The Dark Root (29 page)

He pulled several business cards from his pocket and handed them around the table. “That’s got my and Digger’s home and pager numbers, just in case the shit hits the fan—not that we’d be able to do much about it till we got back here—but I thought you might like it anyway. The way we’re going to handle things from this end is to notify all the departments in VCIN that a special anti-Asian crime task force has been set up, but that it needs all the help it can get. Same rules will apply to them as before—they’ll retain their own information through the pointer-card system—but since this is a federal deal, any participants who give up jurisdiction will get a piece of any seized assets, along with official letters of commendation. That ought to encourage participation.

“From our end, we’ll keep in constant touch with Lester and Joe, and anyone else you two recommend, so that anything we learn can be acted on immediately.”

He paused a moment, as if to shift gears. “From my viewpoint, it’d be nice if all information was routed through here, but I realize you might have to do things differently in a pinch. If so, all I ask is that you let me know as soon as you can.”

He was looking directly at Lester Spinney as he said this, a small ghost of resignation in his voice, which told me that Spinney’s renegade reputation was still intact.

Spinney smiled and gave an almost imperceptible nod of the head. Flynn accepted that response at face value and yielded the floor. Next, Margaret “Maggie” Lanier passed out business cards. “The same holds true for me, only you don’t have to wait for the shit to hit the fan, or until morning for me to act on your request. If you need a search warrant at 2:00 A.M., either call me at home or on my beeper.

“Now, first off, have either one of you worked on the federal level before?” Spinney and I exchanged glances. “Nope,” I answered for us both. “I’ve had some training in procedures.”

“Me, too,” Spinney added, “but not much.”

Maggie smiled. “Then you’re in for a treat. It’s a liberating experience.” She pulled her briefcase up onto the table and extracted two thick folders, one for each of us. “These contain some of the basics. We made them up for occasions just like this, where we don’t have the time or the leisure to send you to Washington or wherever for the standard crash course. Basically, they’re a kind of question-answer primer consisting of the most frequently encountered differences between what you’re used to and how we operate.

“You’ll find ours is a more pro-prosecution system, with fewer constraints, more flexibility, and total mobility. If you have any doubts or questions along the way, though, especially given your inexperience—and nobody’s available to advise you—just act according to the state rules you’re used to. There’s no way you can screw up. Vermont is so pro-defendant, and your regulations so restrictive, I’m amazed you people put anyone in jail.

“Anyway, if you think you have probable cause at any point, call me and I’ll help you write up the warrant application. You can give me the facts over the phone, send them in a fax, or deliver them in person, but whatever method you use, at some point you’ll have to appear in the flesh to sign at the bottom. I can’t go to a magistrate without that signature.”

Spinney looked at her quizzically. “What if I’m sitting on a house in the boonies behind Lunenberg?”

Lanier didn’t relent. “Find somebody to do the sitting while you get to me in Burlington. If Walt gives you a federal vehicle, most of them have car phones with scramblers. You can call me on the way, give me what I need to know, and I’ll have the application ready and waiting when you arrive.” She paused to address his skeptical expression. “The good news is that you can get a warrant at the drop of a hat—probable cause is not what it is at the state level—and in some instances you don’t even need a warrant where you did before. Also, you don’t have to ambush a judge in the men’s room during a break in some trial. I can roust a magistrate just like you can roust me.”

“Well,” Walt cautioned, “don’t get carried away, either.”

Maggie shook her head impatiently. “All right, all right. But you’re still going to hate going back to the state system after all this is over. I’ll guarantee you that. Another big item I should mention: When you want to interview someone who could’ve told you to take a hike in the old days? Now you can hit them with a subpoena to appear in your office for a deposition. They don’t want to do it, they’re in contempt and it’s off to jail. Same thing with documents. If you think they won’t cooperate, you can walk in with a subpoena and seize what you’re after. And if push comes to shove, you also have the grand jury, which sits on alternating Thursdays in either Rutland or Burlington. If a witness refuses to talk to you, you can haul them in front of the grand jury and then I’ll be the one asking the questions. If they still refuse, the judge can find them in contempt and jail them for the remainder of the term. Since grand juries are convened for up to two years at a time sometimes, that can be a convincing threat.”

