The Red Lotus Read online

  But then he realized that his fingerprints were all over both the barrel and the flight. And while he couldn’t imagine any sane person really caring that someone had killed a rat with a dart, for all he knew some animal rights crazy who lived nearby would discover the dead creature before the trash collectors and bring it to the nearby humane society or police station. And so he wandered over to the rats, which scattered quickly, and put the toe of his shoe on the wounded animal. It wasn’t quite dead yet, but he didn’t care. He grabbed the dart by the shaft and yanked it out, eliciting another one of those rat shrieks, though this one was softer and less frenzied. He tossed the dart into the dumpster and left the rat to finish dying. He rather doubted that the other rats would wait for it to stop breathing before feasting upon it.

  He made a mental note that when he got home, he would be sure to spend an extra-long time washing his hands.

  Why do you ask that? Isn’t it obvious?

  Look, delivery systems for biological weapons often revolve around bombs and (and I love this little word) bomblets. The goal is to disperse as widely as possible your anthrax or tularemia or smallpox or cholera. You need an aerosol component. Or you need to get the pathogen into the water system.

  I gather it’s a hell of a lot more difficult than you think.

  The same is true with chemical weapons. Even the monsters who have used chemical weapons in our lifetime haven’t found them a whole lot more effective than quite literally pushing bombs in barrels from hovering helicopters. Primitive, right?

  Well, maybe primitive is best. Sometimes I think technology is overrated. I really do.

  Among the first people ever to use biological weapons was a British general in North America named Jeffrey Amherst. He used woolen blankets infected with smallpox to kill Indians in New England in 1763. It was ingenious. Very creative.

  But even Amherst had crafted a delivery system that was less efficient than nature. Let’s face it, in all of human history, the most effective delivery vehicle for mass death ever to exist on earth has been—wait for it—the rat.

  12

  Alexis arrived in America only a day after the rest of the bike tour. The embassy was going to take care of returning Austin’s remains to Boston, where, Toril told her, his parents had made arrangements to have them retrieved. Officer Vu had returned to the little hotel before she checked out and given her both Austin’s laptop and his tablet. Then she had flown alone to JFK, leaving on Sunday and arriving on Monday. Much to her utter shock, her mother had volunteered to meet her at the airport and drive her either to Alexis’s own East Village apartment or to the house in New Jersey where her mother lived and where Alexis could, to use her mother’s own words, veg and recover. She passed on both of her mother’s offers, much as she liked the idea of becoming an ostrich, a pile of pillows its sand. Unfortunately, she was unable to imagine either “vegging” or “recovering” under her mother’s intense scrutiny in the evenings, or in the solitary confinement of that suburbia during the day. She liked the house and the neighborhood just fine, but there wasn’t a damn thing for her to do there anymore, especially since her mother would need to take the car to the PATH train or the ferry into Manhattan. She’d be wandering aimlessly through the withering remains of her childhood: the stuffed animals that hadn’t aged well and the books that she’d loved at ten and which still stood shoulder to shoulder on her shelves. Besides, she was, more or less, okay. At least she thought she was. And, of course, she had a job.

  And so she took a cab into the city after she landed, arriving home not long after lunch. She’d been traveling nearly twenty-four hours, and though the Xanax had helped her doze on the plane, the slumber had never been deep and she wanted nothing more than to collapse into her own bed and return to eastern time in America. She was supposed to work on Tuesday, but she had already told the hospital that it was in no one’s best interest for her to be in the ER that day, and so she wasn’t planning to return to work until Wednesday. Her revised schedule meant that her shift would begin at noon, which seemed the perfect time to slide back into a routine.

  And by then? By then, she assumed, she would have recovered. At least mostly recovered. Physically recovered. She presumed the jet lag would be behind her. But the rest? It would take more than a day and a half to treat the emotional bruising from the death of her boyfriend and the discovery that he had likely been lying to her and she had no idea why he’d really wanted to return to Vietnam. It would take even longer to parse the meaning of the body she had identified on the slab, and what that body had meant to her when he had been alive.

  * * *

  . . .

  She slept deeply in her own bed in her own apartment. She recalled a detail of one dream as she awoke: she was in a window seat on a plane—an Airbus—flying no more than a hundred yards above the city of the dead near An Bang, the hills an endless, undulating carpet of crypts they’d biked past last week, and it was clear the plane was trying to climb and wasn’t going to make it. It was going to slam into the magnificent dragons and pillars, some ten and fifteen yards high, that marked the lavish family plots, many more colorful and ornate than the nearby pagodas. She saw the dead—curled in despair into small, round balls—cringing beneath their piles of stones as the wings decapitated serpents and basilisks and swans, and sheared off the tops of the columns. The plane was operated by an American carrier and this mattered to her, but when she tried to explain what was happening to Austin, she discovered that he wasn’t in the seat beside her.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw it was the middle of the morning and remembered it was Tuesday. Through a crimp in her bedroom blinds she could see the crisp, blue New York sky.

