The Dark Root Read online

  “What’s been happening?” I asked.

  Spinney didn’t look at me, his eyes fixed on the broad window opposite. “Old-time reunion. These two are chummy.”

  “What about the van?”

  He pointed to a side street to the right of the store. “Down there. About five minutes ago, the two of them—I guess the other one’s the owner—came out the side entrance and took in several boxes. Tango Two estimates about four of ’em. They’ve stayed in the back of the store ever since. The only one I can see from here is the girl at the counter, and she hasn’t moved.”

  He checked his watch. “It’s almost eight. I can’t tell if they’re open, or closed but still have the lights on.”

  At that point, as if responding on cue, the girl came around from behind the counter, locked the door, and pulled a shade down over it and the large window next to it.

  “Damn,” Spinney muttered. “Should’ve kept my mouth shut.”

  “What’d you think about getting a warrant? Find out what’s in the boxes?”

  I saw the glimmer of a grin in the dark. “Yeah.”

  I called Maggie Lanier on the mobile phone, explained our needs, and then flipped a coin with Spinney to decide which one of us was going to sign the application—and thus make the trip back to Burlington. He lost.

  I glanced out the window at the night sky. “You’ll love it—stars are out.”

  · · ·

  Nobody left the store that night. Eventually, all but the nightlights were put out on the ground floor, and others came on one floor above. In the few moments before the curtains were drawn upstairs, I could see the corner of what was obviously a front-facing living room. Presumably, the shipment having been secured somewhere safe, the three friends were settling down for a home-cooked meal and a well-earned night’s rest. I was looking forward to throwing a wrench into that.

  As it turned out, I never got the chance. Some three hours later—shortly before I expected Spinney back—a top-down convertible drove quickly down the main street and slowed suddenly before the store’s front window. Half asleep by now, despite the occasional radio chatter we’d been using to keep awake—I was only vaguely aware of what was going on. As if in sluggish slow motion, I focused on the driver, recognized his Asian features, and was bringing the radio up to my mouth when a passenger stood up in the back of the car and aimed something cylindrical at the building. There was a blinding flash as something went shattering through the store’s plate glass.

  “We got something…” was all I got out before the squealing tires of the departing car were overwhelmed by a tremendous explosion. The peaceful scene before me vanished in a stunning roar, rocking the car and sending me flying across the seat, my arm covering my head just as both side windows were blown in, followed by a wave of hot air and the by-now familiar clatter of falling debris.

  25

  THE CONTRAST BETWEEN ENDLESS NOISE and total darkness was enervating. I kept wishing one would give in to the other.

  “Mr. Gunther?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going to take the bandages off, just to see how we’re doing, and put in some more drops.”

  “Be my guest.”

  The emergency-room doctor—a young woman in her thirties—began peeling the tape that was holding the thick dressing firmly over my eyes. “You have a visitor, by the way.”

  “Hey, Joe.”

  I recognized Spinney’s voice, its usual levity dulled with concern. “Hey, Les. Did you catch ’em?”

  “They blew across the border at Derby Line like a rocket. The Mounties and the provincial police are on it now. Haven’t heard back yet. Probably won’t, either, if the escape went off as well as the attack.”

  The doctor murmured, “Okay—here we go,” and gently lifted the pads from my eyes. I squinted in pain, even though I could see the lights directly overhead had been turned off, and that the white curtain around my bed did a good job as a filter.

  “How’s the vision?” she asked me, her face about ten inches from mine.

  I blinked several times, trying to focus on her, and finally switched to Spinney’s face at the foot of the bed. “I haven’t gotten nearsighted, but everything else looks pretty good. They just hurt, and they’re sensitive.”

  She smiled but stayed put, watching me. “Okay, good. I’m going to shine a light in your eyes, just to make you really uncomfortable, and then I’ll put in some more drops. After that, you should be able to get out of here.”

  She wasn’t underrating her fancy penlight—it hurt like hell and made the tears pour down into my ears—but she seemed satisfied by what she saw.

  She straightened up, smiled again, and expertly administered some soothing, cool drops. “You’re all set. The effects of the flash will pass soon enough, and I seriously doubt you’ll have any permanent damage. I’ll give you some drops to self-administer, along with instructions and a pair of horrible-looking cardboard sunglasses you can use until you can get some decent ones. I think you’ll find you’ll need them for a couple of days, though, so don’t be heroic, and just put up with the jokes, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She nodded curtly. “You’re free to go—you can collect your belongings on the way out. Good luck.”

  Spinney watched her sweep aside the curtain and disappear into the surrounding hubbub of the rest of the ER. “I always get the old guys with bad breath.”

  “What’s left of the jewelry store?” I asked him, checking my watch. I’d been in the Newport hospital for four hours by now.

  “A hole in the ground. The fire chief owns the property till he declares it stone cold, so we still hadn’t been allowed in when I left, but those bastards did a job and a half. Maybe they learned from the idiots we caught in Burlington.”

  I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the gurney, my eyes already adjusted to the semi-gloom. “I take it nobody survived.”

