“Dr. Klesser, did the university receive my earmarked donation?”
Knight knew that Lara didn’t mind his requests. They were usually a fun puzzle to solve, and his donation would buy a cutting-edge PCR machine she had her eye on.
“Yes, we’re very grateful, Randall.”
“Any luck with that tiger?”
“Where did you say the tiger cub came from?” Knight could hear a loud whirring noise in the background—likely one of Lara’s techs drilling a confiscated rhino horn or lion bone for a sample.
“Supposedly wild caught,” Knight replied skeptically.
“Unless two of the rarest tigers in the world traveled thousands of miles to mate, that’s impossible.”
The tiger was a mixed breed—Sumatran and Indochinese DNA. In Knight’s experience, hybrid and inbred tigers emerged only in captivity.
“How certain can you be of that finding?”
“We used twenty-three data points in the DNA. In a murder trial you’d need only fifteen data points for a conviction.”
Knight thanked her for her time, then hung up, his mind racing with questions. Who the hell would mix tiger DNA when all zoos and collectors wanted only purebreds or designer cats? Moreover, how did some shady importer in Macau get his hands on it? Though Knight’s job was to investigate the claim, the fact that the definitive answer to those questions could save his company a lot of money was now secondary to the thrill of hunting down the hidden truth.
CHAPTER 20
TRADITIONAL MEDICINE
hong kong
Audrey sat by her son’s bed, listening to the beep and whir of the monitoring equipment as he slept. Joshua had lost ten kilos and was now the same weight as when he was only nine years old. The detective had tried to work, but she was too distracted. Her desperate fear for her son had forged an idea in her—one that she had assumed would pass, but it hadn’t. It was an idea that forced her to weigh her principles against the life of her son. If he should die and she had failed to do everything in her power to save him, what kind of mother was she?
Audrey fished a card out of a zipped pouch in her purse. She turned it over to reveal the advertisement for the TCM shop. For thousands of years, her people had relied on the old ways. And now she had bet Joshua’s life on Western practices only a few decades old. And the new ways were failing. She held the card delicately in her fingers as she pondered its Faustian proposition.
The next evening, as her shift was ending, Stephen invited Audrey to try a new noodle stall a friend in the Triad Bureau had recommended. Audrey politely declined, saying she had other plans. She then headed out on foot.
Her destination was only half a kilometer away. As she turned off Queen Street onto Ko Shing, she was immediately hit by a wave of smells that took her back to her youth: cinnamon, ginseng, goji berries, dried fish and other earthy aromas she couldn’t quite place. She pressed deeper down the congested, narrow street, which glowed pink and red and green from the neon signs over the medicine shops. Their wares ranged from the standard herbs to grislier things. Many of the storefronts featured clear plastic sacks of shark fins that looked like giant tortilla chips, while others sold all manner of curious animal parts: deer tails for joint pain, dried seahorses to help the kidneys, geckos flayed and mounted on sticks like jumping jacks, to be eaten to cure disease. Audrey, however, was looking for something even more exotic.