The Dark Root (42 page)

Lucas waved away my pessimism and settled into the last chair at the table, nodding and smiling at the others in a generalized greeting. “I would like to say to all of you that I wear today two hats. The Québec Provincial Police know that I am here, and I am expected to report back to them also.”

Avery was back at her map, brusquely efficient once more. “We were just discussing the points of entry the Sonny network has supposedly targeted. It is pretty obvious to me, at least, that more has gone into the choosing of these spots than just running a few people across and seeing if they get caught. As Bob just pointed out, some of the infrared sensors are being bypassed surgically, which indicates a precise knowledge of their location and orientation. And judging alone by the small number of people we’ve caught, we know that information wasn’t obtained by blind luck. That implies help from local residents, perhaps on both sides of the border.”

Bob Carter spoke up again, since it was mostly his troops who maintained relations with the people whose properties straddled or abutted the boundary. “We looked into that as soon as we heard about this network. Comparing that list with the geographic points your Nguyen Van Hai gave us, we did come up with a few that match.” He stabbed the map with a blunt finger at three points.

“I don’t think Truong’ll use those,” I said softly. “He’d have to assume that any contact he’d heard about and used through the Asian old-boy system would be known to Da Wang or his confederates and open to attack if things got hot. It makes sense that he would’ve kept a private route or two up his sleeve.”

Judy Avery immediately seized on the idea. “How would he develop them?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “The safest approach would be to find someone who lives on the border, but who’s never been involved in Asian smuggling before—or maybe any smuggling at all—and who could be bought.”

Carter, ever gregarious, laughed. “Hell—sounds like me.”

Marcotti, of Customs, whose presence here was obviously a polite formality, let out a gentle sigh. “Let’s look at the ‘when’ for a minute.”

Steve Moore spoke up immediately. “The Grateful Dead concert.”

Heads nodded all around the table. Carter agreed. “It’s already giving us fits. We don’t know if there’ll be sixty thousand attending that thing, or a hundred and sixty. As it is, we’ve canceled all leaves, stolen people from other substations, and coordinated with every law-enforcement agency north of Burlington, including you folks.” He nodded at VSP Lieutenant Steve Moore.

With everything else I’d had to focus on, a Grateful Dead concert rang only a vague bell. “When is this, and where?”

Surprisingly, I thought, it was Jacques Lucas who answered. “In two days. We and the QPP have also gathered as many men as we can. It will take place in Swanton.”

“At the fairgrounds, east of town,” Carter added. “Right next to our substation there. In fact, we’re telling the whole Swanton crew to bunk in for a couple of days, ’cause getting back and forth by car’s going to be a joke.”

There was a moment’s silence as we all considered the obvious—the concert was a custom-made opportunity for Truong to make his move.

“Yeah,” Spinney asked, “but does he melt into the crowd, or cross over as far away from the action as he can, where we got one cruiser covering twenty miles?”

Almost simultaneously, several voices answered for one choice or the other. Avery straightened from studying the map and looked around. “Guess we’ve got a problem.”

I leaned toward Spinney and whispered in his ear, “Hold the fort—I want to give Dan a call.”

He nodded, and I slipped out to find a phone. Dan Flynn answered, as usual, halfway through the first ring, “VCIN—Flynn.”

“It’s Joe. Can you put Digger on the other line?”

“Shirtsleeve.” Digger’s voice had all the enthusiasm of a bored morgue attendant.

“I think Truong’s going to bypass everything Nguyen gave us. He knows damn well we’ll make an offer, and he knows what Nguyen’s got to trade. Who do you have in your system up here who’s really wired to the locals—goes to church with ’em, maybe busts their kids when they get drunk, remembers birthdays? Somebody who’s as local as they are.”

I could hear Flynn start to type in the background, but Digger merely growled, “Richard Boucher—Border Patrol. Works out of Derby.”

“He’s tied into the locals, including the ones living on the border?”

Digger sounded disgusted. “That’s what you wanted, right?” The line clicked as he hung up his extension.

Dan laughed a little nervously, no longer typing. “Well, I guess there you have it.”

It being near the end of his shift, Richard Boucher was still at the Derby substation. I explained who I was, what I was up to, and why I was calling. He’d already heard the first two pieces of information—no surprise considering that we’d used his substation to store the contents of Truong’s fire-blackened safe.

