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you’d …”
    “Sorry, Darlene,” I said quickly. “Come in.”
    “Deputy Commissioner, you’ve met Darlene Cooper, haven’t you?”
    He stood up, extended a hand. “We … ah … met last night at the …”
    Darlene gave the man a brief smile. The girl was a cool paradox, beautiful and brilliant – the only nerd who could grace the centerfold of Playboy . She’d done the whole modeling shtick for a year after finishing her degree in Forensics at Monash, became a disciple of Sci, Jack Morgan’s resident lab genius at Private LA. Then she’d come back to Oz and our Private.
    “You wanted to know the latest,” she began before flashing her baby blues at the Deputy Commissioner.
    “Absolutely,” I said.
    She handed me a couple of sheets of paper. They were covered with graphs and numbers. I turned them sideways, then back again.
    “Analysis of skin samples, and DNA,” she explained.
    “Oh, great.”
    “That was bloody quick!” Thorogood said.
    “So what’re your conclusions?” I asked.
    “I took a range of samples from the body. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get any prints, but I found three distinct DNA profiles. One of these is certainly the victim’s.”
    “Any luck finding a match for the other two?”
    Darlene shook her head. “Nothing close on any database.”
    “Anything else?” I asked.
    “Well yeah, actually. I took a sample of material from under Ho Chang’s fingernails.” She handed me a photograph. I stared at it for several moments, passed it to Thorogood. He sat back, held the photo up to the light.
    “It’s human skin. I suspect there was a serious struggle. Ho must have taken a chunk out of the other guy.”
    “But what’s the blue?” Thorogood asked, studying the image. It showed a highly magnified ragged rectangle of skin. One corner was dark blue.
    “Stumped me,” Darlene replied, “… for a few seconds. Then I realized it was probably a bit of a tattoo.”
    Thorogood looked at Darlene, back at the picture.
    “Very clever,” I said.
    “Oh, I’m even cleverer than that.”
    I flicked a glance at Thorogood who was now giving Darlene a skeptical look.
    “I took a sample and ran it through a gas chromatograph that separates out the constituents of a blend. Tattoo ink is a cocktail of many different ingredients. The gas chromatograph pulls these away from each other and gives a readout to show everything that makes up the blend. This is what I got.”
    I took another sheet of paper from my science whiz. It showed a graph with different colored bars lined up across the paper.
    “There were forty-seven different compounds or elements in the ink – vegetable dyes, traces of solvent, zinc, copper. But one thing stood out.”
    I handed the sheet to Thorogood.
    “An unusual level of Antimony.”
    We both looked at Darlene blankly.
    “Only Chinese tattooists use that type of ink. It’s most commonly found in the tattoos of Triad gang members.”

Chapter 10
    Three Years Ago.
    IT WAS ONE of those perfect Sydney mornings. Pristine blue sky, not a cloud in sight, a crispness to the air that made you kid yourself everything was right with the world. Even the traffic was light for 7 am and I had the roof down on the old Porsche convertible I’d bought fifth-hand ten years before.
    We were en route to the airport. Becky, my wife of nine years, our three-year-old son, Cal, and me. Becky looked amazing. She was wearing a diaphanous dress and a thick rope of fake pearls. She was tanned from the spring sunshine. When she moved her hands, the collection of bangles at her wrists jangled. She’d put on a bit of weight and looked better for it. We’d made love that morning while Cal was asleep and I could still visualize her.
    I glanced round and saw her long auburn hair blown back by the warm breeze. She was excited about our trip to Bali. We all were … our first holiday in two years. I’d been working hard to build up my PI agency, Solutions Inc., and I was only now