Lumpini Park (Abby Kane FBI Thriller - Chasing Chinatown Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  LUMPINI PARK

  Chasing Chinatown Trilogy

  Book Two

  (Abby Kane FBI Thriller)

  Ty Hutchinson

  Chapter 1

  The heat index that day was ninety-four degrees Fahrenheit. A fluke? Hardly. Every now and then, San Francisco becomes a hot, sticky mess—something Special Agent Scott Reilly would discover in less than forty minutes.

  The assault team consisted of twelve men from the FBI Special Weapons and Tactical Team packed into two modified civilian vans. Reilly and four other agents followed in a black SUV.

  Waverly Place was their destination, a small, alley-like street about fifty yards long, lined mostly with temples and a few shops. Mixed amongst the buildings were a couple of Chinese Benevolent Organizations, or tongs. The Hop Sing Tong was the target.

  The street was bookended by the vans, and two tactical teams approached the building on foot. The area was unusually quiet for that time of day. A blessing? More like a sign. A hushed murmur of Chinese was the only sound heard as the two teams approached the small crowd of residents that had gathered outside the tong.

  Team One was ordered to clear the crowd of looky-loos while Team Two, Reilly’s team, moved into position to breach the front door, only the lead man reported that it had already been forcibly opened.

  By the time Reilly and his men entered the tong, sweat had bubbled on his forehead, and salty streams seeped into the collar of his shirt. The Kevlar vest he had on didn’t help matters, but what really hit him hard, enough to stop him in his tracks, was the thick, metallic scent in the air.

  Reilly had found the red sticky to go with the red hot.

  Two feet into the tong lay a headless man. Reilly sidestepped the crimson pool that had poured from the severed neck. The edges had already coagulated into a gel dam, preventing further spreading. He thought of searching the man for identification but changed his mind. He’d have to step into the sticky to get close enough. He stood and shook his head at the splatter that had sprayed the whitewashed walls. What the hell happened here?

  The tactical team on the upper floors shouted Clear! faster than expected. That told him one thing—no resistance. More bodies, I imagine.

  He was right.

  What he had originally thought was the buzzing of an electrical current turned out to be an assault by another group of misfits associated with death: flies. Reilly let out a breath and turned to the bottom of the bloodstained stairs. Lead the way, my buzzing friends.

  After passing the second decapitated man, he gave up trying to avoid the blood. It’s like walking in mud; eventually, you say, “Screw it,” and give in, because what’s the point? The entire shoe would need cleaning.

  Reilly had seen a lot during his twenty years with the Bureau. Death didn’t bother him, but headless humans did. He had counted nine so far—more than enough to make him shiver under his weighted vest.

  He never understood the thought process behind choosing decapitation over the simplicity of a gun. A firearm provided distance. Decapitation was close and personal. All he could conclude was that a person who reveled in this manner of dispatching people put absolutely no value on life. How could they? It’s traumatic to see the aftermath, let alone watch it take place. Reilly couldn’t imagine being the executioner.

  He continued up the stairs as he heard the assault team’s stomping boots make their way toward him. The top floor had been cleared.

  “No threats,” said the team leader as he came into view. “Our job here is done. I’ll leave six men outside the building until SFPD can set up a contained perimeter.”

  Reilly nodded.

  The team leader took another step but stopped and grabbed Reilly by the arm. “It’s bad in there.” He motioned to what remained of a shattered door barely hanging by its hinges.

  Reilly’s intelligence indicated that the top floor was where Jing Woo held court. From the look on the team leader’s face, Reilly had a pretty good idea that questioning the elusive leader would be a no-go. He stepped through the doorway, careful not to spear his arm on a splinter.

  The room was still lit, by his count, with fifteen candles of varying heights. He didn’t see the body right away, his eyes needing a moment to adjust to the lower light levels. But once they did, it was unavoidable.

  Lying on top of a small teak table, in the middle of the room was Jing. His head, both arms, and both legs from the knees down hung off the edges. The flaps of his robe lay open, revealing his grisly death. He had been opened from sternum to pubic bone.

  Reilly took a step forward, unsure whether the shadows from the candle lighting were deceiving his eyes. They weren’t. Jing had been gutted. Only an empty cavity remained. Careful of where he stepped, Reilly moved around to the other side of the table where he discovered Jing’s innards, completely intact and left to rot.

  Later, when medical examiner Timothy Green weighed in, he said, “He was alive when his organs were removed. While the procedure was speedy and precise, I believe he felt every bit of it.” Green also reported high levels of amphetamines in Jing’s body. “Most likely used to keep him from passing out during the procedure.”

  It was obvious to Reilly that someone else had wanted Jing more than he had. Was it to punish Jing for the disorder that had taken place on his watch? Had they wanted to silence him? Who knew? This was a first for law enforcement in San Francisco. Never had the walls of Chinatown been breached. The department had moved into uncharted waters, and no one knew what to expect from the vacuum created by Jing’s death. All they could do was hope for the best.

