Lethal Red Secrets: A Murder Mystery Thriller (The Mia Treadwell Murder Mystery Series) Read online

  Lethal Red Secrets

  A MIA TREADWELL STORY

  G.K. LAWRENCE

  © Copyright 2022 - All rights reserved.

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Prologue

  1967

  The young man adjusted his green cap to keep the morning sun, sparkling off the water on the Liaodong Bay, out of his eyes. The terrain was flat out there and he could see—for the first time—the vastness of his homeland. Small patches of snow clung for life in the autumn climate and tan grass poked out here and there where the snow was gone. The decommissioned Soviet truck he drove rocked back and forth, bouncing with every slight imperfection in the dirt road. A gift from the Warsaw pact, the second-hand junk was retired by their northern neighbors and comrades, but not the new ones with the shocks still intact. He checked the rearview mirror. The wooden trailer hitched behind him jostled around and the young man tried to stay slow so it wouldn’t roll and snap the hitch.

  Everything about his appearance and demeanor was military. Minimal. Functional. But for one thing. He caught sight of a wetland with red plants, so large it extended past the horizon. A strange phenomenon, unlike anything he’d ever seen. It was almost alien, like looking over the landscape of Mars. The Revolution rejected superstitions and supernatural explanations, but he couldn’t help but feel this was a sign. He picked some and decorated the truck a bit with the red plants, winding it around the bolts of the vehicle’s frame. Despite his paramilitary role, the color seemed appropriate and forgivable.

  He stopped and unfolded his map. There was hardly a feature in these plains to get his bearings with, and the names of many places had been crossed out and replaced with new names, better names. He blew hot breath into his hands and rubbed them together before pressing them to his ears, which were pink and tingling. Without any trees or mountains or buildings to block it, the wind whaled hard on him and stole every bit of warmth. He didn’t need it. The Revolution kept him warm.

  He continued along the road, stopping once to refill the gas from a can in the back. When he found the village, he didn’t need to ask to make sure he was in the right place. The streets were packed with every single person in the community. They crowded the main dirt thoroughfare, yelling and shaking their fists and cursing, maybe 200 of them, and they parted for the truck as he drove through. He parked in the middle of the road, killing the engine when he reached the source of the mob’s anger.

  He saw five people on their knees, faces looking down in shame at the cold dirt. They all wore tall, white pointed dunce hats, a third as tall as they were. They didn’t argue. They didn’t disagree. They shamefully absorbed the abuse of their neighbors, friends, and family, who called them the worst names anyone could be called. Words that were accusations—and accusations were death sentences. Bourgeois. Reactionary. Capitalist. Counter-revolutionary. Greedy.

  He wasn’t there for those people. The young man heeded the call of Mao Zedong, just the same as all Red Guard. He was here as Mao’s paramilitary youth, the social enforcement wing, delivered with the passion and energy only possessed by the young. They were there to destroy the old so something new and better could be built. They were there to destroy the Four Olds: Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Customs, Old Habits. His mission here was specifically the Old Culture.

  Three others from the village wore the same uniform he did. They raised fists to greet him. Teenagers, all armed with more Soviet gifts: AK-47s. They didn’t respect the Old Custom of respecting their elders. The mob was incited by them, grown adults, most of them more than twice their age, yielding and obeying the youth, asking them what to do, how to behave. These teenagers were here to punish their neighbors and make everyone in the village participate or to accuse the reluctant of being enemies, too.

  The young lady with the tight braids introduced herself, in Mandarin, “I am Zhang Ya Ying! Captain of this brigade!” She was short but she took up a lot of space with her loud voice. The entire brigade was just the three of them, it seemed.

  The young man raised a fist back. “Where is it?”

  “Come with me!” she commanded. She walked with her back stiff and her chin up. Every step she took was a march.

  He followed her into a small house, not much more than a clay hut. Inside the living room, all the meager furniture had been pushed to the walls, making room to expose where the villagers hid a hole, four cubic feet. Inside the hole was art. It wasn’t local; it was beyond what these people would ever see in their entire lifetimes. These pieces were smuggled from the wealthy, smuggled from the elites. The art of the enemy. The art of the past. The art of oppression and ignorance. The young man was here to take it and destroy it before the next generation could be infected with the counter-revolutionary ideology that infiltrated every molecule of it.

  “What are we to do, comrade?” asked Captain Zhang.

