The Red Lotus Read online

  “You didn’t say where he was found,” she said. “And, while I’m asking, what’s the condition of the corpse? How did he die?”

  “The coroner says it was a traumatic head injury. But he had multiple injuries. He was hit by a car, it seems.”

  “You ran the roads,” she said. “The leaders of the bike tour and I ran the roads. We saw no trace of him. Had he detoured someplace? Was he on the wrong road? Might he have been lost?”

  “No. It was just…”

  “It was just what? You can tell me.”

  “Just one of the hairpins south of the summit on the Hai Van Pass…”

  “Go on.”

  “The cyclist was, we believe, hit by a vehicle there. He was sent over the guardrail and onto the rocks below. East side—the sea side. The bicycle was pretty badly mangled.”

  She recalled those switchbacks near the peak. She and Giang had looked over the side in a couple of spots and seen nothing. The drop wasn’t far, maybe twenty or twenty-five feet. Still, that was plenty far if you were clipped into a bike and had just been slammed into by a truck or an SUV or one of those tour buses that took up most of the narrow road. “We were there yesterday. What time was the body found? And was the coroner able to establish a time of death?”

  The captain smiled wistfully. “It’s probably good you’re a doctor. You can ask him if we leave now.”

  “The morgue is at the hospital…where? Here in Hoi An? Hue?”

  “Da Nang. Dr. Tran speaks pretty good English, too. You should do fine together.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Then she took the pen she found in a slot on the obelisk and scribbled a note for the day manager to give to Scott or the other bike tour leaders when they returned, telling them where she was going and what time she was leaving. “Let’s go,” she told the captain. “I don’t want to miss the coroner.”

  Rat math is mind-boggling. It’s not that it’s complicated, even for me. It’s just that everything about it feels exponential. Everything feels supersonic or—and I am choosing this word carefully—surreal.

  Begin with the urban brown rat. The city slicker of rodents. The ones you glimpse when you’re hailing a cab a little before midnight or you see racing into an alley as you’re walking back to your apartment building or hotel.

  Take their teeth, because in them you can see both Darwinian wizardry and rat analytics. Look at their incisors. They grow roughly five inches a year. Now, you don’t see a rat with five- or ten-inch-long chompers, because they chip or wear down. But what may be even more remarkable than the speed with which a rat’s teeth grow is how its teeth function: the two front teeth open a bit like a curtain when it eats, and a fold of skin serves as a dam between them, stopping the animal from swallowing something that it can’t digest.

  Better still, spend a moment with rat reproduction. One rat mom can give birth to ten to twelve litters a year, and the litters are fifteen to twenty baby rats.

  Now, those figures assume there is plenty of garbage. But if there is? A rats’ nest in the basement of your apartment building can quickly become a rats’ nation. Oh, we work to poison them. Some people shoot them. We try and break their necks and backs in traps. But a rat isn’t a mouse. A rat is a formidable enemy. A brown rat in a city stretches sixteen inches from its tail to the twitching, whiskered tip of its nose. And just as they’re about sixteen inches long, they weigh about sixteen ounces. Sixteen and sixteen. That’s what I mean by surreal.

  10

  The smell of the morgue in Da Nang instantly reminded Alexis of the smell of the morgue she had visited as a medical student. Antiseptics and bleach. It propelled her back to the biology labs those days her first year when she and the other aspiring doctors would dissect human cadavers. But those classrooms had had windows, while a morgue invariably has none. Not in America and not here in Vietnam. A morgue was a world of sharp, frigid lines and chrome that glistened, of kidney-shaped steel dishes for organs, and long, sloping autopsy tables with drains. Of body bags and walk-in coolers with body racks. She knew the odor would change when she saw the corpse. When she saw…Austin. The smell would become a stench, as the stink of decomposition superseded the aroma of cleanliness. It always did. Death trumped all. Always had and always would.

