Mrs. Chan shouted, “There he is. That’s him. Michael, what are you doing there?”
Conklin and I look
ed at each other over Mrs. Chan’s head as the image of Mr. Chan went toward the elevators. I fast-forwarded the lobby footage until a blonde-haired woman with wraparound shades and a swingy leather coat entered the scene.
I hit Pause and turned to the grieving woman beside me.
“Mrs. Chan, do you recognize this woman?”
Her eyes were fixed on the blonde.
“Who is she?” Mrs. Chan asked. Her voice was cold. Resigned.
“We don’t know,” I said. “But she may have been the last person to see your husband alive.”
CHAPTER 14
WE ALL STARED at the image of the blonde-haired woman I had stopped in midstride by pressing a key.
We didn’t know her name or her occupation, if she was Chan’s date-by-the-hour, manicurist, longtime lover, drug dealer, financial planner, or personal banker. We didn’t know if she was dead or alive, if she had killed Michael Chan, had set up the hit, or had gotten out before he was shot and didn’t know he was dead. She was unknown subject zero.
Conklin’s prediction that when Mrs. Chan saw the video we would have answers seemed unlikely to come true.
I said to Mrs. Chan, “I’ll show you another view of her.”
I shuffled the discs, found the footage from the camera on the fourteenth floor, and booted it up. I let the footage run as the blond woman stepped out of the elevator and walked away from the camera, down the hall to Chan’s room.
I hit Pause after she had knocked and Chan had opened the door. He wasn’t on camera. We only saw the frozen profile of the striking blonde and the long shadow in the doorway.
Mrs. Chan asked, “Michael was in that room?”
“Yes. He was.”
“Did she shoot him?”
“We don’t know.”
“I want to see what she looked like when she left there.”
I said, “We don’t have anything else. Not long after she entered the suite, the video was corrupted. All we have is two hours of static. If she left through the lobby, she was disguised. We didn’t see her again.”
“She couldn’t just disappear,” said Mrs. Chan.
“The hotel is on floors five through twenty-one of a forty-story building. She may have left through the fire exit. Here’s something else. The room may have been under surveillance.”
I showed Mrs. Chan morgue shots of the two young probable snoops who might have recorded Michael Chan’s last moments. Mrs. Chan didn’t recognize them.
“They might have been students,” I said.
She shook her head, and I made a mental note to screen student ID photos from the university, all four thousand of them. I asked Mrs. Chan for names of her husband’s close friends both on and off campus, and when Richie went for coffee, I asked her personal questions about her marriage.
She got angry.
“I trust Michael. He was faithful to me. Just because that woman looks like that, it doesn’t mean they were having an affair.”
“We’re only concerned with the nature of their connection. We have to find her. For all we know, she’s also a victim.”
I had plenty of questions, and I laid them on Shirley Chan one at a time. Why would Michael use a fake ID? Why did he lie about his whereabouts? Had he lied to her before? Had she ever been suspicious of his movements?