The Dark Root Read online

  “You think he was in competition?”

  She hedged her response. “Could be. There was no violence between him and the locals except that one time, as far as we know—but there was always that distance. Now that you mention it, given his style and the short time he was here, it’s possible Vu was testing the market, putting the squeeze on people to get a reaction and a little spare change, and then reporting back to some boss… It would fit.”

  “You ever heard of someone named Sonny?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  I tried out the other names I’d accumulated, with the same results. She finally said, “I’m sorry. I guess I haven’t been much help.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I answered. “We’re doing this brick by brick, and you’ve just given us quite a few.”

  · · ·

  Ideally, after my conversation with Heather Dahlin in Hartford, I would have assigned round-the-clock surveillance of Michael Vu, as well as the two buildings in Brattleboro that housed an ever-changing community of Asians, and the four Asian restaurants in town. But our operating budget being what it was—and considering that I’d already put a tail on Vince Sharkey—that was out of the question.

  What I did was less dramatic, less effective, and more affordable. The following morning, I brought the entire detective squad up to date, sharing with them my suspicions that we were being market-tested for an Asian gang.

  “I think you’re getting paranoid,” Willy said flatly, a toothpick in his mouth and one foot propped up on the edge of the conference table. “You said yourself that they feed off each other. What do you guess we have in this town? Maybe a hundred and fifty Asians, four hundred in the whole county? Nothing close to a Chinatown.”

  “What about Sally Javits?” countered Sammie.

  “I think she’s paranoid, too,” Willy answered. “What do a bunch of kids know, for Christ’s sake? They chuck a brick through a window now and then, spray paint a wall, do a little dope, scare a few merchants who’re dumber than they are. The first slope who walks in with a gun and a sales pitch has ’em all standing around bawling.”

  “I know you’re not going to like this,” I interrupted, “but that’s the last time I want to hear ‘slope’ or ‘gook’ or anything like it. It’s wrong, it’ll only cause problems we don’t need, and it’ll alienate the very people who might otherwise help us.”

  Kunkle rolled his eyes. “I seriously doubt you’ll get any help from them.”

  “Look,” I said, “I’ll keep this short, but I want you all to hear me loud and clear. There are just over three thousand Asians living in Vermont—that’s fifty percent more than all the state’s blacks, making them our largest minority. Exactly two of them are in prison. Ninety percent of the others have a work ethic and morals that make the rest of us look degenerate. So while Asians may seem a whole lot different from us, they’re to be treated like everyone else. Do I make my point?”

  “If Sonny was only making a sales pitch by killing Benny,” Sammie said quietly, getting us back on track, “he did a hell of a job, and his target sure shoots a hole in the they-only-feed-on-their-own theory.”

  I nodded to Tyler. It had been two days since we’d discovered where Travers had eaten his last meal, and I was behind on Tyler’s progress. “What more do we have on Travers’s death?”

  His voice slid into its professorial mode. “We’ve been able to piece together what happened to him in the house, more or less, but the people who did it went out of their way to be neat and tidy.” He pulled several sheets of paper from a folder before him. “This is my report—finished this morning. It doesn’t include the blood and fiber samples we sent up to Waterbury. Those results won’t be back for a while, but I don’t expect much anyway. From what I could determine, most of the blood came from Travers, and even if the blood we found under the broken glass on the other counter came from someone else, there’s probably not much we can do with it.”

  He sat back in his chair, getting comfortable. “The blood was a help in one way. There was so much of it that his attackers couldn’t get near him without either stepping in it or touching it. Problem is, they all wore gloves—surgical latex, from what I could tell—and those slip-on things surgeons wear over their shoes. We could still tell the general shoe size—which was small, by the way—and the fact that there were three men involved, but that’s about it.

  “I analyzed the cut pants. The knife used was razor sharp, and from the marks left on the tabletop, it was the size and shape of a fillet knife, with a thin, slightly curved blade. But they must’ve taken it with them, so I can’t confirm any of that.

