The Dark Root Read online

  She took a deep breath and turned slightly toward me, her face flushed and streaked with tears. I held up a shot of Edward Diep, the driver of the Nova, using him to warm her up to the process and expecting to draw a blank.

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Okay. That’s fine. Here’s another one.” I held up Henry Lam’s picture, saving Truong and Vu’s for last.

  But my plan, and my hopeful expectations, were upended. Amy focused on Lam’s sneering, insolent face, let out a scream, and began grappling wildly with the door handle, trying to escape from the car, her body thrashing hysterically.

  I dropped the pictures and grabbed hold of her, wrestling her arms to her sides to spare us both possible injury, and then gave her as comforting a body hug as I could in that awkward confinement, issuing soothing noises into her ear as I did so. Had there been any witnesses to all this, I knew I would have made immediate dual appearances before a disciplinary board and on the front page of the newspaper. As it was, we just sat there for several minutes, until I felt confident enough to release her.

  I then surreptitiously locked her door, started the engine, and began to drive as quickly as I safely could toward Women for Women and whatever solace they could offer her. From what I had just witnessed, they had their work cut out for them.

  During the drive, I kept up a steady patter, fueled partly by my own guilt, but also to keep her from doing anything drastic. Her reaction had made me wonder if this girl, traumatized and isolated and emotionally cast adrift, wasn’t veering precariously close to self-destruction.

  I never did show her the last two pictures, as badly as I wanted to. But putting Henry Lam at the scene had convinced me that the three Asian-related events were interconnected—parts of something bigger. The trick was going to be deciphering the common connection.

  Susan Raffner, the director of Women for Women, and one of Gail’s best friends, came out personally to greet us as I pulled into the center’s driveway. I’d told her something about the situation over the phone, but I could tell from her expression that she hadn’t been expecting the near–basket case I delivered. And yielding to a cowardly instinct, I didn’t confess how much I’d exacerbated the situation. Amy Lee would get the same supportive treatment either way, and I wouldn’t have to put up with the deservedly baleful comments I knew I’d get otherwise.

  It was with some relief, therefore, that I heard Dispatch trying to locate me over the car’s mobile radio just as I was wrapping up the introductions.

  I leaned in through the driver’s window and unhooked the microphone. “M-80, this is O-3.”

  “Could you hook up with O-10 at 234-B Canal?”

  “10-4.”

  I made the appropriate noises to the two women, neither of whom was paying much attention to me, and took my leave.

  “O-10” was Willy Kunkle’s radio name, and the address I’d been given was one of a collection of more or less derelict buildings that were used as either storage units or auto-body shops, one of which I was hoping had painted the last car in Benny’s life.

  I pulled up to a place advertising wheel alignments, body work, and while-you-wait grease jobs, and saw Kunkle leaning against the doorjamb of one of the bays, either enjoying the promising but still-anemic spring sunshine or trying to escape the screaming sounds of power tools emanating from within. He had the contented look of a truant officer who’d just nailed one of his worst offenders.

  “You find the painter?” I asked as I walked up to him.

  “Moe Ellis—body man by day, artist by night.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the gloomy interior of the bay behind him. “He’s inside.”

  “You talk to him yet?”

  “Nope. Thought I’d leave the honors to you. You want me to hang around?”

  I nodded. “You’ll scare him a hell of a lot more than I will.”

  “I scare everybody more’n you do,” he muttered as he abandoned his sunny spot to follow me inside.

  The noise enveloped us like an ear-splitting fog, accompanied by the pungent odor of hot metal. One car occupied the center bay like a body stretched out on a morgue table, its paint either overcoated with red Bondo or ground away to bare steel, and completely covered with a layer of dark grit. One man, wearing ear protectors and a breathing mask, was leaning into a door panel with a sander, and another, partly obscured by the hood of the car, was sending up a shower of fiery sparks from a welding torch.

  I glanced back at Kunkle, who pointed at the welder.

