Hunt Among the Killers of Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

in any sort of cover-up; she wasn’t telling them what to do, just backing out gracefully herself. You see how well that worked. I was sitting around here like a patsy when the cops showed up, and meanwhile the Zongchang boys were private-jetting it back to the CCC.”
    “So,” Gabriel said, “the first, best hope for the new, modern China, the dedicated wannabe chief big grand kahuna of the CCC, this guy who is Russian pretending to be Chinese, the guy hunting for a one-of-a-kind statue of a dead Chinese warlord, comes to New York and, confronted with evidence that he’s not what he says he is, kills the woman who found it and ransacks her apartment?” Gabriel was looking around the apartment—the leftovers of Valerie’s life—with a renewed intensity in his gaze.
    “Yeah,” said Mitch. “Or it was done on his orders.”
    Gabriel turned to Lucy. “Okay, now I’m interested.” He picked up the ring of keys. “Your sister gave you these?”
    Mitch nodded. “In case I needed to go out before she got back.”
    The bundle contained four door keys, a main entry key, a foyer key, a mailbox key, a trash-door key and a riot of dead weight in the form of a pewter Empire State Building, a rabbit’s foot (dyed pink), a big rubber sandal with the name VAL embossed on it…and something else.
    “What’s this?” said Gabriel, peering closer.
    It was a silver charm in the form of a little hardcoverbook about a half-inch tall. The cover was engraved with the legend DRINK ME.
    Gabriel pried the seam with a thumbnail and the tiny book popped open like a locket to reveal its cargo.
    “Aha,” he said, looking at the narrow black sliver inside. It was plastic and had tiny metal contacts at one end. “It’s a…thing.”
    “Give me that,” Lucy said. Gabriel plucked it out of the book and handed it over. He could navigate the tunnels of the Paris sewer system in the dark and tell you where an obsidian blade was made by the strike pattern on the stone edge; modern technology, though, was not his bailiwick.
    Fortunately, it was his sister’s. “Memory stick,” she said, turning the sliver over. “Four gigs. The kind you plug into a cell phone.”
    “Like this one?” Mitch held up a unit she’d unplugged from a charger dock that lay overturned on the floor. It looked like the kind of biz-crazy portable device that did everything except unzip your duds and make you see the face of God.
    “We have a winner,” Lucy said, popping a hatch on the back of the thing and sliding the stick inside.
    Mitch, meanwhile, was staring into one of the desk drawers, riffling its contents. “Her passport’s still here. Some credit cards. ID.” A tear leaked from one eye, dropped and spattered across the back of her hand.
    “Let me see that,” said Gabriel while Lucy worked on the phone. “I’d like to see her face.”
    The family resemblance was undeniable.
    “This is some bizarre stuff,” said Lucy, scrolling through data on the phone’s tiny screen. “Mostly spreadsheets, it looks like. Amounts of money, invoices, bills of lading.”
    “She must have known something was going to happen to her,” said Mitch, straining to keep the tremor in her voice from showing. Gabriel could tell she was the sort who wanted to be in control, in charge of her messier emotions, and who would beat herself up for any public display she thought looked weak. “To leave all this stuff behind.”
    “We need to print this out,” Lucy said. “You can’t read it properly on a screen this size.”
    “I’m sure Michael’s got a setup we can use, back at the town house,” Gabriel said. And to Mitch he said, “You want to come with us? I’m not sure it’s good for you to stay here alone.” He put a hand on Mitch’s shoulder, but she shook it off.
    “I’m fine,” she said roughly, sounding anything but.
    “I’ll stay,” Lucy said. “I don’t have to be on a plane till tomorrow morning—”
    “I’m okay ,” Mitch said. “You