Tsao nodded silently. He had to know that her son had been poisoned with horn at the hospital and that this visit might be related. But Tsao was also savvy enough not to ask questions he didn’t want answered.

“What can you tell me about them?” she asked.

“They were run by an old Kowloon gangster named Sky Dragon. Since we drove him out of Hong Kong, he’s been living in exile in Mong La.”

She had never heard of the place. “Where’s that?”

“A warlord-controlled casino town in Myanmar. A lot of triads go there if there’s too much heat on them in China.”

“Who is running the Sun Yee On triad now?”

“We believe the new dai lo is his younger son, Wan, who moved their base of operations to Macau.”

Tsao logged on to his computer and pulled up a dossier, pointing to Wan’s photo. “That’s him.”

Tsao explained that over the previous year, Wan’s phone number had been connected to numerous investigations, and a portrait was coming into focus of a powerful young kingpin who was staking his claim through spectacular acts of ultraviolence against his rivals. He was the kind of villain tailor-made for a hero like Tsao.

“You said he is the younger brother?” Audrey knew that the triads were patriarchal and that the eldest son would inherit the clan.

“The older brother studied in the US—Harvard Business School,” Tsao said. “We see him around Hong Kong occasionally. He seems to have cut ties with the family.” Tsao turned his attention to Wan’s photo, venom on his breath. “If this crook sets foot in Hong Kong, I’ll gladly run him down, but even Wan Koi is not dumb enough to take that risk.”

“Do you have any known addresses or phone numbers for him in Macau?” Audrey asked as she scanned the information on Tsao’s screen.

“Yeah. I’m not sure how current they are, but I’ll print you out what we’ve got.”

That evening, Audrey went to visit her son in the hospital. They talked about how, when he eventually got released, she would take him to whatever movie he wanted to see—“within reason, of course,” she added with a smile and a squeeze on his arm. She stayed by his bedside and watched over the next twenty minutes as his breathing grew more metronomic and he gradually drifted off to sleep.