  He looked over the items. A fine painting of the Empress Dowager, Tzu-Hsi. Luxurious robes made of a material softer than anything he’d ever felt, gold patterned and brilliantly colored, the exact opposite of the clothes worn by a member of The Party. A hat, a Qing Guanmao, the object of the office of the last dynasty, before the KMT, before the CCP. Shoes with smaller, fake shoes underneath like stilts, to create the illusion of tiny feet when the real was covered with robes, a way of faking foot binding. Dozens of items that would be tremendously valuable to capitalists and those who still held onto the Old Ideas.

  He said, “Load it up into the truck. I’m taking it to Beijing.”

  “May I ask why?”
r />   “I’ve been told to bring it to Beijing to be burned in front of others, so they can see the good work we’re all doing.”

  Her harsh face almost smiled. She kept looking at the young man as she barked her orders to the others. “Gather it up!”

  The others did as she said. The captain was not above helping, and neither was the young man. He reached in and grabbed the closest object: a wooden box with a deep red lacquer. Delicate carvings on the outside revealed a scene from Chinese folk religion. This box was decorated with images of old fairy tales, back when every word, every idea, and everything in nature had a god. He didn’t recognize one character, though: a man in a straw hat, digging canals. Opening the clasp, he peeked inside and swallowed hard when he saw it. The ferocious, judging eyes of the captain remained fixed on his face as he closed the box and carried it outside.

  A girl approached the captain and handed her a camera. She took pictures of their work. She ordered the others to lay a cloth down in front of the prisoners, and they did as she said. She ordered them to place the art on the blanket, and they did as she said. She ordered the prisoners to spit on the art. They all did as she said. The captain took pictures of the youth carrying the items, then took pictures of all of it laid out on the blanket. She took pictures of the ferocious mob and the shamed prisoners. When she exhausted her roll of film, she ordered them to load the truck. Carelessly, they tossed their delicate, priceless items like ordinary trash. But not the young man who brought the truck. He added the box to the truck gently.

  When the truck was full, he raised a fist, as did the others. The crowd cheered him and then began kicking dirt and throwing rocks at the five people on their knees. They all understood that the least enthusiastic abuser would be the next person to be suspected of crimes against the revolution, so they all made sure to show exaggerated glee at their cruelty.

  It took him a few tries, but he got his truck running. Sometimes it was a fight when it was cold. He drove out through the opposite side of the village, bouncing on the pothole-dimpled road. He flinched when he heard the clatter of revolutionary assault rifles behind him. He didn’t need to look. He knew how they were used. He’d seen them used enough and he never needed to look again. The crowd cheered the murder of their neighbors and their Old Habits.

  He drove slowly over the bumpy road of frozen mud, potholed and uneven, far past the village and their farms. Out there, the roads were hardly more than parallel lines in the grass. Spotting the first road sign he’d seen for two days, he checked his map. One arrow pointed to Beijing, the other to Dalian. He pressed the brake and brought the truck to a stop. He looked at those signs for a long time before he decided which road he would take.

  Chapter

  One

  PRESENT DAY

  Mia was under the trance of Debbie Harry’s vocals singing “Picture This” as she read the bio of the man she was on her way to meet.

  Hau Junjie. Thirty-five-year-old wunderkind, programmer, entrepreneur, and art collector. He started as a computer programmer from a modest, middle-class family. Went to the London School of Economics. Wrote some software and founded Sesame Road, which now runs logistics for almost 90% of the Hong Kong market. SR has also expanded recently into Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, and is presently bidding for contracts in Africa. Hau is a fan of film, with several credits as a movie producer.

  Mia didn’t recognize any of the titles he’d produced. Mostly action movies, by the look of it. The kind of junk Raphael would love.

  “Mm? Mmm mm mm?”

  Mia removed her earbuds and looked to her right. “I’m sorry, what?”

  The boy with messy hair asked, “Did you know that in the event of a nuclear attack, you can protect your electronics from electromagnetic radiation by putting them inside your microwave?”

  “No, Raphael. I was not aware of that.”

  “Microwave ovens block microwaves so you don’t cook the whole kitchen, and they also block radio waves.”

  “What are you reading?” She leaned over to get a glimpse at the tablet her son was holding.

  “Art of War by Sun Tzu.”

  “I’m pretty sure he didn’t know about radio waves and nuclear weapons.”

  “I just finished a different book about nuclear war.”

  “Why do you need to read about stuff like that? It’s so grim.”

  He shrugged.

  A flight attendant approached and took their orders.

  “Um, I’ll have a seltzer, please.”

