“No. Mona had some difficulties after college, and we were never as close as . . . I would have liked. We thought she was doing better the last two years, and she told us she had a job in publishing. It’s difficult to know your child when you can’t be the kind of mother she wants or needs. This country has different rules.”
Ruth nods. A familiar lament from immigrants. “I’m sorry for your loss. But it’s unlikely I’ll be able to do anything. Most of my cases now are about hidden assets, cheating spouses, insurance fraud, background checks—that sort of thing. Back when I was a member of the force, I did work in Homicide. I know the detectives are quite thorough in murder cases.”
“They’re not!” Fury and desperation strain and crack her voice. “They think she’s just a Chinese whore and she died because she was stupid or got involved with a Chinese gang who wouldn’t bother regular people. My husband is so ashamed that he won’t even mention her name. But she’s my daughter, and she’s worth everything I have, and more.”
Ruth looks at her. She can feel the Regulator suppressing her pity. Pity can lead to bad business decisions.
“I keep on thinking there was some sign I should have seen, some way to tell her that I loved her that I didn’t know. If only I had been a little less busy, a little more willing to pry and dig and to be hurt by her. I can’t stand the way the detectives talk to me, like I’m wasting their time but they don’t want to show it.”
Ruth refrains from explaining that the police detectives are all fitted with Regulators that should make the kind of prejudice she’s implying impossible. The whole point of the Regulator is to make police work under pressure more regular, less dependent on hunches, emotional impulses, appeals to hidden prejudice. If the police are calling it a gang-related act of violence, there are likely good reasons for doing so.
She says nothing because the woman in front of her is in pain, and guilt and love are so mixed up in her that she thinks paying to find her daughter’s killer will make her feel better about being the kind of mother whose daughter would take up prostitution.
Her angry, helpless posture reminds Ruth vaguely of something she tries to put out of her mind.
“Even if I find the killer,” she says, “it won’t make you feel better.”
“I don’t care.” Sarah tries to shrug, but the American gesture looks awkward and uncertain on her. “My husband thinks I’ve gone crazy. I know how hopeless this is; you’re not the first investigator I’ve spoken to. But a few suggested you because you’re a woman and Chinese, so maybe you care just enough to see something they can’t.”
She reaches into her purse and retrieves a check, sliding it across the table to put on top of the file. “Here’s eighty thousand dollars. I’ll pay double your daily rate and all expenses. If you use it up, I can get you more.”
Ruth stares at the check. She thinks about the sorry state of her finances. At forty-nine, how many more chances will she have to set aside some money for when she’ll be too old to do this?
She still feels calm and completely rational, and she knows that the Regulator is doing its job. She’s sure that she’s making her decision based on costs and benefits and a realistic evaluation of the case, and not because of the hunched-over shoulders of Sarah Ding, looking like fragile twin dams holding back a flood of grief.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”
? ? ?
The man’s name isn’t Robert. It’s not Paul or Matt or Barry, either. He never uses the name John, because jokes like that will only make the girls nervous. A long time ago, before he had been to prison, they had called him the Watcher, because he liked to observe and take in a scene, finding the best opportunities and escape routes. He still thinks of himself that way when he’s alone.
In the room he’s rented at the cheap motel along Route 128, he starts his day by taking a shower to wash off the night sweat.
This is the fifth motel he’s stayed in during the last month. Any stay longer than a week tends to catch the attention of the people working at the motels. He watches; he does not get watched. Ideally, he supposes he should get away from Boston altogether, but he hasn’t exhausted the city’s possibilities. It doesn’t feel right to leave before he’s seen all he wants to see.
The Watcher got about sixty thousand dollars in cash from the girl’s apartment, not bad for a day’s work. The girls he picks are intensely aware of the brevity of their careers, and with no bad habits, they pack away money like squirrels preparing for the winter. Since they can’t exactly put it into the bank without raising the suspicion of the IRS, they tuck the money away in stashes in their apartments, ready for him to come along and claim them like found treasure.
The money is a nice bonus, but not the main attraction.
He comes out of the shower, dries himself, and wrapped in a towel, sits down to work at the nut he’s trying to crack. It’s a small, silver half sphere, like half of a walnut. When he had first gotten it, it had been covered in blood and gore, and he had wiped it again and again with paper towels moistened under the motel sink until it gleamed.
He pries open an access port on the back of the device. Opening his laptop, he plugs one end of a cable into it and the other end into the half sphere. He starts a program he had paid a good sum of money for and lets it run. It would probably be more efficient for him to leave the program running all the time, but he likes to be there to see the moment the encryption is broken.
While the program runs, he browses the escort ads. Right now he’s searching for pleasure, not business, so instead of looking for girls like Jasmine, he looks for girls he craves. They’re expensive, but not too expensive, the kind that remind him of the girls he had wanted back in high school: loud, fun, curvaceous now but destined to put on too much weight in a few years, a careless beauty that was all the more desirable because it was fleeting.
The Watcher knows that only a poor man like he had been at seventeen would bother courting women, trying desperately to make them like him. A man with money, with power, like he is now, can buy what he wants. There’s purity and cleanliness to his desire that he feels is nobler and less deceitful than the desire of poor men. They only wish they could have what he does.
The program beeps, and he switches back to it.
Success.
Images, videos, sound recordings are being downloaded onto the computer.
The Watcher browses through the pictures and video recordings. The pictures are face shots or shots of money being handed over—he immediately deletes the ones of him.
But the videos are the best. He settles back and watches the screen flicker, admiring Jasmine’s camera work.
He separates the videos and images by client and puts them into folders. It’s tedious work, but he enjoys it.
? ? ?
The first thing Ruth does with the money is to get some badly needed tune-ups. Going after a killer requires that she be in top condition.
She does not like to carry a gun when she’s on the job. A man in a sport coat with a gun concealed under it can blend into almost any situation, but a woman wearing the kind of clothes that would hide a gun would often stick out like a sore thumb. Keeping a gun in a purse is a terrible idea. It creates a false sense of security, but a purse can be easily snatched away, and then she would be disarmed.
She’s fit and strong for her age, but her opponents are almost always taller and heavier and stronger. She’s learned to compensate for these disadvantages by being more alert and by striking earlier.
But it’s still not enough.
She goes to her doctor. Not the one on her HMO card.
Doctor B had earned his degree in another country and then had to leave home forever because he pissed off the wrong people. Instead of doing a second residency and becoming licensed here, which would have made him easily traceable, he had decided to simply keep on practicing medicine on his own. He would do things doctors who cared about their licenses wouldn’t do. He would take patients they wouldn’t touch.
“It’s been a while,” Doctor B says.
“Check over everything,” she tells him. “And replace what needs replacement.”
“Rich uncle die?”