Inspector Lam knew the area in East Kowloon where the poisoning victim lived. It was a tenement block she had visited more than once in her years as a narcotics detective. While Hong Kong was generally a safe city, Kowloon still had some rough spots, and Audrey felt the need to press-check her pistol, making sure a round was chambered before getting out of her car.

Audrey entered a rickety elevator, noting the complete absence of maintenance records. The car whined and lurched and chittered, and its fluorescent light flickered as it labored toward the fifteenth floor. Audrey suspected that the car would not be serviced until it eventually froze in place or fell to its ruin. Statistically, it was unlikely to happen during this ascent, but she breathed a sigh of relief as she alit on the fifteenth floor, making a mental note to take the stairs on the way down.

Audrey knocked on a door at the end of the hallway, which bore the address the hospital receptionist had given her. A middle-aged woman answered. Audrey held her badge up. “Mrs. Lo, I’d like to speak with your daughter.”

The woman invited Audrey inside and offered her a cup of tea, which she politely accepted in an effort to build rapport, but which she didn’t actually intend to drink. The woman’s only child was her fifteen-year-old daughter, who looked closer to eighteen in her tight-fitting trendy clothes and thick makeup. Audrey questioned the girl for ten minutes in the living room, but the conversation revealed little about the source of the strychnine that nearly killed her.

Audrey asked whether the girl had ever taken any controlled substances of any kind, and the mother interjected, “She’s never done anything like that. She is a good student. She never has any trouble.”

Audrey pressed the daughter to answer on her own behalf, and the girl confirmed she had never taken any illegal substances of any kind. “What about any illegal traditional medicines?” The girl assured the inspector that she had never tried any traditional medicines beyond the herbal teas her mother forced on her when she was sick.

“So you don’t have any idea how you got poisoned?” Audrey asked.

The girl offered that it could have been from the curry fish balls she bought at a food stall earlier on the day she was poisoned.

Audrey sensed that the girl was not being honest. There were numerous tells—she was limiting her movement, pausing before answering, and offering few details when she did speak. While these weren’t damning behaviors in and of themselves, they sparked enough suspicion that Audrey asked the girl’s mother for permission to search the girl’s room. The woman, who was equally mystified by her daughter’s poisoning, readily consented, and Audrey told the two of them to stay in the living room while she entered the bedroom.