Chapter 4: The Open Hand

By nine Tuesday morning, Shen Mo had acquired three names, no date of birth, and an official notation that the department's Mandarin interpreter understood him best when he wrote.

Su carried two black coffees into Interview Two. Hollis sniffed the one nearest him before he trusted it.

Mo sat across the table in gray hospital scrubs, his long black hair secured at the nape with a plain elastic. The bloodstained robe had gone to evidence. Without its heavy folds, he looked leaner than Su had expected, long limbed and spare through the shoulders.

One wrist was cuffed to the steel ring bolted between them. His free hand rested open beside a legal pad.

Traditional characters covered three pages in narrow, exact lines.

The tablet propped near the recorder showed Mei Lin, the department interpreter. She had lowered her glasses and was rubbing the bridge of her nose.

"His spoken language is difficult," Lin said. "His writing is formal but clear. He understands me better each time I repeat a sentence."

"How much better?" Hollis asked.

Lin looked toward Mo. "Ask him."

Su set a coffee near Hollis and sat. Her slate-gray blazer pulled across her shoulders until she settled it around the holster.

"Tell me what Detective Hollis just asked."

Mo answered in Chinese. The sounds were shaped farther back in his mouth than the Mandarin Su knew from family dinners and witness interviews. Lin translated a moment later.

"He asked how much better I understand him."

Hollis lifted his cup. "We're making progress."

Mo studied the steam rising from it and said something short.

"He says your drink has been burned," Lin said.

"Everyone's a critic."

Lin translated. Mo considered this.

"I did not criticize. I diagnosed."

Su pressed the recorder button. The red light came on.

They had explained his rights twice overnight, first aloud and then in writing. Mo had copied each point in his own words beneath Lin's translation. He understood that he could refuse questions, stop the interview, and ask for an attorney. He had declined all three.

His reason occupied one line on the legal pad.

An advocate who did not see the dead man cannot answer for me.

Su had underlined cannot answer for me and asked whether he believed an attorney would speak in his place. Forty minutes of clarification had followed.

Now she stated the time, the room, and everyone present.

"Do you still agree to speak with us?"

Lin translated.

Mo's attention moved from Su's hands to the recorder, then to Hollis and the observation window. He never wasted a glance on the cuff.

"I agree."

"State your full name."

"Shen Mo."

"Date of birth?"

"I do not know your calendar."

"Give me yours."

"The year would not help you."

"Try me."

A pause. "I was born twenty-nine years before Origin Gate fell."

Hollis leaned toward his coffee. "Great. We'll put that into the computer."

Su slid a photograph across the table. It showed Mo emerging through the floor of Wang's records room with his hands raised. The jade chamber did not appear in the frame. Only the black opening, broken bronze bolts, and the hem of his bloodstained robe.

"How long were you under the building?"

"I do not know."

"Hours? Days?"

"Longer."

"Years?"

His gaze found hers then. Those dark, heavy-lidded eyes held no confusion.

"Perhaps."

Su let the answer sit.

"What is Origin Gate?"

"My home."

"Where?"

"Gone."

"Where was it?"

"Gone is not a place."

"Finally, something we agree on."

Lin translated that too. Mo's expression did not change, but his eyes remained on Su for one beat longer than the question required.

She placed another photograph beside the first.

Nolan Price lay on the pine floor, one hand extended toward the empty blue wrapping. The image had been taken before Desai opened his shirt. No internal injury showed.

"You saw this man."

"He lay beside the opening when I climbed."

"Had you seen him before yesterday?"

"No."

"Did you kill him?"

"No."

"Did you touch him?"

"No. I looked."

"You came through the floor beside his body."

"He was above me."

"Convenient."

"I did not arrange it."

His answers arrived without haste. He neither protested nor tried to charm her. He treated each question as a structure to test for weakness.

Su moved the photograph half an inch.

"What killed him?"

"A palm."

Hollis looked at the unmarked skin visible above Price's collar. "Someone slapped him to death?"

Lin translated. Mo looked at Hollis's coffee.

"No."

"Then help me out."

"The hand struck below the breastbone. The force passed beneath the ribs and opened inside him."

"Force doesn't turn corners," Su said.

"This one did."

"You saw that through his clothes?"

"I saw how his body had failed."

"You were across the room."

"The room was small."

Su opened Desai's preliminary imaging note on her laptop. Intact ribs. No bullet, blade, or visible crush injury. Blood in the chest and abdomen. The scans showed destruction without a mechanism.

Nothing about a hand.

"What will Dr. Desai find when she opens his chest?"

Mo studied the photograph. His free hand moved above Price's body, clear of the paper. Long fingers traced the lower edge of the ribs, then stopped over the sternum.

"Five dark wounds against the inner wall. Narrow at the ends. One from each finger."

"Bruises?"

"Wounds."

"And outside?"

"Nothing."

