"I thought we would speak with his secretary."

"Excellent idea," Li said, and shrugged. "But she always takes her leave concurrently with Jao. She is in Hong Kong. Left the same night as Jao. I took her to the airport myself."

Outside Shan paused beside the truck and watched in disbelief as the crew began hosing down the outside of the house.

"Little birds have big voices," Feng said with amusement as he climbed behind the wheel.

Suddenly Shan remembered. The only person he had told about going to the house and the restaurant had been Yeshe.

Dr. Sung appeared in the clinic hallway wearing a surgical gown and bloody gloves. A koujiao mask hung around her neck. "You again?"

"You sound disappointed," Shan said.

"The nurse said there were two men with questions about Prosecutor Jao. I thought it was the others."

"The others?"

"The assistant prosecutor. You two should engage in a dialectic."

"I'm sorry?"

"Talk to each other. Do your own jobs right so I can do mine."

Shan clenched his jaw. "So Li Aidang was asking about the body?"

Sung seemed pleased with Shan's discomfort. "Asking about the body. Asking about you. Asking about your companions," she said, casting a glance down the hall where Feng and Yeshe lingered. "They took the receipts for the personal possessions. You never asked for the receipts."

"I'm sorry," Shan said, without knowing why.

Doctor Sung stripped off her gloves. "I have another surgery in fifteen minutes." She began moving down the corridor.

"The colonel had the head sent here," Shan said to her back, following her.

"A lovely gesture, I thought," she said acidly. "Someone could have warned me. Just like that, out of the bag. Hello, Comrade Prosecutor."

Surely the doctor should have known what to expect from Tan, Shan considered. Then he understood. "You mean, you knew him."

"It's a small town. Sure I knew Jao. Said goodbye last week, when he left on vacation. Then suddenly I'm unwrapping the colonel's package and he's staring right at me, as if we had unfinished business."

"And what were your conclusions?"

"About what?" She opened a closet and scanned its nearly empty shelves. "Great." She put the gloves back on. "I wrote to ask for more gloves. They said just sterilize the ones you have. The fools. Just what do they think would happen if I put latex gloves in an autoclave?"

"The examination of the head."

"Ai yi!" she exclaimed, throwing her head back. "Now he wants an autopsy of a head," she said to the fly-specked ceiling.

Shan just stared at her.

"Okay. One skull, intact. One brain, intact. Hearing organs, sight organs, taste organs, smell organs all intact. One big problem."

Shan moved closer. "You found something?"

"He needed a haircut." She moved down the corridor as Shan stared.

"You looked at his dental records?" he said to her back.

"There you go again. Thinking you're in Beijing. Jao had dental work, but it wasn't done in Tibet. No records to verify against."

"Did you try to match the head to the body?"

"Exactly how large is your inventory of headless bodies, Comrade?"

Shan stared at her without reply.

Sung muttered under her breath, tightened her gloves, and threw him a koujiao from the shelf.

They walked in silence to the morgue. Inside, the stench was far worse now, nearly overwhelming. Shan pulled the mask tighter, looking over his shoulder. Sergeant Feng and Yeshe had refused to enter. They hovered in the hall, watching through the small window in the door.

A soiled cardboard box was on an examination table, resting on top of a covered body. He turned away as Dr. Sung removed the contents of the box and leaned over the body.

"Amazing. It fits." She made a gesture of invitation to Shan. "Perhaps you would like to try? I know. We'll cut off the limbs and play mix and match."

"I was interested in the nature of the cuts."

Sung cast him a peeved look, then retrieved a bottle of alcohol and washed the flesh around the neck. "One, two… I count three cuts. Like I said before, not violent blows. Precise, like slices."

"How can you know?"

"If the killer had relied on force the tissue would have been crushed. These are very neat cuts. A razor-sharp instrument. Like a butcher makes."

A butcher. He had reminded Sung before that Tibet was the only land on the planet with butchers trained to cut up human bodies. "Did you look for a bruise on the skull?"

Sung looked up.

"As you said," Shan added. "He was laid down before the incisions. No blood on his clothes. He must have been knocked unconscious. Then the cuts were made."

"We seldom have a need for complete autopsies," she muttered, and wheeled a lamp on rollers to the edge of the table. It was the closest she would come to an apology.

Sergeant Feng paced in the corridor outside as she examined the scalp.

"All right," she said at last. "Behind the right ear. A long ragged contusion. Some skin was opened."

"A club? A baton?"

"No. Rough-edged. A rock could do it."

Shan produced the card taken from the prosecutor's body. "Do you know why Jao would have been talking to someone about X-ray equipment?"

Sung studied the card. "American?" she asked, handing the card back. "Too expensive for Tibet." She pulled a pad from her pocket and busily wrote notes.

"Why would he want such equipment?"

She shrugged. "Must have been for an investigation." She turned the collar of her blouse up as if suddenly cold.

"What about the Americans at the mine? Would someone need this type of equipment for them?"

Sung shook her head. "They have to use the clinic like everyone else. Allocation of medical resources has been carefully planned."

"Meaning what?" Shan asked.

"Meaning the most productive members of the proletariat must be supported first."

Shan stared at her in disbelief. She was quoting something, as warily as if this were a tamzing session. "The most productive members, doctor?"

"There is a memo from Beijing. I can show it to you. It states that Tibetans suffer permanent brain damage by spending their childhood in oxygen-deprived altitudes."

Shan wouldn't let her get away with it. "You're a graduate of Bei Da University, doctor. Surely you know the difference between medical science and political science."

She returned his stare for a moment, then her gaze drifted to the floor.

"This must be difficult," Shan offered. "An autopsy on a friend."

"Friend? Jao and I talked sometimes. Mostly it was just the investigations. And government functions. He told jokes. You don't often hear jokes in Tibet."

"Like what?"

Sung thought a moment. "There was one. Why do Tibetans die younger than Chinese?" She looked up expectantly, her mouth in a crooked shape that may have been a grin. "Because they want to."

"Investigations. You mean murders?"

"I get dead people. Murder. Suicide. Accident. I just fill out the forms."

"But you wouldn't fill out our form."