The Rivers Run Dry

by Sibella Giorello

  We were crossing the floating bridge over Lake Washington and the road seemed to hover inches above the water, the concrete blocks fracturing the wind. To my right, lake water rippled with white caps. To my left, it stretched smooth as blown glass.

  “You call it flirting,” Jack said. “But you’d be surprised what it turns up. Becky’s brother-in-law works for the Maple Valley police. They’ve kept a file on the guy ever since.”

  I turned my head toward the rippling lake, feeling the wind out of the south pulsing against the Jeep, sending a sporadic whistling sound through the door frame. We drove in silence until we reached the town of Issaquah fifteen minutes later, where the cloud cover had descended down the mountain like disapproving gray brows.

  In the Burger King parking lot, two Bureau vehicles idled next to an Issaquah police cruiser and another cruiser from the state police, plus the gray Crown Vic I’d seen the first day out here, the car belonging to Detective Markel.

  We followed the detective’s convoy down Sunset Avenue, turning in at a manmade waterfall with the word “Talus” engraved on the polished black granite. If anybody cared, I could have explained that it was just about impossible for talus and polished granite to wind up together—talus being the broken rock found at the bottom of crags and cliffs—but I could see why the marketers had seized the word. Talus somehow insinuated wealth, exclusivity, a much better choice than its geological equivalent: scree.

  We followed the newly paved road through what had once been forest but now carried trimmed shrubs and planted autumn flowers that wouldn’t survive the winter. At the top of the hill, a group of new Craftsman-style homes faced east, like manufactured heliotropes ready to greet the rising sun. Down below, the blue mountains cupped Lake Sammamish like a cool drink between sturdy hands.

  Ernie Suggs’s house was three stories, with a driveway unsullied by motor oil stains. His neighbors’ homes were similar palaces yet close enough that when I climbed out of the Jeep, adjusting my bulletproof vest, I could hear a phone ringing next door. It finally stopped.

  After I got out, Jack drove the Jeep to the end of the street and parked, stationed on lookout, with another Bureau car closing the street’s other end. The state trooper parked at the curb, walking toward the house. It was Lowell, the trooper I’d met in the Cougar Mountain parking lot. He nodded and we followed Detective Markel and two Issaquah deputies to Suggs’s front door. We let the two SWAT agents knock.

  Then a blue Toyota Camry raced down the street, pulling into Suggs’s driveway. Byron Ngo leaped out, dark eyes flat as a delta, with about as much current below the surface. Ngo walked to the front door, nodding acknowledgment to the detective. The SWAT agent rang the bell.

  The Asian girl who answered had silken skin the color of honey and my mind flashed to the court file, to the therapist’s report about Suggs’s “complete rehabilitation.”

  She stared at the SWAT agent, then looked at Detective Markel as he held up the search warrant. The girl shook her head, small eyes jumping from one agent to the next, lingering on me, the only female. Then on Ngo, the only Asian.

  “No speak,” she said. “I no speak.”

  Detective Markel turned around. “Can anybody here translate?”

  Ngo stepped forward. “She sounds Thai.”

  I couldn’t understand the words, but the gestures were obvious. The girl nodded vigorously, as though somebody was shaking her thin shoulders, then she held the door open as we filed in. SWAT went first, securing the house. Then the detective, his deputies, and I came up behind Trooper Lowell when Ngo leaped ahead of me. “Experience first,” he said.

  The living room was empty, the brown curtains were drawn, making the leather furniture look like skinned animals crouched for a kill. I smelled curry and bacon and cigarettes, and in one corner of the room the detective inspected a glass and oak gun case, testing the lock. One of our SWAT guys went upstairs, his footsteps soundless, while the other moved into the hallway, MP5 ready.

  “FBI!” Ngo hollered.

  “What the—” Detective Markel spun.

  Ngo was already starting down the hallway with SWAT. The trooper started to follow, but I grabbed his arm.

  “Stay with the girl,” I told him.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because the place isn’t secure yet.”

  It wasn’t enough for him, I could see that.

  “SWAT needs you here. Wait for the agent to come back downstairs,” I said. “Keep a close eye on everything. You’re essential here.”