  “Nobody and damned near nothing. Based on what you saw, ATF’s pretty sure they used a tube-fired rocket. They’ve got someone heading over to see what they can find in the rubble. It was propane, though, that set the place off like a roman candle. The rocket must’ve hit the gas tanks on the back side of the building.”

  I shook my head. “I was half-asleep. I only caught a glimpse of the driver—not enough to make an ID. I don’t even know what make of car it was… A dark four-door convertible is all I remember.”

  “We got all we need on the car. They caught it on video at the border. The Canadians’ll probably find it in a field in a few hours, fresh from somebody’s hot sheet. You ready to go?”

  I wandered behind him, half blinded, to the counter by the door, picked up my drops and floppy glasses, and finished the paperwork. Outside, it was still dark, and pleasantly cool, so I slipped the glasses into my breast pocket for future use.

  I used them at the fire scene, however, surrounded as it was with flashing red, white, and blue electronic strobes, not to mention firefighters equipped with powerful, erratically pointed flashlights. “Hole in the ground” turned out to be a highly accurate description of an erstwhile two-story building. Charred black and glistening with water, the rubble filling the cellar barely came up to my waist. Spinney and I and several other members of the surveillance team stood around the spot where we’d been staked out hours earlier, and watched the fire department slowly gather up its tons of equipment from the flooded street.

  The fire chief—short, square, and grim—came up to us, still dressed in his dirty bunker coat and helmet. He gave a curious glance at my Halloween spectacles, but addressed Lester Spinney. “I guess it’s all yours. I don’t suppose you can tell me what it was all about.”

  It wasn’t a question. Spinney shook his head. “Sorry. Thanks for your help.”

  He looked at us silently for a couple of seconds, shook his head, and left without further comment.

  · · ·

  It took us twenty-four hours—from the middle of one night t
o the middle of the next—to sort through the remains of the store. We were helped by not having to determine the cause of the fire—a question that sometimes involves weeks of painstaking reconstruction of the remnants of a building—but we did want to determine the fate of the boxes that had been carried inside just before the blast.

  Our methods were a demented cross between an archaeological dig and a landfill operation. The cellar hole was surrounded by two backhoes, several trucks, and a large generator, but it was filled with jumpsuit-dressed forensics types in rubber boots, some of them equipped with tweezers and small bags. Our reward, when it came, however, was delivered by a backhoe. As the blade cleared away one of the few remaining piles in the basement’s far corner, a large, sturdy, five-foot-tall metal safe came into view, its blackened, damp surface gleaming in the halogen lights rigged all around the hole. Word went out for a locksmith.

  Three hours later, in the privacy of the Border Patrol substation’s enclosed garage in nearby Derby, the locksmith turned the safe’s handle and began pulling open the door. Spinney stopped it from swinging wide enough to reveal the interior, and thanked the disappointed man with a cheery smile.

  The small bunch of us—Frazier had given in to curiosity and had joined us a half-hour earlier—waited until the locksmith had cleared the exit, and then Spinney let us all see what the fire had left behind. It being a modern, fireproof safe, our expectations had been high. What we saw immediately bore us out.

  Before us were stacks of money—hundreds of thousands of dollars—as well as banded bundles of credit-card receipts, jewelry, a small pile of gold bar, and several baggies filled with white powder—far more than would have fit into the few cardboard boxes delivered the night before.

  Spinney let out a low whistle and slipped on a pair of latex gloves. “Jesus, Joe. We just made our bosses some serious bucks.”

  The others laughed at his gleeful expression. I’d forgotten that being “local” officers—and working for a federal task force—both Spinney and I had made our departments eligible to share in any booty recovered during the investigation. An oddly piratical concept, it was a tempting inducement in persuading municipalities to farm their officers out for federal use. Just hearing Spinney’s comment, I knew my own previously disparaged involvement here was going to suddenly undergo a drastic facelift.

  Ironically, my personal satisfaction in this treasure was mixed. While its cash value would remove a lot of the heat I’d been getting back home, the lack of any documents in the safe meant we had no specific knowledge of how Truong Van Loc was running his small empire.

  After inventorying and shifting our findings to the Border-Patrol safe, Frazier, Spinney, and I retired to a small meeting room in another part of the building.

  “One thing we have going for us—I hope,” Frazier started off, “is that the sheer bulk of that loot indicates most of it was there before last night’s delivery.”

  “Making the jewelry store a bank?” Spinney asked.

  “Possibly the bank,” I added, my enthusiasm suddenly fired by Frazier’s comment. “If we’re lucky, Truong just took a serious hit to his wallet, and maybe to his whole operation.”

  Frazier made a deprecating gesture with his hand. “I don’t know that I’d go that far. Truong could probably refill that safe in a few months, especially if he squeezed his sources. And we don’t know how many other deals he has funding him.”

  “Don’t we?” I asked. The urge was growing inside me to make a few assumptions—always a risk in police work—and to take a few gambles. “His life history’s been put under a microscope. Has there been a single indicator recently of any operation besides this one?”

  Frazier admitted as much with a silent shake of his head.

