The Dark Root (38 page)

It wasn’t a question. Spinney shook his head. “Sorry. Thanks for your help.”

He looked at us silently for a couple of seconds, shook his head, and left without further comment.

· · ·

It took us twenty-four hours—from the middle of one night to the middle of the next—to sort through the remains of the store. We were helped by not having to determine the cause of the fire—a question that sometimes involves weeks of painstaking reconstruction of the remnants of a building—but we did want to determine the fate of the boxes that had been carried inside just before the blast.

Our methods were a demented cross between an archaeological dig and a landfill operation. The cellar hole was surrounded by two backhoes, several trucks, and a large generator, but it was filled with jumpsuit-dressed forensics types in rubber boots, some of them equipped with tweezers and small bags. Our reward, when it came, however, was delivered by a backhoe. As the blade cleared away one of the few remaining piles in the basement’s far corner, a large, sturdy, five-foot-tall metal safe came into view, its blackened, damp surface gleaming in the halogen lights rigged all around the hole. Word went out for a locksmith.

Three hours later, in the privacy of the Border Patrol substation’s enclosed garage in nearby Derby, the locksmith turned the safe’s handle and began pulling open the door. Spinney stopped it from swinging wide enough to reveal the interior, and thanked the disappointed man with a cheery smile.

The small bunch of us—Frazier had given in to curiosity and had joined us a half-hour earlier—waited until the locksmith had cleared the exit, and then Spinney let us all see what the fire had left behind. It being a modern, fireproof safe, our expectations had been high. What we saw immediately bore us out.

Before us were stacks of money—hundreds of thousands of dollars—as well as banded bundles of credit-card receipts, jewelry, a small pile of gold bar, and several baggies filled with white powder—far more than would have fit into the few cardboard boxes delivered the night before.

Spinney let out a low whistle and slipped on a pair of latex gloves. “Jesus, Joe. We just made our bosses some serious bucks.”

The others laughed at his gleeful expression. I’d forgotten that being “local” officers—and working for a federal task force—both Spinney and I had made our departments eligible to share in any booty recovered during the investigation. An oddly piratical concept, it was a tempting inducement in persuading municipalities to farm their officers out for federal use. Just hearing Spinney’s comment, I knew my own previously disparaged involvement here was going to suddenly undergo a drastic facelift.

Ironically, my personal satisfaction in this treasure was mixed. While its cash value would remove a lot of the heat I’d been getting back home, the lack of any documents in the safe meant we had no specific knowledge of how Truong Van Loc was running his small empire.

After inventorying and shifting our findings to the Border-Patrol safe, Frazier, Spinney, and I retired to a small meeting room in another part of the building.

“One thing we have going for us—I hope,” Frazier started off, “is that the sheer bulk of that loot indicates most of it was there before last night’s delivery.”

“Making the jewelry store a bank?” Spinney asked.

“Possibly
the
bank,” I added, my enthusiasm suddenly fired by Frazier’s comment. “If we’re lucky, Truong just took a serious hit to his wallet, and maybe to his whole operation.”

Frazier made a deprecating gesture with his hand. “I don’t know that I’d go that far. Truong could probably refill that safe in a few months, especially if he squeezed his sources. And we don’t know how many other deals he has funding him.”

“Don’t we?” I asked. The urge was growing inside me to make a few assumptions—always a risk in police work—and to take a few gambles. “His life history’s been put under a microscope. Has there been a single indicator recently of any operation besides this one?”

Frazier admitted as much with a silent shake of his head.

“Right, because while Vu and Lam and the others have been allowed to extort and steal what they can, keeping themselves occupied, Truong’s goal has been to destabilize Da Wang’s business, erode the protective shield around him, and then knock him off. But Truong’s monomania has made him vulnerable. He’s got one source of revenue, one way of collecting it, and only one bank to put it in.”

“Joe—” Frazier began.

“What?” I interrupted. “Have your sources picked up an inkling of something else?”

Again, he conceded the point—unhappily.

“Okay, let’s say we’ve closed the bank,” I resumed. “If we ask the local cops to visibly sit on each one of the outlets that supplied the cash, Truong’s pipeline’ll dry up. And with Da Wang applying pressure from his side, he’s going to have to come up with some replacement funds fast.”

