James had always locked doors too. Not just the door to the suite, but the door to his room. Like he’d been afraid of Lee from the start but unwilling to say it out loud.
Still, Lee was careful not to show his father what he knew. His father was used to seeing him half asleep from sedatives—that was the version of Lee he could tolerate. So Lee imagined that his brain had a giant coffee filter and only 30 percent of his thoughts were allowed to come out of his mouth. He could not, for instance, tell his father that he’d found a dead girl who didn’t think she was dead but might help him understand how death worked if he played his cards right. Something that upsetting practically guaranteed another heart attack.
Waiting for her to return was unbearable. Lee was a devourer of information, and he was being starved. The anticipation was tempered only by the fact that Lee knew she would come back.
All he’d had to do was a quick Google search for major events in Chiran’s history. The ghost girl would see the fire, contemplate it for a few hours, and then she wouldn’t be able to resist speaking to him again. Everyone wanted to know the truth, even if it hurt.
Especially Lee Turner.
That was why, as soon as his father left the house that afternoon, Lee headed straight for his office.
The door had a cheap padlock on it because these kinds of sliding doors didn’t have built-in locks. His father had gone to the trouble to add this one himself, had needed to keep Leeor Hina out so badly that he didn’t think his words would be enough. But Lee had done far worse things than pick locks, so he didn’t feel bad aboutthis, of all things.
He slid the round end of one of Hina’s bobby pins into the lock, and after a few seconds of twisting and prodding, the lock unlatched. Lee entered and shut the door behind him.
The office sat in the darkest corner of the house, where sword ferns blocked the weak afternoon light, their prickly shadows shifting across the walls.
His father’s desk sat in the center—the way professors like him always preferred it, so no one could see from the door what was on the computer screen. The rest of the room was still in boxes. Lee could tell from the coating of dust that they weren’t of any importance, or else his father would have unpacked them by now.
Lee sat down in his father’s chair, the leather creaking beneath him. He watched the room from the perspective of his father, laid his arms on the armrests and leaned back, heard the satisfying creak of the chair as it acknowledged his weight and held steady. The cypress trees beyond the window tapped incessantly against the glass. Maybe that was why his father could no longer hear his broken watch—he was too busy hearing the forest knocking at the windows.
Lee didn’t even bother with the laptop—he didn’t know his father’s password, and if he guessed wrong too many times and got locked out, his father would notice. Besides, his father was an old-fashioned man and liked to keep paper documents.
Lee opened the first drawer, took a mental picture of how the papers had been placed, then laid all the objects out on the desk in the exact order they’d been stacked.
The first thing he found was an article cut from a Japanese newspaper. His father had highlighted some parts and annotated the narrow margins with English translations. Lee couldn’t pretend he was great at reading Japanese either—he’d learned it to speak to people, not to read books—but he did his best and pulled out Google Translate on his phone when his best wasn’t enough.
HUMAN TRAFFICKING RING DISSOLVED IN TOKYO
Lee nearly dropped his phone. He felt like he was twelve again, watching his mother’s face on the news, white block letters spelling out HUMAN TRAFFICKING ENDANGERS TOURISTS. He glanced to the doorway, just in case his father or Hina had reappeared, then continued to read.
A human trafficking ring tracked across southern Asia was partially dissolved by police in Tokyo on Thursday. All victims were hospitalized, and police are investigating ties to branches in other countries.
Lee turned the newspaper over with numb fingers, setting it aside.
He’d wondered if his father was stressed abouthim, but of course that was a self-centered thought. Perhaps his father had moved to Japan for this reason—to chase after a human trafficking ring. He so rarely spoke about Lee’s mother anymore that Lee forgot at times that she was not only his mother but also his father’s wife.
But his mother was not found among the victims. Lee knew this even without translating the rest of the article. It was dated over two weeks ago, and if his mother had been found, his father would have said something by now.
The next article was in English.
TATTOO LINKED TO HUMAN TRAFFICKING RING
Below it, a picture of a blurred and faded tattoo: the outline of a turtle.
A rounded almond for the shell, two sharp front fins, two round back fins, a pointed oval for a head. Lee couldn’t tell from the photo what body part the picture showed, just that the skin looked red and inflamed and the turtle on its side looked like an unseeing eye.
Why would they choose a turtle?Lee thought just before he flipped the page and wished he hadn’t.
Seven women with tattoos tied to a human trafficking ring were found dead in Matsuyama with several organs missing, leading police to investigate connections with black market organ sales across southern Asia.
And then Lee understood, all at once, that his father was expecting to find his mother in pieces.
She would have been nearly fifty years old now—she looked young for her age when she was taken, but by now, she was likely too old for a prostitution ring. Someone had probably carved out her organs and sold them, then buried her in a mass grave with other discarded women.
Lee laid his forearms delicately along the armrests and clutched the polished wood, feeling as if the weight of the chair was the only thing anchoring him to the earth.
In a strange way, he liked the idea of his mother’s organs living on in other people, even if they’d made crime lords rich. Maybe one day he would meet the person who held his mother’s heart. It would be like she was still alive, somehow.
