by David DeLee
“That’s why you think Billy is still alive,” she said. Smart woman. “Because of this…whatever thing they want.”
“Yes.”
“What is it?” Singleton asked.
“A computer flash drive. Its why Billy’s apartment was ransacked. We don’t believe they found it.”
Singleton said, “There was a ton of computer stuff in his apartment. Riggi’s, too. The crime labs have it all.”
Bannon shook his head. “If the flash drive they’re looking for had been there, the people holding Billy would have found it. He must have hidden it somewhere else. Somewhere they don’t know where to look.”
“Who wants it?” Singleton asked. “What’s on it?”
Bannon ignored the second question. “Several people but two men in particular. Vincent LaSala and Toi Kwon.”
“Kwon and LaSala? Jesus Christ, Bannon.”
At Singleton’s reaction, Meredith slid forward on the sofa. “Who are these people?”
“Vincent LaSala runs Boston’s criminal syndicate,” Singleton said.
“Toi Kwon is what is called an oyabun,” Bannon said. “The leader of the Yakuza, an Asian gang that operates in Chinatown.”
He sat down next to Meredith and took her hand in his. Over the next twenty minutes, with Singleton staring down them with his arms crossed over his chest, Bannon told her about his meetings with Dominick Bonucci and Vinnie Knuckles, and what they’d learned from spending the night on Kwon’s boat, the Bakuto. He omitted any mention of their criminal involvement in knocking over the checking cash store in Boston or robbing Kwon’s safe.
When he finished, as gently as he could, Bannon said, “There’s no doubt your son’s been working for Vincent LaSala, doing his books. He’s his accountant.”
Meredith looked at Singleton with pleading eyes. “That’s not illegal, is it?”
Singleton frowned. “It depends on how deeply involved he is in the illegal side of the business.”
Bannon squeezed her hands to regain her attention. “Let’s not focus on that at the moment. Getting Billy back safely is the priority. To do that, we need to find that missing flash drive. Do you have any idea where Billy might hide something like that? Maybe here at the house? Does he have a safety deposit box, a storage unit, a friend or girlfriend he might give it to for safekeeping?”
Meredith stared down at her hands. Her forehead furrowed as she thought. But she shook her head. “The only person he’d trust with something like that would have been Alex.”
Singleton said, “We searched his apartment. It was ransacked, too. I have to agree with Brice, it would’ve been stored somewhere else.”
“Meredith, could he have left it here without you know it? Or maybe at Alex’s parent’s house?”
She shook her head. “Billy hasn’t been here since Christmas last year. The same’s true with Alex.”
Bannon agreed. “No. He’d need constant access to it.”
He stood up. “If there’s any place you can think of, anyone you think of who Billy might trust with something like this, give me a call.” Bannon handed her one of his PI business cards.
She accepted it and came to her feet. “Of course, but I wouldn’t count on it. From what I’m learning, I didn’t know my son anywhere near as well as I thought I did. Or at all.”
“I’m sorry you’re going through this,” Bannon said. “But we’ll get Billy back, alive. You have my word on that.”
She nodded, forced a grateful smile, but didn’t say anything more as she blinked back tears.
On the other hand, Bannon could feel Singleton’s staring at him, his eyes burning into him like angry lasers.
“Mrs. Palmer,” Singleton said. “Those items I told you about. I’ve got them in my car.”
The three of them went out to the police car where Singleton retrieved a small cardboard box from the backseat. The top of the box was open. Bannon could see the clear plastic police evidence bags inside.
Singleton handed the box to Meredith.
“Billy’s personal items. They were recovered from his boat,” he said. “Some papers, mostly pertaining to the boat, ownership papers and maintenance records, his keys, sunglasses, a cell phone. We no longer need them for evidentiary purposes. I felt you should have them as soon as possible.”
Meredith accepted the box and pawed half-heartedly through the contents with a sad expression on her face. Bannon noticed Billy’s keyring with its little plastic cartoon character, the discount store tags on it, and his keys. He noticed the car fob was missing from the ring though.
