The Dark Root Read online

  Dr. James Franklin, the hospital’s primary general surgeon, stepped into the waiting room and looked around to see if we were alone. Infamous for an irreverent sense of humor that popped up at even the darkest times, he was deadly serious now, perhaps sensing just how far the ripples of this assault were already reaching.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked.

  Franklin joined me at the window and spoke softly. “Better than he should be. It’s lucky that bomb wasn’t filled with shrapnel. As it is, he still caught several pieces of metal and debris—nothing too serious, though. I gather his seat was completely reclined?”

  “Yeah. Pushed and tilted back, both. We wanted to give him as much room as possible to prop the ankle up.”

  “Right,” Franklin said, half to himself. “The ankle. I didn’t even look at that. The seat position saved him—took him out of the lateral blast path. With Dennis’s seat upright, it shielded him pretty effectively. Jesus, what a mess.”

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  Franklin didn’t respond as readily as I would have liked. “Probably. Not that you could tell it looking at him now. He can’t speak because of some minor searing of his airway. He’s also stone deaf as a result of dual fractured eardrums, and his vision is cloudy. He’s got several fractured ribs, a fractured leg, a few burns, the puncture wounds I mentioned from the debris, and a headache to beat the band—all of which will probably heal with time.”

  “Including the hearing?”

  “A little intervention might be called for there. I’m shipping him up to Mary Hitchcock Hospital today or tomorrow so they can check him over. He’ll be out of circulation for at least a month, although partly as an outpatient.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “You can look at him, through a window, but he’s out like a light. We gave him some meds to make him sleep.”

  “Did you take a look at Dennis?” I asked after a slight pause.

  Franklin’s tone became a shade more formal. “The ME brought me in for a quick consult, just to help me in my treatment of Tony.”

  “What did you find?”

  Franklin sighed.

  “I could tell you the old cliché that he didn’t feel a thing. That wouldn’t be far off the mark. Gould said the metal cap of the pipe bomb hit him like a slug from an elephant gun, right under the xiphoid process, through the diaphragm, and totally bisecting the aorta. There are few better ways to almost instantly kill a man.”

  “So it was a pipe bomb?”

  “Definitely. But like I said, the only shrapnel came from the pipe casing itself and odd pieces of…” He hesitated.

  “What?” I asked sharply.

  “I was going to say debris again. But in case you come across it in one of the reports, you ought to know I found bits of Dennis’s bone in Tony. That’s going to entail some blood work we normally wouldn’t do—just in case somebody asks.”

  “Like an HIV test?”

  He made a sour face. “Among others. I know it’s not likely, but better safe than… Well, you know. That would be a hell of a note, wouldn’t it?” Then he repeated, “God, what a mess. Does this have anything to do with that little show you put on for our patients yesterday?” He motioned with his chin toward the parking lot.

  I shook my head. “Who the hell knows?”

  · · ·

  Morningside Cemetery occupies the top and eastern slope of a hill overlooking the broad Connecticut River, contoured so that to stand in its middle is to be utterly alone among its hundreds of variously sized gravestones. The curve of the hill masks all other signs of civilization—the town to the west and north, the railroad track and the road paralleling the river below disappear beyond the close horizon. It is an island of utter calm, gazing out at the area’s two most prominent features, which the rest of Brattleboro routinely ignores: the river, to which all of downtown turns its back to face Main Street; and Wantastiquet Mountain in neighboring New Hampshire, most often screened from view by buildings, but looming from such a height, and from so nearby, that when it occasionally catches the eye, through an alley or over a low rooftop, it does so like an eminently threatening thundercloud.

  Dennis DeFlorio’s grave was to enjoy this dramatic, beautiful, neglected view forever.

  There were hundreds of people at the burial—most of them in uniform—fanning out in concentric circles from the awning-shaded casket and the decorously camouflaged hole beside it, unhampered by the walls of the small church that had excluded all but a few of them at the service earlier.