  We stepped through the tangle of power cords and air hoses snaking across the floor and approached Moe Ellis from the front, struggling not to look at the mesmerizing, retina-burning chip of sun where the torch tip touched the metal. I stood patiently, waiting for him to finish his weld. Kunkle, true to form, killed the gas at the bottle. Behind us, the grinder suddenly died.

  Ellis straightened, startled, and looked around, blinded by the dark lens of his helmet. “What the fu—” he began muttering as he lifted the visor, and then he froze, his eyes fixed on Kunkle, whose powerful right hand was still resting on the control knob of the acetylene bottle.

  “Hey, Moe.” Willy gestured with his chin to the other man, who was staring at us uncertainly. “Go get some coffee.”

  Ellis looked from one of us to the other. With a theatrical flourish, I pulled out my badge and wordlessly showed it to him, my expression as cold and still as Kunkle’s. Ellis’s companion quickly left the building.

  “Been up to no good, Moe,” Willy said flatly.

  “What? I haven’t done nothin’.”

  “How ’bout an eighty-six Duster, with a brand new coat of midnight blue?” I asked.

  There was a telling hesitation. “You got the wrong guy. I haven’t done a paint job in months, and that was an Olds—red.”

  Kunkle shifted his weight. It wasn’t much of a gesture, but Ellis took a frightened step backward, bumping into a large tool chest on casters.

  “Moe, there’s nothing illegal about painting a car, unless you know something about it you shouldn’t.”

  Ellis licked his lips. “What do you guys want?”

  “Tell us you painted it,” Willy said.

  “Okay. I painted it.”

  “For who?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It was delivered to my place when I wasn’t there, and the deal was done on the phone.”

  This time, Kunkle stepped forward, took the welder’s helmet off Ellis’s head, and placed it on the tool chest behind him, bringing his face two inches from the other man’s. “Careful, Moe.”

  “We’re digging into a murder case, Moe. Not car theft,” I added.

  His eyes grew wider. “I don’t know nothin’ about murder.”

  “So tell us about a hot car instead.”

  There was a long, quiet moment while he considered his options.

  “I want a lawyer,” he finally said.

  “You don’t need a lawyer, you stupid bastard,” Kunkle said in a near-whisper.

  Ellis pulled at his ear nervously. “I don’t?”

  “Who delivered the car, Moe?” I asked.

  “You’re not looking to nail me?”

  Neither one of us responded. He hesitated again and finally said, “Benny Travers?” as if it were a question.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “What he usually… I mean, he said he was in a hurry.”

  Kunkle retreated to his previous position at the gas bottle. “So when did you do it?”

  “The same night—the night before he died.”

  “And when did he pick the car up?”

  “Right after. He never left.”

  Willy’s eyes narrowed. “What bullshit is that? He took it wet?”

  Ellis looked slightly alarmed again. “Not wet-wet, but before it shoulda been moved.”

  “Why, Moe? Why the rush?” I asked again, searching for the panic that had dogged Benny’s heels.

  “I don’t know.”
<
br />   Kunkle suddenly lunged forward and punched the helmet next to Ellis’s head, sending it clattering across the floor. “Stop fucking with us, asshole. You let him drive away without asking? Not even you’re that spaced out.”

  Ellis actually cringed, crouching down near the car’s bumper, and raised his hand to shield his face. “Jesus Christ. What’s with you guys? I really don’t know. I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me. I told him it would screw up the job—that he was just pissing his money away—but he wasn’t interested. He told me to fuck off.”

  “He was nervous?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’m telling you. He hung around while I did the job—kept bugging me to hurry up… Not to worry about the fine stuff. Drank every beer I had in the goddamn house. He was wired.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  Ellis shook his head. “Nope. Just said he had to get movin’—not where, and not why.”

  “You know where he was living?”

  “I heard he had a place on Elliot once, but I also heard he moved. He did that a lot.”

  That much we’d already found out. “And you never saw or heard from him again?”

