9 Dragons Read online

  “All right, I’m going to go. Try to stay calm, Eleanor. For Maddie. We stay calm and we can do this.”

  “We’re going to get her back, right, Harry?”

  Bosch nodded to himself before answering.

  “That’s right. We’re going to get her back.”

  19

  The digital image unit was one of the subgroups of the Scientific Investigation Division and was still located at the old police headquarters at Parker Center. Bosch traversed the two blocks between the old and new buildings like a man running late for a plane. By the time he pushed through the glass doors of the building where he had spent much of his career as a detective he was huffing and there was a shine of sweat on his forehead. He badged his way past the front desk and took the elevator up to the third floor.

  SID was in the process of being readied for the move to the PAB. The old desks and work counters remained in place but the equipment, records and personal effects were being boxed up. The process was carefully orchestrated and was slowing the already plodding march of science in crime fighting.

  DIU was a two-room suite in the back. Bosch stepped in and saw at least a dozen cardboard boxes in stacks on one side of the first room. There were no pictures or maps on the walls and a lot of the shelves were empty. He found one tech at work in the rear lab.

  Barbara Starkey was a veteran who had jumped around among specialties in SID over nearly four decades in the department. Bosch had met her when he was a rookie cop on post guarding the burned-out remains of a house where police had engaged in a major gun battle with members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The militant radicals had taken credit for the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. Starkey at the time was on the forensics team brought in to determine if the remains of Patty Hearst were amid the debris in the smoking shell of the house. Back then the department had a practice of moving female applicants into positions where physical confrontations and the need to carry a weapon were minimal. Starkey had wanted to be a cop. She ended up in the SID and as such had seen firsthand the explosive growth of technology in the use of crime detection. As she liked to tell the rookie techs, when she started in forensics, DNA were just three letters in the alphabet. Now she was an expert in almost all areas of forensics, and her son, Michael, was in the division as well, working as a blood spatter expert.

  Starkey looked up from a twin-screen computer workstation where she was looking at grainy video from a bank robbery. On the screens were double images-one more in focus than the other-of a man pointing a gun at a teller’s window.

  “Harry Bosch! The man with the plan.”

  Bosch had no time for banter. He approached and got right to the point.

  “Barb, I need your help.”

  Starkey frowned when she noted the urgency in his voice.

  “What’s up, darling?”

  Bosch held his phone up.

  “I’ve got a video on my phone. I need to blow it up and slow it down to see if I can identify location. It’s an abduction.”

  Gesturing toward her screen, Starkey said, “I’m right in the middle of this two eleven in West?-”

  “My daughter’s on it, Barbara. I need your help now.”

  This time Starkey didn’t hesitate.

  “Let me see it.”

  Bosch opened the phone and started the video, then handed it to her. She viewed it wordlessly and kept any other nonprofessional response out of her face. If anything, Bosch saw her posture straighten and an aura of professional urgency emerge.

  “Okay, can you send this to me?”

  “I don’t know. I know how to send it to your phone.”

  “Can’t you send e-mail on here with an attachment?”

  “I can send e-mail but I don’t know about an attachment. I’ve never tried.”

  Starkey walked him through it and he sent Starkey an e-mail with the video as an attachment.

  “Okay, now we wait for it to come in.”

  Before Bosch could ask how long that would be, there was a chime from her computer.

  “There it is.”

  Starkey closed her work on the bank robbery, then opened her e-mail and downloaded the video. Soon she had it playing on the left screen. In full-screen size the image was blurred by the pixel spread. Starkey reduced it to half-screen size and it became clearer. Much clearer and harsher than when Bosch had seen the images on his phone. Harry looked at his daughter and tried hard to stay focused.

  “I’m so sorry, Harry,” Starkey said.

  “I know. Let’s not talk about it.”

  On the screen, Maddie Bosch, thirteen years old, sat tied to a chair. A gag made of bright red cloth cut tightly across her mouth. She wore her school uniform, a blue plaid skirt and white blouse with the school crest above the left breast. She looked at the camera-her own cell phone camera-with eyes that tore Bosch’s heart out. Desperate and scared were only the first words of description that went through his mind.

  There was no sound, or rather no one said anything at first on the video. For fifteen seconds the camera held on her and that was enough. She was simply on display for him. The rage came back to Bosch. And the helplessness.

  Then the person behind the camera reached into the frame and pulled the gag temporarily loose from Maddie’s mouth.

  “Dad!”

  The gag was immediately replaced, muffling what was yelled after that single word and leaving Bosch unable to interpret it.

  The hand then dropped down in an attempt to fondle one of the girl’s breasts. She reacted violently, shifting sideways in her bindings and kicking her left leg up at the outstretched arm. The video frame momentarily swung out of control and then was brought back to Maddie. She had fallen over in the chair. For the last five seconds of video the camera just held on her. The screen then went black.

  “There’s no demand,” Starkey said. “They’re just showing her.”

  “It’s a message to me,” Bosch said. “They’re telling me to back off.”

