Asian Identity Thriller: Midnight in Karakorum – Pt 6

On a secret one-man mission to track down the First Lady, Chip Garrison begins with a thorough investigation of Jack Tang's estate and uncovers disturbing clues. Tom Kagy (00:01.002) This is Tom Kagy with unconventional wisdom. Sent on a hush-hush one-man mission to unravel the two-headed mystery of the First Lady's abduction and Jack Tang's murder, Chip Garrison flies across the country to Silicon Valley. To keep his mission from leaking, he sneaks past the police cordon around the massive Tang mansion for a nighttime one-man invesgitation. The vast kitchen in which Tang was elaborately butchered shows an immaculate execution. But one small loose end catches Garrison's attention. In the belief that how a man lived is likely to reveal why he was killed, Garrison moves upstairs to spend quality sleuthing time in Tang's boutique-quality closet. He finds a meticulously-organized wardrobe that seems to suggest a life lived in splendid duplicate. Among Tang's shoe collection Garrison finds an important clue, one that suggests a bizarre possibility. Here then is the first half of a very long Chapter Seven of Midnight in Karakorum. Chapter SEVEN Another Friday night alone, thought Chip Garrison, indulging in a little recreational self-pity while wending his way, map in lap, out to the Tang estate.  It was past midnight back in Washington, nearly one a.m.  Deanne was either asleep, consoling herself with a pint of Dryer’s, or getting it on with the new man she had promised to find if Garrison stood her up one more Friday night, someone richer and better hung.  The hell of it was, Garrison had planned to surprise her tonight with the challenging position he had learned from the boss last night upon barging into his little late-night tea party.  You had to hand it to the man—Garrison hoped he would be that limber at the age of 44.  Now a stretching of his sexual horizons would likely have to wait until the First Lady had been recovered, dead or alive.  He hoped it would be the latter.  He had always liked her straightforward style.  She was a good woman—not to mention a stone fox—caught in a bad marriage.  Not that Garrison blamed the President.  By now he knew enough about the boss’s job to know it didn’t call for a saint.  If anything, it called for someone on better terms with the other side of the cosmos.  An ideal president, Garrison had once cynically decided, was a chameleon—fast-adapting, cold-blooded, equipped with a backbone.  He knew better than to judge a president by his sex life—as long as it didn’t destroy his ability to hold the job.  As far as Garrison could judge such matters, the boss had a knack for puzzling out the lesser of two evils and usually for the right reasons.  Maybe that didn’t add up to greatness, but in the wacky world of politics the man, with all his flaws, was considerably better than the available alternatives. Out here in California it wasn’t quite ten yet.  As Garrison had half expected, the front gate of the Tang estate had been left open to be guarded by a San Mateo County Sheriff’s patrol car.  The investigation was technically in progress though none of the detectives or the forensics people were likely to be actually in the house at this time on a Friday night.  A little further up the quiet road an unmarked Plymouth, probably FBI, looked ridiculous parked in a woodsy stretch of a neighborhood where you could drive for weeks without seeing a Plymouth.  The bureau really should spring for a few late-model imports for those special cases when nothing less would do.  Without slowing down noticeably, Garrison noted that each car contained a single bored occupant.  They were there to keep an eye on the crime scene, not to participate in the investigation, and would stay in their cars except to piss or stretch their legs. Garrison could have pulled right up to the front gate and flashed his badge for access, but he had no intention of tipping off anyone that the White House was scoping out the Tang murder scene.  That would require an awkward explanation to Sam Hanson’s field agents and an even more awkward one later to the press.  Garrison continued along the long meandering loop that returned him to a T-intersection a half-mile below the Tang estate.  To keep from calling as much attention to his rental car as the FBI Plymouth was, Garrison backed up a hundred yards and pulled the car up onto the concrete culvert, nudging back the shrubbery.  He pulled on the black leather gloves before getting out with his black canvas shoulder bag which nicely matched his black sweatshirt, sweatpants and black cross-trainers over black cotton socks.  Getting run over was the least of his worries. He walked quickly down to the T-intersection and turned right to head up the winding unlit road toward the Tang estate, retracing the route he had driven moments earlier.  The sliver of a moon, the same one Deanne had been cursing him under, threw off just enough cold light to let him walk without resorting to a flashlight.  To the right of the road was a steep, thickly wooded upslope unbroken by gates.  To the left he had noted two gates before the one leading to the Tang place.  After passing the second gate, Garrison cut down through the strip of trees and shrubbery that shielded a small stream from the road.  Here the overhanging branches blocked the moonlight and forced him to use a tiny penlight for footing.  