  He straightened up slowly, sensing the worst had passed. “Next I knew, a couple-a days later, I was readin’ he’d been the one that got fried in that crash. Was that the murder you talked about?”

  Willy gave him a withering look. “Don’t think out loud, Moe. It doesn’t make you look good. We said a murder—not his.”

  Ellis gave a small shrug.

  “And don’t think,” Kunkle added, “that you’re still working part-time painting hot cars. That’s over. You’re on our shit list now, get it?”

  He nodded silently.

  “And don’t forget that we just did you a big favor. Right?”

  He began looking thoroughly depressed, realizing what this favor might cost him someday. “Okay.”

  We left him to contemplate life’s odd twists of fate.

  · · ·

  Sammie Martens was waiting in her car when we stepped outside the body shop. “I heard you guys were here. Didn’t want to barge in and catch Willy torturing another witness.”

  To my regret, Willy smiled with pride.

  “You got something?” I asked, slightly irritated.

  Sammie was looking pleased herself. “I found out where Travers ordered his last pizza, and where it was delivered.”

  My mood thus brightened, I bowed theatrically and gestured to the street. “Lead on. We’re right behind you.”

  We didn’t have far to go. We returned down Canal to Birge, along which the old Estey Organ warehouses stood side by side, clad entirely in dark slate—the latest in fire prevention well over a hundred years ago—and descended Baker Street to the bottom of a steep dead end.

  Where Sammie eventually pulled to a stop was typical of Brattleboro’s eccentric layout. From being in the middle of Vermont’s fourth-largest town at the top of the hill, we were now in the dooryard of a rambling, sagging, decrepit old farmhouse, perched on the edge of a large, weed-choked field. Blocked from our view by trees and brush, our urban surroundings might as well have been a figment of imagination. Even its sounds were muffled by the distant rushing of nearby Whetstone Brook.

  But the place held little charm. What some other town might have exploited as the sylvan setting for a condo project, or a pocket municipal park tucked away by the water’s edge, the powers here had left to rot. The building was deserving of an arsonist’s care, and the field had been scarred by a wide dirt road leading to a scattering of retired appliances, rusting car bodies, and assorted trash.

  We assembled in front of the silent, abandoned-looking building.

  “This is it?” Kunkle asked quizzically.

  Sammie merely crossed the hardscrabble front yard and hammered on the door with her fist. The sound echoed dully throughout the house.

  “When did the delivery take place?” I asked, joining her on the rickety porch.

  She was peering through one of the side windows. “A little over an hour before we found him in flames. I talked to the delivery boy and showed him Benny’s mug shot. No doubt about it.”

  I stood beside her, shading my eyes with my hands to see through one of the dusty panes. “You know who owns this?”

  “Gregory Rivière. He’s behind on his town taxes, and he comes up on our computer as a ‘known associate,’ but we’ve never actually nailed him for anything. From what I could find out, he’s originally from Wisconsin and did some drug time in New York. He’s supposed to be out of town right now.”

  “Well,” I said, straightening up and wiping the dust from my hands, “I guess we better round up a search warrant.”

  For the second time in a quarter hour, Sammie smiled with self-satisfaction, retrieving the very document from her back pocket and handing it to me. “Blessed by the Honorable Judge Harrowsmith himself.”

  Kunkle laughed behind me and turned the doorknob. The door swung open without protest.

  We crossed the threshold and paused. There is always a sense of trespass that accompanies an uninvited search, unabated by the knowledge that we are there by legal sanction. I can always feel the absent owner’s spirit cringing as we poke about, examining details unknown by even his or her most intimate friends. On the other hand, the uneasiness is counterbalanced by an intense curiosity, suddenly unleashed to run rampant to its heart’s content. All the taboos of closed doors and forbidden rooms, drummed into us from childhood, are removed. Armed with a search warrant, especially one worded as generally as what Sammie had secured, we were freer than thieves in the night.