Su watched his face. "Be specific."

"The rear wall of the heart is torn. The ribs are whole. The hand entered here."

His finger settled over clean cloth.

Hollis shifted his chair. "Did you see the killer?"

"I was beneath the floor."

"Then how do you know it was a hand?"

"Because the dead man carried its shape."

Su rotated the photograph toward herself. Price's extended arm. His open jacket. The empty wrapping.

"Could he walk after the strike?"

"For perhaps one hundred breaths."

"Why?"

"The force spread before it gathered. Whoever struck him had strength without control."

"Enough time to enter the school? To lock the door?"

"Enough for both."

The phone in Su's pocket vibrated.

DESAI.

Su answered and put the call on speaker.

"Tell me you found a cause," she said.

"I have findings. I do not have a cause."

Desai sounded farther away than the county morgue, her voice flattened by stainless steel and fatigue.

"Have you opened the chest?"

"That's why I'm calling. Were there patterned objects at the scene? A tool with five narrow contact points?"

Su's eyes stayed on Mo.

"Why?"

"Because there are five focal hemorrhages on the inner chest wall. They line up like fingertips."

Hollis stopped with his coffee halfway to his mouth.

Desai continued. "No matching injury outside. No fractures. The posterior wall of the heart is torn. I have no reasonable mechanism yet."

"Could Price have walked afterward?"

"Possibly. Briefly. Why?"

"Call me when you have the rest."

"Yue."

"What?"

"Do not bring me an explanation involving invisible hands."

Su looked at the man cuffed across from her.

"I don't have one."

She ended the call.

Lin had stopped moving on the tablet. She watched Su, then Mo, then Su again.

Hollis set down his cup. "He gave us five injuries before Desai did."

"I counted," Su said.

She pulled up the hallway footage from Wang's school. Procedure reduced to a grainy rectangle: Nolan Price entering at 6:43 a.m., carrying the wrapped medicine box against his left hip.

Su had watched the clip six times. She played it again.

Price crossed the training floor. He smiled at someone beyond the camera. His right arm hung close to his side.

Su slowed the image.

At the records-room hall, Price stopped. His free hand pressed briefly below his breastbone. He shifted the bundle higher, then continued.

The gesture had looked like the burden slipping.

Now it looked like a man holding himself closed.

"The killer never had to leave that room," she said.

Hollis bent toward the screen. "Price arrived injured."

"He knew he was dying." Su replayed the pause. "He still carried the box inside."

"And the box vanished."

Across the table, paper whispered.

Mo's right hand rested on the scene photograph.

The cuff lay open beside his wrist.

Hollis rose so fast his chair struck the wall. His hand went beneath his jacket.

Su did not reach for her weapon. Mo had already come up among three armed officers at the school without hurting any of them. If he wanted the room, the cuff had never been the deciding factor.

She looked at the open steel.

"How long have you been able to do that?"

Lin translated.

"Since you closed it."

Hollis stared at him. "You sat on that all night?"

"No one asked."

"Put your hand on the table."

Mo's palm settled flat.

He had not moved toward the door. He had not even risen. The released cuff remained beside the photograph, its double lock intact.

Su reached across and picked it up. "You didn't break it."

"It was not necessary."

"How did you open it?"

Mo touched one finger to the hinge. "Pressure here. Then here."

"That's not how handcuffs work."

"Yes."

The word survived Lin's translation with its certainty untouched.

Su held the open cuff out across the table.

Mo laid his wrist in the steel himself, fingers loose, palm open toward the ceiling. The lean line of his forearm disappeared beneath the rolled sleeve of the scrubs. Su looked at it a second too long.

She closed the cuff around him. The ratchet clicked once, twice.

Mo watched her scarred knuckles rather than her face.

"If you can leave," she said, "why are you still here?"

"You have the wrapping."

"You could take it."

"It is evidence."

Su kept her hand flat beside the steel ring. "You understand that word now?"

"You have used it seventeen times."

Hollis lowered himself into his chair. "He's counting, too."

Su sat back. The steel had been warm from his skin when she closed it.

"You're still a murder suspect."

"Then continue."

"Most people in your position want to explain what they are."

"Most people have asked."

"And I haven't."

"No."

"Does that bother you?"

"It makes you more useful."

Hollis snorted into his cup.

Su looked at the open cuff. He had stayed through the night and waited at the table when the restraint failed.

She caught herself watching his open hand on the table, the long fingers resting exactly where he had been told to put them, and made herself look away.

She drew the photograph of the empty blue wrapping from the case file and placed it between them.

Mo's eyes narrowed. It was small, but it was the first thing that had disturbed his control.

Su turned off the hallway video. Price had entered Wang's school already dying. Whatever had happened inside the locked room, Mo was the only living person who recognized both the murder and what had been taken.

She touched the corner of the photograph.

"Who owned the box?"