  The Asian-American woman to her left said, “Do you have beer? I’d like a Singha, if you have it. Thank you.” She had been sleeping the entire flight, gently snoring, and Mia only just noticed she was awake.

  The attendant moved on to the next row. The woman reached into her purse and produced a small, beautifully decorated gold and red tin, with the art of a Chinese guardian lion. She opened it up and took out a piece of dried ginger candy, which she popped in her mouth.

  “That’s funny,” said Mia.

  “Hm? Are you speaking to me?”

  “Oh, no. More to myself. Just a weird coincidence.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You ordered a Singha. That’s the Khmer word for the lion on your tin.”

  She looked at the tin. “Lion? No, this is a dog.”

  “I don’t want to be the person who says, ‘well, actually,’ but…”

  “Really? This is a lion? I bought this because I thought it was a dog.” She chuckled. “I have three rescues at home.”

  “They’re sometimes called foo dogs, but it’s supposed to be a representation of a lion. You usually find them in a male and female pair outside of Buddhist temples. Yours is female.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “She’s got a paw on a little cub that’s on its back. Males have a ball under their paw.”

  “Why do they look like dogs then?”

  “You have to put yourself in the minds of the artists at their time in history. The artists never saw a lion. They probably never went more than 50 miles away from where they were born, and they didn’t have zoos and photographs to work with. They had to go by descriptions other people gave them, probably second-hand, like that children’s game telephone. They did their best guess of what a lion looked like. Then other artists just copied the work of their teachers, assuming this must be what a lion looks like. That’s how you get a lion that looks like a British bulldog.”

  “Huh. That’s interesting. Are you a Chinese historian?”

  “No, actually, my expertise is in Byzantine Orthodox art. I’ve been trying to learn as much about the subject as I can for my trip.”

  “We have about three more hours on this flight. At this rate, I expect you’ll be an expert before we land.” She squinted a little. “I feel like I know you from somewhere. Have we met before?”

  “Mm, I don’t think so.”

  “You have a very… distinct appearance. Are you Khmer?”

  Mia had heard countless people stumble over those kinds of words before. When the topic came up, people had to gently navigate unspoken social rules without knowing exactly what the rules even are anymore. Mia understood, though. People often had difficulty figuring out her family’s origins, often guessing that she was Maori, half-Black and half-Asian, or some other novel phenotypic cocktail. It was always more awkward for them than it was for Mia. She reflexively smiled to cut the tension.

  Mia asked, “Do you like true crime?”

  “I do!”

  “Do you listen to the Alternative Theories Podcast?”

  “Yes, of course, I watch their videos online… Wait, are you…?”

  Mia nodded, a little embarrassed.

  The woman continued, “You’re that lady who found the stolen art in Colorado?”

  “That’s me.”

  “That was one of their best episodes! Wow! That story was something else. Those terrible murders… You’re kind of a celebrity.”

  “No, hol
d on, I don’t know about all that.”

  “Well, you are in the true crime world. That story was all anyone could talk about for weeks. It was nice to have a break from that other infamous case in Colorado… But it’s working out, right? You’re sitting in first class, so you must be doing well.”

  “This is actually my first time in first class. A client is paying, so… let’s just say that he is doing very well.”

  “It’s so much money, but it’s amazing what a difference only two extra inches of legroom makes. I’m Xiaoli.” She offered a hand.

  Mia shook it. “Mia Treadwell. And this is my son, Raphael.”

  “Hi.” He barely looked up from his book.

  “You’re the son! Oh my goodness! You were there for all of that. Wow. Do you know how cool your mom is?” Xiaoli asked.

  Raphael nodded without looking up from his book.

  Xiaoli leaned back and said, “I’m absolutely addicted to these candies. I’m on medication that makes things taste weird and the bite of the ginger helps. Would you like one?”

  Mia shook her head and held up a hand. They were so strong that Mia could smell them. Xiaoli reached the tin out to Raphael. “How about you?”

  He made a face when the aroma of ginger reached him. “No, I’m fine, thanks.”

  “What kind of work do you have in Hong Kong?”

  Mia struggled to answer. “That’s the thing. Uh, I don’t know quite yet. I was putting off taking a new job for a month. See, we just moved into a new home in Colorado. We weren’t even unpacked when I got this offer. The money was so good, how could I say no? I spoke with my client’s personal assistant. They were light on the details and they booked me a flight right away. And my son has recently taken an interest in Asian military history, so… here we are. It was very important that they have the meeting in person. I figure the worst-case scenario is I don’t take the job, and me and Raphael have a fun week in Hong Kong.”