The Dark Root Page 28

  “Swell,” I said, sighing. “Where is Frazier? I was hoping he’d finish that briefing he was giving us.”

  “He’s on the phone.” Spinney stared intently into his soup. “You think this is safe to drink?”

  “I’m not about to find out. How’d things work out in Lebanon?”

  He took a tentative sip and raised his eyebrows. “Pretty good. Lebanon was a wash, as expected. We figured the angle of fire came from the supermarket parking lot across the river—confirms that car you saw.”

  “Silencer?”

  “Not necessarily. The water was noisy enough to cover a cannon. Whoever it was wasn’t taking chances on his marksmanship, though. The ME said he used one of those new Rhino jobbies that blow apart on impact. Looked like he’d swallowed a hand grenade. We combed the whole area, canvassed for witnesses… They’re still at it, more or less, but… How ’bout you? What did you learn from your new friend?”

  “That Da Wang’s declared war. He and his friends were supposed to hit a restaurant downtown, but they got lost and went to Plan B, which was the house. ’Course, Plan B was screwed up, too. They were supposed to kick in the doors and wipe the place out—make a statement no one would forget. My friend, as you call him, blames the lead car—said they lost their nerve and turned it into a drive-by. Da Wang’s going to have to improve on his talent.”

  “What’s the scope of this war?”

  “That’s where this kid fizzled out. I guess they knew enough not to give him the whole picture. He’s positive he was one of several teams, but he had no idea what the other targets were. Didn’t know who ‘Sonny’ was, either, although Da Wang’s made him their top priority. Nor did he know how much damage Sonny’s inflicted, although I guess we can assume things are not going well.”

  “What about the snakehead angle?”

  “That was more interesting. We were right about the alien smuggling—it’s a major cash cow, and it’s where Truong seems to be doing Da Wang the most harm. Da Wang has a new snakehead, but he’s having a tough time getting customers. Word’s gotten out the organization ain’t what it used to be. The RCMP’s been getting tip-offs—presumably from Truong’s crew—telling them where the illegals are being assembled prior to crossing. Chewy—the kid’s nickname—claims everyone’s getting sweaty palms, wondering if Da Wang’s losing his touch. Sonny’s taken over a lot of the Vermont restaurants, money’s started to dry up, and word’s gotten back to Da Wang’s backers in the old country. Truong has his own contacts there, so now alien and heroin suppliers are either playing both sides or holding off entirely until the dust settles.”

  “Guess Truong’s putting all those import-business contacts to use after all,” Spinney mused. “Makes you wonder if we’re missing the boat here. Could be all that bad-boy-goes-straight stuff was pure smoke screen.”

  I silently watched him as he sipped from his cup. It was an uncomfortably plausible point he’d just made, and one to which I was inordinately sensitive. In our line of work, greed, power, and frustration were the most popular criminal stimulants, and they tended to be expressed hot and fast. Ten-year-old, karma-induced revenge rarely came up. What were the chances I was overstating Truong’s motive—ennobling a crook whose ambitions were no different than Da Wang’s?

  I backed away from any hard-set conclusions, biding my time with a short-term truism. “Either way, we get the same mess on our hands.”

  Walt Frazier suddenly appeared at the doorway, looking worn and tired. Nearing retirement, he probably wished nights like these would be forever banished to his past. In that, he was not alone. Even Spinney, the youngest of us, looked ready for twelve hours of sleep. I doubted any of us would be allowed that luxury.

  “We gonna keep Chewy or let the Burlington PD have him?” I asked as Frazier approached.

  He pulled a molded-plastic chair over and sat down heavily, stretching out his legs. “That’s what I was trying to sort out. Maggie wants to see what we’ve got first. Nice interview, by the way—too bad it was such shitty news. I suppose we can hope the other hit teams are as brain dead as this one. I wish to hell he could’ve told us more—be nice to head ’em off, instead of running around picking up the pieces.”

  “We could do that if we knew what properties Truong controlled,” I mused, half to myself.

  “Oh—good luck with that one.” Spinney finished off his soup with one last gulp.

