City of Strangers (Luis Chavez Book 2) (18 page)

“How long would SARS be present in the sample?” Luis asked. “Couldn’t it have vanished?”

“The virus maybe, but not the body’s response to it. But the samples were kept in inert substances that wouldn’t absorb the virus. In a human the virus would alter, grow, change, or die. On something inert it could survive indefinitely, just waiting to be activated. Scientists have done biochemical weapons tests with viruses on spider webs. Someone trying to infect an enemy that may return to an area will spray a sample on the web and, the theory is, the bad guy could still get sick if they touch the spider web weeks later.”

Luis puzzled over this for a moment. He’d been so sure there was some kind of connection here. Now they were back to square one.

“I should probably get some sleep before heading back over to Good Samaritan,” Susan said, rising and patting Luis on the shoulder. “It was a good guess, but sometimes that’s not good enough.”

Luis nodded and headed out of the clinic. As he rode the bus back to St. Augustine’s, he tried to put the pieces together, but the final image remained elusive. He had arranged for a substitute to teach his morning classes, a priest from Holy Trinity in Baldwin Hills, but Luis knew he couldn’t keep doing this. He was either a parish priest or he was some kind of amateur sleuth gallivanting around the city, trying to do the job of the police.

For the rest of the day he threw himself into his work. He taught his classes, he graded papers, he prepared a test for the end of the week, and he actually, in long hand, began to write his sermon about Saint Peter Claver.

When he checked the local news on his phone in the early evening, he caught sight of Michael Story at a press conference, alongside the mayor, the chief of police, a representative of the ICE, and a few other groups. Without ever using the word “triad,” the mayor succinctly explained that the outbreak resulted not from poor security measures at the airport but because of an unscrupulous criminal organization. He was careful not to cite “illegal immigrants,” knowing what kind of backlash a statement like that could lead to. By tying it to a bunch of crooks, he turned fear into a rallying cry. The news story then showed one of these alleged crooks, a Chui Songwei, being arrested as he attempted to flee the country with his wife and two children from Las Vegas’s McCarran Airport.

And then came the clincher.

“Deputy District Attorney Michael Story, who is spearheading the investigation, made headlines earlier this year when he took on a human trafficking—”

Luis turned off and pocketed his phone. He knew the rest. He also knew that Michael likely orchestrated the entire event down to the mayor’s speech. He wouldn’t have put it past him to have driven Songwei the five hours to McCarran just to make sure he looked guilty as sin for the cameras.

But it still didn’t explain the killing of Father Chang.

With all of this on his mind, he headed to the chapel to help with evening Mass. Before he could reach the sacristy, Erna stopped him in the hallway.

“There’s a delivery for you in the office,” she said. “I would’ve brought it to the rectory, but it was too heavy.”

Luis thanked her and moved to the admin office. He was surprised to see that the box came from St. Jerome’s. He opened it and found what was described on a card as Father Chang’s personal effects as taken from his car. It wasn’t much. Just what Pastor Siu-Tung had described.

When Luis got to the bulk boxes of pills, however, he was surprised. They weren’t the same as the ones he’d come across in Chang’s medicine cabinet. In fact, they weren’t for hypertension at all. The boxes were labeled “Glutide,” with English-language instructions designating it as a product for diabetics. Price stickers on each seemed to indicate that, yes, they’d been paid for in Indonesian rupiah. Only the why was missing.

Unsure what to make of this, Luis called Susan.

“I’m looking at a stack of generic pharmaceuticals Father Chang had in his car trunk the night he was killed. Was he diabetic?”

“No, not at all. He was hypertensive and took Lozol for it. But diabetic? No. And yes, I would’ve known.”

“Could he have been bringing them back for someone? A cheaper alternative to what’s available here?” Luis asked.

“Can you read me the active ingredients on the box?”

Luis did. There were only two.