  Starkey didn’t respond at first. She put both her hands on an editing deck attached to the computer’s keyboard. Bosch knew that by manipulating the dials, she was able to move the video forward and backward with precise control.

  “Harry, I’m going to go through this frame by frame but it’s going to take some time,” she said. “You’ve got thirty seconds of video here.”

  “I can go through it with you.”

  “I think it would be better if you let me do my job and then I call you the moment I find anything. Trust me, Harry. I know she’s your daughter.”

  Bosch nodded. He knew he had to let her work without breathing down her neck. It would bring the best results.

  “Okay. Can we just take a look at the kick and then I’ll leave you to it? I want to see if there’s something there. He moved the camera when she kicked at him and there was a flash of light. Like a window.”

  Starkey rolled the video back to the moment Maddie had kicked at her captor. In real time the video at that point had been a blur of sudden movement and light followed by a quick correction back to the girl.

  But now in stop-action of frame-by-frame playback, Bosch saw that the camera had momentarily swept left across a room to a window, and then back.

  “You’re good, Harry,” Starkey said. “We may have something here.”

  Bosch bent down to look over her shoulder and get closer. Starkey backed up the video and rolled it slowly forward again. Maddie’s effort to kick at the outreached arm of her captor made the frame of the video go left and then jog down to the floor. It then came up on the window and corrected to the right again.

  The room appeared to be a low-rent hotel room with a single bed and a table and lamp directly behind the chair Maddie was tied to. Bosch noted a dirty beige rug with a variety of stains on it. The wall over the bed was pockmarked with holes left by nails used to hold up wall hangings. The pictures or paintings had possibly been removed to make the location harder to identify.

 
; Starkey backed the video up to the window and froze it there. It was a vertical window with a single pane that opened out like a door. There appeared to be no screen. It had been cranked open in full outward extension and in the glass was a reflection of an urban cityscape.

  “Where do you think this is, Harry?”

  “Hong Kong.”

  “Hong Kong?”

  “She lives there with her mother.”

  “Well…”

  “Well, what?”

  “It’s just going to make it harder for us to determine location. How well do you know Hong Kong?”

  “I’ve been going twice a year for about six years. Just clean this up, if you can. Can you make that part bigger?”

  Using the mouse, Starkey outlined the window and then moved a copy of that part of the video over to the second screen. She increased its size and then went through some focusing maneuvers.

  “We don’t have the pixels, Harry, but if I run a program that sort of fills in what we don’t have, we can sort of sharpen it. Maybe you’ll recognize something in the reflection.”

  Bosch nodded, even though he was behind her.

  On the second screen, the reflection in the window became a sharper image with three different levels of depth. The first thing Bosch noted was that the location of the room was up high. The reflection showed a channel down a city street from at least ten stories up, he judged. He could see the sides of buildings lining the street and the edge of a large billboard or building sign with the English letters N-O. There was also a collage of street-level signs with Chinese characters. These were smaller and not as clear.

  Beyond this reflection Bosch could see tall buildings in the distance. He recognized one of them by the two white spires on the roof. The twin radio antennas were braced by a crossbar and the configuration always reminded Bosch of football goalposts.

  Outlining the buildings was the third level of reflection: a mountain ridgeline broken only by a structure that had a bowl shape -supported by two thick columns.

  “Is this helping, Harry?”

  “Yeah, yeah, definitely. This has to be Kowloon. The reflection goes across the harbor to Central and then the mountain peak behind it. This building with the goalposts is the Bank of China. Very famous part of the skyline. And that is Victoria Peak behind it. That structure you see up on the top through the goalposts is like a lookout spot next to the peak tower up there. So to reflect all of this I’m pretty sure you’d have to be across the harbor in Kowloon.”

  “I’ve never been there, so none of this means anything to me.”

  “Central Hong Kong is actually an island. But there are other islands surrounding it and across the harbor is Kowloon and an area called the New Territories.”

  “Sounds too complicated for me. But if any of this helps you, then-”

  “It helps a lot. Can you print this?”

  He pointed to the second screen with the isolated view of the window.

  “Sure thing. There’s one thing that’s sort of weird, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You see in the foreground this partial reflection of the sign”

  She used the cursor to put a box around the two letters N and O that were part of a larger sign and word in English.

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “You have to remember, this is a reflection in the window. It’s like a mirror, so everything is reverse. You understand”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, so all the signs should be backwards but these letters aren’t backwards. Of course, with the O you can’t tell. It’s the same forward or backwards. But this N is not backwards, Harry. So when you remember this is a reverse reflection, then that means-”

  “The sign is backwards?”

  “Yes. It would have to be in order for it to show up correctly in a reflection.”

  Bosch nodded. She was right. It was strange but not something he had the time to dwell on at the moment. He knew it was time to get moving. He wanted to call Eleanor and tell her he thought their daughter was being held in Kowloon. Maybe it would connect with something on her end. It was a start at least.

  “Can I get that copy?”

  “I’m already printing it. It takes a couple minutes because it’s a high-res printer.”

