9 Dragons

are we going?” Harry asked.
    “To the river. There is a park. We go there until we know where we are going.”
    In other words, there was no plan yet. The memory card was the plan.
    “That stuff you told me about the pirates when you were a kid, that was the triad, wasn’t it”
    After a moment Sun nodded once.
    “Is that what you did, smuggle people in and out?”
    “No, my job was different.”
    He said nothing else and Bosch decided not to press it. The phone was ready. He quickly went to the call records. There were none. The page was blank.
    “There’s nothing on here. No record of any calls.”
    He went to the e-mail file and again found the screen empty.
    “Nothing transferred with the card,” he said, agitation growing in his voice.
    “This is common,” Sun said calmly. “Only permanent files go on the memory card. Look to see if there are any videos or photos.”
    Using the little ball roller in the middle of his phone’s keyboard, Bosch went to the video icon and selected it. The video file was empty.
    “No videos,” he said.
    It began to dawn on Bosch that Peng might have pulled the card from Madeline’s phone because he believed it held a record of all uses of the phone. But it didn’t. The last, best lead was looking like a bust.
    He clicked on the photo icon and here he found a list of stored JPEG photos.
    “I’ve got photos.”
    He started opening the photos one by one, but the only shots that seemed recent were the photos of John Li’s lungs and ankle tattoos that Bosch had sent her. The rest were photos of Madeline’s friends and from school trips. They were not specifically dated but did not appear to be in any way related to her abduction. He found a few photos from her trip to the jade market in Kowloon. She had taken photos of small jade sculptures of couples in Kama Sutra positions of sexual intercourse. Bosch wrote these off as teenage curiosity. Photos that would be sure to provide uneasy giggles among the girls at school.
    “Nothing,” he reported to Sun.
    He kept trying, moving across the screen and clicking on icon after icon in hopes of finding a hidden message. Finally, he found that Madeline’s phone book was also on the card and had been transferred to his phone.
    “Her phone book’s on here.”
    He opened the file and saw the list of contacts. He didn’t know all of her friends and many were simply listed by nicknames. He clicked on the listing for
Dad
and got a screen that had his own cell and home numbers but nothing else, nothing that shouldn’t be there.
    He went back to the list and moved on, finally finding what he thought he might be looking for when he got to the
T
s. There was a listing for Tuen Mun that contained only a phone number.
    Sun had pulled into a long, thin park that ran along the river and under one of the bridges. Bosch held the phone out to him.
    “I found a number. It was listed under Tuen Mun. The only number not listed under a name.”
    “Why would she have this number?”
    Bosch thought for a moment, trying to put it together.
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    Sun took the phone and studied the screen.
    “This is a cell number.”
    “How do you know?”
    “It begins with a nine. This is a cell designation in Hong Kong.”
    “Okay, so what do we do with it? It’s labeled Tuen Mun. It might belong to the guy who has my daughter.”
    Sun stared out the windshield at the river, trying to come up with an answer and a plan.
    “We could text him,” he said. “Maybe he will respond to us.”
    Bosch nodded.
    “Yeah, try to deke him. Maybe we get a location from him.”
    “What is ‘deke?’”
    “Decoy him. Fake him out. Act like we know him and set up a meet. He gives us his location.”
    Sun pondered this while continuing to watch the river. A barge was slowly making its way south toward the sea. Bosch started thinking of an alternate plan. David Chu back in L.A. might have the sources that could run down the name and address attached to a Hong Kong cell number.
    “He may recognize that number and know it is a deke,” Sun finally said. “We should use my phone.”
    “You sure?” Bosch asked.
    “Yes. I think the message should be sent in traditional Chinese. To help with the deke.”
    Bosch nodded again.
    “Right. Good idea.”
    Sun pulled his cell phone out and asked for the number Bosch had found. He opened up a text field but then hesitated.
    “What do I say?”
    “Well, we need to put some urgency into it. Make