“That’s identical to a number of products here. The cost of travel would wipe out any savings. Worse, it’s the Wild West down there. A lot of what you find on the shelves isn’t even what it says it is. You’ve got these fly-by-night drug companies making unregulated generics in India and China to compete with the expensive American and European brands. They claim to be the same stuff, but you never know the quality of the active ingredients or what’s being used for the inactive ones, much less the conditions under which it was made. It’s big, big business.”

“Do people ever get hurt?” Luis asked, Susan’s statement triggering something in the back of his mind.

“Yeah, all the time,” Susan confirmed. “People even die. A few years ago it happened here. Nineteen people died because of some tainted pills they thought they were getting from a Canadian pharmaceutical company, but it turned out to be a totally unregulated fly-by-night outfit in China.”

Luis’s mind raced. He stared at the box in his hand, a theory beginning to form.

“What is it, Father?” Susan asked.

“If I wanted to know everything about Father Chang’s travels, where would I start?”

XVIII

Tracking Father Chang’s movements through Indonesia proved remarkably easy. At least, at first. Susan directed Luis to online editions of St. Jerome’s church bulletin as well as ones from the churches Father Chang had visited overseas. There he was taking photos with locals, sampling the cuisine laid out for him, visiting parishes both urban and rural, and taking part in everything from dances to building projects to Mass. A clear picture was painted of everywhere he went, whom he saw, and the parishes he visited. It was practically a diary.

But peering at it through the prism of someone who was there for another purpose altogether, Luis saw it for what it was—a cover story.

There were gaps in time. Half days missing. A day missing. Nights missing. A weekend missing. Pulling up a second browser window on Erna’s computer, Luis looked at a map of the sprawling, multi-island nation. Some of the gaps could be accounted for with travel time. The rest, however, were a mystery.

When he searched local news stories for instances of SARS, no results came back. When he switched that to cases of tainted pharmaceuticals, he hit the mother lode. The stories began with a handful of unusual deaths. In an early article it was suggested that an outbreak of some kind of infectious disease had claimed the lives of about a dozen men. Then there was a second article from a different part of the country saying much the same thing. In both cases the victims were elderly, poor, and male. Local fears centered on some new mosquito-borne disease that attacked a compromised immune system. The men had uniformly suffered from issues typical of their ages like heart disease and high blood pressure.

When no definitive cause was discovered and the deaths ebbed off, it seemed as if the story, too, would go away.

But when a third outbreak happened farther up the coast, a local blogger cum investigator named Kirk Asmara got involved. He’d known the family of one of the dead men and had begun putting the pieces together. After speaking to all the families, he learned that each of the men took beta-blockers for high blood pressure. More importantly, in each household he discovered the leftover pills were all of the same low-grade generic brand. These weren’t the kind found in the finest hospitals and pharmacies so much as from street vendors or bodegas, where one could also buy anything from knockoff perfume that turned out to be colored water and vanilla to bulk cases of shampoo that turned out to be vegetable oil, dish soap, and food coloring.

One death from shoddy generics was easily swept under the rug. A pattern like this was harder to ignore. When Asmara gathered his findings and took them to Jakarta’s largest daily, it ran the story on the front page. There was a minor outcry, prompting a government investigation. The drugs were discovered to have come from a company in Hong Kong, which quickly admitted its guilt, made payments to the families of the dead in the amounts of 70 million rupiah, or about $5,000, a piece, and shuttered.

As far as Asmara could tell, no one was ever charged.

A few months later there was another outbreak of deaths Asmara tracked back to tainted pharmaceuticals. He began reaching out to activists in other areas around the Indian Ocean and discovered even more victims. In each case the pharmaceuticals could be traced back to shadowy companies in China or India that would often close up shop or outright vanish as soon as improprieties were reported. What Asmara seemed to realize, however, was that with this intricate a web of distribution and such high profits to be made, there had to be at least some kind of major corporation backing it from somewhere.

Luis couldn’t tell exactly when in the timeline Father Chang got involved, but once he did, his travels to the region coincided with Asmara’s web articles outlining clandestine visits to distribution centers and dealers. He seemed to know he was getting close to the big story, and Father Chang was helping.

