Shan made his way to a lingering group of Chinese tourists and picked out an affluent-looking man with an expensive Japanese camera. He flashed his badge. “I need to see the photographs you were just taking,” he announced.

The man paled. “Officer, I never meant—”

“Quickly!”

The frightened tourist fumbled with his camera, then a picture of the stretcher emerged on the screen at the back of the device. “Earlier,” Shan said, and the man began scrolling through photos. He stopped the man on the fifth image. At the edge of the photo he could see the lean Westerner with short-cropped graying hair at the tea stand. “Can you enlarge that part?” he asked, pointing at the Westerner. The tourist complied, until the man filled half the screen. Clearly visible on his forehead was a red-tinged bruise.

There was no sign of the Westerner anywhere when Shan rushed outside. Buses were pulling away. Tan was waiting. “You’re coming back with me,” the colonel declared. “The file on Metok will be waiting for you.”

At the top of the tired old building where Tan still kept his office in Lhadrung, the colonel’s steadfast assistant Amah Jiejie greeted Shan with a cup of tea then took him into a conference room where a foot-high stack of papers awaited him. The matronly, ever-cheerful administrator opened the curtains and pulled a notepad and pencils out of the cabinet along the wall. “The colonel said it was better to ask for all corruption cases in the past five years than single out just one.”

“The colonel is a chess player,” Shan observed.

She extended a finger to a thin file not on the stack. “Not much there I’m afraid.”