jade market. Through the open entry points he saw rows and rows of stalls, old men and women selling their wares under a flimsy roof of plywood and tenting. It was crowded with customers coming and going.
Bosch thought of the jade monkeys on red twine that he had found in his daughter’s room. She had been here. He wondered if she had come this far from home on her own or with friends, maybe with He and Quick.
Outside one of the entrances an old woman was selling incense sticks and had a bucket fire going. On a folding table next to her were rows of papier-maché items for sale to be burned. Bosch saw a row of tigers and wondered why a dead ancestor would need a tiger.
“Here,” Sun said.
He held a registration form up for Bosch to read.
“What’s it say?”
“Tuen Mun. We go there.”
It sounded to Bosch like he had said Tin Moon.
“What’s Tin Moon?”
“Tuen Mun. It is in the New Territories. This man lives there.”
“What’s his name”
“Peng Qingcai.”
Qingcai, Bosch thought. An easy jump to an Americanized name to use with girls at the mall might be Quick. Maybe Peng Qingcai was He’s older brother, the boy Madeline had left the mall with on Friday.
“Does the registration have his age or birth date?”
“No, no age.”
It was a long shot. Bosch had not put his birth date down when he had rented the rooms, and the deskman had only taken his passport number, none of the other particulars of identity.
“The address is there?”
“Yes.”
“Can you find it?”
“Yes, I know this place.”
“Good. Let’s go. How long?”
“It is long time in the car. We go north and then west. It will take one hour or more. The train would be faster.”
Time was at a premium but Bosch knew the car gave them autonomy.
“No,” he said. “Once we find her we’ll need the car.”
Sun nodded his agreement and pulled the car away from the curb. Once they were on their way, Bosch shrugged off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeve to take a better look at the knife wound on his arm. It was a two-inch slash on the upper inside of his forearm. Blood was finally clotting in the wound.
Sun looked over at it quickly and then back at the road.
“Who did this to you?”
“The man behind the counter.”
Sun nodded.
“He set us up, Sun Yee. He saw my money and set us up. I was so stupid.”
“It was a mistake.”
He had certainly backed off his angry accusation in the stairwell. But Bosch wasn’t backing off his own assessment. He had gotten Eleanor killed.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t the one who paid for it,” he said.
Bosch pulled the switchblade out of the jacket pocket and reached to the backseat for the blanket. He cut a long strip off the blanket and wrapped it around his arm, tucking the end underneath. He made sure it wasn’t too tight but that it would keep blood from running down his arm.
He rolled his shirtsleeve back down. It was soaked with blood between the elbow and cuff. He pulled his jacket back on. Luckily it was black and the bloodstains weren’t readily noticeable.
As they moved north through Kowloon the urban blight and crowding grew exponentially. It was like any large city, Bosch thought. The further you got from the money, the more gritty and desperate the appearances grew.
“Tell me about Tuen Mun,” he said.
“Very crowded,” Sun said. “Only Chinese. Heavy-duty.”
“Heavy-duty triad?”
“Yes. It is not a good place for your daughter to be.”
Bosch didn’t think it would be. But he saw one thing positive about it. Moving in and hiding a white girl might be hard to do without notice. If Madeline was being held in Tuen Mun, he would find her. They would find her.
31
In the past five years, Harry Bosch’s only financial contribution to the support of his daughter had been to pay for her trips to Los Angeles, give her spending money from time to time and write an annual check for twelve thousand dollars to cover half her tuition to the exclusive Happy Valley Academy. This last contribution was not the result of any demand by his ex-wife. Eleanor Wish had made a very comfortable living and never once asked Bosch directly or indirectly through legal channels for a dollar of child support. It was Bosch who needed and demanded to be allowed to contribute in some way. Helping to pay for her schooling allowed him wrongly or rightly to feel that he played some