  Suddenly inspired by the challenge, I got up and moved over to a pay phone mounted on the wall. “There might be a way.”

  I picked up the receiver, dialed Dan Flynn’s pager number, and hung up, smiling. “Sweet revenge.”

  Five minutes later, the phone rang. “Morning, Dan. It’s Joe. Walt and Lester and I were shooting the shit up here in Burlington. Thought you might like to put in your two cents.”

  “Fuck you. What d’you want?” Flynn’s voice was barely a mumble.

  I laughed, feeling no guilt whatsoever. “A while back, you were telling me how some of the Asian restaurants get their supplies exclusively from outfits in New York or Boston—everything from napkins to noodles to menus.”

  “Yeah. They don’t buy anything locally.”

  “You said that’s what made it difficult to know what was in the delivery truck, or what might be moving from place to place.”

  “Right.”

  “What was your source for that? Is there someone we could talk to so we could identify one of these trucks—maybe put a tail on it? We’re trying to find a way to pinpoint Truong’s properties.”

  “I heard it at a conference in New York. Someone on the Asian-crime squad down there was talking about it. His name was… Damn. I don’t have my computer handy. Fred something… Wilkinson. Fred Wilkinson. Give him a call. He was real friendly.”

  I thanked him, dialed Information, and eventually worked my way to Wilkinson’s office, preparing to leave my name and pager number, along with a brief message. Instead, Wilkinson picked up in person, sounding as tired as I was.

  I briefly explained who I was and what we were up to. His response, almost cutting me off in mid-sentence, was, “Ryder, U-Haul, sometimes just a plain step-van. They don’t go regularly, they don’t follow the same route twice in a row, and most of the time they’re clean as a whistle.”

  “There been any upheavals at your end recently? A change in management at one of the suppliers?”

  “Who knows? But I wouldn’t waste my time with delivery trucks. Unless you got some inside dope, you’ll probably end up busting a shipment of rice.”

  His disinterest was as palpable as his fatigue. I thanked him for his time, and let him head off to bed—not without some envy.

  Spinney read my expression. “No soap?”

  “Not really…” I scratched my head. “Still… There’s a restaurant owner in Bratt who was squeezed by Truong’s boys. If we can squeeze him in turn, maybe we can get some help about the rest of the pipeline.”

  Spinney leaped to his feet in mock enthusiasm. “Hot damn. Another drive down the interstate?”

  That thought hadn’t occurred to me yet. “S’pose so.”

  Frazier spoke up. “Look, if you two are heading off again, let me at least give you the punch line to my briefing on Truong Van Loc. I think you’ll find it useful. The rest I can give later.”

  We both looked at him expectantly.

  “Joe, you were saying that when you stopped his car last winter, you thought none of them knew each other. Turns out that when Truong went legit, he had a small staff—mostly warehouse people to handle the imports. One of them was Henry Lam. Henry disappeared when Truong did. Apparently, they were pretty tight—the San Francisco police labeled Lam a surrogate son of sorts.”

  Spinney and I exchanged glances, having guessed at some kind of connection.

  “Also, I got the goods on Wang Chien-kuo. Not only was he in San Francisco at the time Truong’s little brother got whacked, he was one of the Dragon Boys leaders.”

  I stared at
him, the final large piece falling into place with satisfying logic. “Did he order the hit on Chinatown Gang?”

  “He was in a position to. Truong undoubtedly knows more about that than we do. We also found out that of the two known Dragon Boys shooters from San Francisco we thought were still alive, one was found badly decomposed two months ago in a Florida swamp—a confirmed drug killing. It took them till last week to match dental records. The last one hasn’t been seen in years—even his own family thinks he’s dead by now.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Spinney. “Profit may be part of what’s driving Truong Van Loc, but revenge is starting to look pretty reasonable.”

  24

  OUR FIRST STOP IN BATTLEBORO was the high school, and Amy Lee. Unfortunately, the hopeful enthusiasm that had fueled another long jaunt down the length of the state was met with sudden and ominous disappointment. According to the school’s principal, Amy had stopped coming to classes a week ago. Calls to her home had netted only a succession of excuses, from sickness to a trip to an ailing relative, all of which had suggested a call to us, something the principal had been planning to do the next day.