The center of the stream marked the lower edge of the Tang property line.  By picking his way carefully over a series of rocks, Garrison managed to cross it without wetting his feet.  Another hundred feet up a slope made slippery by moss and vines brought him to the hedgerow that edged a broad circular driveway.  Across it stood the most spectacular house Garrison had ever trespassed into.  A string of dim Malibu lights illuminated a curving walkway that led first to a side entrance for servants and deliveries, then on to the damnably white front entrance.  The driveway down to the front gate was long and winding enough that a driver parked out front wouldn’t see someone entering through the front door, and certainly not through the side entrance.  On the chance the sheriff’s deputy had gotten out of the car and strolled up the driveway, Garrison decided to try the side door first.  If investigators had been going in and out all day, there was a good chance it was unlocked.  At least the alarm would be disarmed.  He tried the side door and found it deadbolted.  Shit.  His FBI training hadn’t included a course in lockpicking and he didn’t want to waste time testing what little he had picked up from the times he had locked himself out of his own apartment.  He could try the front door or go around back to try one of the windows.  From the side door Garrison had a longer view down the driveway.  There was no sign of movement below.  The risk of going through the front door was minimal.  And if he was spotted, he could probably outrun some deputy in stiff leather shoes.  Cursing the Malibu lights and the sheer breadth of the house, Garrison scurried to the front door in a crouch and tried the knob.  It was unlocked.  He took off his shoes and slipped them into a pouch on the side of his canvas bag before walking in.  The damned place was huge.  For a moment its sheer size, amplified by the darkness, disoriented Garrison.  Get a grip, he told himself.  This shack isn’t half as big as the White House.  His brain shifted into gear and his eyes grew accustomed to the light which was even dimmer than outside.  Still, there was a lot of glass through which some light managed to seep in.  The living room first, he decided.  Much of the furniture was leather, which wasn’t optimal.  There was a silk-upholstered sofa and a settee.  Then he spotted the window treatment.  The heavy fabrics were ideal collectors of pheromones, the hormonal scent signatures as unique to a person as his fingerprints.  From his black shoulder bag Garrison took out a tiny black vaccuum-cleaner.  The vaccuum cleaner itself was ordinary enough except maybe in its size and power, but the gear that would sift through what it would collect was so cutting-edge that its existence was known to only a handful of people outside DARPA—Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  The PPI—Pheromone Positive Identification—project was one of a thousand so called “black” projects funded with tens of billions of federal dollars diverted into classified items of DOD and CIA budgets.  Garrison had first gotten wind of the project when he had seen it listed—along with several dozen other black projects—in a memo he had routinely reviewed for the President.  PPI had been conceived as one of several alternative strategies for equipping tiny intelligent drones with the means to reliably identify and home in on—for observation and possible termination—enemy leaders deemed worthy of being military targets.   This much Garrison had gathered during the briefing arranged under the President’s orders via the Defense Department.  Involving DOD was risky, given that DARPA oversight was shared by the DCI—Director of Central Intelligence—who also happened to be CIA director Martin Underwood.  By going through the DOD side Garrison had hoped to minimize the chances of a double-agent alerting the North Koreans who, purportedly, were responsible for abducting the First Lady.  With a little luck it would produce a lead to the near end of a trail that would lead to the First Lady.  Given the timing of Tang’s murder, and his role in the AATA fundraiser where the First Lady was abducted, it seemed reasonable to suppose the two events involved the same group of perps.  But the abduction had been so clean, and the number of people there so huge, Garrison had decided the only hope for making use of PPI was on the murder side. Switching on the vacuum, Garrison swept its flared nozzle down a long section of the window treatment.  He also swept swatches of a sofa that showed the effects of its exceptionally convenient location and inviting shape.  Next would be the kitchen where Tang had been killed, at least where he had been turned into ground round.  If the killer were human, even a cold-blooded one, his body would have released billions of pheromone molecules, most of which would have disappeared into the atmosphere, but thousands, perhaps millions, would have been absorbed by porous surfaces in the kitchen and, indeed, throughout the house.  In fact, since the murder happened just a little over twenty-four hours ago, the air itself could contain several parts per billion of the telltale pheromones.  But the name of the game here was relative concentrations.  PPI’s usefulness depended on the precise location where samples were taken and the relative concentrations of the various pheromones present within a given sample.  