  Toril Bjornstad had called back when they were driving here from the hotel, Alexis in the backseat of the cruiser, and they hadn’t spoken long. Alexis by then had known at least as much as the FBI attaché. But they had agreed that they would speak more after Alexis had ID’d the body.

  Dr. Tran, the coroner, was a tall man, slender but with broad shoulders beneath his scrubs. His hair had not yet begun to gray, and he had a trim chin curtain of a beard. She could imagine him cycling with Austin or throwing darts with Austin or simply drinking with Austin at some hipster bar in Greenwich Village or SoHo. The two CSCD officers had joined her in the first-floor corner of the hospital that housed the morgue, and so there were four of them in the sterile room. When Captain Nguyen had introduced her to him, he had told the coroner that Alexis, too, was a physician. It was clear the two men had a friendly relationship forged over crime scenes and cadavers.

  “What kind of doctor?” Tran asked her.

  “ER.”

  He nodded. “Well, then. Let me show you what we have.”

  He led them around a corner to a wall with refrigerator lockers and a steel table, and there, beneath a white sheet, was the corpse. Already she could smell it. Tran stood on the far side of the table, at the head, and said to her, “I know you’ve seen dead bodies before. That won’t be a shock. But have you seen dead loved ones?”

  “My father,” she told him, which wasn’t the truth. The casket had been closed. But she knew what was coming. She didn’t bother to add that it had been years and years ago that her father had died.

  “Okay, then,” he murmured, and he handed the captain a jar that she understood was, despite the Vietnamese words, Vicks VapoRub. “Quang? Want some?” he asked.

  The captain nodded and unscrewed the lid and put some just below both nostrils. His young assistant, Vu, did the same. Then Quang handed her the jar, but she shook her head. She felt a moral obligation of sorts—a loyalty, despite the fact that Austin had lied to her so egregiously—to smell her boyfriend now in all his putrescence.

  “Ready?” Tran asked, and with two hands he pulled back the sheet to the chest and there he was. Austin. She did not recoil from the mephitic stink and the gas, breathing through her mouth as she gazed at him for a long moment and felt, despite her years around the sick and the wounded and the dead, a small rupture inside her, a flutter of shock. Then a wave of sadness. Had she been hoping for a miracle, that his wallet was nearby because of some unfathomable and inexplicable coincidence? Apparently, she had.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice flat. “It’s him. That’s Austin.” This was clear despite the fact that Vietnam was a land of heat and humidity, and already the decomposition was advanced. It was October, but the air was still hot and moist.

  “No doubt?” Quang asked.

  “None.”

  The right side of his face, his cheekbone, was swollen like a pear, and there were jagged cuts and runnels filled with dried blood from his lips to his eyes. His right eye had been pressed shut by the contusions, but his left looked closed in sleep. She presumed someone—perhaps this coroner—had shut it.

  “As you can see,” he said to her, “the bugs have already begun to feast on him. Especially in the lacerations and abrasions. I’m sorry.”

  He reached for the top of the sheet to cover him once again, but she stopped him and asked, “May I look some more?”

  The pathologist shrugged and said it was fine, and so she pulled the sheet all the way down, revealing the entirety of his poor, savaged, naked body. Much of it was blotched with bruises, and she could see instantly that his right tibia and fibula, t
he bones linking his ankle to his knee, were badly broken, and a portion of the larger bone, the tibia, was sticking through flesh like a small shark fin. It looked as if his left knee had been twisted—wrenched hard—perpendicular to the way it was meant to move. The cleat from the bottom of his cycling shoe had probably stuck like glue to the pedal as his body had careened over the guardrail, shredding the ligaments and the menisci. She noted that all along his body, the blood had settled on the right: the skin there had the reddish tint of livor.

  “Had rigor mortis set in when you found him?” she asked.

  “It had.”

  “Cause of death was blunt trauma?”

  He nodded and she started to reach for Austin’s head, but he stopped her. “I would advise against that,” Tran said. “But if you insist, you’ll need gloves.”

