Shan looked back at the arc of bloodstains. This was supposed to be the morgue. Corpses had no blood pressure. They did not spray blood.

Suddenly the body in the chair groaned. Revived by the light, it swung its arms stiffly to pull down the sheet, then produced a pair of thick, horn-rimmed glasses.

Feng gasped and retreated toward the door.

It was a woman, Shan realized, and it wasn't a sheet that covered her but a vastly oversized smock. From its folds she produced a clipboard.

"We sent the report," she declared in a shrill, impatient tone, and stood. "No one understood why you needed to come." Bags of fatigue shadowed her eyes. In one hand she held a pencil like a spear. "Some people like to look at the dead. Is that it? You like to gawk at the corpses?"

A man's life, Choje taught his monks, did not move in a linear progression, with each day an equal chit on the calendar of existence. Rather it moved from defining moment to defining moment, marked by the decisions that roiled the soul. Here was such a moment, Shan thought. He could play Tan's hound, starting here and now, trying to somehow save the 404th or he could turn around, as Choje would want, ignoring Tan, being true to all that passed as virtue in his world. He clenched his jaw and turned to the diminutive woman.

"We will need to speak to the doctor who performed the autopsy," Shan said. "Dr. Sung."

Inexplicably, the woman laughed. From another fold of her smock she pulled a koujiao, one of the surgical masks used by much of the population of China to ward off dust and viruses in the winter months. "Other people. Other people just like to cause trouble." She tied the mask over her mouth and gestured toward a box of kiajiou on the nearest table. As she walked, a stethoscope appeared in the folds of the smock.

There was still a way, a narrow opening he might wedge through. He would have to get the accident report signed. An accident caused by the 404th would answer Tan's needs without the agony of a murder investigation. Sign the report, then find a way to conduct death rites for the lost soul. To answer the political dilemma, the 404th could be disciplined for negligent behavior. A month on cold rations, perhaps a mass reduction of every prisoner. It would be summer soon; even the old ones could survive a reduction. It was not a perfect solution, but it was one within his reach.

By the time the three men fastened their masks, she had stripped the sheet from the body and pulled a clipboard from the table.

"Death occurred fifteen to twenty hours before discovery, meaning the evening before," she recited. "Cause of death: traumatic simultaneous severance of the carotid artery, jugular vein, and spinal cord. Between the atlas and the occipital." She studied the three men as she spoke, then seemed to dismiss Yeshe. He was obviously Tibetan. She paused over Shan's threadbare clothes and settled on addressing Sergeant Feng.

"I thought he was decapitated," Yeshe said hesitantly, glancing at Shan.

"That's what I said," the woman snapped.

"You can't be more specific about the time?" Shan asked.

"Rigor mortis was still present," she said, again to Feng. "I can guarantee you the night before. Beyond that…" She shrugged. "The air is so dry. And cold. The body was covered. Too many variables. To be more precise would require a battery of tests."

She saw the expression on Shan's face and threw him a sour look. "This isn't exactly Beijing University, Comrade."

Shan studied the poster again. "At Bei Da you would have had a chromatograph," he said, using the colloquial expression for Beijing University, the reference most commonly used in Beijing itself.

She turned slowly. "You are from the capital?" A new tone had entered her voice, one of tentative respect. In their country, power came in many shapes. One could not be too careful. Maybe this would be easier than he'd thought. Let the investigator live just a few moments, long enough to make her understand the importance of the accident report.

"I had the honor of teaching a course with a professor of forensic medicine at Bei Da," he said. "Just a two-week seminar, really. Investigation Technique in the Socialist Order."

"Your skills have served you well." She seemed unable to resist sarcasm.

"Someone said my technique involved too much investigation, not enough of the socialist order." He said it with an edge of remorse, the way he had been trained to do in tamzing sessions.

"Here you are," she observed.

"Here you are," he shot back.

She smiled, as though he were a great wit. When she did so the bags under her eyes disappeared for a moment. He realized that she was slender beneath the huge gown. Without the bags, and without her hair tied so severely behind her, Dr. Sung could have passed for a stylish member of any Beijing hospital staff.

Silently she made a complete circuit of the table, studying Sergeant Feng, then Shan again. She approached Shan slowly, then suddenly grabbed his arm, as if he might bolt away. He did not resist as she rolled up his sleeve and studied the tattooed number on his forearm.

"A trusty?" she asked. "We have a trusty who cleans the toilets. And one to wipe up the blood. Never had one sent to interrogate me." She paced about him with intense curiosity, as though contemplating dissection of the strange organism before her.

Sergeant Feng broke the spell with a sharp, guttural call. It was not a word, but a warning. Yeshe was attempting to ease the door open. He stopped, confused but obsequious, and retreated to the corner, where he squatted against the wall.

Shan read the report hanging at the end of the table. "Dr. Sung." He pronounced her name slowly. "Did you perform any tissue analysis?"

The woman looked to Feng as though for help, but the sergeant was inching away from the corpse. She shrugged. "Late middle-aged. Twenty-five pounds overweight. Lungs beginning to clog with tar. A deteroriated liver, but he probably didn't know it yet. Trace of alcohol in his blood. Ate less than two hours before death. Rice. Cabbage. Meat. Good meat, not mutton. Maybe lamb. Even beef."

Cigarettes, alcohol, beef. The diet of the privileged. The diet, he comforted himself, of a tourist.

Feng found a bulletin board, where he pretended to read a schedule of political meetings.

Shan moved slowly around the table, forcing himself to study the truncated shell of the man who had stopped the work of the 404th and forced the colonel to exhume Shan from the gulag, the man whose unhappy spirit now haunted the Dragon Claws. With his pencil he pushed back the lifeless fingers of the left hand. It was empty. He moved on, paused and studied the hand again. There was a narrow line at the base of the forefinger. He pushed it with the eraser. It was an incision.

Dr. Sung donned rubber gloves and studied the hand with a small pocket lamp. There was a second cut, she announced, in the palm just below the thumb.

"Your custodial report said nothing about removing an object from the hand." It had been something small, no more than two inches in diameter, with sharp edges.

"Because we didn't." She bent over the incision. "Whatever was there was wrenched free after death. No bleeding. No clotting. Happened afterward." She felt the fingers one by one and looked up with a blush of embarrassment. "Two of the phalanges are broken. Something squeezed the hand with great force. The death grip was broken open."

"To get at what it held."

"Presumably."