The Second Perimeter (23 page)

48

D
eMarco didn’t tell Bill Smith about Fat Neil, but he did tell him about the working premise they’d developed. Smith was impressed.
“That’s pretty good,” Smith said, “particularly the housing angle. We hadn’t thought of that but I’ll get Dudley’s guys looking into it. We figured the pharmacist was our best bet. We thought if we could find him, we could make him give up Li Mei’s partners, and that might give us some leads as to where she’s hiding. Right now we’ve identified nine or ten guys who could have supplied her with the kinda drugs she’d need, and Dudley’s pulling ’em all in.”
“What else are you doing?” DeMarco said.
Smith frowned, annoyed by DeMarco’s question, but he answered him. “We’ve got about thirty guys,” he said, “watching the Chinese embassy to see if any of their people run to Li Mei. On top of that, we’ve cut the cables going to their computers, jammed their radio transmissions, and every time they pick up a phone we make sure they hear lots of clicks and beeps. We’re sending a very strong message that if we don’t find Emma, normal business is going to be difficult for a very long time.”
“Is that it?”
“No. We’re still watching airports and train stations and border crossings. And we’ve got undercover guys down on the docks. The problem is the longer this goes on, the less vigilant people get.
“So go home, DeMarco,” Smith said, before DeMarco could ask another question. “We’re pros and we’re doing everything we can. And we’re not doing all these things just because we like Emma or because she used to work for us. Emma’s brain is a friggin’
vault
in which a lotta secrets are stored and we don’t want Li Mei to crack it open, or if she has, we have to know what she got. And there’s another thing: we think it’s possible that Li Mei still has the stuff she got from Carmody and Washburn. So…”
“Why would she still have their files?” DeMarco said. “Wouldn’t she have shipped those out of the country as soon as she got them?”
“Maybe, but maybe not. You gotta remember that Li Mei got busted once before using a courier and we don’t think she’d trust FedEx to get a box of stolen, classified material to China. So we think there’s a good chance she’s hanging on to the stuff until she can deliver it in person. The point is, Joe, we’re busting our asses to find Emma because we
have
to, not just because we’re nice guys, and we’re gonna keep busting our asses until we either get her or know she’s dead.”
Smith’s cell phone rang. He answered it, said “Okay” a couple of times, and hung up. “I think we’ve got the pharmacist,” he said.

* * *

THE PHARMACIST WAS
a short, bald Chinese man in his seventies with round glasses and a large wart on the left side of his nose. He was pale and sweating profusely, and DeMarco was worried that he’d have a heart attack before he told them anything.
The pharmacist was sitting in the interrogation room at the RCMP complex near Queen Elizabeth Park, the same room where Phil Carmody had initially been questioned. DeMarco, Bill Smith, and Robert Morton were behind the one-way window watching a young Chinese woman interrogate the pharmacist.
The young woman was short, a bit on the homely side, and she looked tougher than shoe leather. She was one of Morton’s street cops. She was screaming at the pharmacist in machine-gun rapid Chinese, in a high-pitched voice, spittle flying from her lips. The sound of her voice was worse than fingernails on a blackboard, and DeMarco thought that if she’d been screaming at him he’d have confessed just to stop the noise.
“What’s she saying?” DeMarco asked Smith.
“How the hell would I know,” Smith said.
“Well,” Morton said, “my Mandarin’s a bit rusty but I believe she’s saying—”
“Dudley,” Smith said, “since when do you speak Chinese?”
Morton smiled slightly. “As I was saying, Mr. DeMarco, I believe the sergeant is informing Mr. Fong that if he doesn’t tell her what she wants to know, we’re going to deport him
and
his large, extended family. She’s saying we’re going to put them all into a boat and drop them a mile off the Chinese coast, and those who
can’t
swim will be the lucky ones. She’s also saying that before we deport him we’re going to freeze his bank accounts and close down his pharmacy, his butcher shop, and his real estate agency.”
“Jesus, he’s an industrious old bastard,” Smith said.
“Yes, he is,” Morton said. “He’s also…Ah, I believe Sergeant Chang has made some sort of breakthrough.”
The pharmacist had stopped shaking his head and Sergeant Chang had stopped screaming at him. She was listening as the pharmacist spoke to her, his voice too low for DeMarco to hear. Ten minutes later, Sergeant Chang left the interrogation room.
Sergeant Chang stood at attention before Morton. She was five three and looked like she weighed about eighty pounds but she had really mean-looking, small black eyes. She was scary, DeMarco thought— like the female villain in a kung fu movie.
“He says he gave drugs of the type that could be used in an interrogation to a man named Loc Zhongyu. I know Zhongyu. He can be very, ah,
cruel
. Very brutal. When he was young he belonged to a gang. He freelances now, strong-arm stuff. We know he’s killed before but we’ve never been able to convict him.”
“But I assume we have his picture in our files,” Morton said.
“Yes, sir. And one other thing. Loc Zhongyu has a cousin who helps him. The cousin isn’t very bright, but he’s big.”
“Do we have the cousin’s picture also, Sergeant?” Morton asked.
“I don’t know, sir. I’ll go look if I’m no longer needed here.”
“How big a supply of drugs did he give this Loc guy?” DeMarco asked.
Sergeant Chang locked her black eyes onto DeMarco’s face. “I didn’t ask that,” the sergeant said. She sounded annoyed, as if DeMarco was questioning her skills.
But Morton understood what DeMarco was getting at. “What we need to know, Sergeant, is if Li Mei and her companions will have to be resupplied, in which case we’ll stake out Mr. Fong’s pharmacy.”
“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Chang said, and her eyes narrowed and the expression on her face changed and she walked back into the interrogation room. She took up a position behind the pharmacist, put her face about two inches from his right ear, and started screaming.