  “Got it.”

  Bosch stared at the image on the screen, looking for any other details that would help. Most notable was a partial reflection of the building his daughter was held in. A line of air-conditioning units protruded beneath the windows. That meant it was an older building and that might help him draw a bead on the place.

  “Kowloon,” Starkey said. “Sounds sort of ominous.”

  “My daughter told me it means ‘Nine Dragons.’”

  “See, I told you. Who would name their neighborhood Nine Dragons unless they wanted to scare people away?”

  “It comes from a legend. During one of the old dynasties the emperor was supposedly just a boy who got chased by the Mongols into the area that is now Hong Kong. He saw the eight mountain peaks that surrounded it and wanted to call the place Eight Dragons. But one of the men who guarded him reminded him that the emperor was a dragon too. So they called it Nine Dragons. Kowloon.”

  “Your daughter told you this?”

  “Yeah. She learned it in school.”

  Silence followed. Bosch could hear the printer working somewhere behind him. Starkey got up and went behind a stack of boxes and pulled the printout of the window reflection out of the high-resolution graphics printer.

  She handed it to Bosch. It was a glossy reprint on photo paper. It was as clear as the image on the computer screen.

  “Thanks, Barbara.”

  “I’m not done, Harry. Like I said, I’m going to look at every frame of that video-thirty per second-and if there’s something else that will help, I’ll find it. I’ll also take the audio track apart.”

  Bosch just nodded and looked down at the printout in his hand.

  “You’ll find her, Harry. I know you will.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  20

  Bosch called his ex-wife on the speed dial while on the way back to the PAB. She answered the call with an urgent question.

  “Harry, anything”

  “Not a lot but we’re working on it. I am pretty sure the video I was sent was shot in Kowloon. Does that mean anything to you”

  “No. Kowloon? Why there?”

  “I have no idea. But we may be able to find the place.”

  “You mean the police will?”

  “No, I mean you and me, Eleanor. When I come. In fact, I still need to book my flight. Have you called anybody? What have you got?”

  “I don’t have anything!” she yelled, surprising Bosch. “My daughter is somewhere out there and I don’t have anything! The police don’t even believe me!”

  “What are you talking about? You called them?”

  “Yes, I called them. I can’t sit here and just wait for you to show up tomorrow. I called the Triad Bureau.”

  Bosch felt his insides tighten. He couldn’t bring himself to trust strangers, experts though they might be, with his daughter’s life.

  “What did they say?”

  “They put my name into the computer and got a hit. The police have a file on me. Who I am, who I work for. And they knew about the time before. When I thought she was kidnapped and it turned out she was staying at her friend’s. So they didn’t believe me. They think she ran away again and her friends are lying to me. They said to wait a day and call back if she doesn’t show up.”

  “Did you tell them about the video?”

  “I told them but they didn’t care. They said if there is no ransom demand, then it was probably staged by her and her friends to get attention. They don’t believe me!”

  She started crying in frustration and fear but Bosch considered the police reaction and thought it could work in their favor.

  “Eleanor, listen to me, I think this is good.”
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  “Good? How could it be good? The police are not even looking for her.”

  “I told you before, I don’t want the police. The people who have her will see the police coming a mile away. But they won’t see me.”

  “This isn’t L.A., Harry. You don’t know your way like you do there.”

  “I’ll find my way and you’ll help me.”

  There was a long silence before she responded. Bosch was almost back to the PAB.

  “Harry, you have to promise me you’ll get her back.”

  “I will, Eleanor,” he responded without hesitation. “I promise you. I’m going to get her back.”

  He walked into the main lobby, holding his jacket open so the badge on his belt could be seen at the fancy new reception counter.

  “I gotta go up an elevator now,” he said. “I’ll probably lose the connection.”

  “Okay, Harry.”

  But he stopped outside the elevator alcove.

  “I just thought of something,” he said. “Was one of the friends you talked to named He?”

  “He”

  “Yeah, H-E. Maddie said it means ‘river.’ She told me that was the name of one of the friends she hangs out with in the mall.”

  “When was this?”

  “You mean when did she tell me? Just a few days ago. Must’ve been Thursday for you. Thursday morning when she was walking to school. I was talking to her and brought up the smoking you mentioned. She-”

  Eleanor interrupted by making some kind of sound of disgust.

  “What?” Bosch asked.

  “That was why she’s treated me like shit lately,” she said. “You ratted me out.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. I sent her a photo I knew would bait her into calling me and the smoking would come up. It worked. And when I told her that she better not be smoking, she mentioned He. She said sometimes at the mall He’s older brother hangs out to watch over her, and he’s the one that smokes.”

  “I don’t know any of her friends named He, or her brother. I guess that shows how out of touch I am with my own daughter.”

  “Listen, Eleanor, at a time like this we’re both going to be second-guessing everything we ever did or said to her. But it’s a distraction from what we need to be focusing on now. Okay? Don’t get distracted by what you did or didn’t do. Let’s focus on getting her back.”