The Dark Root (24 page)

Gail was there with me, coming down once more from her studies in South Royalton. As an ex-selectman with an unusually high profile, her presence was noticed by a department that had once perceived her as one of the bosses, and was all the more appreciated given the slant of her politics.

Not that politics came into it here, as it might have in another town, where finding fault or gaining advantage are often knee-jerk reactions to crisis. For a place as culturally diverse as Brattleboro, there was still an intense sense of community, heightened in such times because people felt it slowly eroding away despite the high pitch of their well-intentioned nostalgia.

Unlike in Boston, or even many of its neighboring communities, this town’s civilian population did not take the death of one of its police officers in stride. It was as stunned and bewildered as the tiny group weeping by the side of the casket. Dennis’s wife, Emily, and his two young children, were like the splash in the center of a sun-dappled pond, where the reflections came not from rippling water, but from the rows upon rows of parade-ground uniforms, from gleaming buttons, belt buckles, and badges stirred in among the dark-clad citizens of the town. The small family’s sorrow spread out to the farthest reaches of the crowd, to be absorbed, reproduced, and offered up for public scrutiny by a semicircle of cameramen, photographers, and reporters.

After it was over, after the ritual salute by weapons fire, the folding of the flag, the speaking of words that didn’t remotely reflect the man in the casket, the crowd melted away over the monument-studded horizon and abandoned the cemetery workers to their practical work with shovel and backhoe.

Gail and I went for a walk among the gravestones, some of which dated back two hundred years. We walked without speaking, holding hands, until we found a comfortable-looking marker, wide enough for us to lean against, facing the enormous, silent mountain across the water.

“What are you thinking?” she asked after a while.

“That of all the cops in the department, Dennis was the one guaranteed to die in his bed—probably from choking on a donut. I was the one who suggested taking the Jeep. Why did he offer to drive? He normally didn’t volunteer for anything. I guess he’d gotten into this case—something about it had caught him up—made him enthusiastic…”

“Not a bad time to go, if you have to. That’s something.”

But I shook my head emphatically. “He didn’t die at the right time, or for a noble cause. He was butchered. The poor dumb son of a bitch was blown apart by some bastard who didn’t give a shit who he killed. Dennis DeFlorio is a monument to somebody’s twisted pride—a status symbol, like some fucking tattoo.”

I paused to pluck at a few tufts of grass. “Worst part is, I’d been told a cop was being targeted. I just didn’t take it seriously.”

Then I returned to a sore that had been festering in me for days. “Same thing with Vince Sharkey. Alfie Brewster might’ve set up that shoot-out, but I was the one who got Vince all worked up. And then I canceled the tail we had on him.”

“None of this is your fault, Joe.”

I didn’t argue with her. “Tony told me the post-shoot investigator thought we’d played a little loose going into that deal. He was right. It wasn’t Ron’s fault we both almost got killed. I’m his boss. It was mine.”

Gail was not cooperating. “You’re feeling sorry for yourself. You didn’t kill Dennis. And Ron would’ve been dead, too, if you hadn’t been there. Ask yourself instead, ‘What do I do now?’ The department’s in shock, and with Tony out of commission, you’re the one they’ll be looking to for leadership. You’ve got to give them something to focus on.”

It was then, as if responding to some oddly theatrical cue, that Billy Manierre found us.

He came obliquely, his uniform hat in hand, as if ready to shy off at the slightest notice. His eyes were fixed on Gail, his old-school training sensitive to any hysterical feminine outburst she might spontaneously indulge in.

Instead, she smiled warmly, as most people did on greeting Billy—the living embodiment of the round, friendly, cop-on-the-beat.

“Have a seat.” She patted the thick grass next to her.

He predictably demurred, standing awkwardly instead, looking around as if in fear of an ambush.

I got to my feet to make him feel more comfortable. “What’s up?”

“I was going back to the station—see to the paperwork and all—but I thought maybe we ought to talk a little before. It’ll probably be a nuthouse back there—lot of media back in town, lot of people wanting to bend my ear…”

I helped him out. “You’d like an update?”

“If you’re up to it. I know this may not be the time or place.”