“Of course,” Walter weighed in again, cautioning against Maggie’s brisk optimism, “I would tread carefully there. Just because that particular tool is available, doesn’t mean it should be overused.” I could sense the sweat of his distant masters, and wondered if Maggie Lanier—usually the more conservative, as a prosecutor—was using this opportunity to indulge in a little playful chain-pulling. Politics, I knew, ran hot and heavy among the various federal branches, and you never knew who might be sore about someone else—and who might use you as a convenient, if unwitting, cudgel.

My suspicions were surprisingly addressed by Frazier’s very next statement, delivered with obvious discomfort. “Actually, this brings up a point that I don’t want to overemphasize—it’s a kind of last-ditch loophole, in a way, but I think I ought to get it out in the open, just so you all know…”

“An escape clause?” Maggie asked incredulously. Spinney lifted a single eyebrow and gave me a tired smile. Walter shifted restlessly in his seat. “That’s not its intention…”

“Oh, come on, Walter,” Maggie interrupted again, drawing out his name, “that’s exactly its intention.” She turned to us. “They’ve written themselves an
out
if this whole thing gets sticky. They’ve done it before—they’ve all done it before. In exchange for footing the bill and giving you locals a little extra clout, they reserve the right to either close down or kidnap the case, whichever suits them best.”

There was an embarrassed silence. Frazier cleared his throat, caught between the policy makers behind him and the people he’d committed to in this room. It was palpably obvious now why he’d been called down to Washington to fine-tune this deal. I could also tell from his expression that he’d been victimized as much as we.

“There’s a snowball’s chance in hell it’ll be invoked,” he said stiffly. “And given that, it’s not such a bad deal, considering the risk the Bureau’s taking.”

“I agree,” I said quickly and was relieved to see Spinney nodding his head next to me. “We knew going in this probably wouldn’t fly. That it has—even with a few strings attached—doesn’t bother me. I’d be nervous in their shoes, too.”

Maggie merely smiled and shook her head. Dan Flynn remained perfectly circumspect. Maggie wrapped up her pitch. “Read through those folders, call me if you have any questions, and now that I’ve dumped all over Walter, I probably ought to ’fess up that my boss is having kittens, too. He’d appreciate it if you kept in touch.”

Spinney looked at me and raised both eyebrows. “Makes you wonder why we don’t do this sort of thing more often, doesn’t it?”

THE BORDER BETWEEN VERMONT AND QUÉBEC
is one of the few demarcations where a politically drawn line on a map has taken on a distinct and dramatic identity. From forests to farmland, near-wilderness to cluttered civilization, and from rolling countryside to flat plains, the contrasts extend beyond mere differences in language, culture, and architecture—they announce a separateness more pronounced than anywhere else along the American-Canadian boundary.

Part of this is helped by the fact that the vast majority of Canada’s population lives along a hundred-mile-wide corridor paralleling the border. Another is that the greatest density of that population is divided between Toronto and Montreal, which is the largest French-speaking city in the world after Paris. Looking at a road map that includes both Québec and Vermont, one is struck by the disparity between a Canadian crazy quilt of highways, interstates, back roads, and towns, and the vast tracts of uninhabited, road-free timberland to its south.

Smugglers of both people and products, of course, made the same eye-catching and profitable discovery a few hundred years earlier.

Spinney and I were driving north in one of the cars Maggie had mentioned, a bland Caprice, neutral color, regular plates, no radio or air conditioning, but with a state-of-the-art mobile phone with a scrambler, tucked away under the dash. The kind of car that, for all its demure subtlety, could have had
Undercover
stenciled on its sides.

On the seat between us was a blowup of the sales receipt that J.P. Tyler had found in the Trans Am in Brattleboro, marking the date, time, and place of purchase. Slim as it was, this was the nominal reason for the trip—to interview whichever clerk had produced that receipt, maybe get a description of his customers, and scope out the general neighborhood in the hope it might yield something. The futility of such a quest was virtually guaranteed, so the other incentive—less definable but more important—was to finally make the connection between what we had and whatever it was the Montreal police might be willing to share with us.

