Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly Read Free Book Online Page A

son.”
    Bosch opened the door and left the tiny room.

7
    F erras had the cash register from Fortune Liquors on his desk and had run a wire from its side into the side of his laptop. Bosch put the photo printouts down on his desk and looked across at his partner.
    “What’s happening?”
    “I went over to forensics. They were through with this. No prints other than the victim’s. I’m just getting into the memory now. I can tell you the take for the day up until the murder was under two hundred bucks. The victim would have had a hard time making a payment of two hundred sixteen dollars, if that’s what you think happened.”
    “Well, I’ve got some stuff on that to tell you. Anything else from forensics?”
    “Not much. They’re still processing every—oh, the GSR on the widow came back negative. But I guess we were expecting that.”
    Bosch nodded. Since Mrs. Li had discovered her husband’s body, it was routine to test her hands and arms for gunshot residue to determine if she had recently discharged a firearm. As expected, the test came back negative for GSR. Bosch was pretty sure she could now be scratched from the list of potential suspects, even though she was barely on it in the first place.
    “How deep is the memory on that thing?” Bosch asked.
    “It looks like it goes back a whole year. I ran some averages. The gross income on that place was slightly less than three thousand a week. You figure in overhead and cost of goods, insurance and stuff like that, and this guy was lucky if he was clearing fifty a year for himself. That ain’t no way to make a living. Probably more dangerous down there doing what he did than being a cop on those streets.”
    “Yesterday the son said business was down lately.”
    “Looking at this, I don’t see where it was ever up.”
    “It’s a cash business. He could have pulled money out of it in other ways.”
    “Probably. And then there was the guy he was paying off. If he was handing him two bills and change a week, that would add up. That would be ten grand off the top on an annual basis.”
    Bosch told Ferras what he had learned from Chu and that he was hoping the AGU could come up with an ID. They both agreed that the focal point of the investigation was shifting toward the man in the grainy printout from the store’s surveillance camera. The triad bagman. Meanwhile, the possible gangbanger who had argued with John Li the Saturday before his murder still needed to be identified and interviewed, but the contradictions between the crime scene and an anger/revenge-type killing put that lead into second position.
    They went to work on the statements and other voluminous paperwork that accompanied every murder investigation. Chu arrived first at ten o’clock, making his way right to Bosch’s desk unannounced.
    “Yee-ling isn’t here yet?” he asked by way of greeting.
    Bosch looked up from his work.
    “Who’s Yee-ling?”
    “Yee-ling Li, the mother.”
    Bosch realized he had not known the full name of the victim’s wife. This bothered him because it was an indication of how little he really knew about the case.
    “She’s not here yet. You come up with anything over there?”
    “I checked through our photo albums. Didn’t see our guy. But we’re making inquiries.”
    “Yeah, you keep saying that. What exactly does ‘making inquiries’ mean?”
    “It means that the AGU has a network of connections within the community and we will make discreet inquiries about who this man is and what Mr. Li’s affiliation was.”
    “Affiliation?” Ferras asked. “He was being extorted. His affiliation was that he was a victim.”
    “Detective Ferras,” Chu said patiently. “You are looking at it from the typical western point of view. As I explained to Detective Bosch this morning, Mr. Li may have had a lifelong relationship with a triad society. It is called quang xi, in his native dialect. It has no direct translation but it has to do with one’s social