to his jaw-line. Circles under his eyes hung on his face like half moons. When Hulan introduced herself, Dr. Du smiled warmly and asked after her mother. Then, for David’s sake, Dr. Du switched to English. “I have been to the United States many times,” he said, “to visit Chinese medicine colleges and to speak at your universities. I have also been to Disneyland and Mount Rushmore. Have you been to those places?”
When David said he hadn’t been to Mount Rushmore, Dr. Du pulled out a few snapshots. While David looked at them, Hulan explained why they were there. When she was done, Dr. Du addressed David. “You are right. Many of our herbs and minerals are very dangerous if used in excess. You take something like cinnabar. You know it sedates the heart and calms the spirit. You think, I will take extra. The next thing, you are very sick, maybe dead, because cinnabar contains mercury. You know ginseng? You can buy this anywhere—even an American drugstore, no? You think, This will help my longevity. This will make me more of a man. You take it home, cook it in a little water, and drink a lot. Next thing, you have a bloody nose. The life is coming out of you, not going into you.”
“If you wanted to kill someone very quickly,” Hulan asked, “what would you use?”
The old doctor clapped his hands together as he realized they’d come to him on MPS business. “You want me to help you! I like this! We must have tea, and I will think.” He called out to the hallway and a young woman came in, poured tea into stubby waterglasses, and backed out of the room. Dr. Du asked about the victims’ general physical makeup.
“They were both men in their early twenties.”
Dr. Du shook his head sadly. “So young for death, no?” Then he asked, “Did your labs check for realgar? Do you know this word? We call it Male Yellow. The active ingredient is arsenic.”
“I’m sure they checked for that,” Hulan said.
“Can you tell me the condition of the bodies?” Dr. Du asked.
As
Hulan gave a clinical synopsis, the doctor stood and paced. Suddenly he stopped. “I know! I have it! We have a beetle in China that’s very poisonous. Our beetle is black with yellow stripes. You have it in the West, too. We call it ban mao. You call it by three different names—myalbris, cantharides, or, the most common name, Spanish fly.”