Frazier pursed his lips, but still remained silent.

“The Vermont pipeline is crucial to Truong,” I pressed on. “Illegal aliens seem to be his primary cash commodity, and the pipeline his way of getting them to market. We’re guessing his old import-business contacts are busy recruiting in the old country, and that he has a collection of receivers in Boston and/or New York. But if we really have identified most of his Vermont network, and we and Da Wang together manage to even temporarily shut it down, he’s going to have to come up with a new way of moving aliens—fast.”

Frazier’s face was still clouded, so I played my trump. “We’ve been on the defensive from the start. We got lucky with this bank, so now we need to press him—anticipate him. It doesn’t really matter if I’m right or wrong about the specifics of his setup. What matters is if we can somehow force his hand, ’cause, let’s face it, if we don’t do something soon, we’re going to wind up counting dead bodies again.”

The allusion to Dennis’s ghost did the trick. “How’re we going to persuade a half-dozen municipal police forces to sit on Truong’s properties for free?” Frazier asked.

“We can ask ’em, for starters,” Spinney answered cheerfully, readily accepting the idea. “Then, we can either help them—or embarrass them into helping us. If we use state troopers to do some of the sitting, I bet at least a few of the locals aren’t going to want to be frozen out.”

“Besides,” I added, “we’re not talking about a total shutdown here—just a big enough presence to be a deterrent. If Da Wang keeps on the pressure, we won’t need a lot of time. Truong’s going to have to move fast to survive, and he’s going to want to try because he must feel he has Da Wang worried.”

Walt finally gave in. “Well, what the hell. You guys work better together than most of us feds do. If you can do it, more power to you. But assuming we shut down Truong’s pipeline, what then?”

“Dan Flynn told me a while back,” I answered, “that both the Border Patrol and INS had noticed a new operator in the game—that’s where the name Sonny cropped up early on. If we coordinate with their intelligence folks, maybe we can pick up a pattern that’s specific to Truong’s operation, and try to stake it out.”

I paused to step back a little. “If any of my theory is right, Truong’s most obvious option is to try for a major influx of aliens, either a single large shipment—like in a truck—or a coordinated, broad-based border crossing. The first is quick, cost-efficient, doesn’t take many people, and entails one fast drive through Vermont to either Boston or New York. In eight hours, at the most, it’s a done deal. But it’s dangerous. If it’s stopped, he’s dead. The second option’s safer, but it means more people, more money, and more time. My hunch is he’d shoot for the first, because time and money are two things he’s short of.”

“Well,” Spinney volunteered, “I can coordinate with Dan on squeezing the pipeline. His old-boy system ought to come in handy there.”

Frazier looked at me. “I guess the two of us can meet with INS and the Border Patrol and see if we can identify a pattern in Truong’s border activities.” He shook his head, however, as he said it. “I got to tell you, though, as pie-in-the-sky as this whole deal is, I think finding a pattern is its weakest link. The Border Patrol does the best it can, but it’s guarding a friendly boundary, and even they admit that for every crosser they catch, there might be a dozen they miss. How’re you going to establish an accurate picture of illegal activity with a ratio like that?”

My mind returned to this expanding case’s humble beginnings in Brattleboro, and to the one person we’d been able to put behind bars as a result—the tight-lipped Nguyen Van Hai. “We need an inside source,” I answered. “I’ve got one, but he’s going to need some work.”

Frazier understood where I was headed. “That, I like better.
I’ll
talk to the other feds. You focus on making your man talkative.”

· · ·

Nguyen Van Hai was being held in Vermont’s maximum-security prison in St. Albans, above Burlington—the Northwest State Correctional Facility—coincidentally located near the Canadian border. But since I had no reason to think that he’d be any more open with me than he had been earlier, I returned to Brattleboro to do some homework first, hoping to discover the right conversational pry bar.

I flew back to Dummerston with Al Hammond, who’d been nice enough—or curious enough—to stick around. I picked up my standard-issue undercover car where it was still parked at what the locals mockingly called Dummerston International, and drove into Brattleboro, relishing the familiarity of my surroundings. Paradoxically, it was only then that the aftereffects of the building blast fully took hold of me, conspiring with and adding to both Frazier’s dour outlook and my own previous self-doubts. The closer I got to the office, the less sure I became that any part of the plan I’d outlined in Derby was even remotely attainable.

