9 Dragons

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 fucking eye to quit the triad?”
    “I do not regret my decision.”
    He put his sunglasses back on.
    Between Sun’s revelations and the horror scene in the bathroom, Bosch was beginning to feel like he was in some sort of medieval painting. He reminded himself that his daughter wasn’t in the bathroom, that she was still alive and out there somewhere.
    “Okay,” he said, “I don’t know what happened here or why, but we have to stay on the trail. There’s got to be something in this apartment that will tell us where Maddie is. We’ve got to find it and we’re running out of time.”
    Bosch reached into his pocket but it was empty.
    “I’m out of gloves, so be careful what you touch. And we probably have blood on the bottom of our shoes. No sense in transferring it around the place.”
    Bosch removed his shoes and cleaned the blood off them in the sink in the kitchenette. Sun did the same thing. The men then searched the apartment, beginning in the bedroom and working their way toward the front door. They found nothing that was useful until they got to the small kitchen and Bosch noticed that, like the apartment next door, there was a dish of salt on the table. Only the salt was piled higher on this plate and Bosch could see finger trails left by someone who had built the granules into a mound. He ran his own fingers through the pile and displaced a small square of black plastic that had been buried in salt. Bosch immediately recognized it as the memory card from a cell phone.
    “Got something.”
    Sun turned from a kitchen drawer he had been looking through. Bosch held up the memory card. He was sure it was the card missing from his daughter’s cell phone.
    “It was in the salt. Maybe he hid it just as they came.”
    Bosch looked at the tiny plastic card. There was a reason Peng Qingcai removed it before burning his daughter’s phone. There was a reason he had then tried to hide it. Bosch wanted to go to work on those reasons right away but decided that for Sun and him to extend their stay in an apartment with three bodies in the shower was not a smart move.
    “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
    Bosch moved to the window next to the door and looked down through the curtain to the street before giving the all-clear sign. Sun opened the door and they quickly exited. Bosch pulled the door closed before stripping off his gloves. He glanced behind him as he stepped away and saw that the old woman next door was on the walkway, kneeling in front of her altar and burning another sacrifice to the ghosts. Bosch did a double-take when he saw that she was using a candle to light one of the real hundred-dollar bills he had given her.
    Bosch turned and walked quickly down the walkway in the opposite direction. He knew he was in a world beyond his understanding. He only had to understand his mission to find his daughter. Nothing else mattered.

33
    B osch retrieved the gun but left the blanket behind. As soon as he was back in the car, he took out his phone. It was an exact duplicate of his daughter’s that he’d bought as part of a package deal. He opened the rear compartment and removed the battery and memory card. He then slid the card from his daughter’s phone into the cradle. He replaced the battery, closed the compartment and switched the phone on.
    While they waited for the phone to boot, Sun pulled the car away from the curb and they headed away from the building where the family had been massacred.
    “Where