  “And you’d advise against it because…”

  “Because a helmet can only do so much to protect against this kind of injury. Part of the back of his head is gone.”

  “Gone,” she repeated.

  “We have bits of his”—and he paused, seeming to search for the word in English, and then touched his cranium where it extended out from the back of his neck.

  “Occipital bone,” she said.

  He snapped his fingers. “Yes. Thank you. We found pieces of his occipital bone in the brush beside him and scraped brains and scalp off a nearby rock.” He went to a drawer and pulled out a pair of blue latex gloves. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” she said, and she put them on and cradled Austin’s head gently in one hand and turned it slightly so she could see the damage for herself. She took comfort in the idea that he had probably died about as close to instantly as possible. But, still, it had not been instant. There had been a moment of awareness of what was about to occur. She assumed, unless you were fortunate enough to die in your sleep or you were so doped up on morphine, there always was.

  Beside them, Captain Nguyen’s phone rang, and he excused himself, adjourning to the other side of the L-shaped mortuary. His assistant followed him like a dutiful puppy.

  “Tell me what you believe happened,” she said to Tran. “Please. The sequence. The captain has told me a bit.”

  “As far as I can tell, he was riding down the hill and was hit by a vehicle going up it. I suppose they were both close to the middle of the road, and they were both going fast. The vehicle, which I believe was a truck, hit him and sent him over the guardrail. If the injuries were survivable after the impact, they weren’t when he hit the rocks below. But I suspect he was already dying from the collision.”

  So, that moment of awareness of what was happening to him? Had it been as he had been flying over the guardrail or had it been a second or two earlier, when he saw he was about to have a head-on collision with a speeding truck or a car? She’d never know.

  Tran motioned toward the right side of Austin’s face. “I’m guessing that the front wheel of his bike met the bumper of the vehicle and he was thrown hard into the front edge of the vehicle’s roof. That’s the head wound there, and it was probably enough to kill him. It broke off a part of his helmet. Also, look at the marks around the broken bones below his right knee. That’s a grill mark. His leg hit it on the way up and into the roof. The mark could be from a Range Rover, but that’s speculation. Could also be from an Innova—a Toyota. It’s really not clear enough to be definitive.”

  She held her breath and leaned in close for a look. But already he was directing her attention toward Austin’s neck. “Note also the injuries below his jaw—how deeply the helmet strap dug into the skin.”

  “Time of death?” she asked.

  “Yesterday or last night.”

  “Last night?” she repeated.

  “Maybe early evening.”

  “He was riding after dark?”

  “Possibly.”

  She pondered this and thought of the cerebral side of the ER: pattern recognition. The whiteboard of her mind. On the one hand, that would explain why neither she nor the bike tour leaders had seen Austin’s body when they had peered over the side of the guardrails near the summit. But why in the world would he have been on the road when the sun had just about set or had set, and most (or all) of the light was gone? He was too smart for that. Too experienced. He’d only have been on the road at night if he had to be.

  “We found him at noon today,” the coroner was saying. “He’d been dead at least twelve hours. But based on the decomposition? Could have been eighteen. Or twenty.”

  “Who found him?”

  “Da Nang police.”

  “I assume you have his bike and his helmet.”

  “We do. They’re evidence in the event the police ever find the driver.”

  “And his bike clothes? His gloves, his jersey? Are they evidence, too?”

  “No.” He pointed at a plastic bag on a spotless steel counter. “They’re in there. You want them?”

  She didn’t, but the jersey was his blue and yellow Speed Racer cycling shirt that he had loved because he had been such a fan of the vintage cartoon as a boy. She thought maybe his parents—whoever they really were—would want it and so she nodded. “Sure. I’ll take the bag,” she said.

  “Okay,” Tran said. “It’s yours.”

  “The wallet was found in the brush nearby. But not his phone and not his bike bag. Do I have that right?”