  “Right, because while Vu and Lam and the others have been allowed to extort and steal what they can, keeping themselves occupied, Truong’s goal has been to destabilize Da Wang’s business, erode the protective shield around him, and then knock him off. But Truong’s monomania has made him vulnerable. He’s got one source of revenue, one way of collecting it, and only one bank to put it in.”

  “Joe—” Frazier began.

  “What?” I interrupted. “Have your sources picked up an inkling of something else?”

  Again, he conceded the point—unhappily.

  “Okay, let’s say we’ve closed the bank,” I resumed. “If we ask the local cops to visibly sit on each one of the outlets that supplied the cash, Truong’s pipeline’ll dry up. And with Da Wang applying pressure from his side, he’s going to have to come up with some replacement funds fast.”

  Frazier pursed his lips, but still remained silent.

  “The Vermont pipeline is crucial to Truong,” I pressed on. “Illegal aliens seem to be his primary cash commodity, and the pipeline his way of getting them to market. We’re guessing his old import-business contacts are busy recruiting in the old country, and that he has a collection of receivers in Boston and/or New York. But if we really have identified most of his Vermont network, and we and Da Wang together manage to even temporarily shut it down, he’s going to have to come up with a new way of moving aliens—fast.”

  Frazier’s face was still clouded, so I played my trump. “We’ve been on the defensive from the start. We got lucky with this bank, so now we need to press him—anticipate him. It doesn’t really matter if I’m right or wrong about the specifics of his setup. What matters is if we can somehow force his hand, ’cause, let’s face it, if we don’t do something soon, we’re going to wind up counting dead bodies again.”

  The allusion to Dennis’s ghost did the trick. “How’re we going to persuade a half-dozen municipal police forces to sit on Truong’s properties for free?” Frazier asked.

  “We can ask ’em, for starters,” Spinney answered cheerfully, readily accepting the idea. “Then, we can either help them—or embarrass them into helping us. If we use state troopers to do some of the sitting, I bet at least a few of the locals aren’t going to want to be frozen out.”

  “Besides,” I added, “we’re not talking about a total shutdown here—just a big enough presence to be a deterrent. If Da Wang keeps on the pressure, we won’t need a lot of time. Truong’s going to have to move fast to survive, and he’s going to want to try because he must feel he has Da Wang worried.”

  Walt finally gave in. “Well, what the hell. You guys work better together than most of us feds do. If you can do it, more power to you. But assuming we shut down Truong’s pipeline, what then?”

  “Dan Flynn told me a while back,” I answered, “that both the Border Patrol and INS had noticed a new operator in the game—that’s where the name Sonny cropped up early on. If we coordinate with their intelligence folks, maybe we can pick up a pattern that’s specific to Truong’s operation, and try to stake it out.”

  I paused to step back a little. “If any of my theory is right, Truong’s most obvious option is to try for a major influx of aliens, either a single large shipment—like in a truck—or a coordinated, broad-based border crossing. The first is quick, cost-efficient, doesn’t take many people, and entails one fast drive through Vermont to either Boston or New York. In eight hours, at the most, it’s a done deal. But it’s dangerous. If it’s stopped, he’s dead. The second option’s safer, but it means more people, more money, and more time. My hunch is he’d shoot for the first, because time and money are two things he’s short of.”

  “Well,” Spinney volunteered, “I can coordinate with Dan on squeezing the pipeline. His old-boy system ought to come in handy there.”

  Frazier looked at me. “I guess the two of us can meet with INS and the Border Patrol and see if we can identify a pattern in Truong’s border activities.” He shook his head, however, as he said it. “I got to tell you, though, as pie-in-the-sky as this whole deal is, I think finding a pattern is its weakest link. The Border Patrol does the best it can, but it’s guarding a friendly boundary, and even they admit that for every crosser they catch, there mig
ht be a dozen they miss. How’re you going to establish an accurate picture of illegal activity with a ratio like that?”

  My mind returned to this expanding case’s humble beginnings in Brattleboro, and to the one person we’d been able to put behind bars as a result—the tight-lipped Nguyen Van Hai. “We need an inside source,” I answered. “I’ve got one, but he’s going to need some work.”

  Frazier understood where I was headed. “That, I like better. I’ll talk to the other feds. You focus on making your man talkative.”

  · · ·

  Nguyen Van Hai was being held in Vermont’s maximum-security prison in St. Albans, above Burlington—the Northwest State Correctional Facility—coincidentally located near the Canadian border. But since I had no reason to think that he’d be any more open with me than he had been earlier, I returned to Brattleboro to do some homework first, hoping to discover the right conversational pry bar.

  I flew back to Dummerston with Al Hammond, who’d been nice enough—or curious enough—to stick around. I picked up my standard-issue undercover car where it was still parked at what the locals mockingly called Dummerston International, and drove into Brattleboro, relishing the familiarity of my surroundings. Paradoxically, it was only then that the aftereffects of the building blast fully took hold of me, conspiring with and adding to both Frazier’s dour outlook and my own previous self-doubts. The closer I got to the office, the less sure I became that any part of the plan I’d outlined in Derby was even remotely attainable.

  Seeing Harriet Fritter at her usual post was a help, however, not to mention her maternal reaction at seeing me wearing dark glasses indoors.