  The killing of a police officer does that to other men and women who wear badges for a living—stimulates them to convene as they never will for other occasions. They will travel hundreds of miles, from several states away and from Canada, to pay their respects—not so much to a person they never knew, but in homage to an exclusive, lonely, tribal occupation that no one besides them fully understands. Every cop who dies in the line of duty does so alone—in surprise; and perhaps for that reason, every other cop who can do so attends the interment, if for no other reason than to atone for arriving too late.

  Gail was there with me, coming down once more from her studies in South Royalton. As an ex-selectman with an unusually high profile, her presence was noticed by a department that had once perceived her as one of the bosses, and was all the more appreciated given the slant of her politics.

  Not that politics came into it here, as it might have in another town, where finding fault or gaining advantage are often knee-jerk reactions to crisis. For a place as culturally diverse as Brattleboro, there was still an intense sense of community, heightened in such times because people felt it slowly eroding away despite the high pitch of their well-intentioned nostalgia.

  Unlike in Boston, or even many of its neighboring communities, this town’s civilian population did not take the death of one of its police officers in stride. It was as stunned and bewildered as the tiny group weeping by the side of the casket. Dennis’s wife, Emily, and his two young children, were like the splash in the center of a sun-dappled pond, where the reflections came not from rippling water, but from the rows upon rows of parade-ground uniforms, from gleaming buttons, belt buckles, and badges stirred in among the dark-clad citizens of the town. The small family’s sorrow spread out to the farthest reaches of the crowd, to be absorbed, reproduced, and offered up for public scrutiny by a semicircle of cameramen, photographers, and reporters.

  After it was over, after the ritual salute by weapons fire, the folding of the flag, the speaking of words that didn’t remotely reflect the man in the casket, the crowd melted away over the monument-studded horizon and abandoned the cemetery workers to their practical work with shovel and backhoe.

  Gail and I went for a walk among the gravestones, some of which dated back two hundred years. We walked without speaking, holding hands, until we found a comfortable-looking marker, wide enough for us to lean against, facing the enormous, silent mountain across the water.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked after a while.

  “That of all the cops in the department, Dennis was the one guaranteed to die in his bed—probably from choking on a donut. I was the one who suggested taking the Jeep. Why did he offer to drive? He normally didn’t volunteer for anything. I guess he’d gotten into this case—something about it had caught him up—made him enthusiastic…”

  “Not a bad time to go, if you have to. That’s something.”

  But I shook my head emphatically. “He didn’t die at the right time, or for a noble cause. He was butchered. The poor dumb son of a bitch was blown apart by some bastard who didn’t give a shit who he killed. Dennis DeFlorio is a monument to somebody’s twisted pride—a status symbol, like some fucking tattoo.”

  I paused to pluck at a few tufts of grass. “Worst part is, I’d been told a cop was being targeted. I just didn’t take it seriously.”

  Then I returned to a sore that had been festering in me for days. “Same thing with Vince Sharkey.
Alfie Brewster might’ve set up that shoot-out, but I was the one who got Vince all worked up. And then I canceled the tail we had on him.”

  “None of this is your fault, Joe.”

  I didn’t argue with her. “Tony told me the post-shoot investigator thought we’d played a little loose going into that deal. He was right. It wasn’t Ron’s fault we both almost got killed. I’m his boss. It was mine.”

  Gail was not cooperating. “You’re feeling sorry for yourself. You didn’t kill Dennis. And Ron would’ve been dead, too, if you hadn’t been there. Ask yourself instead, ‘What do I do now?’ The department’s in shock, and with Tony out of commission, you’re the one they’ll be looking to for leadership. You’ve got to give them something to focus on.”

  It was then, as if responding to some oddly theatrical cue, that Billy Manierre found us.

  He came obliquely, his uniform hat in hand, as if ready to shy off at the slightest notice. His eyes were fixed on Gail, his old-school training sensitive to any hysterical feminine outburst she might spontaneously indulge in.

  Instead, she smiled warmly, as most people did on greeting Billy—the living embodiment of the round, friendly, cop-on-the-beat.

  “Have a seat.” She patted the thick grass next to her.

  He predictably demurred, standing awkwardly instead, looking around as if in fear of an ambush.