  Chapter 2

  My head felt clear, and my thigh was near full recovery. What more did I need—a doctor’s note? Apparently. I couldn’t get a word in without my supervisor, Special Agent Reilly, cutting me off. Technically, I was still on paid medical leave. It had been two weeks since the raid on the Hop Sing Tong and things had quieted down. So I thought.

  “I don’t want to hear it, Abby.”

  “But—”

  “I told you to take the entire week off—not a few days.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I can’t believe you actually came in.”

  “It’s important.”

  “And by the way, what’s this I hear about you not wanting the promotion? Who turns down a promotion?”

  I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back in my chair. My mouth had officially gone on strike. If he wanted an answer, he would first have to hear me out.

  We sat in silence. Daggers flew forth from our eyes… well, from mine. Neither side was willing to give in. Character weakness was not an attribute agents coveted. In the end, Reilly folded. I sure as hell wasn’t going to.

  “Fine, what’s so important that you had to come to the office to tell me?”

  I removed my laptop from my shoulder bag and placed it on his desk. “It’s not over.”

  I was fresh off the Cotton Candy Killer case, a husband and wife’s tour of San Francisco that involved killing people and creating crime scenes utilizing their body parts in a scenario that tied back to something famous about the city.

  I had teamed up with Kyle Kang, a detective with the San Francisco Police department, to work the case. We’d eventually caught up with the killers, and their reign of terror had come to an abrupt end. Both of their bodies were at the morgue.

  But while wrapping up the investigation, I realized there was more to the case than we had previously thought.

  The Carlsons’ laptop was full of pictures and videos of them committin
g the grisly murders. It also contained the online game “Chasing Chinatown” that had motivated their kills.

  As they uploaded proof of their deeds, the Carlsons advanced in the game. It was clear someone else was involved, so after their death, Kang and I had assumed their identities and continued playing the game, even staging and photographing a fake murder scene in the hopes of uncovering the people behind it.

  “What’s not over?” Reilly scrunched an eye.

  “The Carlson case. Chasing Chinatown is still in play.”

  “I don’t understand. The Carlsons were the killers, and they’re laying stiff on a table. Plus, we raided the Tong and Jing Woo, the man behind the game was—”

  “Hold that thought. Hear me out. As you know, I uploaded the contents of the Carlson’s laptop to my own hard drive to help with our investigation,” I said as I clicked on the game application. “Detective Kang and I never did submit the photos from our staged crime, so I did it last night out of curiosity. The game congratulated me on completing the chase in San Francisco and gave me five more objectives to complete.”

  “Where?” Reilly asked.

  I turned the laptop toward him. “Bangkok.”

  “Thailand? This game takes them around the world so they can kill people?”

  “Pretty much. But that’s not all. I also found this.” I pulled up the leaderboard I had discovered. “They’re not the only ones playing.”

  Reilly leaned in. “Are these all teams, like the Carlsons?”

  “Yeah, there are twenty. Well, nineteen now. From what I can gather, they’re running around the world and targeting innocent people based on the objectives the game gives them.”

  Reilly remained quiet. His eyes focused on the screen, and his mouth opened slightly. He hadn’t been expecting that.

  “It’s live, too, you know,” I said, breaking the silence.

  His eyes met mine. “How do you know?”

  “The map of the world shows where everyone is and their path of travel. Whenever a team completes an objective, or what the game calls an Attraction, it broadcasts it. Shortly after I submitted the photos of our crime to complete the last Attraction in San Francisco, a pop-up bubble appeared on the map stating that the Carlsons had completed the Chase in San Francisco.”

  Reilly leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his hair. “This is beyond the Bureau, Abby. We’re talking international, with nineteen killers—”

  “Teams. There could be one, two, or more people in a team. We don’t know.”

  “They’re moving from city to city, from country to country. This is a logistical nightmare. The number of law enforcement agencies in each country—and let’s not forget about Interpol—that would need to be briefed… Wait. Scratch that. First, they would need to be convinced that this game is real. Just coordinating all of that is a feat in itself.”

  “That’s not all.”

  Reilly shifted in his seat. “Don’t tell me you found something else.”

  “I don’t think they’ll be able to utilize the game to help them. We have access to the Carlsons’ account and that’s it. We can share the information we have about the game and brief them on how to recognize a crime scene that might be connected to Chasing Chinatown, but other than that, they’ll have a harder time stopping the murders than we did.”

  Reilly shook his head before letting out what sounded like a defeated breath. “Let me run this up the flagpole. I’ll get back to you about the next steps.”

  “Speaking of next steps, I want it on the record that I’m not interested in being your spokesperson for the investigation.”

  “Are you kidding? You know more about this than anybody.”

  “You know just as much as I do. It’s a waste of time for me to travel around briefing people.”

  “And what do you propose you’ll do instead?”

  “That I continue playing the game. In Bangkok.”

  Chapter 3

  I left Reilly alone in his office to simmer with a double dose of the Monday blues. The logistics of notifying and briefing law enforcement agencies across the world wasn’t something I wanted to be involved with. As much as the FBI had a responsibility to notify those countries, it wasn’t our job to police and capture the killers. No matter what decision came down the pipeline, I had one goal in mind: to track the mastermind behind the game. I told Reilly that our focus should be nabbing the person responsible for the game and that I was the person best suited for that job.

