“No,” said Kathy, “I didn’t check for anything like that. I have to say, this body is a bit of a puzzle. I can’t find any obvious reason for the man to be here. He looks in good condition. His organs are all normal. It’s not that it’s out of the ordinary, of course. I do standard postmortems all the time. People do simply pass away. But if he is part of some international intrigue, I mean, you’d expect something more, wouldn’t you?”
“Well,” said Chan, “this part of it might not be so obvious. It’s some kind of adhesive for a mask.”
He noted that the man’s body type and height indeed resembled Sean Daniel’s.
Kathy inspected the man’s hairline. “Yes, I think I do see something.” She produced a magnifying glass. “Yes, “I see it. It’s faint, but it’s there.”
She gave Chan a look of disbelief. “A mask? Why on earth would he wear a mask of Sean Daniel?”
Chan told her the reason as Daniel had explained it to him.
“Huh. So not being able to kill him, they decided a double would make a good plant in MI6. Boy, this spy stuff is too much, huh? What a game.”
“Yes,” said Chan, sitting down. “What a game.”
He was silent for a while. Kathy watched the wheels turning.
“So what, Brains Chan, what’s the scoop? Whodunnit?”
Chan smiled, but he wasn’t feeling at all in the mood for humor.
“Right. Who killed him?” he asked.
“Are you looking at me for an answer, or is that a rhetorical question?”
“Well,” said Chan, “if you were a guessing woman, what would be your guess? Who killed this look-alike?”
“My findings are inconclusive. Not that I’m necessarily leaning toward natural causes by any means. But it could be.”
“Have you looked for any kind of poisoning?”
“Yes, I have, but you know, despite what you see in the movies, there are untraceable poisons. More than you’d think. Espionage at the level we’re talking about, they probably know all of them.”
“Okay,” said Chan. “Next question. If Hank Lee saw that it was a mask, and if whoever’s behind this wanted to keep the substitution plan a secret by coming to retrieve that mask, then why didn’t they kill Hank Lee when they knew he knew? Why let him live?”
Kathy shook her head slowly. “Okay, good question. Are they incompetent? You wouldn’t think so.”
“No,” agreed Chan. “To dream up a scheme like this, you’re anything but stupid.”
“So Hank had not to be killed,” said Kathy. “They needed him to live to tell us that he knew about the mask.”
“Right,” said Chan. “And the reason why they needed him to tell us about the mask, you know, it’s the same reason why they had to kill this guy.”
Kathy nodded, following him to know what that reason was.
“They had to sell it,” said Chan. “They needed the body to be found with the mask, and they needed the coroner to find the mask and live to tell about it. That’s the key to convincing us the plot is real.”
“Sorry, what?”
“This plot is far-fetched, to say the least,” said Chan. “In order to make it seem less so, parts of it had to be carried out in an obvious manner.”
“I kind of follow, but . . .?”
“Well,” said Chan, standing up and heading out. “I’ll explain the whole thing to you once I talk to Sean Daniel again. I think I know what’s going on, and if my hunch is correct, then I’ve got this mystery solved.”
And with that Chan was out the door and on his way back to the Kalihi Valley monastery when Agent Sean Daniel lay recuperating from his grievous wound.
Lanning Lee 