  I got to my feet to make him feel more comfortable. “What’s up?”

  “I was going back to the station—see to the paperwork and all—but I thought maybe we ought to talk a little before. It’ll probably be a nuthouse back there—lot of media back in town, lot of people wanting to bend my ear…”

  I helped him out. “You’d like an update?”

  “If you’re up to it. I know this may not be the time or place.”

  My eyes slid off his face and strayed across the river. Legend had it that once, years ago, there’d been a fire on top of Wantastiquet, and that when firefighters had started climbing its steep, tree-choked slopes, they’d been met and scattered by an avalanche of rattlesnakes, all fleeing downhill in a writhing mass. Apocryphal or not, the story had its own curious appeal to me right now.

  “No—that’s fine. I can do that,” I began, and then, both stimulated by Gail’s pep talk and yielding to the smoldering frustration that Dennis’s death had finally made unbearable, I added, “I’m about to spring something on you, though. Something I kicked around with Jack Derby and Tony a few days ago. Tony wasn’t too keen on it. But I’d like to make a pitch to Walter Frazier that the FBI create a task force—involving me—to take this case over.”

  Billy’s mouth opened slightly in surprise. “Boy, Joe. That’s a little out of the blue. I mean, I heard something about it, but… What would that mean for us?”

  As I spoke, my determination grew, along with an intoxicating sense of relief. “That I’d be reassigned. The department would still pay my salary, and the FBI would pick up the expenses and overtime. That’s if Frazier’s interested. It would release our manpower to catch up on other work, cut down on the overtime we’ve been racking up, and allow you to tell the press that the whole mess is out of your hands and that they can serenade the FBI for further details.”

  “Jesus, Joe. I don’t think Tony’ll go for this.”

  “Maybe not, but he’s flat on his back with a nose full of tubes. You’re the chief now.”

  His discomfort began to gel into opposition. “I’m acting chief. I can’t authorize something like this.”

  I looked at him closely. “Billy, I talked to a cop in Montreal this morning named Jean-Paul Lacoste. He’s their Asian-gang expert up there. He told me the man who got whacked in Montreal right after we stopped that car with Truong and Lam and the other guy last winter worked for a Chinese leader named Da Wang, that he’d been Da Wang’s right-hand man in charge of the Montreal–Vermont–Boston illegal-alien pipeline. He was what they call a snakehead—a runner of illegals.”

  “Okay,” Billy said cautiously.

  “Dan Flynn says there’s been lots of new activity in illegal aliens—that the name ‘Sonny’ has been cropping up, as a rival snakehead. And using our photo of Truong, Dan’s also established that Sonny and Truong are the same person.”

  “So Truong replaced Da Wang’s snakehead?” Billy asked, visibly confused.

  I shook my head. “It’s more complicated than that. At first, I thought the snakehead had played a role in killing Truong Van Loc’s brother, and that he was killed for revenge. But as far as we know, the snakehead had never been to the U.S. Plus, if that had been Truong’s goal, why’s he still around? I think Truong is making a grab for Da Wang’s business, although I still don’t know why.”

  “Making Brattleboro’s troubles part of an international conspiracy,” Gail spoke up from near our feet, “which is what would make this attractive to the feds.”

  “We’re not going to be able to solve this case from here, Billy,” I pressed him. “And to keep trying is only going to frustrate our own people. But if I go federal and become a liaison to the department, I can keep them involved—give them a sense that Dennis’s death is something they’re still a part of, if only by proxy.

  “Look at what we’re holding otherwise. We already swept the streets for every Asian we could find and got zip. J.P. checked every hardware and sporting-goods store within fifty miles of here for the type of pipe and powder used in that bomb and found nothing. And that’s because it was done by an outside team, just the way Da Wang’s snakehead was hit. Sally warned us they were going to take out a cop, and that’s exactly what they did. Now it’s our choice—we can either keep pissing around, putting names to people we can’t locate, or we can confront them on their own turf and use federal muscle to close them down.”