  We assured him we would find out what had happened to her. Personally, however, I was nervous. Given the battle we knew was forming—and some of the techniques we’d already witnessed—the taking of hostages didn’t seem too farfetched.

  We began by interviewing Amy’s friends, comparing the various explanations they’d received concerning her sudden absence. Stimulated by the inconsistencies we found there, we discreetly visited the neighbor who’d blown the whistle on the home invasion earlier, and discovered that Amy had not been seen or heard from for the past week. During that same period, however, strange cars had been stopping by the Lee house for brief visits, most of them sporting Canadian plates.

  The Lee house itself, with its shaggy lawn, drawn curtains, and utter lack of life, looked like an abandoned property up for sale.

  “Do we interview the other neighbors?” Spinney asked as we sat in my car. “If she was grabbed, maybe one of them saw something.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to tip any more people that we’re interested.” I moved to turn the key in the ignition and then stopped. “The one we do want to interview is Thomas Lee.”

  “Thought he told you to pound sand.”

  “That was before. He might’ve changed his mind. ’Course, chances are now he has a whole new reason not to be chatty.” I picked up the mobile phone, got the number for the Blue Willow Restaurant through Information, and called, asking for Thomas Lee.

  “This is Lee,” the familiar voice answered eventually, sounding halting and tired. I disguised my voice by dropping it a few malevolent notes lower. “Thomas. We need to talk. About Amy.” There was a pause and a hint of panic in his response, which confirmed our suspicions. “Is she okay? Who is this, please?”

  “Depends on you how she is, Thomas. You know the Old Guilford Road, out to Fort Dummer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go there now—take it all the way to the end and wait.” I hung up. Spinney gave me an admiring smile, something I didn’t feel I deserved. “You oughta’ be in pictures.”

  · · ·

  Fort Dummer was Vermont’s original white settlement, a blockhouse built in 1724 as a lookout against invaders from the north with designs on the more populated Massachusetts farmland to the south. Named after William Dummer, who with William Brattle and two Bostonians had bought a large chunk of what would become southeastern Vermont, the blockhouse stood as fitting, if symbolic, testimony to the vagaries of human enterprise. Left to stand forgotten in the woods for its first quarter century, the original site was now underwater, after the Vernon Dam drowned it in 1911. Still, sentiment being the historical apologist it can be, misty-eyed citizens eventually established both a monument to Fort Dummer and a small park in its name at the bottom of a dead-end road south of town. It was there that I’d instructed Thomas Lee to meet us.

  The Old Guilford Road is long, sparsely populated, has no side roads beyond a certain point, and allowed us a perfect opportunity to see if Lee was being followed. We could also get there faster than he could, which is exactly what we did, parking unobtrusively among other cars in the lot of a converted farmhouse, now home to the Vermont Agricultural Business Education Center.

  Ten minutes after our arrival, Thomas Lee drove by, alone, hunched over the steering wheel like an octogenarian trying to see the road.

  “Jesus,” Spinney muttered, “he doesn’t look too healthy.”

  We waited another quarter hour, during which no other car drove by, and then we pulled out of the lot to join Lee at the park.

  “What’s our approach?” Spinney asked as we drove the extra half-mile along an ever-narrowing road, gradually getting squeezed between a ragged string of occasional modest homes and I-91, which ran like a broad river just to our right and slightly below us.

  “Fast and hard. My bet is he’s only reacting now to whoever pushes the most.”

  We passed the open wooden gate and the sign welcoming us to the park. It being early in the season, there was no one manning the small booth astride the dirt road that led to the small parking area beyond. The place was abandoned. Almost.

  I spotted Lee’s car with its nose against a distant railing, and pulled up quickly on his passenger side, so he could get a clear view of me.

  His eyes widened predictably, and he shouted, “You. Get away. Get away. You’ll kill her.”