Then it came to a swift halt. Six months back Asmara died when his motorcycle collided with a guardrail on a lonely stretch of road outside Makassar. There was no suggestion that it was anything but an accident, except the detail Luis discovered that Asmara didn’t actually own a motorcycle. On a memorial website set up by the families of those he was trying to help, Luis found a note from Father Chang. It was short and anguished and in the end said only that the fight against “Fanrong” would go on.

Fanrong?

Fanrong, it turned out, was the name of a drug manufacturer and subsidiary of an outfit called the Jiankang Holding Group. Though
jiànkāng
meant “health,” it had a worldwide reputation for promoting the exact opposite. It was also a billion-dollar enterprise and rumored to be linked to the Hong Kong triad.

And there it was: the big monied corporation behind the cheaply made and occasionally fatally tainted pharmaceuticals.

Luis shook his head. Of course, organized crime was involved in the mass production of knockoffs going way back, from Louis Vuitton suitcases that fell apart after two usages or Chanel suits that became discolored when exposed to even a droplet of rain. Only these knockoffs killed people. If all these outbreaks really were linked together,
thousands
of people.

Like the SARS outbreak in Los Angeles was doing.

It’s not an outbreak at all,
Luis realized.
It’s contaminated pills.

He had to find Susan.

Tony Qi was no investigator, but he knew when things didn’t add up. He mapped and remapped the route they’d taken with Jun from the John Wayne Airport to Sunset to the Beverly Hills Hotel and then to the house. There was no way possible for her to have come into contact with anyone on the list of the infected or the dead. Either she had come over with the virus, which would have been the coincidence of all coincidences, or she had picked it up some other way.

Which is when he thought of Dr. Martin Soong.

“I’ve been tested and retested for the disease,” Martin said when Tony drove over to his mid-Wilshire office. “There’s no one I’ve come in contact with who I know to have been infected, but that doesn’t mean much. That said, the gestation period of the disease does match up perfectly with when I first saw her. So yes, I’ve been concerned. But I would’ve expressed the symptoms of the disease by now, so the timing is a coincidence.”

No such thing,
Tony thought.

“Could you be a carrier without being infected yourself?” Tony asked.

“No. For some diseases, yes. For SARS, no.”

“What about your equipment? Could it have carried the virus in?”

Martin shook his head. “It’s all sterilized. Besides, if she was infected from it, it would mean another patient had it, and that hasn’t happened. She’s the only one, I’m afraid.”

This answer didn’t work for Tony. He’d actually called Oscar after leaving the house the other night to get the gangster turned real estate baron to assign a couple of men to watch the house and make sure no one else entered. When he’d rung back several hours later, Oscar reported that no one had entered or exited except Dr. Soong.

Could it have been Archie?

When he called the big man’s home, Archie answered, apologized again for quitting, but reported that his health was just fine.

On the drive up to the house, Tony tried to think of other points of intersection between Jun’s world and Los Angeles at large and couldn’t come up with a one. The house had been vacant before they’d moved in. The house to the left was unoccupied; the house to the right was home to an elderly couple, who seldom left. The postman drove by, but there was no mail.

He was only a hundred yards from the house when his cell phone rang. Surprised to get reception, he discovered the caller to be Bo Xu, one of the warehouse managers who was overseeing the switch from the triad deliverymen to Oscar’s crew.

“Mr. Xu? How are you?” Tony asked as he answered.

“There’s an issue with these men you’ve sent me,” Xu complained. “Their delivery times are shot to hell. I even had one group leave their truck half-full of perishables out on Sawtelle. They just left it there! I had to find a second crew to take over. They’d run out of gas.”

“Whose job is it to fill the trucks?” Tony asked.

“The driver.”

“Were they told that?”

There was a pause. “I’m sure they were.”

“Well, let’s make double sure, and I’ll have a word with Oscar.”

“That’s not the issue,” Xu said without thanking him. “An entire section of deliveries is going undelivered.”

“Section? I’m confused. What do you mean?”

