in stacks on the floor. The overhead shelving was crowded as well with boxes that had Chinese writing on them. Bosch backed up and moved to the second door. He opened it without hesitation.
The small bathroom was awash in dried blood. It had been splashed over the sink, the toilet and the tiled floor. There were spatter and drip lines on the back wall and on the dirty white plastic shower curtain with flowers on it.
It was impossible to step into the room without stepping on one of the blood trails. But Bosch didn’t worry about it. He had to get to the shower curtain. He had to know.
He quickly moved across the room and yanked the plastic back.
The shower stall was tiny by American standards. It was no bigger than the old phone booths outside Du-Par’s in the Farmers Market. But somehow someone had managed to pile three bodies on top of one another in there.
Bosch held his breath as he leaned over and in to try to identify the victims. They were fully clothed. The boy, who was the biggest, was on top. He was facedown atop a woman of about forty-his mother-who was sitting slouched against a wall. Their positioning suggested some sort of Oedipal fantasy that probably was not the killer’s intention. Both of their throats had been savagely cut from ear to ear.
Behind and partially underneath the mother-as if hiding-was the body of a young girl. Her long dark hair was covering her face.
“Ah, God,” Bosch called out. “Sun Yee!”
Soon Sun came in behind him and he heard the sharp intake of his breath. Bosch started putting on the second glove.
“There’s a girl on the bottom and I can’t tell if it’s Maddie,” he said. “Put these on.”
He pulled another pair of gloves from his pocket and handed them to Sun, who quickly snapped them on. Together they pulled the body of the dead boy out of the shower stall and lowered it to the floor beneath the sink. Bosch then gently moved the mother’s body until he could see the face of the girl on the tile beneath. She, too, had been slashed across the throat. Her eyes were open and looked fearfully at death. It tore Bosch’s heart to see that look, but it wasn’t his daughter’s face.
“It’s not her,” he said. “It’s gotta be her friend. He.”
Harry turned away from the carnage and squeezed past Sun. He went out to the bedroom and sat down on the bed. He heard a bumping sound from the bathroom and guessed that Sun was putting the bodies back as they had found them.
Bosch exhaled loudly and leaned forward, arms folded across his chest. He was thinking about the girl’s frightened eyes. He almost fell forward off the bed.
“What happened here?” he asked in a whisper.
Sun stepped out of the bathroom and adopted his bodyguard stance. He said nothing. Harry noticed that there was blood on his gloved hands.
Bosch stood up and looked around the room as if it might hold some explanation for the scene in the bathroom.
“Could another triad have taken her from him? Then killed them all to cover the tracks?”
Sun shook his head.
“That would have started a war. But the boy is not triad.”
“What? How do you know that?”
“There is only one triad in vertical Tuen Mun. Golden Triangle. I looked and he did not have the mark.”
“What mark?”
Sun hesitated for a moment, turning toward the bathroom door but then turning back to Bosch. He pulled off one of his gloves, then reached up to his mouth and pulled down his lower lip. On the soft, inside skin was an old and blurred black-ink tattoo of two Chinese characters. Bosch assumed they meant Golden Triangle.
“So you are in the triad?”
Sun released his lip and shook his head.
“No more. It has been more than twenty years.”
“I thought you can’t just quit a triad. If you leave, you leave in a box.”
“I made a sacrifice and the council allowed me to leave. I also had to leave Tuen Mun. This is how I went to Macau.”
“What kind of sacrifice?”
Sun looked even more reluctant than when he’d shown Bosch the tattoo. But slowly he reached up to his face again, this time removing his sunglasses. For a moment Bosch noticed nothing wrong, but then he realized that Sun’s left eye was a prosthetic. He had a glass eye. There was a slightly noticeable scar hooking down from the outside corner.
“You had to give up a