D
eMarco entered the motel room where Neil was staying. The area where Neil’s equipment sat was operating-room clean, but every other flat surface was stacked with boxes from various takeout places: Domino’s, Wendy’s, Tony Roma’s, KFC. DeMarco noted that all the food had come from U.S. fast-food chains and concluded that Neil had no desire to expand his cultural horizon. All the boxes were empty— it was apparently impossible for Neil to order more than he could consume— but the room still smelled like the bottom of a Dumpster.
Neil looked up at DeMarco in annoyance. He was talking on the phone and DeMarco heard him say, “I miss you, too, honey. I can’t stand being away from you either.”
Last year Fat Neil had married. Neil— an egotistical, condescending slob— had a wife and a stable relationship while Joe DeMarco had neither. And Neil’s wife was a sweet, normal person. She wasn’t Hollywood gorgeous but she was cute. She was also very bright— Neil would have eaten a dumb woman alive— and she was compassionate and considerate and loving, all those attributes that men value in the women who might one day bear their children or tend to them in their feeble, sundown years.
“And I might not be here much longer,” DeMarco heard Fat Neil say.
“What?” DeMarco said.
Neil jerked his thumb toward an open door that allowed entry to the room adjacent to Neil’s. Shit, DeMarco thought, he’s rented a second room. He would have to declare bankruptcy if this went on much longer. As DeMarco walked toward the open door he wondered if Neil had rented the adjoining space because he couldn’t sleep in the landfill he’d created. DeMarco pushed open the door, and there sat Bobby.
Bobby Prentiss was Neil’s protégé, the heir apparent to his electronic domain. He was a young black man who wore Rastafarian dreadlocks that hung down between his narrow shoulders. He looked about sixteen years old but was actually twenty-six. He had dropped out of MIT when the university refused to allow him to develop his own eclectic curriculum. Neil said Bobby was the best hacker he knew, and coming from Neil that was high praise indeed.
“Bobby,” DeMarco said. “How you doing?”
“Aw right,” Bobby mumbled as he continued to look at the computer screen in front of him. Bobby wasn’t much of a talker.
“When did you get out here?”
“Uh, last night.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re here.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said.
“Bobby, Neil’s talking to his wife but he said something about a breakthrough. You know what he’s talking about?”
“Yeah,” Bobby said.
Jesus
, DeMarco thought. “Well, can you tell me what it is?”
“Uh, sure,” Bobby said. He stopped pecking at the keyboard, picked up an index card, and handed it to DeMarco. On the card was written an address in an area near Vancouver called Delta and the names Lili and Tian Moy.
“What’s this, Bobby?”
“What?” Bobby said, lost once again in cyberspace.
“Bobby…”
“Quit bothering Bobby, DeMarco,” Fat Neil said. “Come here and I’ll tell you what we’ve got.”