Despite an hour’s worth of travel amid this foreign, crowded environment of villages, silos, gas stations, and a sudden explosion of churches, seeing Montreal finally thrust up into view on the far side of the Champlain Bridge—its massive bulk lording over the flat, vast expanse of the Saint Lawrence River at its feet—was a startling and intimidating surprise. Its shoreline cluttered with piers, breweries, warehouses, and ocean-going tankers, its horizon dominated by the seven-hundred-foot Mt. Royal, itself crowned with a five-story-tall Catholic cross, and with a towering downtown reminiscent of Chicago in between, Montreal presents itself as a huge, muscular, and oddly disjointed metropolis.

“Jesus Christ,” Spinney murmured, “this place must keep ’em busy.” I swung left off Autoroute 10 and caught Notre Dame heading east, the river to my right screened by a drab succession of industrial buildings. I kept my eyes glued to the thick flow of fast-moving traffic, while Spinney rubbernecked beside me with an endless string of awestruck comments.

“Keep a lookout for something huge,” I told him. “Lacoste’s office is right near it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He said it looks like the world’s biggest harp, anchored to the world’s biggest shower cap. It’s a leaning tower over six-hundred feet tall.” I shoved the map I had draped across my lap toward him and tapped my finger in the vague proximity of where I was headed.

But his eyes were glued to the window again. “Sure is ugly.”

I took a quick glance at where he was staring and saw an enormous, thrusting, sharp-pointed object angling up above the low buildings nearby—so huge and overpowering and out of character with everything around it as to look faintly threatening, like something left over from an over budget science-fiction movie. Simulating the harp image, a row of taut steel cables fanned out from its peak to a bulbous, lumpy, awkward dome, all of which reminded me of the physical restraints they strap to straining madmen. I took a left up a side street and headed toward it.

“What the hell is it?” Spinney asked.

“The ’76 Olympic stadium—where the Expos play now. That tower holds up the roof. Supposedly, it cost ’em a billion dollars, doesn’t work worth a damn, is starting to fall apart, and is still being paid off. Lacoste was pretty eloquent about it.”

I came up to Hochelaga—Montreal’s original Indian name, according to the homework I’d done—and turned right, feeling more than seeing the looming presence of the tower a mere block farther north. I then did a U-turn in front of the building we were after—an unprepossessing, two-story glass-and-steel shoe box with the MUC symbol outside its front door—the Montreal Urban Community Police substation Lacoste called home base.

Spinney and I got out, stretched, locked the car, and headed up the broad cement stairs, to be met at the wide, double glass doors by a tall, thin, fashionably dressed man with a shiny bald head and a flowing mustache. “You are Joe Gunther?” he asked, a wide smile spreading across his face.

I recognized the slightly singsong Gallic accent and the clipped English. “Jean-Paul Lacoste?”

He spread his arms, the gesture reminding me of some black-and-white European movie. “It is me. Welcome to Montreal.”

I introduced Spinney while Lacoste swept around behind us and herded us across the sterile entryway to a side door and a set of stairs leading up. “I saw you from the window,” he explained. “The green license plate. Not too many of them in this city.”

We all three climbed to the second floor and a long, low room strewn with modular desk units and banks of filing cabinets. Most of the desks had computers, about half of which were being operated by a varied assortment of men and women in plainclothes. Lining the walls were a string of fishbowl offices with windows looking onto the central squad room, and windows facing outside. Bigger, more modern, more populated, and with more fancy equipment than I’d ever had to play with, it was nevertheless as familiar to me as my own office. The one glaring exception was that everyone was speaking French—not the kind I’d been taught in school, and which my mother had further helped me to conquer with home tutoring, but an oddly guttural, chopped-up version that I couldn’t grasp at all.

Lacoste made long-distance introductions as we walked the length of the room, flinging his arm toward one person or another, calling out our names and giving us incomprehensible versions of theirs. Everyone nodded and smiled and went back to work.