"Okay, Hank. Look for them in a few minutes, and for Christ's sake don't let anyone else open your e-mail."
"Thanks, Poke. I'm pretty sure this will do it."
Morrison hangs up, and Rafferty works the chain off his neck and opens the safe. The CDs slide out in a long spill across the surface of the bed. He flips open the cases as though they contained venomous snakes and finds the two he thinks the boy's photos will be on, then carries them back into the living room.
It takes him five or ten dreadful minutes to find what he's looking for. He chooses two from relatively early in the sequence, before the bestiality reached its crescendo, and mails them off. Then he closes the lid of the computer in self-defense and carries the cases back into the bedroom. As he gathers up the ones on the bed, he decides the best way to dispose of them will be to give them to Arthit and let the police destroy them. He feels slightly lighter as he relocks the safe.
Back in the living room, he realizes he wants to tell somebody about Hank's possible breakthrough. Miaow is in school. Arthit is at work. Superman isn't reachable, and Rafferty wouldn't tell him anyway without the matter being resolved. That leaves the person he really wants to talk to, and he dials Rose's cell number.
"Hello?" Her tone is brisk.
"How long has it been since I told you I love you?"
"Ah," she says, a bit coolly. "What a nice surprise."
"It is not. You've known it forever."
"Yes. I suppose I have."
"You're a world I want to enter," Rafferty says.
"And I'll hold the door."
"There's something I want to tell you."
"Something good?"
"I think so."
Rose covers the mouthpiece of the phone and says something. Then she says, "Can it wait?"
"Sure," Rafferty says. "You're somewhere where you can't talk."
"Absolutely correct."
"At Bangkok Domestics?"
"Actually," she says, "I'm at Peachy and Rose's Household Agency."
"Peachy?"
"The canned kind, I think. By the way, your last conversation was extremely productive. Just a complete about-face. You may recall that there had been a certain prickliness."
"On Peachy's end."
"Yes. Oh, and I remember having said something to you recently about keeping a cool heart. Well, a hot one works occasionally, too."
"Peachy and Rose, huh? That has a nice ring."
"And two more situations have been found for members of the labor pool. Turns out some people actually prefer attractive maids."
"I know I would."
"Oh, good," Rose says sweetly. "We can send you someone you already know. You won't even have to learn her name."
"Rose, our Cambodian guest is gone. You can come home."
"Hmmm. That means the bed is free?"
He is up and pacing, feeling better than he has all day. "Why not come right now? We'd have the place to ourselves."
"I'd love to." She lowers her voice. "You have no idea how much I'd love to." Back at a normal volume, she says, "We're meeting with a designer about the new letterhead and business cards, and then I've got two interviews to supervise."
"The demands of success," Rafferty says.
"A good businessperson puts business first."
"I guess she does."
"A good businessperson also pays her debts," Rose says. "And, of course, the interest. Have you got a payment coming."
He finds himself grinning at the phone. "I'll change the sheets."
"Hardly seems worth it." Rose lowers her voice again. "We'll probably have to throw them away when we're done."
41
With nothing to do and a recently emptied stomach, Rafferty discovers he is ravenous. He hasn't eaten since the breakfast with Chut and Nick. By now, he thinks, they should have some buyers lined up.
He kills ninety minutes at a restaurant called Banana House, eating as much chili as the waitresses dare to serve a foreigner, since all Thais secretly believe that farang live on mayonnaise and warm milk. He sits back in the chair, burps fire, and thinks about the past few days.
Chouk is in jail, partially provided for. Action is being taken to close Madame Wing's long-overdue account. Clarissa Ulrich is poised for her heartsick flight home. Rose is designing the graphics for her new business. Hank Morrison is knee-deep in adoptive parents. Miaow is at school until three.
Doughnut is making a life, he supposes, either selling flowers or not. Whatever it is, he hopes it will be less interesting than the one she has had so far.
On his way out of the restaurant, Rafferty finds himself at a complete loss. The day stretches in front of him, hot and featureless as the Gobi, although he's never seen the Gobi. He's pretty sure it's hot and featureless, though, and if it's not, it must be a miserable excuse for a desert.
Well, the boy might be back by now.
It takes him just twenty minutes, a world record, to get home. With no need for hurry, the Bangkok traffic moves like lightning. He nods out in the back of the tuk-tuk and revises his plans as it lurches to a stop at the curb. He'll sleep until the end of the world, or maybe a little longer.
His sleepiness vanishes at the sight of his apartment door. It is wide open.
The boy, he thinks, the boy doesn't like air-conditioning. But even from the hall, he can see that something-everything-is wrong. He has the gun in his hand as he goes in.
The first thing he registers is the long slash in the couch, the stuffing exploding from it onto the floor like the cotton snow in the Christmas windows of Bangkok department stores. Yellow streaks across the wall announce the places where raw eggs shattered against it. The coffee table is on its side with one leg snapped off. The carpet where the boy likes to sit has been sliced and torn to expose the gray concrete beneath.
Why can't the world be soft?
The boy.
Rafferty runs down the hallway to Miaow's room and throws open the door. No one there, everything where it should be. The bunk beds are made. The pink T-shirt she gave him is the only thing out of place, wadded tightly on the floor. He picks it up, and it flutters to the carpet in pieces. It has been cut into ribbons.
And suddenly he knows, and his stomach shrivels until it is the size of a walnut and heavy as an anvil. He hurtles back through the hall, into the living room, and stops, his heart plummeting. The laptop is open, its screen bright and terrible.
The boy, he thinks. He was going to play Tetris. And then Rafferty realizes that he e-mailed Morrison, got up, and left the disk in the computer.
He hurries into the bathroom and, for the second time that day, he throws up.
He needs several frantic minutes to find the telephone number. He has had it for months on a pad next to the phone on the chance he might need it, but nothing is where it should be, and in his panic he picks the pad up and throws it aside and then chases it across the room, kicking things in front of him.
The boy glares at him from the computer screen on his desk. His hands are cuffed behind him, his feet separated by a pole like the ones that forced Doughnut's ankles apart. His eyes are wide and dry, glittering through his tangle of hair: Even then he had refused to weep.
That picture, on this screen, in this room. That disk in the computer. The boy's last chance to trust, and he finds that evil here.
I should have known. I should have known. The disk is on the floor, warped and blackened, partially torched with, Rafferty guesses, a disposable butane lighter, one of the dozens Rose has left behind. He dials the number on the pad and waits, swearing at each ring. The battery on the computer dies, and the screen goes black. A small mercy.