* * *

“AS YOU’LL RECALL
, we assumed Li Mei rented a place outside Vancouver, somewhere remote, and they rented it within the last two weeks,” Neil said. “So I got back copies of real estate ads for that time period for Vancouver and the surrounding towns, and focused on locations meeting certain criteria. Single-family dwellings, dwellings on large lots not too close to the neighbors, that sort of thing. The problem is, you can only get so much information from an ad. The next step was to find out who had rented the places. In some cases, we could use databases: people would activate phones or electricity, that sort of thing. If they did, we would get names to see if they sounded Asian. The problem was that it wasn’t always necessary to activate the utilities in these places. So then what I did— I’m such a sly fellow, I took…”
Neil had stopped speaking because he was trying to unwrap a piece of Bazooka bubble gum and his short fingernails were having trouble getting the paper off the gum. After he finally scraped the wrapper from the gum, he then took time to read the cartoon. DeMarco barely suppressed an urge to jam the gum up Neil’s nose.
“Anyway,” Neil said, “I took the phone number in the ads and programmed a machine to dial all the numbers and leave a recorded message. The message said that if two or three Asians have just rented from you, and if one of them is a tall, pretty woman in her early forties, call this number because these people might be dangerous criminals. I also offered a reward.”
“A reward! How in the hell am I supposed to pay a—”
“We got a hit about an hour ago,” Neil said, and blew a triumphant pink bubble.
“Well shit, Neil! Why didn’t you call me?” DeMarco said.
“Relax. I’m just trying to see if we can get anything else before we, I mean you, run out there on a wild goose chase.”
“What else are you trying to get?”
“Driver’s license pictures. We have the names of the renters and if they’re legit, they probably have a driver’s license. So Bobby’s getting into Canadian DMV records and we’re pulling up pictures. If they have licenses and they don’t look like the lovely Li Mei and her two ugly companions, we’ll know they’re not the right ones.”
“So how long is this going to take?”
“I don’t know, but it’ll take a lot longer if you bother Bobby.”
Bobby came into Neil’s pigpen two minutes later. “They don’t have driver’s licenses,” he said. “At least not legitimate ones.”
“So they could be our guys,” DeMarco said.
“Maybe, but not necessarily,” Neil said. “They could just be a pair of illegal immigrants renting the place.”
“Let’s get the damn landlord on the phone again,” DeMarco said.
The phone rang six times before a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Ma’am,” DeMarco said, “this is Chief Superintendent Robert Morton, RCMP. I’m calling about the people who rented your house.”
“Does this mean we get the reward?”
“Possibly, ma’am, but we need to get a few more facts.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Can you describe the woman?”
“Well, she’s Asian, Oriental, whatever.”
“Yes, ma’am. But is she Chinese, Japanese, or Korean?”
“I don’t know. How can you tell the difference?”
“Jesus,” DeMarco said under his breath.
“What?” the woman said. “I didn’t hear that.”
“Uh, never mind, ma’am. Was the woman who rented from you tall?”
“Sort of.”
“How tall are you, ma’am?”
“Five two.”
“And she’s taller than you?”
“Yes, quite a bit taller.”
Neil muttered that anyone over five six would seem tall to her.
“And is she pretty, ma’am? The woman we’re looking for is very pretty.”
“Well, I guess. Sort of.”
“Christ,” DeMarco muttered.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, “I didn’t hear that.”
“What about the woman’s husband, ma’am? What can you tell me about him?”
“Well, he’s Asian, too.”
“We know that, ma’am, but can you describe him. Is he a big man?”
“Sort of. He’s about as big as my husband.”
“How big is your husband, ma’am?”
“Jack?”
“Yes, ma’am. How big is Jack?”
“Oh, he’s five eight and weighs almost two hundred pounds. He really needs to lose some weight.”
“And this man, the renter, he weighed as much as your husband?” DeMarco said.
“I guess. Maybe a little less.”
DeMarco wondered if the woman’s description of the male renter was accurate. One of the men the pharmacist had identified, Loc Zhongyu, was five seven but skinny. And his cousin, the man they thought was with Loc, was over six four. But he wasn’t sure he could trust the woman’s memory.
“Have you been to your rental house since these people moved in?” DeMarco asked.
“No. The house is about twenty miles from here. Maybe my husband has, but I haven’t. I don’t drive.”
“Okay,” DeMarco said. “Now this is what I need you to do, ma’am. I need you and your husband to stay away from your rental property. Don’t go near it until we contact you again. We’re not sure that your renters are the people we’re looking for, and until we are sure, you need to stay away from them.”
“When will we get the reward?” the woman said.
“When we’re sure, ma’am,” DeMarco said and hung up.
“Lovely, bright woman,” Neil said.
DeMarco ignored him and called Bill Smith’s cell phone. Smith didn’t answer. DeMarco left a message for Smith to call him as soon as possible. He called Morton next. A man at Morton’s office told him that Morton had taken emergency leave.
“Emergency leave?” DeMarco said. “What’s wrong with him?”
“A family matter, sir. I can’t discuss the details with you.”
“I need Morton’s cell-phone number. Or his home number.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t give out that sort of information over the phone.”
DeMarco started to scream into the receiver, then realizing the futility of it, left a message that if Morton called in he should call Mr. DeMarco.
“Would you like Bobby to get this Morton person’s numbers?” Neil said.
DeMarco thought for a minute. He could call Glen Harris and get help from the FBI, but the Bureau would form a committee and hold ten meetings before they made a decision. Plus Harris pissed him off. DeMarco had called Diane when he’d arrived in Vancouver, hoping he’d be able to see her, but she’d been sent back to Seattle. Harris had assigned her to a desk job until he could finish debriefing the shoot-out in Chinatown. Diane was still shaken by Darren Thayer’s death, and now she was worried that Harris was going to torpedo her career. Yeah, Harris really pissed him off.
“Yeah, get Morton’s number,” DeMarco said, “but I’m not going to wait. I’m going out to this place to see if Emma’s there.”
“You’re going alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a gun, DeMarco?”
“No.”
“How many people has this woman killed already?”
“Six.”
“Six,” Fat Neil repeated. “And she’s with two known criminals who are probably armed. I think you should wait for—”
“Call me when you get Morton’s number,” DeMarco said.