“Look to Jampa’s spirit first,” Shan said. Lokesh contemplated Shan’s words then slowly nodded his agreement and removed Jampa’s gau and mala. The old man shook them over Jampa’s head, as if to get the dead man’s attention, then slowly backed out of the room, the rosary and prayer amulet raised in the air as he continued the words of the death ritual.

Shan had loaded Lokesh into his vehicle under the watchful eye of Major Xun when he realized he had forgotten Jampa’s shoes, which Lokesh would want for his ritual. As he lifted them from under the dead man’s bed he heard a quiet sob and looked up to see Amah Jiejie sitting on a chair in the shadowed corner.

“He never hurt anyone,” she said with a sob as Shan approached. “He never deserved this.” The matronly Chinese woman dabbed at her cheek, then fixed her eyes on Jampa. “He was softening the colonel, helping us understand things.”

“Us?” Shan asked.

She nodded. “I was frightened for my life and Jampa took away my fear.”

Shan pulled up a chair beside her. “Please, I want to hear about it.”

The gray-haired woman spoke in a whisper, watching the door. “Last month something terrible happened. Jampa helped me. It was a piece of paper rolled up and inserted into the eye sockets of a little animal skull, left in my lunch bag. The paper had words in Tibetan and terrible drawings. A big scorpion. A fox or a wolf, rows of human skulls, and above them a sketch of a larger skull, with three eye holes. It was a death threat, what else could it be? Jampa found me staring at it, pale as a ghost. But Jampa took it and said not to worry. He threw the skull out the window and said the paper was more like someone’s bad joke.”

“Why would he call it a joke?” Shan asked.

Amah Jiejie reached down and extracted a wad of paper from the bottom of the big bag she used as a purse. “I wasn’t sure how to destroy it. I was going to ask Jampa.”

Shan took the paper and straightened it, pressing out the many creases against the wall. It was a Tibetan death curse, or rather someone’s idea of a Tibetan curse.

“Jampa said the words weren’t right and that the three-eyed skull wasn’t a Buddhist thing at all, so it had no effect, it represented no danger.”

Shan saw that the old Tibetan had been right. He had seen death threats, and this was just a poor imitation of one.

“It still scares me, Shan. Maybe it wasn’t really a death curse but surely it was meant as one.”

“No, just meant to scare you, to have you think Tibetans were stalking you,” Shan told her. It meant, he knew, that whoever had done this had not been Tibetan.