  The initial pickings, however, didn’t generate much excitement. Befitting a house with no lock on the front door, the place at first didn’t offer any more than the junk-clotted field below it. Sparsely furnished, evil-smelling, choked with dust and mildew, it appeared totally deserted.

  Until Sammie appeared from around the kitchen door, pale and serious. “I think I got something.”

  I’d been combing the contents of a box-strewn dining room, finding nothing but old clothes and unpacked household items. Willy appeared from the neighboring living room, attracted by the tone of Sammie’s voice.

  We both joined her at the kitchen entrance. “I don’t think we should go much beyond here without calling Tyler,” she advised.

  Over her shoulder, we could see the remnants of a bag of chips and the famous pizza, part of it still in its box, along with one half-eaten piece, draped like a Salvador Dalì imitation over the edge of the counter, its red drippings hard and dry on the floor beneath it.

  As in some perverse parody, however, the floor and counter weren’t soiled only by old tomato sauce. There were large quantities of dry blood intermixed with it, extending far beyond the capabilities of a single pizza. A ragged trail of it led across the floor to a chair, which was daubed in enough dry blood to look sloppily painted with the stuff.

  “Far out,” Kunkle murmured admiringly.

  “What do you think?” Sammie asked. “Grabbed from behind as he stood at the counter, his back to this door, cut or hit hard enough to make him bleed, and then dragged to the chair?”

  “By at least two men,” Kunkle agreed. “Benny was a big boy.”

  Along the wall next to us there was a row of glass-doored cabinets over a second counter. Sammie pointed to shards of glass and more blood splayed across its surface, indicators of another wound. “He must’ve put up a fight.”

  But I was looking at the chair, less interested in how he’d been brought there than in what had happened to him once he’d been seated. Against Sammie’s good advice, I carefully picked my way across the room, studying the floor as I went, making sure my feet disturbed nothing. The others stayed put.

  The chair had been turned away from a small table shoved up against the far wall, to face the length of the room like a witness stand does a courtroom. From closer up, I could clearly see the chair’s two front legs were strapped wi
th broken bands of blood-smeared duct tape, another length of which I found stuck horizontally across the chair’s back. There was a final, balled-up wad of tape lying under the table, presumably used to tie Travers’s hands behind his back, and a pair of blue jeans, blackened by old blood, slashed to ribbons. Across the top of the table were the oblong smears of a knife that had been repeatedly placed there—and obviously repeatedly used.

  I began to understand why Ben Travers had been in such a hurry when he’d flown off the Upper Dummerston Road.

  6

  JACK DERBY, THE NEWLY ELECTED State’s Attorney for Windham County, was a startling contrast from his predecessor, James Dunn. Tall, slim, with bookish good looks set off by a pair of tortoiseshell bifocals, Derby was the kind of man Rotarians like to invite over for lunch. He favored sport jackets over suits, appeared easygoing and conversational, never hesitating to stop in a hallway or on the street to answer a question or respond to a comment, and generally came across as an approachable, regular kind of a guy—a man you could trust with your vote.

  But however engaging, Derby could also be as tough, demanding, and ruthless as Dunn.

  Sitting in Tony Brandt’s office, Derby was slouched down, relaxed, a ready and interested smile on his face, but with eyes as cool and calculating as a pool shark’s.

  He held up a finger. “So you think Ben Travers, already hot to leave town, escaped in a stolen car after being tied to a chair and tortured by Sonny and his boys. But for all intents and purposes, there is no Sonny, the man you think is his lieutenant has an alibi, as do his goons, and you have no reliable witnesses to Travers’s intentions, the torture, the car chase, or the final flight off the cliff.”

  He held up two fingers. “Then you’ve got these three supposedly connected episodes—a suspicious traffic stop, a suspected home invasion and rape, which may or may not have involved one of the men from the traffic stop, and Travers’s death, which may or may not have involved Asians. Speaking strictly legally here, that’s about it, right? The bottom line is that, aside from the Travers homicide, you really don’t have anything, and even that’s looking iffy.”