Free The Last Six Million Seconds by John Burdett Page B

expensive Italian furniture, which his sister and her husband already owned anyway, could make the statement as well as a four-thousand-square-foot flat. Most families lived in spaces one tenth of that size. In Hong Kong real wealth expressed itself through space.
    Pushing open a door to a fourth spare bedroom, Chan heard a murmur, an intake of breath. Angie held back, but Chan entered the room just long enough to glimpse a couple, a Western man with a Chinese woman, in an airtight embrace. It was the man, apparently young and blond, who was showing the most flesh with his shirt nearly off, backed up against a window while the woman pushed against him. The woman turned at the disturbance, raised her eyes at Chan, then turned back to the man. Chan had glimpsed a long jaw on a Chinese face; from the back she was mostly black hair, strong shoulders and a silver dress that shimmered like water and revealed 80 percent of her vertebrae. He closed the door with care until the last inch, which he completed with a malevolent bang. Angie grinned.
    They returned to the party, but after forty minutes Angie admitted she was hating it too. The women sneered at her cheap cotton dress, and the British men cringed at her accent. The Chinese noticed only that she didn’t have money and ignored her.
    Chan used his chin to point to the door. “Let’s go.”
    Angie gave him a grateful smile. “It’s all right, I can stand it for another twenty minutes. Hadn’t you better talk to your sister and your brother-in-law?”
    “I guess.”
    “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
    Chan shrugged. “You know … parties. I don’t know why she invited me.”
    Angie looked baffled. “But she’s your sister, Charlie. She loves you, mate.”
    Chan nodded. “Sure, you’re right.”
    He found a criminal defense lawyer he knew for her to talk to while he went to the kitchen to hunt for Jenny. She was there supervising the Filipino maid. Her husband, Jonathan Wong, was talking to a famous Chinese woman whom Chan now recognized from newspaper stories about the glitterati. He recognized her from her dress too. It was silver and shimmered like water.
    “This is my notorious detective brother-in-law,” Wong said when he saw him. “Charlie Chan, meet Emily Ping.” Chan summoned a smile for the famous Chinese woman, who looked into his eyes, winked once and held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
    Chan glanced around the kitchen for her blond friend. Apart from the Filipino maid there were only Chinese in the room. “Hi. Look—”
    “It must be fascinating to have a lawyer and a detective in the same family,” Emily Ping said. “What do you talk about?”
    She was tall for a Chinese woman, over five feet seven, but she would have been striking at any height. Her black hair was swept back from a high forehead, the silver dress dipped almost as deeply in front as at the back, revealing most of two ivory globes that Chan found difficult to ignore; she stood straight as a post with a jaw you could hang a Chinese lantern from. More Rambo than bimbo, Chan decided. She was older than he would have guessed from that first glimpse. Mid- to late thirties with an unbroken history of money and power; only the very rich were quite so shameless.She gazed at him for a moment with a kind of nonspecific lust, then smiled. The blond boy? Eaten and forgotten already?
    “Oh, he has all the interesting cases. We only talk about his work; mine’s too boring for words.” Wong spoke in English with an impeccable Oxford accent. He pretended not to see the brazen gaze in Emily’s eyes.
    “What are you working on right now, for instance?” Emily asked Chan.
    “The Mincer Murders. Maybe you read about them. Three people fed live into an industrial mincer.”
    She was tough. She blinked, smiled again. “How interesting. Yes, I remember. In Mongkok, wasn’t it?”
    “Where else?”
    “And have you solved the mystery yet?”
    Despite himself, he was held