The Golden Mountain Murders Read Free Page A

go. “Well, if you think this is important,” he had said with a shrug. They had dismissed him quickly and he had been happy to leave their presence.
    The next evening, well after office hours, his team gathered: Lily, his ex-wife and forensics expert; her new husband, the remarkably ugly but remarkably honest Captain Chen; Kenneth Lo, his info-tech guy; and two young officers whom he had, of late, taken under his wing. Joan Shui was back in Hong Kong settling the final details of the sale of her condominium before moving to Shanghai to join both Fong and Shanghai’s Special Investigations Unit as their arson specialist. Even if Joan were in Shanghai, Fong was unsure if he could handle a meeting with Lily on one end of the table and Joan on the other. At this point he thought it unlikely that even he could ride those cross-currents without drowning.
    The room’s thick dusty draperies were shut and the lights on the table were all dimmed and hooded. The room was already thick with cigarette smoke by the time Fong arrived. Lily held a cup of steaming cha in her elegant hand. Kenneth Lo had several smallscreen gizmos in front of him and was busily tapping a tiny computer screen with a metal stick. Captain Chen hovered over Kenneth’s shoulder, watching. The two young officers were supplying most of the dense cheap tobacco smoke that accompanied almost all meetings in the People’s Republic of China. Fong recalled once telling a group of officers that there was no smoking. They took him to mean that there was no smoking, now – they butted out and within ten minutes lit up again.
    Fong allowed his fingers to trace the edge of the familiar old oval table. He’d convened many meetings here before. But this was different. This wasn’t a sanctioned departmental meeting. Fong shrugged off a shiver of tension and laid out the basics of the blood trade, just to be sure that everyone understood where they were with all this.
    “It took me longer to get our Beijing compatriots to agree to my trip to the West than I’d anticipated so our time line is pretty tight.” He reached into his pocket and put on his glasses, jotted a note on his pad and pocketed it. Turning to the two officers he said, “You’re up.”
    The younger of the two cleared his throat and handed out copies of a newspaper article. “Everyone should give this a quick read.”
    The article was from the Wall Street Journal, Asia edition, under the headline “Blood for Sale”:
Last December the residents of Appleton, Wisconsin, were told that their small town had a blood crisis and that everyone should chip in by rolling up their sleeves and donating blood.
    The citizens did as they were asked and donated generously to help save the lives of their friends and neighbors.
    What the Appletonians didn’t know, though – don’t know to this day – was that the same December their blood bank was appealing for blood, it sold 650 pints at a profit to other blood banks around the country. They also didn’t and don’t know that last year their blood center contracted to sell 200 pints a month to a blood bank 528 miles away in Lexington, Kentucky, and that Lexington sold half the blood it bought from Appleton to yet a third blood bank near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Which in turn sold thousands of pints it bought from Lexington and other blood banks to four hospitals in New York City.
    What began as a generous “gift of life”from people in Appleton to their neighbors ended up as part of a chain of blood brokered to hospitals in Manhattan, where patients were charged $120 a pint. Along that 2,777-mile route, human blood became just another commodity.
    Fong took a pencil and circled the words “just another commodity” then said, “Okay. So that’s the demand side. What’s next?”
    The other young investigator handed out a somewhat lengthy document. “This is the formal complaint registered by some members of the Canadian Chinese community with our