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“My son woke me in the night,” the woman blurted out. “A bad dream. I had just gotten him to sleep again when I heard...” Her face took on a puzzled expression. “It sounded like a child crying next door. But then it stopped. I told myself it was a cat, because how could it be a child? There were only the two men in that house.”
A chill ran through Mei-li, but all she said was, “M’goy,” as she handed over the banknotes.
She glanced at the house once more, then turned and walked back over the footbridge to where Patrick waited with the Rolls. Her smartphone was out, and she was texting. Forensics team, she typed. Tai O. Pictures to follow. Then she added the GPS coordinates. When she was done, she emailed the pictures she’d taken of the abandoned house.
Patrick took one look at her face as he held the door for her and asked only one question. “Hai?”
“Hai.”
Mei-li checked her watch, wondering why Dirk hadn’t called her, and turned the ringer on her cell phone back on. She hadn’t wanted anything to interrupt her while she’d been reconnoitering, but her phone hadn’t buzzed, either. So she called him.
“Dirk?” she said when he answered on the second ring.
“Yes, Mei-li?”
“I thought you were going to call me when—”
He cut her off. “No reason to. The wire instructions never arrived.”
“What?”
“Yeah.” Just one word, but she could hear the tight anger and frustration embodied in his voice. Like a lion straining at the leash.
She tried to think of what she could say to reassure him. “Let me check with my contact at RMM. Could be the repairs on the plane aren’t finished. If I were the kidnappers, I’d wait until the very last minute this time, just in case something else goes wrong.” She took a breath. “Think about it. I’m sure if they’d known they were going to be trapped here, they wouldn’t have mentioned Terrell Blackwood’s name to you the first time they called.”
“Makes sense,” Dirk said, calmer this time.
“I’ll let you know if I find out anything. And I should be back in an hour, unless traffic is bad.”
There was a long silence at the other end, and she thought he’d hung up without saying goodbye, but then he said, “I’m in the study now. I...there are too many people in the other room to say what—” He stopped as if he didn’t know exactly how to say what he wanted to say.
“I know,” she told him, tenderness welling up in her. “I understand. I’ll be there as soon as I can. And I have some good news for you. I found the house where the kidnappers stayed in Tai O.” She dashed off a text after she hung up with Dirk, a question that was swiftly answered. Repairs delayed. Critical part damaged in transit.
Her lips curved in a smile of admiration. She didn’t know how RMM had done it, but somehow they’d sabotaged one of the parts necessary to repair the plane. She quickly texted Dirk to let him know, then sat back and rode the rest of the way in silence, trying to put all the pieces together.
She’d located the house where the kidnappers had stayed in Tai O, but she still didn’t know why they’d chosen to stay there. And she didn’t know why they’d left after only one night. She’d conjectured that the first night—the night of the typhoon—the kidnappers and the little girls had stayed in an apartment in Central belonging to one of the kidnappers, but had moved to Tai O the second night. A conjecture that was now confirmed.
She’d already followed the GPS coordinates from the first photo—the one from the night before last—to an apartment building in Central, and with the altitude she’d almost been able to pinpoint which floor. But that only meant the apartment in question could be one of fifty on each floor. And even if she were able to take geotagged photos in each of those apartments, she wasn’t sure the GPS coordinates would be that precise.
The photo from Tai O had been taken very early in the morning. That matched the time stamp on the photo as well as the eyewitness account that the kidnappers had departed before dawn. But the next photo had been taken in Mong Kok. Why? Especially since the last photo of the night had been taken in Aberdeen.
She’d tracked down the Mong Kok location, too, before heading to Tai O—a street-level massage parlor with residential units above it in a seedier part of town. Patrick had refused to let her get out of the Rolls to investigate further. “Triads,” he’d said firmly, accelerating away from the building as best he could on the crowded street.