My eyes slid off his face and strayed across the river. Legend had it that once, years ago, there’d been a fire on top of Wantastiquet, and that when firefighters had started climbing its steep, tree-choked slopes, they’d been met and scattered by an avalanche of rattlesnakes, all fleeing downhill in a writhing mass. Apocryphal or not, the story had its own curious appeal to me right now.

“No—that’s fine. I can do that,” I began, and then, both stimulated by Gail’s pep talk and yielding to the smoldering frustration that Dennis’s death had finally made unbearable, I added, “I’m about to spring something on you, though. Something I kicked around with Jack Derby and Tony a few days ago. Tony wasn’t too keen on it. But I’d like to make a pitch to Walter Frazier that the FBI create a task force—involving me—to take this case over.”

Billy’s mouth opened slightly in surprise. “Boy, Joe. That’s a little out of the blue. I mean, I heard something about it, but… What would that mean for us?”

As I spoke, my determination grew, along with an intoxicating sense of relief. “That I’d be reassigned. The department would still pay my salary, and the FBI would pick up the expenses and overtime. That’s if Frazier’s interested. It would release our manpower to catch up on other work, cut down on the overtime we’ve been racking up, and allow you to tell the press that the whole mess is out of your hands and that they can serenade the FBI for further details.”

“Jesus, Joe. I don’t think Tony’ll go for this.”

“Maybe not, but he’s flat on his back with a nose full of tubes. You’re the chief now.”

His discomfort began to gel into opposition. “I’m acting chief. I can’t authorize something like this.”

I looked at him closely. “Billy, I talked to a cop in Montreal this morning named Jean-Paul Lacoste. He’s their Asian-gang expert up there. He told me the man who got whacked in Montreal right after we stopped that car with Truong and Lam and the other guy last winter worked for a Chinese leader named Da Wang, that he’d been Da Wang’s right-hand man in charge of the Montreal–Vermont–Boston illegal-alien pipeline. He was what they call a snakehead—a runner of illegals.”

“Okay,” Billy said cautiously.

“Dan Flynn says there’s been lots of new activity in illegal aliens—that the name ‘Sonny’ has been cropping up, as a rival snakehead. And using our photo of Truong, Dan’s also established that Sonny and Truong are the same person.”

“So Truong replaced Da Wang’s snakehead?” Billy asked, visibly confused.

I shook my head. “It’s more complicated than that. At first, I thought the snakehead had played a role in killing Truong Van Loc’s brother, and that he was killed for revenge. But as far as we know, the snakehead had never been to the U.S. Plus, if that had been Truong’s goal, why’s he still around? I think Truong is making a grab for Da Wang’s business, although I still don’t know why.”

“Making Brattleboro’s troubles part of an international conspiracy,” Gail spoke up from near our feet, “which is what would make this attractive to the feds.”

“We’re not going to be able to solve this case from here, Billy,” I pressed him. “And to keep trying is only going to frustrate our own people. But if I go federal and become a liaison to the department, I can keep them involved—give them a sense that Dennis’s death is something they’re still a part of, if only by proxy.

“Look at what we’re holding otherwise. We already swept the streets for every Asian we could find and got zip. J.P. checked every hardware and sporting-goods store within fifty miles of here for the type of pipe and powder used in that bomb and found nothing. And that’s because it was done by an outside team, just the way Da Wang’s snakehead was hit. Sally warned us they were going to take out a cop, and that’s exactly what they did. Now it’s our choice—we can either keep pissing around, putting names to people we can’t locate, or we can confront them on their own turf and use federal muscle to close them down.”

Billy shifted his weight and crossed his arms, staring out across the river. He finally shook his head in exasperation.

“What?” I asked, after he said nothing.

“I was just wishing I hadn’t walked over here.”

WALTER FRAZIER LOOKED FROM ME TO
Dan Flynn. The three of us were sitting in his office in Burlington, several days after Dennis’s funeral. “A task force made up of you two?”

“No,” I answered. “The state police is the official applicant. That’s why we’re here and not talking to Bishop in Rutland. Being head of VCIN, Dan wouldn’t be in the field. The state police would assign someone, and the two of us would interact with all the appropriate agencies—federal and local—as needed. The number of people involved from other agencies would vary.”

“And I’d be running it,” he stated, his voice flat.