  Billy shifted his weight and crossed his arms, staring out across the river. He finally shook his head in exasperation.

  “What?” I asked, after he said nothing.

  “I was just wishing I hadn’t walked over here.”

  17

  WALTER FRAZIER LOOKED FROM ME TO Dan Flynn. The three of us were sitting in his office in Burlington, several days after Dennis’s funeral. “A task force made up of you two?”

  “No,” I answered. “The state police is the official applicant. That’s why we’re here and not talking to Bishop in Rutland. Being head of VCIN, Dan wouldn’t be in the field. The state police would assign someone, and the two of us would interact with all the appropriate agencies—federal and local—as needed. The number of people involved from other agencies would vary.”

  “And I’d be running it,” he stated, his voice flat.

  “Right—or whoever you’d appoint. It would be a Bureau-sanctioned operation, but without the overhead and loss of manpower to you. And if the Bureau pays our tab instead of the Department of Justice, then I and whoever Dan’s bosses assign could be deputized as U.S. Marshals and act as federal officers.”

  Frazier was beginning to smile. “The U.S. Attorney’s office’s will smell a rat. They’ll wonder why we need a new task force when there’re so many around already.”

  Flynn and I exchanged glances. “In my experience,” Dan answered, “there are two types of task forces—the ones where everybody’s focused on a specific job, which means they won’t want us messing things up, and the ones with virtually open contracts, like the generalized local-federal drug task forces, which can get to be so much like departments unto themselves that we’d end up on the bottom of their in-tray just like any other new case. The Windham County SA has signed onto this idea, and we flew it by Maggie Lanier—one of the U.S. Attorney’s assistants—and she was interested.”

  Frazier’s smile widened. “Which means when you pitch this to the U.S. Attorney himself, he’ll already have a letter from Derby, and several in-house memos on his desk from Lanier, all telling him what a good idea it is. What an amazing coincidence.” He leaned back in his chair and locked his hands behind his neck. “Assuming I toss
this idea upstairs, what’s going to make my DC bosses go along with it?”

  “Asian organized crime—including money laundering, card fraud, alien smuggling, and murder. Plus, it’s international and it’ll be good PR with the Canadians.”

  Dan added, “It’s also small, cheap, efficient, and completely under your control, and Joe’s already done a lot of the spade work, which was one of the big selling points to Lanier. Not to mention that if it flops, nobody’ll probably ever hear about it, while if we hit it big, then everybody shares and you get to look like a benevolent Big Brother.”

  “Walt,” I picked up, feeling more and more like a junk-bond salesman, “we’re not asking you to buy into some huge, unwieldy operation that’s going to drag on forever. I couldn’t afford that personally. The only reason I’m here is because my chief is flat on his back in the hospital and I browbeat our second-in-command into letting me make this pitch. But if I’m not back at my desk in pretty short order, somebody else will be.”

  I leaned forward in my chair. “As that report makes clear”—I pointed at the document on his desk that I’d faxed him a few days earlier—“I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. We’re after two organizations fighting a turf war in Vermont, both of which have strong ties to, or interest in, Montreal. I’ve got a growing number of names and faces, one of which is already in jail, and I think, if we can use state and federal muscle, that we can take these people apart. We can go where they go, document what they’re up to, and shut at least one of them down, almost like a special-interdiction unit.”

  Walt looked at Dan. “So how do you fit in? VCIN’s role isn’t going to be affected by any of this, is it? You’ll still be gathering and passing along information like before, right?”

  I answered instead. “VCIN’s the key to the whole operation. I need the clout, the laws, and the jurisdiction that you can grant me, but I’m going to be working in-state a lot. Dan’s still putting his network together, but he already has more contacts statewide than any other agency, including yours. Which means our de facto task force will be as big as VCIN itself—at no additional cost. Through it, I’ll not only know what’s going on in all the local nooks and crannies that might help us, I’ll also know who to contact and who to avoid, including inside the various federal agencies. That knowledge will help streamline things incredibly, allowing us—more or less—to pick and choose who we work with, which will mean cutting down on red tape and on some of the crankier personalities.”