The Dark Root (12 page)

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.

"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, and 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?”

“The green one. At the time, I thought it was trying to pass. While I was gone on this trip, after the conference came to a close every day, I was sort of on my own, not being a very social person. So I tended to go to bed early, like I do at home. That’s when all this kept coming back, like a nightmare. The day it happened I was running late—I had something else to focus on—but at the conference, I guess I realized how close I’d come to getting killed, so I kept reliving it, and each time I saw things more clearly.”

“You mentioned seeing one of the men.”

“Yes. The driver of the green car. When you think of it, he and I came within just a few feet of one another, if only for a second,” he added with a smile. “I was looking at him because I thought he was going to kill me, of course. But he was staring right through me—like he couldn’t have cared less whether we hit each other or not. It was creepy. I’ve seen that face every night since it happened—totally empty of feeling, except a kind of cold rage.”

I decided to put his recall to the test. I placed ten photographs across the surface of the drawing board. All of them were Asian, including recent surveillance shots of Vu and some of his colleagues, and the stills I’d had Tyler extract from the video of Truong, Diep, and Lam.

John Crocker didn’t hesitate. As soon as the picture of Truong Van Loc hit the table, he said, “That’s him.”

“Let me put the others down,” I cautioned, “just so you can be absolutely positive. Some of these photos look alike.”

In fact, they did. I’d made it a point to find at least one near-match for every player I knew personally, and as luck would have it, two of them had the same general features and long hair as Truong.

But Crocker didn’t budge. “That’s him,” he repeated. “Without a doubt.”

I collected the pictures and put them back in my pocket. “You said one of the reasons you didn’t call this in was because you hadn’t gotten the license numbers. Does that mean you got a glimpse at the plates themselves?”

“Oh yes, they were heading right at me. The blue car was from Vermont, and the green one from Québec.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked, a little startled.

“I was born in a small town. I look at every car that comes at me that way. First the plate, to see if it’s from in-state, then the face, to see if the driver’s somebody I know.”

I smiled at his answer, at the familiar chord it struck. I waved to half the people on the road when I was out and about, as they did to me. It was just something you did, living in Vermont.

· · ·

The satisfaction—in fact, the vindication—of finally putting Truong Van Loc’s face and name to one of Benny’s killers was only offset by the little I could do with the information at this point. Issuing an arrest warrant was hopelessly premature, since I still needed more evidence. We hadn’t found the car, or the famous Glock, or Truong’s reputed companions, and it could have been argued in court that at the time Crocker saw Truong, the latter was merely in the midst of recklessly passing another car.

The best I could do, therefore, was issue a New England and Canada-wide BOL—be-on-the-lookout—bulletin, featuring Truong’s picture and vital statistics.

I was in the middle of doing the paperwork for just that when Harriet’s disembodied voice came over the phone speaker, advising me that Heather Dahlin was on the line.

“What’s up?” I asked her when I picked up the phone.

“We got a call from the hospital an hour ago about an Asian woman in her thirties who came into the ER complaining of abdominal pains. According to her, she fell late last night. She didn’t do anything about it at the time because she thought the pain would go away, but this morning it got worse than she could bear, so her husband drove her in. The docs looked her over, diagnosed internal injuries, got her into the operating room. She died of internal bleeding.”

“She say she fell downstairs?” I asked, sensing a familiar scenario.

“Better than that. The hospital called the PD because they didn’t buy her story. Based on their experience, she had all the signs of someone who’d been beaten to death. A unit went over, checked out the body, and discovered she was Asian
and
the wife of one of the restaurant owners I was telling you about. That’s when they called me. We all went over to the husband’s house and found out he wasn’t looking too good either. Nor was his house.”

“Home invasion?”

“That’s what we think, but we hit the same wall you did. He said she fell downstairs, that he tried to grab her and fell with her. We could see the house was trashed, of course, but he won’t talk about it.”

“How’re you going to deal with it?” I asked.

“We’ll play it by the numbers—it is a homicide, after all—but we’ll probably get nowhere,” she said dismissively. “The interesting thing is, I checked out the Asian hot spots to see what I could pick up, and guess what I found?”

Now I understood where she was headed, and the reason for her excitement. “New players.”

“Bingo. Those tough guys I told you about who gave Michael Vu the cold shoulder? Can’t find a single one of ’em. They’ve all been replaced by new people.”

“Vietnamese?”

“No, no. It’s a mixed bag, like before. I haven’t found out who’s who yet. But I thought you’d like to know.”

“Thanks, Heather. I’ll update Dan Flynn. Maybe he’ll have heard something from his end.”

· · ·

“You know,” Flynn said minutes later, “you’ve got an amazing sense of timing. I’ve been calling around, and you and Dahlin aren’t the only ones seeing changes among the Asians. I’ve had feedback now from Burlington, Rutland, Springfield, and a few odd spots like Newport and St. Albans. It’s nothing much, and most of the people I talked to said they hadn’t even filed reports within their own departments, much less been tempted to let me know, but there’s been movement.”

“What kind?”

“Power shifting, mostly. Old faces being replaced by new ones. The point is, it’s happening all over the state, all at the same time.”

“Any more mention of Michael Vu or Sonny?”

“I asked. With Vu, I got nothing, but Sonny cropped up with the Burlington PD and with INS.”

The mention of INS sharpened my interest. “What did Immigration say?”

“They were a long shot, since Dahlin’s pointer card said Michael Vu was into illegal aliens. But they said they’d heard Sonny’s name just recently. A couple of illegals the Border Patrol handed over to them said that Sonny had made the arrangements. I called a friend at the Border Patrol. He couldn’t help me with Sonny or Vu or any of the other names I had, but he did say the number of Asian crossers had gone up, and it looked like the regular channels were either being changed or challenged.”

“By a competitor?”

“Who knows? Asian illegals are the tightest-lipped of all of them. Sonny could’ve been operating for years, and we just tumbled to it now. And habits in border crossings change all the time, for all sorts of reasons. That’s the problem with all this information—you can mold it to fit whatever theory you want.”

That last comment made me stop and think a moment. “Dan,” I finally asked, “what’s your own gut reaction? Am I way off base here?”

He laughed. “Hell, Joe, you’re talking to somebody who’s paid to see conspiracies under every rug. I’m a believer.”

I hung up the phone and contemplated where we stood. In conventional terms, I was in trouble, having a rape with no complainant and a murder with skimpy evidence. Only Truong Van Loc was good news, since I was convinced his reappearance could have far-reaching consequences.

But even there, I was in a jam. Assuming I was heading in the right direction, it was starting to look as though Truong and Sonny and the others might be involved in federal-level violations. Which meant that if some government agency suddenly took an interest in this case, and the State’s Attorney was willing to wash his hands of it, our sole reward would be a pat on the head for some preliminary ground work, and the hope that somebody might end up doing federal time.