“Right—or whoever you’d appoint. It would be a Bureau-sanctioned operation, but without the overhead and loss of manpower to you. And if the Bureau pays our tab instead of the Department of Justice, then I and whoever Dan’s bosses assign could be deputized as U.S. Marshals and act as federal officers.”

Frazier was beginning to smile. “The U.S. Attorney’s office’s will smell a rat. They’ll wonder why we need a new task force when there’re so many around already.”

Flynn and I exchanged glances. “In my experience,” Dan answered, “there are two types of task forces—the ones where everybody’s focused on a specific job, which means they won’t want us messing things up, and the ones with virtually open contracts, like the generalized local-federal drug task forces, which can get to be so much like departments unto themselves that we’d end up on the bottom of their in-tray just like any other new case. The Windham County SA has signed onto this idea, and we flew it by Maggie Lanier—one of the U.S. Attorney’s assistants—and she was interested.”

Frazier’s smile widened. “Which means when you pitch this to the U.S. Attorney himself, he’ll already have a letter from Derby, and several in-house memos on his desk from Lanier, all telling him what a good idea it is. What an amazing coincidence.” He leaned back in his chair and locked his hands behind his neck. “Assuming I toss this idea upstairs, what’s going to make my DC bosses go along with it?”

“Asian organized crime—including money laundering, card fraud, alien smuggling, and murder. Plus, it’s international and it’ll be good PR with the Canadians.”

Dan added, “It’s also small, cheap, efficient, and completely under your control, and Joe’s already done a lot of the spade work, which was one of the big selling points to Lanier. Not to mention that if it flops, nobody’ll probably ever hear about it, while if we hit it big, then everybody shares and you get to look like a benevolent Big Brother.”

“Walt,” I picked up, feeling more and more like a junk-bond salesman, “we’re not asking you to buy into some huge, unwieldy operation that’s going to drag on forever. I couldn’t afford that personally. The only reason I’m here is because my chief is flat on his back in the hospital and I browbeat our second-in-command into letting me make this pitch. But if I’m not back at my desk in pretty short order, somebody else will be.”

I leaned forward in my chair. “As that report makes clear”—I pointed at the document on his desk that I’d faxed him a few days earlier—“I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. We’re after two organizations fighting a turf war in Vermont, both of which have strong ties to, or interest in, Montreal. I’ve got a growing number of names and faces, one of which is already in jail, and I think, if we can use state and federal muscle, that we can take these people apart. We can go where they go, document what they’re up to, and shut at least one of them down, almost like a special-interdiction unit.”

Walt looked at Dan. “So how do you fit in? VCIN’s role isn’t going to be affected by any of this, is it? You’ll still be gathering and passing along information like before, right?”

I answered instead. “VCIN’s the key to the whole operation. I need the clout, the laws, and the jurisdiction that you can grant me, but I’m going to be working in-state a lot. Dan’s still putting his network together, but he already has more contacts statewide than any other agency, including yours. Which means our de facto task force will be as big as VCIN itself—at no additional cost. Through it, I’ll not only know what’s going on in all the local nooks and crannies that might help us, I’ll also know who to contact and who to avoid, including inside the various federal agencies. That knowledge will help streamline things incredibly, allowing us—more or less—to pick and choose who we work with, which will mean cutting down on red tape and on some of the crankier personalities.”

The implication was left undefined, but we all three knew the first example of this last advantage was the fact that Dan and I were here, talking with Frazier, instead of butting our heads against his colleague Josh Bishop down in Rutland.

“I do have a selfish interest,” Dan admitted. “If this succeeds, VCIN’ll come out looking good, something I wouldn’t mind my own brass noticing.”

Frazier chuckled and shook his head. “God almighty. You two do make it sound fun and easy. You think you can get the U.S. Attorney to give it a provisional nod, conditional on what my bosses decide?”

“We can try, assuming you give it a provisional nod, conditional on what the U.S. Attorney says.”

Frazier laughed outright. “What the hell—it might even work. I’ll give it a whirl.”

· · ·

Tony Brandt was still in the hospital when I went to visit him—albeit a larger one in Lebanon, New Hampshire—still deaf, still covered with bandages, but at last out of Intensive Care. One of his injuries, however, had been underappreciated early on and was raising havoc with him now. Somehow, during the explosion, he had inhaled enough superheated air to damage his vocal cords, so he was under doctor’s orders not to speak a word.