His voice was low, slow, and oddly comforting. He picked up immediately on the kind of person I was after. “Someone we’ve never thought twice about—maybe the average honest citizen who’s suddenly in a financial jam and has something Truong could buy.”

There was a thoughtful pause. “There’s Eugene Blood. He lives alone with his sister, and she’s dying of Alzheimer’s. He’s had to mortgage his farm to pay the doctor bills. He’s got a hundred acres east of Derby Line, and the boundary cuts right through the middle of ’em.”

“What made you think of him?”

“I don’t know how much you know about me, but I was born up here and I’ve lived here all my life, except for the first few years as a patrolman on the southern border. So I’ve known the Bloods since I was little, and I’d never seen Gene so low as these last months. It got so I dropped by their place almost every time I went on patrol, just to give a little support. About three days back, Gene seemed a whole lot happier. But when I asked him why, all he said was that he’d sold some equipment and come into a little money. He wouldn’t go into details and tried to get away from the subject as quick as he could. I hate to say it about an old friend like that, but what you just asked me fits him pretty well.”

“He have the personality for it?”

Boucher laughed softly. “He did in the old Prohibition days—at least according to the stories he tells. Plus, he wouldn’t have to do much—just tell whoever it is where our sensors are planted and keep quiet. That alone could be worth a lot.”

I made a mental note to ask Maggie Lanier for a search warrant of Blood’s bank records, to see how much that sudden windfall amounted to. “I take it you don’t swallow the equipment-sales angle.”

“He could get maybe ten cents on the dollar for the junk he calls equipment. He sold all the good stuff a long time ago—this thing’s been draggin’ on forever. He doesn’t have anything else.”

“I’m assuming your knowledge of the locals only covers the area around Derby. Are there others like you in other substations that keep close tabs?”

“I’m the only native Vermonter, if that’s what you mean, but there’re other guys who spend a lot of time drinking coffee on these people’s porches. You want me to call around?”

“I’d appreciate it. I want to see if there’re any other Gene Bloods out there.” I gave him my pager number. He said he’d get back to me in a couple of hours.

I returned to the conference to find everyone standing around the maps, talking fervently and taking notes. Lester stepped away from them and spoke to me quietly by the door. “This is about to break up. Nobody’s too happy with just letting us take fifty men and staking ’em wherever we want, so a few compromises’ve been made. The largest concentration is going to be around the concert site—Lucas and his boys on one side, Carter and his on the other. A smaller staging area will be Derby, near Newport, just in case something pops up to the east, and then there’ll be a third unit here, monitoring things in the communications center, with a helicopter on standby for quick transport. A few patrol cars—VSP, sheriff ’s men, Border Patrol, you name it—will be positioned along the boundary in between on regular shifts, advised on what it is we’re looking for. All this’ll happen ASAP. I told them I’d stay with the mobile unit here, since this is the eyes and ears, but I didn’t commit you one way or the other. What did you get out of Flynn?”

“A line on a farmer named Eugene Blood. He’s been clean as a whistle up to now, but he’s got a barrel full of medical bills, and I just talked to a Border Patrol agent named Boucher who thinks he may’ve come into a lot of money in the last few days. He’s got a hundred acres on both sides of the boundary. Boucher’s calling around to the other substations to find out if there might be more people that fit the bill. He’s supposed to get back to me today.”

Spinney raised his eyebrows. “But you’re putting your money on Blood?”

“So far I am. I was impressed his was the one name Boucher came up with right off the bat, but I’ll know better in a couple of hours. I’d like to put some mobile sensors on his property in any case—ones he won’t know about. I wouldn’t mind getting a peek at his bank records, either, assuming Lanier thinks there’s enough for a warrant.”

“I can take a shot at that,” Spinney said quickly and then smiled a little self-consciously. “I kind of like working with Maggie.”

I smiled back and gave him Richard Boucher’s name and number for help on filling in the details of the affidavit.

· · ·

As motel rooms went, it had seen its better days, as had the bed I was sprawled across. It was generally dark and dingy, decorated in hues to mask the more flagrant stains and signs of wear. I had the television on with the sound off, a paper plate of Cheez-Whiz and crackers and a pickle balanced on my chest, and I was watching a small band of cowboys hiding behind boulders, high on a hill overlooking an Indian campfire. The requisite blonde, busty, perfectly made-up frontier woman, one shoulder of her dress attractively torn, was lashed near a fire to what looked like a utility pole planted in the desert by a forgetful service truck.