  I still hadn’t had a chance to tell my unofficial partner, Detective Kyle Kang, about my latest revelation. I knew it would ruin his day as it had Reilly’s, but last time I’d checked, I wasn’t the Easter Bunny.

  I tried his cell for the third time and again got voicemail. Why aren’t you picking up? With a big sigh, I called the precinct and was transferred to his actual partner, Detective Pete Sokolov.

  “Agent Kane. How can I help you?” Sokolov’s Russian accent tended to fluctuate depending on his mood. Stress made it thicker and, to some degree, broke his English more than usual.

  “I’m trying to track down your partner. Have you seen him?”

  “Last time I see him was in hospital. You call his cell phone?”

  “Yes, I’ve left two messages but haven’t heard back.”

  I could hear Sokolov frowning through the phone. “Hmm, not sound like him. I will check his apartment.”

  “You know what, I’m heading in that direction. I’ll stop by, but thanks for the offer.”

  “You tell me if you find him, okay?”

  I told Sokolov I would. While my casework didn’t rely on Kang’s involvement, I wanted to continue working the case with him. He knew all the minute details about the game, the killers and the crime scenes. Plus, two heads were better than one. Once word got out about serial killers playing a global game á la the Amazing Race, there would be a lot of department heads around the world trying to coordinate their response. Translation: clusterfuck.

  If I could steer Kang and me away from that, we could focus on the head of the snake: the game developer.

  Kang lived in Russian Hill, a neighborhood famous for its crooked Lombard Street. I lived five minutes away in North Beach. Our proximity to each other helped with our partnership.

  I parked, walked up the steps to his Victorian duplex and knocked. As I waited, I watched people walk their dogs, pick up coffee at the nearby convenience store, and catch the number 10 bus at the corner. He lived on a lively street; people were always out and about, the complete opposite of my sleepy enclave. I knocked once more, louder and longer, and resumed my people watching. After a moment or two, I took out my phone and dialed his cell once more. Voicemail. Again.

  Dammit, Kyle. Where are you?

  I knocked once more, but this time I threw in the doorbell I had just noticed. No sooner had the chimes quieted than I heard what I could describe only as a cackle coming from inside. The shrill voice grew louder, accompanied by the clacking of heels against a wooden floor. Something about the pitch, something familiar, bothered me. The laughter grew closer. It was only footsteps away from the front door when I heard a voice coo, “Stay put, Big Boy. I got it.” Not in a breathy, sexy way but in a teenage, Japanese anime way.

  Please don’t let it be who I think—

  Before I could finish my thought, the door swung open, and standing before me was the tall, thin, ivory-toned Suzi Zhang.

  Her nauseous giggling stopped the moment she set eyes upon me. Instead of tightening the pink silk robe she was wearing, she put both hands against the doorframe and leaned forward, allowing her robe to flap open in the breeze and display the sparkly matching bra and panties she wore.

  Her hair had been tossed into a bun on top of her head with a few tendrils framing her small, round face. Her makeup was perfect; I couldn’t understand how, since I had a pretty good idea of what I had interrupted. And lastly, she towered over my five-foot-one frame thanks to the pair of black stripper heels she
wore. I imagined they were permanently grafted to her feet.

  I was momentarily embarrassed. I had interrupted Kyle during what was obviously a very private, and sadly, gross moment. But that didn’t last long. Who answers the door dressed in lingerie, heels, and a flimsy silk robe? Oh, I know, a tramp.

  Her smile turned into a smirk, and one of her eyebrows rose. “Oh, it’s you.”

  I didn’t want to let on that I found any of this surprising. I knew she wanted a reaction. “Is Detective Kang available?” I kept my tone neutral.

  She used one of her manicured nails to scratch the corner of her mouth before flashing another plastic smile. “Kyle, your employee is here,” she called out before turning and walking away.

  Remain calm. She’s just a bimbo.

  A few seconds later, a robed Kang appeared. His cheeks were flushed red, and he did his best to avoid eye contact. He swallowed before speaking. “Abby, uh… hi. What are you doing here?”

  “I should ask you the same thing. Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “Oh, I…uh, I took the day off.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Mmm-hmmm’?”

  “Look, I’m sorry I broke up your recovery efforts, but I have something important to discuss with you. It would be better if we didn’t talk here.”

  <><><>

  A disheveled Kang met me at the La Boulange Bakery on Columbus Avenue thirty minutes later. No sooner had he sat down than his mouth spilled forth a series of apologies for not returning my calls, as well as for the awkward visit at his home.

  I held up my hand. “I’m beyond that. Can you get past it?”

  Kang nodded. “So what’s this important information that you have to share?”

  I removed my laptop from my shoulder bag and placed it on the table.

  “Don’t tell me—”

  “I won’t. I’ll just show you.”

  Chapter 4

  I refrained from saying any more than needed to walk Kang through my latest discovery in the Chasing Chinatown game.