TWO DAYS PASSED without Tay making any progress at all in finding out who the dead man at the Woodlands HDB estate was, let alone figuring out who killed him. He stayed in his office, mostly, leaving the matter of getting an ID on their corpse largely to Sergeant Kang. He simply didn’t want to encounter his colleagues who were working the various aspects of the bombings when he wasn’t.
As nearly as Tay could tell, he and Kang were the only investigators not working the bombings. After more than twenty years in CID and fifteen in its elite Special Investigations Section, being pushed to the curb was a humiliation Tay could not bear. He was angry and embarrassed in equal measures, and from moment to moment first one emotion and then the other took control of him. So he stayed in his office, talked to no one but Kang, and shuffled papers without much of any idea what the papers he was shuffling actually were.
Tay spent a lot of the time thinking about resigning, of course. He had thought about quitting the police force several times before, but never that seriously. He certainly didn’t need the job. His father had left him comfortably off and he was working only because he wanted to do something that mattered.
Tay had been twelve or thirteen when his father died on a business trip. He was an accountant, a careful man who had insisted his family live modestly, and his death had been entirely unexpected. Tay’s mother had been shocked at his father’s death, but even more shocked to discover she and her son had inherited a small fortune in real estate. Now Tay’s mother was dead, too, and her share of his father’s estate had passed to him, too. He had more money than he knew what to do with, so why was he still doing this job?
He was doing it because it was what he did. This was the only vocation Tay knew. It was sometimes stupid, frequently meaningless, and always utterly compromised, but it was a job he did as well as he could regardless of that. There were days when he felt everything slipping away. There were times when he felt his place in the world was somewhere he had never intended to be. But through it all, he kept doing his job.
It was just that simple, really. Tay was a policeman. That was who he was.
Sergeant Kang didn’t appear to mind their banishment from the bombing case as much as Tay did. Robbie Kang was a man who did mostly what he was told and hardly ever thought much about it. That was what made him such a good Singaporean. It was because of people like Robbie Kang that Singapore worked. They didn’t care much about what their government was doing, so it just did whatever it wanted and the Robbie Kangs of the world went on living. They got married, picked out cars, had children, borrowed money, bought apartments. They left the rest to others.
Tay was one of the others.
***
There was a rap on Tay’s half-open door and Sergeant Kang’s head appeared around it.
“Am I disturbing you, sir?”
Tay looked startled, and probably a little embarrassed. It was almost as if Kang had been standing outside listening to his thoughts.
Kang seemed to sense something was wrong and started to close the door.
“No, it’s fine,” Tay said quickly. “I was just thinking about something. Come in.”
Kang sat down in one of the straight chairs in front of Tay’s desk. “It’s about the FMB report on the apartment at the Woodlands, sir.”
“They found something?”
“Not really, sir. There were some hair and fibers and some prints, but the prints were mostly partials and we didn’t get a match on any of them, and the hair and fibers are pretty useless until we have something to match them to. Their best guess is the place was carefully cleaned.”
“That’s it?”
“Just one thing that seems a little odd. They found traces of flour on the shoes of the deceased.”
“Flowers?”
“No, sir. Flour. Like from a bakery. There wasn’t much. Just some spoors in the treads of his shoes. He could have simply walked across a kitchen where someone had once spilled some flour. It probably doesn’t mean anything.”
Tay thought about that for a moment and decided Kang was probably right.
“How about the ID on the deceased?” he asked. “Are you getting anywhere with that?”
“Not really, sir.”
“Have you found the owner of the apartment?”
“We’ve confirmed that Mr. Ching actually is in LA. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone living there.”
“Who knew that?”
“I’m not sure, sir. Probably at least some of the neighbors knew, but the daughter says she hadn’t talked to any estate agents yet so it’s hardly public knowledge.”
“So you think Mr. Ching is in the clear?”
Kang hesitated. “In the clear, sir?”
“Yes, I gather you think we should take him off our list of suspects.”
Kang hesitate again, even longer this time.
“He’s an eighty-three year old man, sir.”
Tay said nothing.
“And he’s been in Los Angeles for the last five months.”
Tay said nothing.
Suddenly Kang brightened. “You’re kidding me, aren’t you, sir?”
“Yes, Sergeant Kang, I am indeed kidding you. I’m so happy you finally noticed.”
Kang smiled uncertainly and Tay ticked off another box on Kang’s list of Singaporean national characteristics. Very little sense of humor.
Tay took the FMB report from Kang and flipped through it. Nothing in it stuck him and he tossed it on his desk among all the other pieces of paper from which nothing had stuck him either.
“So where does that leave you on the ID, Sergeant?”
“Nowhere, sir. No hits on the fingerprints in our database, so he wasn’t a citizen or a PR here. And there was nothing to go on in the apartment or in his clothes.”
“How about the neighbors? A Caucasian in that neighborhood would have been pretty conspicuous. Didn’t anyone know him?”
“I haven’t found anyone yet, sir. But with everyone else assigned to the bombings, they won’t give me any extra manpower and I’ve had to do all the door knocking myself. I’ve only found a few people at home so far and nobody knew anything at all about a Caucasian in the neighborhood. If you could get me some more men and we had more thorough coverage—”
“If he wasn’t a citizen or a permanent resident,” Tay interrupted, “he would have filled out an immigration card when he entered Singapore. Can’t you trace him that way?”
“I’ve already asked for a list of all the male Caucasian entries who haven’t exited yet and the Singapore address they gave, but it’s going to be a long list. I’m not sure it’s going to be very helpful without anything to narrow it down. If he’d been carrying a wallet or something—”
Tay abruptly slapped both hands on his desk and pushed himself up from his chair.
“Well, better get to it, Sergeant. Sounds to me like you’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
“Where will you be, sir? Just in case I need you.”
“Don’t worry about that, Sergeant. You won’t need me. I’m absolutely certain about that.”
“Yes, sir.”