  “You do.”

  “Tell me: Do you think the police will ever find the driver?”

  The pathologist shook his head. “No, I don’t. Sorry.”

  “But they’ll try?”

  “They will. A little. They’ll get some help from the traffic police. The CGST. But we don’t even know for a fact that your friend was hit by a Range Rover or an Innova. It could have been one of the oil tankers that can’t use the tunnel beneath the mountain. Or some farmer with a truck full of pigs. I think it was an SUV, but I don’t know that for a fact based on the injuries. I just suspect it, given the grill mark on his leg. But given how far he was thrown over the guardrail? For all I know, it was a bus that hit him.”

  “You’ll look for those models of SUVs?” she asked.

  “That’s up to the police. If they do look for the vehicle, they’ll also have to look for Honda CR-Vs, Fortuners, Land Cruisers, and, for all I know, just about anything else you can find in a dealership.”

  “What about the back of his head? Broken open on the rocks below?”

  “Yes, I think so. He probably landed on his head. And by then, his helmet—whatever was left of it—was likely askew. It was pretty worthless.”

  “Will the corpse be sent home?”

  “Absolutely. Or the ashes, if that’s what the family prefers.”

  For a long moment, she surveyed his ruined body, knowing it was the last time she would ever see it. She said good-bye to him in her mind, and tried to forgive him for lying to her. To everyone. What sort of sad, private wound was he cradling to make up that kind of story? She had stood there so long in silence that Tran finally murmured, “Would you like me to leave you alone?”

  She came back to herself. To the two of them. “No. I’m fine.”

  He nodded and looked up as the CSCD captain and the younger officer returned. “Don’t bother to go home,” the captain said to the pathologist, “I’d appreciate it if you can come with me.” Then, to Alexis, he continued, “Officer Vu will drive you back to your hotel. Would you forgive me?”

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  He looked sheepish. “Da Nang isn’t the gang capital of Vietnam. Far from it, despite what the video games might tell you. But there seems to have been an execution here today. Or last night. Two young toughs and a woman a little older. They were all shot in the head.”

  “The crime scene is near here?” Tran asked.

  “It is. Just nort
h of the city. Sounds like some kind of lab. Meth lab, but that’s a guess. There’s fire damage.”

  Alexis was about to pull off her gloves, but stopped herself. She noticed something on Austin’s right hand. A puncture wound near the anterior capitate bones—some of the larger metacarpals. She lifted his hand and, despite everyone’s desire to move on now, studied it. The bone was clearly broken based on the bruising.

  “What do you think of this?” she asked Tran.

  “I think it’s another broken bone.”

  “No,” she said, her tone more adamant. “The wound. It looks like it was done with a…a spike or something. A skewer.”

  “There are so many possibilities. A stick—”

  “A stick wouldn’t do this!”

  “The tip of a pointed rock then,” the coroner said. “When he landed.”

  The captain leaned over and looked at it. “It sure isn’t what killed him.”

  “No,” Tran agreed. “It’s just one more wound among many.” He started to pull the sheet over the corpse, but Alexis stopped him. The puncture wasn’t the only odd wound that marked his body. She thought back on her short history with the man. There were also the scars on his fingers from the cat bite in the bakery and the scar on his upper arm from the gunshot. She took out her cell phone and snapped a series of close-up photos of the hole on the back of Austin’s hand. Just in case, she took photos as well of the scars from the bite marks on his fingers and the spot where she had pulled a bullet from his biceps. And then, because she was thorough, she photographed his legs and his face and what remained of the back of his head.

  * * *

  . . .

  “I wouldn’t say the case is closed,” Toril told Alexis on the phone. Alexis was sitting on the side of the bed in her hotel room in Hoi An and staring at her and Austin’s suitcases. “But I rather doubt a whole lot of energy is going to be directed toward a possible hit-and-run. I mean, we don’t even know for sure he didn’t just fly off the road.”