“We still have his car keys,” Singleton said, noting the missing item. “We took Billy’s car form the marina to examine it for any evidence we could find. It’s in our impound yard. We’re finished with it, too. I can have an officer bring it around whenever you want.”
“Thank you,” Meredith said. “any time is fine.”
Singleton hesitated. “There’s one more thing.” He paused. “There was a gun.”
Meredith gasped. “A gun!”
“Yes. A small, .32 caliber revolver. It’s still being tested by ballistics. But we do know it was not the weapon used to kill Alex.”
Meredith inhaled sharply.
“Keep it,” she said. “I’ll have nothing to do with such a thing.”
She’d reached her breaking point. The roller coaster ride of was he alive or dead, safe or in trouble, and now learning how much she didn’t know about her own son, how much of his life he’d kept from her. With the box of personal effects tucked under her arm, she backed away from them. With tears running down her cheeks, she ran for the house.
“Keep it. Keep it all. I don’t want it.”
She ran into the house and slammed the door shut.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Bordered by Boston Commons, Downtown Crossing, and the South End, Boston’s Chinatown had been home to the city’s notorious red-light district: colorfully dubbed the Combat Zone due to its reputation for crime and violence and the many soldiers and sailors that would visit the strip clubs, brothels, and sex shops while on leave. But that was forty years ago. Most of the peep shows, strip clubs, X-rated movie theaters, and adult bookstores have since been replaced with residential high rises, Asian restaurants, retail shops, and the renovated Boston Opera House.
That’s not to say the dark side of Chinatown is gone. Like all big cities, crimes of prostitution, sex trafficking, drug dens, and gambling still fester, it’s simply not as visible as it used to be.
Now it’s hidden, more difficult to find, Tara thought, like rats and cockroaches. Still there, but harder to root out.
It was late afternoon, dusk had gathered, and she and Kayla had been driving around the city for hours—not as fun as it sounds in Boston’s downtown traffic—by the time they drove south along the upper end of Harrison Avenue. Tara was at the wheel of her candy red Mazda Miata convertible. Her one indulgence when it came to western culture excess. Well, that and Häagen-Dazs ice cream.
The car’s roof was up against the October cold. From behind dark sunglasses, Tara scanned the mix-use buildings on either side of the city street. The storefronts were cosmetics places, jewelry and accessories stores, nail salons, a fresh fish market, and Asian restaurants; Malay, Vietnamese, Chinese, and sushi.
They reached a small brick building that contained only three storefronts next to a surface parking lot. With a computer tablet open on her lap, Kayla glanced up at the second and third story windows above the shops. Residential apartments. Most of the windows were covered in sheer curtains or had window boxes hung from them. In one window pane she saw what they were looking for: a yellow sign with bold red kanji written on it.
“I think that’s it,” she said.
Tara hooked a right into the parking lot. The nimble little Miata handled the quick S-turn into an open slot smoothly. Facing the brick building, Tara snapped off the headlights and shut off the purring engine.
Like Bannon and his little PI business, T
ara sometimes got involved with helping people outside their Homeland Security assignments, too. Most recently she’d been helping a Boston detective sergeant named Curtis Martin from the department’s Family Justice Division, the unit responsible for investigating crimes against children, domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking.
Most recently, he’d come to her for help investigating a series of pop-up brothels that have plagued Boston, operating in Chinatown and outward, reaching into the South End.
They were notoriously difficult to track down because as the name implied, they moved around a lot, popping up in vacant apartments, low-rent hotels and motels, and abandoned buildings. They’d operate for a week to ten days then shut down and move on, only to pop up again somewhere else. More often than not the workers were illegal immigrants smuggled into the country and forced to work in the sex trade to earn their freedom.