“They’re refusing to deliver to the hospitals and clinics,” Xu said. “They’ve bought into the bull about it having come from China and figure if they walk into a Chinese-owned clinic, they’ll catch the virus.”

“But taking money from Chinese bosses in Chinese warehouses is just fine, huh?”

“Seems to be.”

Tony considered this problem. He knew the triad controlled the supplying of linens and cleaning supplies to a number of hospitals and urgent-care facilities around Los Angeles that would fall under the Oscar arrangement. But all the Chinese-owned unlicensed clinics they supported wouldn’t need temp deliverymen.

“For the unlicensed clinics, just send our regular drivers. I’ll talk to Oscar about how to handle the hospitals.”

“Great,” Xu replied, then hung up.

Tony parked at the house on Grand View and headed inside. Chen Jiang was seated in the living room drinking tea and watching television.

Why wasn’t
she
the one to get sick?
Tony scoffed.

But the thought stopped him in his tracks. Why
wasn’t
Jun’s constant companion sick? There was nothing Jun did away from her. She ate the same meals, had stayed in the same rooms, had shaken the same hands, had breathed the same air.

So why wasn’t she sick?

It couldn’t be the pregnancy.

“Hello, Tony,” Jiang said. “She is sleeping, but I have to wake her up soon for her pills.”

“Which ones? I’ll wake her up.”

“The ones in the bathroom,” Jiang said. “The prenatal vitamins I’m still giving her, but also the ones Dr. Soong left for her symptoms.”

Slipping a mask over his face, Tony entered the bedroom and was mortified. The Jun he’d seen even hours before was spectral now. If he couldn’t hear her ragged breathing, he might imagine she was dead. He didn’t even want to think about the status of her unborn child. He turned to move into the bathroom when he heard his name.

“Mr. Qi?”

“Tony. Please.”

“All right. Tony, can you come closer?”

He moved to the bed. The voice was as unrecognizable as its owner. Jun held out her hand to him, and he only hesitated for a moment until taking it.

“I know I can’t ask you to do this, but will you lie down with me for a moment? Just long enough to tell me another of your stories.”

Tony looked down at her. What had come before felt like prologue. She had an easy charm and a flirtatious streak, which had likely served her well as an actress and television presenter. He’d let himself be seduced like any viewer might. Rather than money, what she wanted from him was likely the odd favor, the knowledge that he’d come when called, and so forth.

But things were different now. Now she needed something but wasn’t sure how to get it so was falling back on whatever had worked in the past.

“Ms. Tan,” Tony said carefully. “I fear we’re in danger of crossing a line.”

And like that the artifice momentarily vanished from her face. It looked like she’d been caught out, her condition preventing her from coming back with the perfect witty deflection. She nodded but then found her way back to a serviceable response.

“I understand if you’re worried about getting sick,” she said evenly. “But if you fear Kuo Kuang, you should know he won’t learn of any of this.”

Telling himself that he was doing this only because the extreme situation demanded it, he moved to the other side of the bed and slipped in next to her. With arms so weak they felt like a child’s, she wrapped his arms around her and moved her body close to his. He put his head on the pillow next to hers as her hair grazed his nose. He inhaled, smelling both her illness and traces still of the scent he’d found so intoxicating when she’d emerged from the plane for the first time. He held her, and she gripped his arms tighter.

“If you could take me anywhere in the world, where would it be?” she asked in barely more than a whisper. “If we could board a plane tomorrow, what would I see when we landed?”

“You’ve seen Paris, but have you seen the Val-d’Oise?” he asked.

“What is that?”

“It’s the great forested river valley about an hour north of Paris. It’s all rolling hills, farmland, rich forests, and lakes. It’s a magical place. If you go far enough east, you reach a place many still swear is the location of Merlin’s tomb and the underwater castle of the Lady of the Lake.”

“I thought King Arthur was an English story.”

“It is. But if you ever saw this place, called Broc
é
liande, you would understand its reputation. They say that if you pierce the surface on just the right day, you will see the Lady’s great castle in the depths below. But if you swim to it, the distance will remain constant until you’ve exhausted yourself and drown.”