Seeing Harriet Fritter at her usual post was a help, however, not to mention her maternal reaction at seeing me wearing dark glasses indoors.

She scowled suspiciously. “What have you done to yourself?”

“You hear about that explosion up in Newport?”

Her mouth opened in surprise. “Oh, no.”

I pointed at the glasses, which I’d finally replaced with a better-fitting pair of my own from the car. “Slight flash burn. Should be free and clear in another day. Three more Asians were killed, though.”

She shook her head mournfully as Sammie turned the corner of one of the room dividers. “I thought I heard your voice. How’s the case going?”

The difference in style made me smile. As far as Sammie was concerned, physical danger was part of the job. She wasted little time on nurturing maternal instincts. I followed her back to her cubbyhole at the back of the room and felt her scrutiny as soon as I sat down. In a more private setting, her compassionate side was allowed a bit more rein.

“You look terrible. How bad was it?”

“We were maybe fifteen minutes away from walking into the place with a warrant.”

“Ouch.” She sat down opposite me, immediately grasping a point even I had been staving off. “You could’ve bought it with Dennis, too. You starting to wonder about your own mortality?”

I shook my head. “What’s bugging me is how this case keeps getting derailed. In my gut I feel we’re close, but in fact there’s not much to justify it. What I’m looking for now is a way to crack Nguyen Van Hai.”

She raised her eyebrows doubtfully but said nothing.

“Have you come up with anything while I’ve been gone?”

She looked a little embarrassed. “Not much. To be honest, since you left, we haven’t been giving the case top priority. Billy made it clear he didn’t want any more time spent on it—said it had cost plenty enough already. I think part of that was so that he could tell the reporters to take a hike—that it was out of our hands. It worked—I’ll give him that.” Then her eyes took on a devious gleam. “Still, none of that affected what I could do on my own time.”

I smiled, shaking my head at her predictable doggedness. “So what do you have?”

She retrieved a folder from her desk top and opened it, her pleasure immediately tempered. “Not that much, I’m afraid. Old news, mostly. You’d asked for IDs on the hit team that did that restaurant in San Francisco.”

She handed me a small pile of mug shots, each one stapled to an abbreviated rap sheet. “Those came in yesterday. I was going to send them up to you today, in fact.”

I went through the pile slowly, recognizing Johnny Xi, the first—as far as we knew—of Truong’s exercises in human carving. There were others—seven altogether, five of them stamped
deceased
across the top. The names meant nothing to me. But the face of the last one in the pile was all too familiar. I’d seen it just a couple of days earlier, on videotape.

I turned it around and showed it to Sammie. “Ring a bell?”

She squinted slightly, and then shrugged. “Maybe,” she answered cautiously. “Should it?”

“It’s an old shot. It’s our pal Edward Diep.” I looked at the rap sheet. Diep’s name was given as Lo Yu Lung, the same that Sammie had dug up on the phone just before the task force had been launched, but which had meant nothing to either one of us at the time. “We never got anything more on Diep, did we, aside from a Philadelphia address?”

Sammie shook her head. “Nope.”

“Can I use your phone?” I reached by her and dialed Frazier’s number. “Remember Edward Diep?” I asked him after he answered.

“Not much to remember. According to our Philly office, he’s long gone. Nobody seems to know anything about him.”

His choice of words caught my attention. “Like he didn’t exist?”

There was a pause at the other end. I could hear Frazier rustling papers on his desk. “That’s the implication,” he finally answered. “Inquiries were made of neighbors and nearby retailers. Nobody pegged on the mug shot. One guy’s quoted as saying he would’ve remembered, ’cause Asians run pretty thin out there.”

“Meaning it wasn’t an Asian neighborhood?” I asked, my excitement growing.

“I don’t know the city. I guess not. Why?”

“Because the one thing we’ve heard from the start of all this is that Asian crooks especially like to hang together. That’s what Dahlin discovered in Hartford, and what Lacoste was driving home in Montreal. Rich or poor, big-time or local, they seek out their own company. If that’s true, then why did Diep live so far away?”