  “We also found a blue plastic bag, ten-gallon size, which was used over the victim’s head. It was under the table, wadded up behind the pants.”

  “How do you know it was used over his head?” asked Dennis DeFlorio. Dennis was our robbery/burglary/B & E specialist, just back from vacation. Neither my best nor my brightest, he was nevertheless my most consistent subordinate—not given to moods, or prone to office politics, and utterly dependable to do exactly what he was told, if little beyond that.

  “Teeth marks on the inside,” Tyler answered. “You could tell they’d used it to cut off his air supply and that he tried to chew his way out. Suffocation’s not the point, of course. It’s just a way to build up panic.”

  “The voice of personal experience?” Willy cracked.

  J.P. gave him a rare but telling hostile stare. For all his seeming detachment, Tyler was not unaffected by the ghostly agonies left behind at many of the scenes he investigated. He covered his sensitivity well, but he took no pride in pretending he was unaffected. To his own rare credit, Willy dropped it, feigning a sudden interest in his coffee.

  “The point is,” J.P. concluded, “that this was neither spur of the moment nor the work of amateurs. It’s difficult to extract oneself from such a scene without leaving something incriminating behind. But that’s what these people did. And the use of gloves and booties implies prior experience.”

  “How ’bout the duct tape?” I asked. “Could you trace that?”

  He shook his head. “It’s cheaper-grade stuff—something you could get at any discount store anywhere. In fact, that’s the reason Benny got away. At some point, they must’ve either taken a break or gone off to talk privately, because they all left the kitchen and went into the living room. I found small traces of blood from their feet in there, and I could tell from disturbances in the dust where they’d cleared three seats for themselves. Travers took advantage of the opportunity to tear his right hand free and get loose. He escaped through the kitchen door, which leads into a sort of garage-barn combination, where he’d hidden the repainted car.”

  A donut halfway to his mouth, DeFlorio asked, “Without his pants?”

  Sammie gave him a scowl and pushed Tyler’s report toward him. “They’d been torturing him, Dennis. They cut his pants off and used the knife on his balls. He didn’t care how he looked.”

  It wasn’t totally fair. This was the man’s first day back on the job, and Tyler had been delicately circumspect in his description of Travers’s ordeal. Dennis’s hand froze. He looked around self-consciously, murmured, “Right,” and replaced the donut in its colorful box.

  I tried to cover the embarrassed silence. “Ron, what’s Vince Sharkey been up to since we put that tail on him?”

  Klesczewski pulled a note pad from his jacket pocket and flipped it open. “Not much. Hanging around the Flat Street address that houses some of the Asians, watching from his car, partway down the block.”

  “Is there any sense that he’s up to something?”

  Ron shook his head. “He’s been meeting with his boys, but so far we haven’t seen anything unusual.”

  I looked over at Willy. “Anything from your sources?”

  “Word has it you threw Vince in the river. Right now, it sounds like he’s more pissed at you than at any goo… Asian. Things have settled down a bit over the
last two days. Vu and his people have been quiet, the old patterns are starting to pick up again, and nobody’s seen hide nor tail of Sonny.”

  “But what about Benny’s operations?” I pressed him. “What’s the feeling out there? Is Vince going to inherit the business, or is he going to have to fight Vu for it?”

  Kunkle wobbled his hand from side to side equivocally. “Vince doesn’t get much respect without Benny around. If Vu or Sonny knocked off Benny to grab his business, there’s not much Vince can do about it.”

  “So, was hassling Scott Fisher and Alfie Brewster and the others just his looking for a soft spot, or is Sonny out to dominate everything in town?” I asked.

  Sol Stennis, who was in on this meeting because of his knowledge of juvenile crime, now spoke up for the first time. “Vu’s been dropping by the local hangouts a lot, talking to the kids like a recruiter, using Sonny’s name. He’s paid for a few parties and takes people for drives in a new Beemer he just picked up. Rumors are he’s offering drugs and guns and cars to any converts. It’s looking pretty serious. He’s also been making regular visits to the Asian restaurants and businesses, probably to keep himself financed.”

