When he did, he felt his bladder convulse and struggled against the urge to piss himself again.

The photo was of Lyle – Lyle of the Suzuki 4 × 4; Lyle who had serviced Jeff Bukelo before him; Lyle who’d almost cried when he’d lost his job.

Not to mention his life.

Lyle was naked in the picture. Naked and bloody from the jagged barbed wire that dug into his flesh as it bound his wrists together, his arms to his torso, his knees and ankles to each other.

There was a bloody pulp where his penis had once been and Chuck felt a sick pull to explore with his eyes where it might be now …

‘He had a big mouth,’ said the man, and Chuck had the answer to any question he might have had.

And that’s why, by the time Tom Patrick, Charles Lumsden and Ronaldo Suarez reached the TDJC facility at Hutchins, Dallas, the deal was already dead.

28

JEFF BUKELO LOOKED at Ronaldo Suarez and felt superior. It wasn’t a rare feeling for him, but usually he felt superior because of the power he wielded, like a stick, over others: his mousy wife, his two cowed children, his security-booth colleagues. But Suarez made Jeff feel superior because he was much, much fatter than him.

Jeff was a good size himself, with a beer gut that spilled over his work pants, but he always told himself that his weight helped him to dominate others, which it pretty much did. But this cop was a fucking barrel of fat, and that made Jeff feel pretty damned good about his own relatively svelte figure.

Of course, he’d have felt even better about it if the cop hadn’t brought along a sidekick, who was as thin as a goddamned whip, but you couldn’t have everything in life – nice though that might have been.

Jeff appraised Suarez – and the other one whose name he’d already forgotten. His piggy little eyes shone with low cunning. He figured he was ahead of this particular game. He could smell desperation on the detective.

Suarez hit play on a bulky old police DVD and Jeff watched Lyle’s head bobbing in his lap.

‘Recognize THIS?’

Jeff saw the slim man blink defensively. Seemed Suarez’s interview technique was to batter a suspect into submission with sheer volume.

He shrugged. ‘Jealous?’

‘Yeah,’ the fat man said unexpectedly, ‘I wish my wife was that good.’

‘So? Divorce her.’

‘What say we ignore the sexual-assault charge and you tell us WHAT they were stealing and WHO FOR?’

Jeff jabbed a forefinger at the television. ‘I already got my pay docked for that!’

‘BIG FUCKING DEAL!’ shouted Suarez. ‘I’ll put you in a cage full of perverts so fast you won’t know if you got your pay docked or your GODDAMNED TAIL!’

Jeff glanced at the whip but the man just watched him steadily through lazy green eyes. It gave Jeff a little twinge of irritation that this guy never spoke. What was this? Bad Cop, Possibly-Even-Worse Cop? Fuck ’em both.

‘I don’t give a shit.’ He waved a finger at the screen. ‘That there is consenting between two adults. Lyle says anything different and he’s a fucking lying little queer.’

‘What about Chuck Zhong? Is he a lying little queer too? Huh?’

‘I never touched him.’

‘That’s not what he says.’

‘Then, yeah, he’s a lying little queer too. You got evidence? You got another tape? Then go fuck yourself. Both of you.’

The slim man stood up slowly and Jeff turned his attention to him. ‘Okay, here we go,’ he drawled. ‘Loud cop, dumb cop. I get it.’

The thin man barely looked at him. Instead he took a pad of Post-its from his pocket and peeled one off. Jeff’s eyes found the camera in the corner of the room bare seconds before the man reached up and covered the lens.

Jeff swallowed hard, suddenly not so sure he’d played this quite right.

The man wandered over to him, seemingly without focus, then punched him so hard in the nose that he fell backwards off the metal chair with a loud bang.

Jeff Bukelo’s size had generally spared him the indignity of being punched in the nose. He couldn’t remember the last time it had happened and for that he was suddenly very grateful. It hurt like a motherfucker.

Before he could properly appreciate that, the thin man grabbed him by the sideburns and yanked his head round to watch the TV. Jeff yelped and, in passing, caught a disturbing look from Suarez, which made it plain that he wasn’t going to come to his aid. He wasn’t going to stop the assault; wasn’t going to play Good Cop.

‘You think your wife’d like to see that tape, Jeff? You think your kids would? Little Marlee and Jeff Junior? You think “consenting adults” is gonna cut it for them? Do you?’ The man shook Jeff by the chops, making him howl.

‘I’ll sue you, you sonofawhore! I’ll see you kicked off the fucking force for this!’

The slim man started laughing and Suarez joined in.

‘Oh, yeah?’ said the man gripping Jeff Bukelo’s face. ‘You got a tape?’

29

NICHOLAS NICHOLAS SHOWED Suarez and Tom to the engineering office where Annette Lim had been killed.

‘Shouldn’t you be at home?’ said Suarez, not shouting.

Nicholas shrugged. ‘I had a few days off. Better to work, I think.’ He frowned around the office from the doorway.

Tom spoke to Nicholas without looking at him: ‘What’s your middle name?’

‘Hudson.’

Tom ducked low under the police tape stretched across the doorway. ‘Ah, well, two out of three ain’t bad.’

Nicholas Nicholas smiled a little.

Suarez struggled to bend double under the tape but couldn’t make it. ‘Fuck.’

‘You want I should cut that for you, Detective?’

‘Nah. I looked round before they taped it off. Let the fucking limbo kid have his turn.’

As he had in a heat-hazed half-barn half a world away from Irving, Texas, Tom skirted his objective as if a direct approach might scare it off. He’d seen it the moment Nicholas opened the door – the pad of certificates lying on the desk – and his heart had knocked against his ribs like it wanted out.

‘Is this how you found it?’ he asked Nicholas Nicholas.