  She reached for her phone on her nightstand and saw that she had a text from her neighbor Ellie, asking her if she needed anything. There was a text from Talia, her new friend from the bike tour, asking how she was doing. The lead guide, Scott, had texted her, as well—again, just checking in. There was nothing else. No other missed texts, no calls at all. There was nothing pressing in her emails. She texted Talia and Scott that she was fine, thanking them, and then she texted Ellie that she would love to have a drink that night when Ellie returned from her own job at the animal hospital.

  She fell back into the pillows and scrolled through her photos from Vietnam and her photos of Austin. She decided that her favorite photo from the trip was, of all things, the image of the man mugging in the tailor’s shop in Hoi An as the cuffs of his pants were chalked, his face boyish and ebullient, his smile infectious. That was how she wanted to remember him. She liked it more than the exotic birds and the pristine beach and the rice paddies and pagodas, and certainly more than any of him—of them—on bikes. She stared at a shot of the two of them resting on their bikes, one leg on the ground and one clipped into a pedal, before the city of the dead near the massive tomb of Khai Dinh, and winced, her nightmare coming back to her. Often those bike photos were in the rain or in the shade, and usually their faces were sweaty or hidden by helmets and sunglasses, or smeared with sunblock that in some cases looked like war paint. But this one, with those exquisite monuments to the deceased stretching, it seemed, to the horizon? With the sun high and their features clear? It was too much, it was too goddamn prescient.

  She guessed that she liked the photo from the tailor’s shop best because Austin looked like such an innocent. He didn’t look like he was up to something.

  And while it seemed likely that he had been up to something, she reminded herself that she didn’t know this for a fact. Shame was a powerful motivator, and maybe that’s all this was. Perhaps she’d get an inkling into what he was thinking when she brought his parents that new suit and his Speed Racer cycling jersey.

  The most recent photos on the phone were the ones from the morgue in Da Nang. She decided to steer clear of those until she had had some coffee.

  * * *

  . .
 .

  But, of course, there was no half-and-half in the apartment. Even the cheese in the crisper in the refrigerator had started to turn a little brown in her long absence. And so she showered and dressed and wandered to the coffee shop around the corner from her apartment, and there, over a cheese omelet and bad coffee with fresh milk from a tinny creamer, she pored over the photos on her phone from the morgue. She had a table she liked by the window. She studied especially the wound on the back of Austin’s hand. At first, it reminded her a bit of a god-awful bug bite. There was a circle and swelling. But what insect had a stinger as big as that perfect point? It wasn’t a mosquito, and it wasn’t a mosquito with malaria, because those bites looked no different from an ordinary puncture. Besides, she had insisted they both take Atovaquone, an antimalarial, even though he hadn’t taken the pills the last time he had gone to Vietnam and had returned home perfectly fine. And if he’d scratched the bite? The scabbing would have been different. No, this swelling was due entirely to a broken bone. She knew that from the pathologist, but even if she had just looked at a photo, she could have diagnosed the injury from the inflammation and the black-and-blue mark.

  When she looked up, there was a young pug at the end of a leash on the other side of the window and she waved at the dog. The animal tilted his head and put his front paws on the glass, his round eyes dark and happy. The dog’s owner was a statuesque older woman in a stylish jeans jacket and red leather gloves, which were nice but not essential today, because it was probably forty-five degrees outside and the sun was beaming down on the city. But the gloves made Alexis think of something. She scrolled back to the photo of Austin’s right hand. There were no other scrapes on it, no other broken bones. No broken fingers. There were no other abrasions at all. There were, however, cuts on the tips of his fingers on his left hand.

  She recalled that he’d been wearing his cycling gloves. If this puncture wound on his right hand had been caused by a collision with a vehicle or by a sharp rock when he had gone careening over the guardrail, there would be blood on the inside of the glove and, very likely, a tear of some kind in the material. She could check this: the gloves were still wadded in the plastic bag with his cycling jersey that the coroner had given her. They were in her suitcase.

  She swallowed the last of her coffee and stood. She didn’t bother to wait for the server to return. She went straight to the cashier, paid her check, and raced home to her apartment.

  13

  There was no rip in the right cycling glove. No puncture, no tear. There was no blood on it, either. The fabric was yellow along the section that would have covered the hole in the back of his hand, so she would have seen a bloodstain, if there had been one. But there was none at all on the outside and so she turned it inside out, and there wasn’t a drop on the inside.

  She sat on her couch and tossed the glove onto the glass coffee table. Of course, there wasn’t any blood; there wasn’t a rip.

  She recalled the three Psych energy gel packets she had found on the road in Vietnam. They had been Austin’s, that seemed clear to her now, and they were a distress flare. Someone had abducted him, and he had left the Psych on the pavement as a beacon. Then someone had hurt him: she imagined a person taking a screwdriver—a Phillips head—or the tip of a knife and pounding it into the back of his hand. No, not a knife. An awl: that’s how round the wound was. But that didn’t matter right now. What did was that the wound had occurred well before the bike accident. She was sure of it.

  But then they had let him go. They’d learned from him what they wanted or gotten from him what they needed—clearly torturing him to get it—and released him.

  But they’d kept his phone, perhaps because there was something on it.

  Which meant that something might be on one of his computers.