  He fumbled with his ignition, trying to start the engine so he could drive off. I piled out of our car, crossed over, and slid into his passenger seat. Spinney, more leisurely, came around and got into the back as I put my hand on top of Lee’s and switched the motor off again.

  He pulled his hand away as if I’d burned him, which in a sense I knew I had. “What are you doing? I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Then listen instead,” I said quietly. “No one’s watching us. We made sure of that. I’m no longer working for the Brattleboro Police, Mr. Lee. I’m a federal agent on an FBI task force, and I’m going after the same people who grabbed your daughter.”

  Lee was breathing fast, almost hyperventilating. His hands were back on the steering wheel, hanging on tight. “They will kill her if I talk to you. That is what they said.” His words were choppy, as if torn off and set adrift.

  “They don’t know we’re talking, and it’s too late now anyway. If they were watching, she’s history. It’s not up to you, Mr. Lee. It never has been.”

  I let those words sink in. Slowly, his breathing calmed, and his hands slid to the bottom of the wheel before finally dropping into his lap. He looked down at them, as if surprised they were there. “Why do you do this?”

  “Because it’s the only thing to do. You’re caught between two big rocks, Mr. Lee, and the only way your family can survive is to have at least one of them removed. You don’t help us help you, you can pretty much forget about Amy. How’s your wife?”

  He shook his head. “Not good.”

  “Amy goes, she goes, too. You know that.” I looked at him, so lost in his woes he barely knew we were there any longer, and I decided to take a gamble. “Mr. Lee, when we first met, your house had been destroyed, your daughter raped, your wife beaten and traumatized, and you had been coerced into using your restaurant to break the law.”

  His head lifted and he stared at me.

  I kept going, encouraged. “Since then, one of the three men who did that has died. The others are feeling the heat. But you’re not being squeezed by those people anymore, are you? You’re back under the control of Da Wang. Only now, instead of just harboring illegal aliens now and then, or turning a blind eye to the occasional dope deal in the kitchen, you’re being turned into a full-fledged crook. They claimed you’d been disloyal. That they didn’t trust you anymore. That you’d have to do more for them. And that Amy would be their guarantee of your cooperation. Am I wrong, Mr. Lee?”

  He shook
his head slightly. “No.” I could hear Spinney audibly releasing his breath, acknowledging the risk I’d just taken. “What makes you think the first bunch won’t come back—with a vengeance—and maybe do the same thing with your wife?”

  He didn’t answer but took a deep breath and shuddered.

  “You know they will, to save face if nothing else. Unless you help us change things, that’s the fix you’ll be in forever—being kicked back and forth, staying silent for the sake of your family, and watching them all die anyway.”

  I gave my words time to sink in.

  “I do not know what to do,” he finally whispered.

  “You’re worried we’ll ask too much—that you’ll be exposed and cause Amy’s death.”

  He nodded.

  “If you tell us what we need to know, that’ll be the end of it. You won’t see us again. Nobody’ll ever know we made contact.”

  A small furrow appeared between his eyebrows as he looked at me. “What is it?”

  “My guess is that you’re pretty much doing what you did before, with a few additions and in bigger numbers—processing aliens, credit-card receipts, laundering money, maybe some drugs… Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s what you did for Michael Vu’s gang?”

  “Yes.”

  “How was the contraband moved through your place, when you were cooperating with Vu?”

  He looked puzzled. “With Vu?”

  “Look,” I said, delivering my pitch. “I don’t want to put your daughter further at risk. Remember, I said we need to go after at least one of the rocks you’re stuck between? Let’s go after the lesser of the two—the one that’s not controlling you at the moment. It’s a way we can further disguise the fact that we ever had this conversation.”

  He nodded slowly. “I see.”

  “So how was it handled?”

  “The aliens came and went in cars or small buses, as they do now. All I did, and all I still do, is hold them for a little while.”

  “And the money laundering? The drugs?”

  “A man in a van would come by sometimes—I never knew when—and would pick up receipts and packages. Members of my staff—gang members—did all of that. I was just to run the restaurant. It is a good restaurant… An honest restaurant.”