  I turned to Billy Manierre, the rotund and avuncular chief of patrol, who commanded the uniformed troops. “We can’t afford an around-the-clock tail on him, but I want Michael Vu to see us damn near every time he looks up. I want him pulled over for minor traffic violations, questioned for anything he or one of his people does that warrants a conversation, and I want everyone he deals with to feel the same heat. Keep in touch on the radio when you see him around town, and keep him company as much as you can. And take pictures—I want to build a photo album of everyone he contacts. Asians, whites… I don’t care. And get names if you can. Don’t be subtle. Word should get out fast that dealing with Michael Vu is like dealing with us.”

  Manierre nodded, and I addressed the others. “In the meantime, I want us digging into this clown’s background, beyond just his rap sheet. I want calls made to California to find out where he came from, who he hung out with, where he’s been. I want to know what he’s been suspected of doing, as well as everything he’s done. Dennis, once you’ve checked what’s on your desk, maybe you could start on that.

  “Also, none of us has even set eyes on Sonny yet. I want to find out how the two of them keep in touch. Find out if Vu makes a habit of using a particular pay phone. And ask around about Sonny, too—find out who, if anyone, has seen the guy, or had a conversation with him, and if they have, get a description, a psychological profile, anything you can. We need to know who Sonny is.

  “And J.P., don’t give up on that crime scene yet. That routine with the tape, the chair, the knife, and the plastic bag sounds like a practiced MO. Circulate the details everywhere you think makes sense, especially cities with big Chinatowns, like San Francisco and New York. And don’t forget Canada. Toronto not only has the oldest Chinatown on the continent, but it’s considered the primary trans-shipment point for aliens coming into this country.”

  Tyler nodded silently.

  I held up a cautioning finger and looked specifically at Kunkle. “But, remember, leaning on Vu does not mean leaning on every Asian you come across. It’s the innocent people who are the primary targets of gangsters like this, so we’re working for them, not against them, all right?”

  “What about the tail on Vince?” Ron asked. “You want that maintained?”

  I thought for a moment. My just-completed speech to the contrary, I hadn’t totally overruled Willy’s dismissal of all this as paranoia. Twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance was beginning to sound excessive, especially given what little it had produced. Besides, if we started watching Michael Vu with a magnifying glass, we’d pick up Vince Sharkey if he wandered within sight.

  “No,” I answered him, “I think we can call it off.” But a small doubt lingered—one I hoped I wouldn’t come to regret.

  8

  "JOE, THERE'S A CALL FOR YOU on line four. A Mr. Crocker,” Harriet Fritter announced from the new phone console on my desk. “He says it’s about the hot-rodders on Upper Dummerston Road.”

  “Thanks, Harriet,” I answered to thin air, without touching the phone, a disengagement from the norm I found fundamentally rattling, despite having had this new phone system for over a month.

  I picked up the light, flimsy-feeling receiver. “Mr. Crocker? Joe Gunther.”

  “Oh, hi.” The voice was a light tenor, slightly breathless. “My name is John Crocker. I’ve been out of town on business all week, and I got back last night and was going through my mail when I saw the article in the paper about the hot-rodders you were looking for on the Upper Dummerston Road.”

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Crocker?” I asked, to slow him down a little.

  “What?… I design lenses.”

  “For glasses?”

  He gave a small but pleased laugh. “Oh, no. Optical lenses for high-resolution equipment. I’ve had some of my designs sent into space. One of them flew on the shuttle.”

  “And you live in town?”

  His voice had lost its nervous edge, and I instinctively began forming an opinion of him as a witness. “North of town—Hillwinds.”

  “Nice place.” One of the most expensive in the area, in fact, and located off the Upper Dummerston Road.

  His yes sounded vaguely embarrassed, so I got to the point. “You saw some of these hot-rodders?”

