“No,” Enda lied. Li didn’t need to know where the bodies were buried. Figuratively speaking. Mostly.
“He swore he would.”
“It must have slipped his mind,” Enda said. “You can pull up just on the right, here.”
Li stopped the car in the street, put it into park, and turned on the emergency lights. He groaned as he got out, then opened the door for Enda.
“Thanks for the ride, Li,” Enda said.
The detective thumped the roof of the car with his fist. “Look after yourself. No one else will.” With that, he got back behind the wheel, and drove away.
Enda was two blocks from where she needed to be—no point giving Li more information than was necessary. She turned up her collar, zipped her coat to her chin, and started walking.
* * *
The office blocks along Academy-ro looked identical from the street, their facades dull mirrors that reflected the city back at itself. When Enda was sure she had the right place, she craned her neck and peered up toward the building’s apex, where brutalist gargoyles loomed from its corners, gray against a gray sky, square-headed like statues of Soviet workers. She nodded to herself and cut across the current of foot traffic to be swallowed by the revolving door of the building’s entrance.
This particular corporate tower was called Links Academy-ro, though the small golf course it referred to was long gone, bulldozed so another block of office buildings could spring forth from the packed-garbage foundation of the city. Reckless development had put the “Neo” in Neo Songdo—the new landmass extending from Korea’s side, created from ocean waste, and growing to double the original plan.
Scores of young people filled the building’s lobby, sitting on battered leather couches or resting against the wall. None of them noticed Enda as she crossed the foyer, too busy working at their phones and laptops. She rode the elevator up to the eighth floor, alone in the metal cube. The majority of the building sat empty, the unlit numbers on the elevator control panel suggesting bare floors, accessible only with the right credentials. City authorities always preferred another surplus office block to a neat stretch of grass where Songdo’s working poor could erect their tents. The city needed their labor, but it didn’t need to offer them shelter.
The elevator dinged, and Enda emerged into a busy, open-plan office, crammed with a hundred small cubicles decorated with action figures, tchotchkes, and printouts of anatomically exaggerated, if otherwise gratuitously accurate, cartoon characters. Workers chatted in Korean, Hindi, English, and Mandarin, and the hum of computers merged with the drone of the building’s climate control.
Nobody bothered Enda as she skirted the mass of cubicles, aimed for the one enclosed office in the far corner of the floor. She opened the office door without knocking, and paused. Instead of Marc slouched in his chair, scratching at his beer belly, a woman sat at the desk. She was beautiful despite the heavy bags under her eyes, with wavy black hair, golden skin dotted with freckles, and piercing amber eyes.
Her eyebrows climbed as she waited for Enda to speak, and slowly fell as Enda continued to stare. She smiled.
Enda cleared her throat. “I’m sorry. I was looking for Marc?”
“He’s no longer with us,” the woman said, with a slight Irish lilt.
“He quit?” Enda asked.
“Oh, no, I’m sorry. He’s dead.”
Enda sagged.
“Were you close?” the woman asked.
Enda shook her head. “If we were, I wouldn’t be finding out now.”
Marc had lived in the city longer than anyone Enda knew, yet his harsh Australian accent had never dulled in all the years he spent away from the motherland. He was the closest thing Enda had had to a criminal contact in Songdo. Real criminals didn’t last long in a city of ubiquitous surveillance, but people like Marc filled the gap between corporate mission statement and reality, the gap between the word of the law and the reality of it.
“Please, sit.” The woman motioned to the chair opposite. “I’m Crystal. You can call me Crystal or Crys, but never Crystie. Just make sure that you call me.” It sounded well rehearsed, the kind of thing she’d tell every client, but the playful set of her lips told Enda she was flirting.
“Enda.” She offered her hand and they shook—Crystal’s hand cool to the touch, fingers slender. Enda pulled out the chair opposite and sat down. “How did he die?”
“Pills,” Crystal said. “It must have been, oh, four or five months ago.”