The sample he would take from the kitchen, for example, would be expected to reveal highest concentrations of pheromones from Tang’s housekeeper, then possibly Tang, then possibly the killer or killers in roughly the same concentrations as the various law enforcement and forensics people who had been polluting the air since last night, not to mention sundry guests, repairmen or delivery boys.  By methodically accounting for all known persons, the pheromones of the unknown killer could be isolated.  Then it would be a matter of matching those against samples taken from the abodes or offices of all potential suspects until a match was found.  Potentially, the technology could revolutionize crime investigations, but the amount of processing power and legwork it required, especially at this stage when pheromone samples weren’t routinely archived like fingerprints, made it prohibitive for all but the most serious cases.   During his nine years in the FBI, gung-ho special agent Garrison had met more than his share of fresh stiffs, but he found himself tensing as he entered the kitchen which was about the size of Garrison’s entire apartment.  A couple of the interstate abduction-murders he had worked had been spiced up by a touch of mayhem—eyeballs gouged with screwdrivers, fingers sliced off—but they had been garden-variety compared with what the preliminary FBI memo to Hanson had described.  In the center of the kitchen was a cooking island big enough to butcher, filet and cook an entire cow.  That’s where Tang had been found in various pieces and bits, but of course, he wasn’t there now.  By that afternoon every conceivable photo would have been taken and the other evidence collected and catalogued, leaving the coroner free to remove Tang for more refined fileting in the name of a tidy autopsy report.  Under normal circumstances, his body would now be lying in a drawer with a tag wired to his big toe.  In this case, however, the coroner’s assistant would have been at a loss as to where a tag might be tied.  Garrison arrived at a plausible option.  According to the report at least, the killer apparently hadn’t cut off and ground up that part of Tang’s anatomy as well. Cut the crap, Garrison reminded himself.  There’s a big job to be done and your lonesome white ass is on the hook. The blood on the large wooden cutting block had run off on one side and flowed down a table leg and spread in a large puddle on the white marble floor.  Most of the H2O having evaporated by now, the dried blood formed a virtually black crustation.  Law enforcement personnel would leave puddles like that untouched, taking care not to step in it, at least until all photos had been taken.  By that time the blood would have dried to the state it was in now.  Yet, about fifteen inches outside one edge of the puddle was a shoeprint.  It had probably been created when someone had carelessly stepped into the puddle before the blood had dried, then apparently taken a quick backstep on seeing his error.  What the hell.  The kitchen window was angled away from the front gate and the counter provided some shielding.  Garrison dug into his pocket for a penlight, twisted it on and shone it on the shoeprint.  It was from a man’s dress shoe, a new pair judging by the sharpness of the brand imprint—an expensive European one that probably cost as much as Garrison’s best suit—on the heel and in front of the instep.  The print looked to have been made while the blood was fresh, before it had turned tacky, judging by the way it outspread the sole’s outline around the toe where the most blood had been picked up—probably because full weight had been committed to the toe but not to the heel when the klutz noticed his blunder.  What’s more, just behind the print was a formation of tiny droplets, virtually proving the blood had been fresh enough to spray off during the quick backstep.  Even more convincingly, no evidence of the misstep remained in the main puddle, suggesting the blood had been fresh enough simply to flow over the misstep.  Assuming the blood had crusted at the normal rate for room temperature, the print had to have been made less than an hour or two of the killing.  It didn’t take long for human blood to turn tacky.  And since Tang’s secretary, who had discovered the body, was a woman, and no detective or investigator would have been so careless, the print was likely the killer’s.  From his bag he took out a tape measure, pulled out about a foot of the stiff metal tape and placed it alongside the shoeprint.  Then he took out his 17mm infrared camera and snapped twice. Garrison’s heart raced with excitement.  If the print were the killer’s, he suddenly knew a great deal.  The killer’s shoe size and taste in shoes.  That he was an amateur with a cast-iron stomach.  No pro would be that careless or wear new dress shoes for a messy murder.  He hadn’t even bothered to wipe off the print.  Must have been in one hell of a big hurry, Garrison thought.  Maybe someone was coming.  Or waiting outside.  Garrison looked for more bloody shoe prints and saw none.  The killer must have removed and carried it.  And if he were that careless, he might have let it drip more blood, which might provide some clue as to his movements. Several minutes of crawling around the kitchen and hallway on his gloved hands and knees with a penlight failed to turn up other drops.  He didn’t have time to scour the entire house, especially with all the pheromone samples yet to be collected.  