“You don’t think this is going to work?” Gail asked on the other end of the phone line.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, sighing. “If it doesn’t, it won’t be for lack of planning or cooperation. It’s been a textbook case of how the system’s supposed to work.”

“So why’re you in the dumps?”

I didn’t answer for a moment, watching the cowboys split up. The hero pulled his hat farther down on his forehead. “Things have come up that make Truong a little less the monster I thought he was. He’s no pacifist, but he probably didn’t have anything to do with Dennis’s death, or the shoot-out Ron and I were in. And he didn’t grab Amy Lee, either—that was Da Wang’s doing.”

“But he did kill Benny Travers?”

“As far as we know.” I tried to get a better handle on what was bothering me. “It’s not that he’s not guilty. It’s just that, usually, the further we dig into a case, the more dirt we get. That’s been true here, too, of course, but it’s a little different. I mean, I realize everyone always has a reason for knocking the other person off. People get pushed to that fine line and then they rationalize crossing it. Truong’s no different, and considering he’s been after his brother’s killers for years now—and carving them to death, one by one—you can’t say he’s the victim of any sudden impulse. But look where he came from, the models he had to follow, and the effort he made to defy them all. That was no slouch.”

“You don’t feel sorry for him, do you?” Gail asked in the pause that followed.

The hero cowboy cut the ropes tying the Indians’ horses in place, and he and his buddies quietly slipped onto the backs of a few of them, preparing to start a stampede. The supposedly wild, prairie mustangs looked as wired as a bunch of overfed cows.

“Not exactly, but I do feel sorry. I can’t put my finger on it. Somehow, there’s a sense of betrayal and disappointment that keeps pulling at me. I don’t know if it’s Truong losing his brother, and then being stabbed in the back by his own lieutenant, or the constant sight of people hell-bent on grabbing the American Dream, being screwed by their own countrymen, and then somehow taking it in stride. Could be I’ve been drawing parallels between Truong’s brother and my avenging Dennis, even though I know it’s not the same. Maybe I’m getting old enough that all the blacks and whites are fading into grays. We’re getting ready to begin the biggest operation I’ve ever been a part of, and I don’t think any one of us knows a damn thing about the people we’re about to close down. If it works, we’ll slap ourselves on the back, and everybody’ll file reports bragging about how well things worked—I’ll even be handing the selectmen a bundle of confiscated cash they won’t believe—but none of it’ll have the slightest effect on the root cause of the problem.

“Not only that, but I don’t know if any of this will help find Amy Lee. Maybe that’s what’s really getting to me. After all the rest of this is history, she may still be out there, like some tossed-away pawn—the one person who should’ve had nothing to worry about.”

“You can only do what you can, Joe.” It was a platitude—but a truthful one nevertheless.

The hero, in the lead, charged his mustangs across the campground, scattering the Indians. He flew off his now wild-eyed steed, slashed the ropes holding the young lovely to the pole, and swept her up in his arms, oblivious to the peril of being flattened by the horses behind him, or stuck by an arrow from one of the suddenly displaced two hundred Indians.

They kissed and faced the camera, smiling. Neat and tidy—no questions left hanging.

IT WAS PITCH-BLACK, DRIZZLING,
and a thick ground fog had settled into the low spots. Gene Blood’s farm lay like a dark, misty blanket across the high undulations east of Lake Memphremagog, the rough edges of its streams and shallow ravines—even of the boulders lining its fields—smoothed and contoured by years of northern ice and snow and bone-cracking wind, making it all at once beautiful, soothing, and utterly hostile.

It was as quiet as a graveyard.

I was crouched in the lee of a small outcropping of rocks, high on a field that fell away to a row of trees marking the boundary with Canada. The fog had piled up against the base of the woods, so even with the pair of night-vision binoculars I’d been issued, all I could see at the bottom of the field was a slowly shifting, impenetrable haze, which in the artificial green glow of the binoculars, looked like a slow-motion surf, rubbing up against a dark and mysterious forest, full of promise and threat.