Hunter asked Mr. Wang about Kelly Jensen. He said that she came into the shop almost every day when she was around, but sometimes she’d disappear for weeks. He liked Kelly very much. He said she was very polite, always happy and very beautiful.

‘In my country, whole village be asking her to marry.’

Hunter smiled and looked around the shop while he waited. He bought a cup of microwavable coffee and a packet of teriyaki-flavored beef jerky. A few minutes later Fang Li arrived. He was in his late twenties, with longish black hair that shined like in a shampoo commercial. His features were striking, a replica of what his father must have looked like when he was younger, but much taller and well built. He quickly spoke to his father before turning and offering his hand to Hunter.

‘I’m Fang Li, but everybody calls me Li.’

Hunter introduced himself and told him the purpose of his visit.

‘OK, come with me and I’ll show you.’ Li guided Hunter through a back door that led into a large, well-organized storage room. The entire place carried a sweet and pleasant smell, a combination of exotic spices, condiments, soaps, fruit and unburned incense. At the far end of it, up a set of wooden stairs was the shop’s office. Hundreds of Chinese calendars hung from the walls – Hunter had never seen so many. It was like they used them as wallpaper. Apart from the calendars there were several old, metal filing cabinets, a wooden shelf rack, a water cooler and a large desk with a computer monitor on it. Chinese characters danced across the screen.

Li chuckled as he read them.

‘What does that mean?’ Hunter asked.

‘Be yourself. There’s no one better suited for the job.’

Hunter smiled. ‘Very true.’

‘My father likes this kinda thing. Proverbs and all, you know. But he prefers to create his own, so I programed a little screen saver for him. It reads from a list of his own wise sayings.’

‘So is that what you do? Computer programing?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Your father said that you could store as much as a whole year’s worth of footage.’

‘That’s right. My father’s pretty much obsessed with organization.’ He pointed out the window at the storage room. ‘Nothing’s ever out of place with him.’

Hunter nodded.

‘He’s also big on security. We’ve got five cameras filming twenty-four hours a day. One picking up the front door, one facing the parking lot out back, and three inside the shop. There’s no way we could archive that much data without having a ridiculous amount of hard drive space or compressing the hell out of the footage. So I created a small program that automatically compresses the files that are over three days old and then archives them into external high-capacity hard drives.’ Li rolled his chair back and pointed at four small black boxes under the desk. ‘At the end of twelve months, those files auto-delete to create more space.’ He paused and faced Hunter. ‘So what do you need, Detective?’

Hunter wrote something down on a piece of paper and placed it on the desk in front of Li. ‘I need a copy of all the footage you have between those dates.’

Li looked at the paper. ‘An entire week’s worth? From all five cameras?’

‘Maybe, but let’s start with the footage from the one in the parking lot.’

Li coughed. ‘That’s one hundred and sixty-eight hours of footage. Even compressed that’ll take . . .’ his eyes narrowed and his lips moved without a sound for a second, ‘. . . around thirty DVDs. Maybe a few more. When do you need them for?’

‘Yesterday.’

Li’s face paled. He checked his watch. ‘Even if I had a professional multi-DVD copier, which I don’t, it’d still take most of the day.’

Hunter thought about it for a beat. ‘Wait a second. You said that older files are stored in those external hard drives, right?’ He pointed at the black boxes. ‘Will the files from those dates be in one of them?’

Li quickly picked up on what Hunter was suggesting and his lips spread into a smile. ‘They will be, yes. Very good idea. You could take the whole hard drive. There’s nothing in them but archived CCTV footage. Nothing that my father would need, anyway. You can link the drive to any computer, easy. It will save you tons of time, but you’ll still have to uncompress the files on your side.’

‘We can do that.’

Li nodded. ‘Let me show you how to find them.’

Fifty-Nine

Hunter made it back to Parker Center in less than half an hour and went straight into the Information Technology Division. Brian Doyle was at his desk, speed-reading through a pile of papers. He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. His eyes were bloodshot and his face unshaven. An empty pizza box was by the edge of the desk and the coffee percolator in the corner was practically empty.

‘Have you been here all night?’ Hunter asked.

Doyle looked up but said nothing. His stare went straight through Hunter.

‘Are you OK?’

Doyle’s eyes finally focused. ‘Umm? Yeah, sorry, I’m fine.’ He placed the sheet he was reading on the desk. ‘Just understaffed and overworked. Everyone always needs everything ASAP. I’ve got cases piling up everywhere. And this afternoon there’s this huge sting operation going on.’ He leaned back in his chair and studied Hunter for a second. ‘What the hell happened to your face?’ He pointed at the cut above his eyebrow.

Hunter shook his head. ‘Walked into a door.’

‘Of course you did. Just hope the door isn’t gonna sue the department.’

‘She won’t.’

‘She? A woman did that to you?’

‘Long story.’

‘I bet.’ He cleared a space at the edge of his desk and leaned against it. ‘OK, Robert, for you to be here, it’s gotta be something urgent.’

Hunter nodded. ‘But I only need about three minutes of your time, Jack. Then I’m out of here.’

‘Is this about the psycho who killed Doctor Winston with that bomb?’

An almost imperceptible nod. Hunter felt his chest tighten around his heart as he remembered he’d never see his old friend again.

‘He was a good man. I met him a couple of times.’ Doyle checked his watch. ‘What do you need?’

Hunter handed him the high-capacity hard drive and waited while Doyle hooked it up to his PC. Unsurprisingly, all the directories in the hard drive were perfectly organized – first by camera location and then by date.

‘Can these files be uncompressed in bulk?’ Hunter asked.

‘Not simultaneously. They’re massive. It’d be too processor intensive and it’d crash any machine, but . . .’ Doyle lifted his index finger, ‘you could line them up inside an application. As soon as one file finishes uncompressing, it’ll automatically move to the next one in the list. That way you don’t even have to be there. Just leave it working and come back when it’s all done.’

‘That’ll work for me.’

Doyle smiled. ‘Please tell me you don’t need all of these files. There’re hundreds of them. This will take days.’

‘No.’ Hunter shook his head. ‘Just a handful of them – to start with.’

‘OK, in that case I’ll tell you the easiest thing to do. Because this is an external drive, I can link it up to an empty laptop instead of clogging up the machine in your office. That way you can work on your machine if you need to and just leave the laptop on the side, as it does its thing. Give me five minutes and I’ll have it all set up for you.’