Inspector Zhang And The Falling Woman by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online Page B

put into it.   I wanted to explain what it was like in Thailand, but there was no easy way to put it into words and if I did try to explain then they'd think that I was a few cards short of a full deck.  
    When a crime takes place in the West, more often than not it's solved by meat and potatoes police work. The police gather evidence, speak to witnesses, identify a suspect and, hopefully, arrest him. In Thailand, the police generally have a pretty good idea of who has committed a crime and then they work backwards to get the evidence to convict him. Or if the perpetrator has enough money or connections to buy himself out of trouble, then they look for evidence to convict someone else.   The end result is the same, but the approach is totally different.   What I really wanted to tell Mr. and Mrs. Clare was that the best way of finding where Jon Junior had gone would be to find out where he was and if that sounds a bit like Alice in Wonderland , then welcome to Thailand. But I didn't. I just kept on smiling reassuringly.
    “Do you think we should stay in Bangkok?” asked Mr. Clare.
    I shrugged. “That's up to you. But I can't offer any guarantees of how long it could take. I might be lucky and find him after a couple of phone calls. Or I might still be looking for him in two months.”
    “It's just that my cousin Jeb is minding the shop, and when the good Lord was handing out business acumen, Jeb was standing at the back of the queue playing with his Gameboy.” He held up his hands.   “Not that money's an issue; it's not. But Mr. Richards said there wasn't much that Mrs. Clare and I could do ourselves, not being able to speak the language and all.”
    I nodded sympathetically.   “He's probably right. You'd only be a day away if you were back in Utah. As soon as I found anything, I'd call you.”
    “God bless you, Mr. Turtledove,” said Mrs. Clare, and she reached over and patted the back of my hand.   She looked into my eyes with such intensity that for a moment I believed that a blessing from her might actually count for something.
    “I would say one thing, just to put your minds at rest,” I said.   “If anything really bad had happened, the police would probably know about it and the embassy would have been informed.   And if he'd been robbed, his credit card would have been used, here or elsewhere in the world. If it had been theft, they wouldn't have thrown the card away.”
    “You're saying you don't think that he's dead, that's what you're saying?” said Mrs. Clare.
    I nodded and looked into her eyes and tried to make it look as if my opinion might actually count for something.
    Her husband was leaning forward, his eyes narrowing as if he had the start of a headache. He looked like a man who had something on his mind.
    “Is there something else, Mr. Clare? Something worrying you?”
    He looked over at his wife and she flashed him a quick, uncomfortable smile. Yes, there was something else, something that was painful that they didn't want to talk about.
    “We read something in the paper, about a fire,” said Mr. Clare. “In a nightclub.”
    “Jon Junior wouldn't be in a nightclub,” said his wife, quickly.
    Too quickly.
    The nightclub they were talking about was the Kube.   Two hundred and eighteen people had died. A lot had been foreigners. Most of the bodies still hadn't been identified.
    I nodded and tried to look reassuring. “That was last week,” I said.
    March the thirteenth, to be exact. A Saturday.
    “We wondered…” said Mr. Clare. “We thought…” He shuddered and Mrs. Clare reached over to hold his hand.
    “Jon Junior doesn't go to nightclubs,” said Mrs. Clare. “He doesn't drink. He doesn't like the music.”
    “If…” said Mr. Clare, but then he winced as if he didn't want to finish the sentence. I tried an even more reassuring smile to see if that would help. To my surprise, it did.   “If Jon Junior was by any chance involved…in the fire.” He rubbed his