The Ambassador's Wife Read Online Free PDF

she was probably killed between noon and midnight on Monday,” he said.
    Kang nodded. “Yes, sir.”
    Tay stopped, thought a moment, and then asked, “What do you make of the curtains?”
    “The curtains, sir?”
    “They were open in the living room, but closed in the bedroom. Don’t you think that’s a little odd?”
    Kang didn’t really, so he wasn’t entirely sure what to say.
    “Look, Sergeant, if they were in the room during the day, they might leave the drapes open, but at night they’d have them closed. Why leave them one way in the living room and the other in the bedroom?”
    “Maybe they came into the room during the day and then moved into the bedroom after dark.”
    “That’s what I was thinking,” Tay said. “Which would make the time of death somewhere in the range of six to seven o’clock, wouldn’t it?”
    “That makes sense, sir.”
    Tay sat for a while after that with his face perfectly still. He reached for the open box of Marlboros again and shook out another cigarette.
    “Her killer posed her, Sergeant. He posed her after he was done with her and stripped away her dignity. He wanted to degrade her. He wanted to tell us just how worthless she is.”
    Tay picked up the lighter and flipped it open. He watched the flame burn, but he didn’t touch it to his cigarette.
    “How about a drink, Robbie?”
    “I’m afraid I can’t, sir. My wife and I are going out tonight. She organized something with this friend of hers and if I show up late she’ll murder me.” Sergeant Kang paused and looked down at his hands. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean any disrespect to—”
    “I know you didn’t, Sergeant. Go on home. We’ll see where we are tomorrow morning. At least we ought to have the preliminary-report from FMB and maybe we’ll even have an ID on the body by then.”
    “I hope so. Thank you, sir. Good night.”
    AFTER Sergeant Kang had gone, Inspector Tay lit the Marlboro and sat smoking it in silence. He watched the street and the crowds passing on the sidewalk and he wondered not for the first time what the hell he was doing there with a police warrant card in his pocket and the stink of death on his clothes.
    The only child of an American-born Chinese man and a Singaporean-born Chinese woman, Tay had lived the whole of his life in Singapore. His father had been an accountant, a careful man who insisted that his family live modestly. When he died suddenly of a heart attack, Tay’s mother was shocked to discover she and her son had inherited a small fortune in real estate. She hadn’t even known her husband had been buying properties for two decades, let alone that his investments would leave her and her son quite comfortably off for the rest of their lives.
    Regardless, she had quickly adjusted to the concept. Within a year, she moved to New York and acquired what she described to Tay as a Park Avenue duplex, although Tay noticed her address was actually on East Ninety-Third Street. When his mother married a widowed American investment banker who was a senior partner at some investment firm the name of which Tay could never quite remember, Tay was at the National University. He didn’t go to New York for the wedding. Actually, he couldn’t quite recall having been invited to New York for the wedding, but he supposed that was beside the point. He told himself he would have stayed in Singapore even if he had been invited.
    By the time Tay graduated from university, he had chosen to his mother’s complete horror to make his career in police work rather than living the life of the idle well off she preferred for him. Looking back later on that decision, Tay could not for the life of him remember exactly why he had made it, but he had stuck with it regardless. As a brighter-than-average recruit who was dutiful and conscientious, he was soon promoted, first to general investigative work, then to the Criminal Investigations Department, and finally to the elite Special Investigations