No telling when an officer or a security patrol might happen across his rental Chevy and come bopping up to the house with a flashlight and an unsnapped holster.  Getting to his feet, Garrison surveyed the kitchen again.  What struck him visually was how neatly all the blood was concentrated on and around the cutting table.  There were some spatters on the adjacent stainless steel sink, the eight-burner Wolf range, the overhead fan unit, the large wooden block holding a couple dozen knives of all sizes and shapes, and, of course, the gleaming industrial-grade electric meat grinder that must have set Tang back at least couple of grand.  Perfect for whipping up moo shoo pork—or moo shoo Tang—for a hundred of your favorite computer nerds.  But every bit of the blood—except the shoeprint—was consistent with using a 14-inch electric roast knife to behead and dismember a dead tycoon, as the FBI memo had pointed out.  Not one sign of struggle. It was as though Tang had graciously lain on the cutting table for quick dismemberment.  Even if someone had surprised Tang and snuffed him before he could put up a fight, you would expect at least some serious trauma to the head or to the torso .  According to the memo, there hadn’t been so much as a strangulation mark on either side of the severed neck.  No bruises or broken blood vessels around the nose and mouth to suggest suffocation either.  Or hypodermic marks on the torso.  Of course, the arms and legs might have sustained any number of traumas and marks, but Garrison had never heard of someone being murdered with bullets to the thigh or arm.  In any case, some poor coroner’s assistant had spent a half hour mucking around in the mixed muscle, fat, bone and gristle filling the grinder’s output bin and failed to turn up any trace of lead or other foreign substance.  The killer had removed and taken all clothing and jewelry.  No slugs had been found at all on any part of Tang’s person or home.  Despite the tasteless way the body had been left, the killing itself seemed to have been effortless.  No doubt the coroner would turn up toxins or powerful narcotics in the blood.  Not even the most willing, well-mannered victim could lie still while being dismembered with an electric roast knife.  There had likely been a hypodermic injection to one of the extremities.  That was a possible non-whacko reason for the grinder, as the memo had suggested.  Having now seen the kitchen with his own eyes, Garrison decided the only possible explanation was that Tang had been napping, charging his batteries for the big fundraiser, been surprised and injected with a powerful fast-degrading toxin, then carried to the kitchen for butchering.  No more time to lose.  From the back of the tiny vacuum’s handle Garrison popped out a clear plastic cartridge that looked something like a tiny box of breath mints.  He labeled the cartridge with a permanent marker before dropping it into his canvas bag.  He popped in a fresh cartridge and made a few passes up and down the treatment of the kitchen window nearest the butcher table.  Then he moved quickly over to the dining room.  The long, lacquered table, gleaming dully in the wan moonlight from the double-height windows, still held Tang’s sumptuous last supper.  The one he had shared with Robert Rosefall, struggling publisher/editor who had graduated from Boalt and practiced law for nine years.  Tang’s buddy from way back.  Lives in Malibu with wife and couple of kids.  It hadn’t taken Garrison long to agree with Hanson’s assessment that Rosefall had been framed.  Garrison was no profiler, but as an FBI special agent he had studied enough profiles spit out by the FBI’s mainframe to know that Rosefall didn’t fit.  A real profile of a non-family killer would have been a junior-high dropout with a couple of aggravated assaults, an armed robbery or two, maybe a drug bust, a part-time job with some moving company or service station, an apartment in some dumpy neighborhood, no kids—at least none claimed.  Whoever framed Robert Rosefall must have known Schumacher would take a quick election-eve conviction over pursuing the real killer.  Probably someone with knowledge of the players in local politics.  Stop wasting time on speculation, Garrison reminded himself.  You can’t get caught in here with your pants down.  Changing cartridges, Garrison swept the fabric cover of the chair at the head of the table, where Tang had likely sat, then, changing cartridges again, the other chair with a place setting.  Then he climbed the staircase to the second floor and found the master suite.  He couldn’t miss it.  The suite took up practically the entire second floor.  The California-king-sized bed was neatly made.  Perhaps Tang had napped on the bedroom sofa.  What puzzled Garrison about the bedroom was that the shelves of both nightstands held an assortment of books and magazines.  Tang was a bachelor.  According to the housekeeper and the black project security team who had been watching him, Tang had rarely brought women into the house.  A software wonder boy who worked sixteen-hour days.  Experience had taught Garrison that people who slept alone in a bed made for two always favored one side, stashing their bedtime reading in and around only one of the nightstands.  Yet both nightstands held reading material.  Was Tang some oddball ambidextrous sleeper?  Maybe the rich were different from you and me.  