On the drive down from the Keel Haul, Tara had handed Kayla a slip of paper with the following symbols written on it: 매음굴. She asked her to do a deep dive into the Internet’s dark web for any combination of them. It took some time, but Kayla tracked them to some rather disturbing message boards. There she retrieved the address they’d just pulled up to. The same symbols were on the yellow sign in the second story window.
As they climbed out of the Miata. Tara said, “The kanji. It says Lotus Massage.”
“I didn’t know you read Chinese.”
“I get by. Also a little Japanese.”
“These symbols,” Kayla waved the slip of paper, “they’re not kanji.”
“Korean hangul. It means brothel,” Tara said. “They’re used like a marker, a sign post, letting the deviates online know where the latest location is. They change as regularly as the brothels change location. It’s almost impossible for the police to keep up with them because they change so fast.”
“That’s because they don’t have me,” Kayla said.
Tara fist bumped her. “Tru dat.”
Kayla laughed.
On the street, they found a plain brown metal door next to the storefront window for a pawn shop. The door was unlocked and opened directly onto a set of stairs leading up to the second floor. Beside the stairs a narrow hallway led into the back. Dreary and depressing couldn’t begin to describe the place.
Once inside, they let the door swing shut behind them.
The walls were peeling and in desperate need of paint. The stairwell smelled of burned Kung Pao Chicken, soy sauce, and urine. Thumb-tacked to the wall was a piece of paper torn from a notebook. It had the Lotus Message kanji and the Korean symbols crudely written on it in black sharpie, with a crooked arrow pointing upstairs.
Tara and Kayla went upstairs
The second floor corridor ran to the back of the building. There were two thickly painted black doors on either side of the hall. Closed. And if the residence were smart, triple-locked. A large Asian man in a dark suit stood at one. He had his hands clasped one over the other in front of him. He watched them approach.
In English, he asked, “Can I help you?”
“We’re here for a massage,” Tara said.
The man narrowed his dark eyes. “We do not get many women inquiring about massages.”
“That’s so last decade, dude,” Tara said. “Women are independent nowadays, we go where we want, get what we want.”
“We do not have any male masseurs.”
“And that’s kind of discriminatory,” Kayla added.
Tara gave Kayla an adoring look.
He arched an eyebrow, taking a minute to size them up. Satisfied, he shrugged and twisted the knob, opening the door to the apartment he was guarding. “See the woman at the desk behind the window.”
“You’re a peach,” Tara said.
They stepped past him into what had started out life as the living room of a cramped apartment. Three sofas lined the walls around the room. Six women on them. All Asian except for one black woman and a Hispanic girl who looked all of about eighteen. They wore varying degrees of revealing lingerie, the garments looked threadbare and unwashed. With bored expressions on their faces the women flipped through magazines, filed their nails, and snapped gum, without looking up. One smoked a cigarette, fouling the air with bluish smoke. Bangles on her wrist jangled each time she pulled the cigarette from her lipstick covered lips. One woman, also very young, had a bruise under her eye. She’d attempted to conceal it with makeup.
The room had an open pass through to the adjoining room. Behind it an older, serious looking Asian woman sat at a desk. She flipped through a fashion magazine that Tara recognized to be several months old. On the desk were a phone and an appointment calendar, opened to that day’s date.
The woman looked up. She didn’t smile. To the guard still at the door, in English, she said, “That’ll be all, Li Qiang.”
The large man nodded. He stepped back into the hallway and pulled the door closed.
“What do you want?” the woman asked.
Tara leaned casually on the cutaway shelf. In halting Chinese, she told the woman they were interested in a massage.
In Chinese, the woman asked, “Both of you?”
Tara said, in English, “Yes. Together.”
The woman frowned. “Méiyǒu. One each.”
“No.” Tara shook her head. “Yīqǐ. Together.”
The woman stared hard at Tara, then nodded. “Charge double.”
Tara acted angry. “Méiyǒu. One girl. Charge for one.”
The woman pursed her lips, stubborn. “Two. Double the work.”
“Méiyǒu. No,” Tara insisted.
