Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation by Eliot Pattison Page B

then the ambush. Someone betrayed them, someone shamed them.”
    “What fire?”
    “Two days before the murders, in town. The Religious Affairs office was nearly burned down. Officially they say it was an accident. But the unofficial version is different. They found something in the fire, a statue of an old protector god that didn’t belong there, sitting in the ashes, unharmed. Like the god had decided to take revenge after all these years.”
    Shan’s mind raced. Since the last season of protests in Tibet the government had grown unpredictable in reacting to anything that might hint of political unrest. More than ever, Public Security worked in the shadows. It would have worked especially hard to assure no one suspected an overt act against Religious Affairs. “What kind of deity?” he asked.
    Jin grimaced, as if Shan were trying to trap him. Displaying such knowledge in some circles would show dangerous reactionary leanings. “The mother protector, Tara. Not like at the killings.”
    Shan went very still. “There was a deity at the murder scene?”
    Jin frowned. He clearly had not intended to divulge so much. “On a high, flat rock a hundred feet away, found the next day, looking at the crime scene. The head of a bull, holding a rope and sword,” he explained.
    “You mean Yama the Lord of Death.”
    As if to change the subject, Jin reached into his pocket and produced a heavy steel carabiner, the snaplink model favored by climbers on the upper slopes. “They think I can find a trail of these that will lead me to the traitor.”
    “A trail of snaplinks?”
    “Someone handed these out to shepherds and farmers in the upper valleys, like favors or souvenirs. They must have been stolen, like those ropes that were used in the ambush.” As he spoke, the handheld radio in his vehicle crackled to life with a report that the town of old Tingri, forty miles away, had been searched with no sign of the fugitives. Jin muttered a curse, then reached in and shut off the radio. He hated being accountable to anyone else when he was outside the office.
    The woman appeared on the slope above the house, frantically running with the boy toward their pastures. “Did they have one of the snaplinks?”
    Jin shrugged. “You know these hill people. They won’t talk to anyone in a uniform. I said I’m coming back tomorrow to shoot ten sheep if they don’t tell me where I can find those monks.”
    “But you won’t.”
    The constable shrugged again. “I am fond of mutton.”
    “They’ll spend the day moving all their sheep. Come back tomorrow and you’ll find no trace of the sheep or the shepherds. And shepherds don’t go anywhere close to the base camp, there’s no grass that high up. You need to look in town or in the base camp itself.”
    “I don’t get paid to concoct theories. Someone’s coming from Lhasa for that. A real wheelsmasher. He’ll start with the other small gompas, assuming monks help each other.”
    Shan’s mouth went dry. A wheelsmasher was one of the senior zealots from the Bureau of Religious Affairs, notorious for crushing old prayer wheels under their boots. A wheelsmasher team had come through the month before, removing all public statues of Buddha. “I need to see Tan,” he said again, more urgently.
    “We used to have a captain from Shanghai who kept a pack of those big Tibetan mastiffs, the ones they say are incarnations of failed monks. He would cruise along the roads and shoot a stray one, then skin it and feed it to his pack. He could never stop laughing when he watched, telling everyone it was the story of modern Tibet. Dog eat dog. That’s what you are to those who are running the jail now. Fresh meat. It’s not the county’s jail anymore. It belongs to Public Security until this is over.”
    “They have to eat. They have to have their toilets cleaned.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “Meaning they still rely on your office to assure the dirty chores get done.”
    Jin’s silence was all