  “Good Lord, yes. I was almost killed by one of them. It was the day I was heading out on this trip I mentioned. I was driving past the golf course, going south, when I saw two of them heading right toward me, across both lanes, at a terrific rate. I pulled over as far as I could and slammed on the brakes—put one wheel in the ditch.”

  “Did they hit you?”

  “No, no. I don’t know how they missed. It couldn’t have been by more than an inch or two.”

  “Did you see them go by?” I asked, visualizing him with his hands over his eyes.

  “I’d thrown myself across the seat, thinking that might give me a little more protection when we collided.”

  I nodded to myself and let out an inaudible sigh. “So you didn’t get a good look at them.”

  “Actually, I did—at one of them.” I froze in my chair, suddenly alert. “Can you describe him?”

  “Well, I don’t know how good I’d be at that, but he was young, and Oriental.”

  “Mr. Crocker, where are you calling from?”

  He sounded surprised. “My office. On Main Street. The Bank of Vermont Building.”

  “Would you mind if I dropped by and finished this conversation face to face? I have some pictures I’d like you to look at.”

  “Right now? Well… I guess that would be all right.” He gave me the number of an office on the second floor.

  The Bank of Vermont Building, named after the establishment on the ground floor, was a rare successful attempt at integrating a modern structure with its hundred-year-old neighbors. As squared off as they were, and with a complimentary touch of red brick around its foundation, the bank was nevertheless a light and airy addition to the block, slightly recessed from the sidewalk and adorned with a couple of small trees on each corner. It took me all of five minutes to walk to it from my own architectural tribute to Dickens.

  Crocker’s office was behind a plain door marked only by the number he’d given me. A slight, short man, with glasses and a receding hairline, John Crocker matched his tentative tenor voice perfectly. “Mr. Gunther?” he asked as he opened the door himself. He gave me a moist, limp hand to shake. “I guess they don’t call you ‘Mister.’ I am sorry. Is it ‘Officer’?”

  “‘Joe’ will do fine. Something occurred to me on the way over. Why didn’t you report this near-accident?”

  He cast his eyes to the floor and shuffled his feet slightly. For a man who must’ve been in his forties, he reminded me of a nerdy teenager caught in a lie. “I was running late. I had a plane to catch at Bradley, an
d once it was all over, and I found that my car was okay and that I could back it out of the ditch, I didn’t see the point. I hadn’t gotten the numbers off the license plate, and I didn’t think there was much anyone could do in any case.” He lifted his eyes slowly to meet mine. “Was that breaking the law or something?”

  “No—not to worry. I appreciate your calling us now.”

  He smiled shyly. “You’re welcome.”

  I looked around the large, bright office, dominated by several enormous drawing boards parked in a row. Opposite me was a bank of windows and an incongruously beautiful view of Mount Wantastiquet across the sun-dappled Connecticut River. “Can we sit somewhere, Mr. Crocker? I’d like you to look at a few photographs.”

  “Of course,” he said, circling the drawing boards and pulling chairs out from under two of them. “Where would you like to do this?”

  I joined him with my back to the windows and looked down at the designs attached to the boards. From the little I could decipher, they were simply huge circles, crosshatched with lines and covered with neat, incomprehensible, mathematical markings. I shook my head slightly and pointed vaguely at one of them. “Can we lay them across that?”

  “Sure, no problem.” He swept aside a couple of rulers and a pencil, and pulled one of the chairs over to join the one already there. They were tall, well-built, and surprisingly comfortable to sit in.

  “You saw two cars abreast,” I began, “heading your way at a high rate of speed?”

  “That’s correct.” His knees were drawn up, his hands in his lap, like an attentive student.

  “What color were they?”

  “Dark green and dark blue,” he answered without hesitation. “The green one was closer to the ground, like a sports model, and it was slightly behind the other one.”

  I was encouraged by that. Dark and low matched the description Thomas Lee’s neighbor had given to the car we suspected had carried out the home invasion. “Which one was in your lane?”