  Austin’s laptop and tablet were both in his suitcase, where she’d packed them after that Vietnamese police officer had brought them back to her in Hoi An. She dug them out now and placed them both on the coffee table. She had learned when she had booted them up in Vietnam that she would need a password to see the contents of either, and so she didn’t bother to turn them on. She had absolutely no idea what in the world his password might be. She could try dozens and dozens of words that she thought might have meaning to him, but if he had secrets—which, it seemed, he did—he had very secret passwords.

  Actually, that was the solution…or part of the solution. If she tried and failed enough times, the computer would ask her to reset her password.

  But she would need his Apple ID to do that, which might be his email address. But then again, it might not. And, either way, she didn’t have access to his email without the password.

  And, of course, who knew what sort of crazy encryption he might be using.

  Still, the world was filled with tech geeks and hackers for whom getting into his laptop would be child’s play—or, if not child’s play, a task they might be willing to take on. She just had to find one.

  * * *

  . . .

  That afternoon, she went to the hospital, but she went nowhere near the ER. She’d be there tomorrow, beginning at noon, and that would be soon enough.

  Instead she went to the wing on the other side of the building from admitting and emergency, and rode the elevator to the seventh floor: the hospital administrators, public relations, and advancement. It was the wing with the executives and the scientists. The offices and the labs. Hers was a university hospital with teaching and research components, and the university labs were extensive. The wing was linked by a glass walkway to the skyscraper next door, a building that housed a couple of Big Pharma companies with their executives and their labs, too. She’d called Sally Gleason that morning once she saw that she wasn’t going to be able to access either Austin’s computer or tablet, and the development director said she had a brief window at three thirty. Alexis had been on the floor twice before, first when Austin was showing her his office soon after they met and then again when she had used that office to change into a dress he had bought her as a surprise. They were going to a summer fund-raiser for the hospital: not a black-tie sort of gig, but flashy, and he surprised her with the perfect white cocktail dress for the occasion.

  An administrative assistant, a young guy with moussed hair the color of corn silk and an ill-fitting black-and-red-check blazer—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two years old, and Alexis speculated he was some hospital administrator’s or physician’s son interning here—ushered her back into a corridor with offices that faced the East River and the northernmost tip of Brooklyn. Sally was sitting on the side of her desk with another executive standing beside her, sharing with her pages from a notebook presentation. He was a handsome guy roughly her age, with a chiseled nose, sharp cheekbones, and a hint of a five-o’clock shadow. He had leaned into his baldness by shaving his head, and it worked for him. He was in a black suit with a gorgeous blue-and-gold paisley necktie. She thought she’d seen him before, and presumed if she had it had been at an event with Austin.

  When Sally saw Alexis and the assistant in her doorway, she beckoned her in, and in a pair of short sentences and a single gesture managed to thank and dismiss both of her employees. She didn’t introduce either to her, but the one who had shaved his head nodded at Alexis flirtatiously on his way out. Then Sally motioned for her to take a seat on the leather couch by the credenza and sat down beside her. The office was big and well appointed, and Alexis thought her mother would approve. Beside the couch, instead of a small end table, was the sort of eccentric touch that her mother appreciated: an art deco standing ashtray about three feet high, the rim a pair of porcelain panthers, black and menacing. The basin for ashes and cigarette butts was now a planter, and there was a succulent growing there that looked a little pink in the afternoon sun.

  “I’m so sorry to see you again under these circumstances,” she said to Alexis, an
d for a moment she thought the executive was going to take hold of her hands. “I much prefer seeing you on Austin’s arm at galas.”

  “Me too,” Alexis agreed.

  “Do you want some coffee?” the administrator asked. She was a tall woman with a round, surprisingly cherubic face and dark hair that was now sprinkled with white. She was wearing a crisp, impeccably tailored navy-blue skirt and blazer. Her lipstick looked fresh and moist, as if recently reapplied. The ridiculous sports jacket the kid who had escorted her back here was wearing probably drove Sally crazy.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Not jet-lagged?”

  “A little.”

  “Do you work tonight?” Sally asked, a hint of wariness in her voice.

  “No. My next shift isn’t until tomorrow at noon.”

  “You’ll get a good night’s sleep?”

  “I will,” Alexis replied. She considered joking that she’d pop a Xanax tonight to be sure, but she doubted she would. Besides, she had a feeling a joke like that would not merely fall flat: it might raise alarm bells. Then she said, her tone light, “So, a friend of mine had an interesting theory: Austin had met someone on his first trip to Vietnam and was seeing her when he died.”

  “As in another woman?”

  “Uh-huh. I offered it as a reason for his disappearance to an FBI attaché in Vietnam. You know, that’s where he was going the day he died. She didn’t put much credence in the idea.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “He never mentioned anyone? I mean, he was single then. A single guy on a bike tour. It wouldn’t have been wrong.”

  Sally folded her arms across her chest and gazed down at the pointed tips of her shoes. When she looked up, she said, “He wasn’t going to tell me about some random hookup when he came back. That wasn’t the sort of thing we’d talk about when we weren’t talking about work.”