Schumacher’s investigators hadn’t bothered taking Tang’s bedroom reading into evidence, probably hadn’t even bothered flipping through it.  Pathetic.  The time pressure weighed heavily but the FBI special agent in him couldn’t resist checking out Tang’s bedtime reading.  He started with the nightstand on the side near the bedroom door.  The untidy stack included three newsmagazine and four trade journals dealing with graphic arts and advertising design.  Two more glossies featuring the kinds of technically spectacular photos that photographers dream of creating.  Two tattered paperbacks printed in Chinese characters.  Stuck between the two books was a packet of photos.  After a brief hesitation Garrison slipped that and the two Chinese paperbacks into his bag.  Tampering with a crime scene and stealing evidence were felonies worth several years of his life.  But who would notice?  Sure as hell, not Schumacher’s people.  The nightstand on the other side, the side near the window, held five business magazines and two issues of Rim.  Also thick hardbound book on Russian history, a badly printed paperback on post-Soviet Siberian society and economy, a bound dissertation on the key players in the current Chinese political scene and a slim volume titled Thread of the Silkworm.   If Tang was using his two nightstands to organize his reading material by subject, the logic escaped Garrison.  With the luxury of a gigantic bed and two nightstands, Garrison supposed, he might organize his reading too.  Who was he kidding?  He had a hard enough time keeping his dirty laundry off the clean stuff.  The business magazines were all recent issues published during the past two weeks.  One issue of Rim appeared new but the other was wrinkled, practically tattered, as though it had been read and re-read over and over.  It had been published four years ago.  There was no time to peruse its contents.  Garrison dropped it into his bag, then, the Silkworm book. Garrison checked his watch.  It was nearly midnight.  He really had to get his ass in gear and finish up. Armed with a fresh cartridge, Garrison pulled back the plush bedcovers.  The sheets looked like they had just been changed.  Of course, Tang never got to sleep between them Thursday night.  Garrison pulled back the sheets as well and swept the gauze-covered padding below on both sides of the bed.  Then he changed cartridges and moved into the walk-in closet adjacent to the bathroom.  There were no windows in the closet though it could easily have accommodated a couple of large picture windows.  Finally, a room where he could turn on the lights.  As he shut the door, he noticed that it was surprisingly heavy, a thick slab of solid wood instead of the hollow affairs on most closets.  He flipped the light switch.  What a relief to see in color again!  Like the kitchen, the closet was bigger than Garrison’s apartment, and much more plushly furnished.  To the left was what amounted to a mini-den, containing a long, well-worn black leather sofa, a teak coffee table, two black leather swivel chairs and an eight-foot solid teak desk that must have weighed at least a half ton.  Why would Tang ever want to lounge in his closet?  The house contained several far more appealing places to lounge.  Privacy from the household help?  Perhaps.  To the right of the closet door were six rows of clothes racks and, against the wall, a long rack devoted to shoes and ties.  What a clothes horse! Garrison thought.  One rack was devoted exclusively to suits, in expensive fabrics.  There must have been five dozen, mostly in black, dark gray, camel and taupe.  The closet was like the men’s department of an exclusive department store.  The suits were carefully arranged by color, starting with the lightest shade of camel and working up to the blackest black.  There wasn’t a single suit that didn’t have at least one identical copy hanging beside it.  Those London and Milan tailors probably gave one hell of a big discount when you bought by the dozen.  Between the dark greys and blacks, however, there were a few gaps, as though several suits had been pulled out.  Probably being dry-cleaned.  He checked the vinyl cover on one of the suits.  Dynasty Cleaners, Los Altos Hills.  He jotted the name and phone number on a notebook he kept in an outer pocket of his shoulder bag.  By the look of things it was unlikely Tang wore a suit twice before having it dry cleaned, making the suits hardly worth sampling. The shirts, slacks, even the polo shirts, jeans and shorts, were hung or folded as though they were on sale.  There were the shoes though.  Unlikely even Tang would throw away shoes after a single wearing, if for no other reason than the sheer discomfort of breaking in a new pair.  The shoe rack contained dress shoes, tennis shoes, running shoes, cowboy boots, dress boots, hiking boots, even a few pairs of sandals.  In all, there must have been a hundred pairs.  Then Garrison noticed several things simultaneously.  Virtually every pair of dress shoes were the same expensive European brand as the one that had made the bloody misstep down in the kitchen.  Every pair of shoes had at least one twin.  Except three pairs.  They were unmatched.  Or rather, their mates were gone, leaving obvious gaps in the careful arrangement.  Could Tang have sent them out resoling?  Somehow Garrison doubted it.  Maybe he had had them donated to the Salvation Army.  First chance, he would have to talk with Tang’s housekeeper.