Finally, the woman said, “You drive hard bargain. Charge price one time and half.”
Tara nodded, satisfied. “Done.”
“Half hour or hour?”
Tara answered in English. “A half hour should be long enough.”
She pulled three hundred and fifty dollars from the front pocket of her white jeans and handed the folded bills to the woman. “How long to wait?”
The woman, busy putting the money in a strongbox she’d pulled from a desk drawer, waved without looking up. “Ready now. Pick girl. Go.”
Tara already knew which girl to pick. The young Asian girl who had a bruise on her cheek. Tara pointed. “That one.”
The woman behind the desk stood up and shouted, “Huan…”
The rest of her instructions were shouted in a rapid-fire Chinese, part Mandarin mixed with random Hakka words—one of four main languages spoken in Taiwan—from what Tara could pick up. Go. These two. Back room.
The girl sat curled up at the end of the sofa, her legs tucked under her. She stretched them out and stood up. Tara blinked at how young the girl was. Can’t be more than nineteen, she thought around the ache in her heart. The girl’s straight black hair was cut in severe bangs. She wore a black camisole top and matching panties and spike-heeled black pumps.
She kept her eyes cast to the carpet as she passed them. “This way, please.”
Kayla stared at Tara, her expression read of disapproval. She whispered, “What are we doing here?”
Under her breath, Tara said, “Just follow my lead.”
Led down a dingy, dimly-lit hallway, the walls had been painted lime green a long, long time ago and, not surprisingly, were in desperate need of a fresh coat. The air was heavy with the smell of old cigarette smoke, pot, and incense. And oddly, of Old Spice. They passed two closed doors before Huan stopped at an open doorway.
At the open door, Huan waved a hand indicating they should enter. She forced an unconvincing smile.
Tara went in first, Kayla behind her.
The room was barren except for a single queen-size bed on a metal frame with a sagging mattress. The peeling walls were painted the same hideous lime green as the hallway. A blanket hung over the window cutting off the late day’s fading sunlight save for a silver of light where the blanket gaped at the sill.
Huan closed the door behind them. A bare, 40-watt bulb i
n the ceiling fixture prevented the room from being plunged into total darkness. She stepped around them, and wordlessly, began to slip the thin strap of her cami-top off her shoulder.
Tara waved a hand at her, stopping her. “That won’t be necessary.”
Huan’s dark eyes clouded with suspicion.
“Who runs this place? Give me his name?”
Huan shook her head. “We do not speak of such things. Bad things happen when we break the rules.” She touched the bruise under her eye. “Girls disappear.”
“That’s not going to happen to you,” Tara said. “We’re here to help.”
Huan’s eyes went wide. She shook her head. “No. Men come here. They say they try to help. Then never do. Girls disappear.”
“We’re not like those men. We can help. I promise,” Tara said. “I have friends that can help you.”
“Not me. My family. Back home. In Taiwan. If I say anything they will die. Please.”
“They won’t.” Tara pointed at Kayla. “We can help get you out. Take you to safety. We’ll help save your family. But you need to trust us. Tell me who runs this place.”
Huan eyes darted from her to Kayla then back to Tara. “Yong Wang.”
“He runs it for a man named Toi Kwon, yes?”
Huan blinked and looked at Kayla.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Tara said.
Huan nodded hurriedly. “Shi de. Yes. Yes. Now you must go!”
“Not yet. Yong Wang. Is he here now?” Tara asked. “In this building?”
“Shi de. Yes.” Huan pushed Tara toward the door. “You go. Now!”
She took Huan by the shoulders. The small Asian girl—panicked now—stiffened under her grasp. Her arms were rail thin. From the way the too short camisole swished, she could count the girl’s ribs.
“It’s okay,” Tara said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“You must go!” the girl shouted.
Huan broke away from Tara’s grip and backed across the room, bumping against the blanket covered window. “I help you I get in trouble. Beaten.”
She pointed at her bruise.
“We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” Tara said.
