An found the second journey because the totals did not add up.
The contractor had supplied a statement covering Yansheng’s hotel and transport. Luo forwarded it as proof that his employee had completed the assignment. An printed it at work during her lunch break and put a ruler beneath each row.
There was a transfer to the airport. There was a transfer back.
She called Yanchuan. In Kenya it was still morning. He was sitting on the hotel bed, drying a shirt with a hairdryer because he had packed for a shorter visit.
“The return was canceled,” he said.
“The flight was missed. That doesn’t explain a second fare.”
She sent a photograph. He enlarged it until the receipt number filled his screen. The first journey had been entered at sixteen forty-two on Friday, October 30. The second was entered forty-seven minutes later. Beside it, a short description said, return to service office.
He turned off the hairdryer.
“Does that mean he came back?”
“It means somebody billed for bringing something back. A passenger, luggage, a driver who was turned around. Ask for the booking.”
The transport company answered in the afternoon. Amina had helped find its published office number; the contractor then authorized the accounts clerk to discuss the disputed charges. The clerk spoke quickly and sounded irritated that an unsettled account had become her problem.
“We charge for a vehicle once dispatched,” she said. “Sometimes people think no passenger means no cost.”
“Who ordered the second journey?”
“Same account.”
“And who traveled?”
“The driver fills the trip sheet. I have the invoice.”
Yanchuan nearly asked for the driver’s personal number. Instead he asked whether the company could preserve the sheet and give it to the investigator handling the case. The clerk’s tone changed when he supplied the reference. She told him which office should receive the request.
That evening Luo called him to say they were troubling people who had already cooperated.
“We asked about a charge.”
“Accounts descriptions are not a travel history.”
“Then please stop using the hotel payment as a sighting.”
Luo was quiet. Yanchuan could hear a printer running at his end. He imagined the man beside it, holding documents he might not have read before speaking to the family.
“I will correct that wording,” Luo said at last.
An joined the next call. She had her son’s homework beside her and kept moving the microphone away to answer him. Yanchuan resented the interruptions until he heard the boy trying to pronounce a word his father usually helped with.
The trip-sheet request went through the case contact. The company sent a scan to the investigator, who later relayed a limited detail to the family: the return had been ordered by the contractor’s dispatcher. The driver’s entry recorded no passenger on that leg. It recorded a sealed document envelope.
For several seconds Yanchuan stared at the message. His brother had become an envelope, then an empty seat.
“The first leg?” he asked.
Not established from this sheet. The driver was being contacted about the earlier booking separately.
He pressed the phone against his forehead. An waited. She had learned that when he stopped speaking, he was usually trying to build a conclusion faster than the facts could hold it.
“Why send documents back to a service office?” he said.
“Maybe because somebody needed them there.”
“The acceptance package.”
“Maybe. We don’t know what was inside.”
He added the dispatcher’s order to the chronology. An corrected the column heading from journey made by Yansheng to vehicle booking associated with assignment. The line grew longer and less satisfying.
After the call, a hotel employee knocked to ask whether he needed fresh towels. Yanchuan had left his damp shirt over both of the old ones. He apologized and gathered it up. Outside his window, a minibus sounded its horn, taking people home from jobs whose endings nobody would have to reconstruct.
Before sleeping, he looked at the two fares again. The second no longer promised to show where his brother had gone. It showed where someone had wanted a package to go, and who had been willing to pay for it.