  The skin on his square face pulled tight, the muscles flexing in his jaw. But he stepped back, nodding. I walked down the hallway. The SWAT agent had secured a half bath, and Ngo was positioned outside the only other door. It was closed, and the detective stood on the other side of the jamb, his .45 drawn.

  “FBI!” Ngo yelled again.

  There was no reply.

  Ngo glanced at SWAT, nodded, then reached out, quickly twisting the knob, flinging the door open.

  The voice inside the room seemed to leak out. “You guys just don’t know when to quit. Come on in, enjoy the show.”

  Ngo glanced into the room, pulled back. Then glanced again. With his left hand he signaled SWAT, and walked into the room.

  Daylight leaked through the horizontal blinds, falling on the large platform bed sheathed with black satin sheets. The shiny material bunched around the oddly elongated torso and the two Asian girls on either side of him. The girls clutched at the satin, trying to pull the slippery material over their naked bodies. I looked away, from instinct, then looked back, from training, and saw Suggs’s left forearm sheathed in white gauze.

  “First yer breaking my arm. Then yer busting into my house,” he said. “Man, I’ll never have to work again.”

  The SWAT agent slid open a set of mirrored closet doors that made the room feel overpopulated. A sleeve of clothing dangled from the shelf inside, as though reaching for the wire hangers below that held lace outfits dyed the color of fake gems. I walked over, pushing aside the lingerie, until I found the shoes resting on the pale carpeting. When I glanced over my shoulder, Ngo was pawing through an oak dresser while the detective and his deputies stood beside the bed. The detective’s thousand-mile stare was slightly fractured by the sight of Suggs and the girls. But Suggs continued to smile as though we’d arrived in time to witness his prowess with girls who still shopped in the juniors’ department.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” the detective said. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law. You have the right to speak to a lawyer. If you can’t afford one—”

  “Afford one?” Suggs interrupted. “I got lawyers begging me to hire them.”

  “—one will be appointed to you without cost. Do you understand each of these rights the way I have explained them to you?”

  “Yeah, I understand. You broke into my house right after the Feds broke my wrist. This is so bad, it’s great. What’s the charge anyway?”

  “Abduction,” Detective Markel said. “Possibly murder.”

  “What?” Suggs said.

  The detective pulled out his cuffs.

  “Hey, man, you can’t cuff me.” He lifted his left arm. The splint and white gauze ended at his knuckles, and his fingers looked like blue sausages. “That girlie over there, she broke my wrist last night.”

  Detective Markel looked at me.

  “Cuff him,” I said. “Just make sure the hasps are double locked.”

  “You got a problem with yer ears?” Suggs said. “I just told you, my wrist is broken.”

  “You’re wearing a splint. Broken usually means a cast.”

  “It’s cracked, the bone’s cracked. The only reason they didn’t put a cast on was they’re waiting for the swelling to go down.”

  “So wait a few more days,” I said.

  “I don’t believe this,” Suggs said. “You know what? By the time this is over, you’ll be lucky to scrub toilets fer a
living. Hey, I know. You can scrub my toilet—in my new house in Maui.”

  The second SWAT agent appeared in the doorway. He spoke to Ngo. “There’s an office upstairs. We secured a computer and file cabinet.”

  Ngo left. The detective ordered his deputies to cuff Suggs, then followed Ngo down the hall.

  I turned to the closet again, lifting each shoe, examining the soles. Suggs wore lifts, one leg apparently shorter than the other, and his tennis shoes held a milky green soil inside the treads. I took an evidence bag from my back pocket, dropping in the tennis shoes.

  The deputies had wrapped a beach towel around Suggs’s naked waist. I helped the two girls dress, with the only available clothing—the ridiculous lace numbers—then I walked them down the hall to the living room.

  The deputies and Suggs were already there, with Officer Lowell standing behind a large leather chair that now contained the girl from the front door. The trooper kept his back to the window, but his face appeared flushed, the skin like burnt copper. Perhaps embarrassed by the girls in their outfits.

  I turned to Suggs. “How did you do it?”

  “I don’t have to talk to you,” he said.

  “Did you ratchet the clamps down on yourself? Or did you lean against the seat until the bone cracked?”

  “You did this to me, girlie. I got witnesses. G-Men witnesses. My lawyer took pictures. By the time this is over, I’m gonna own the government.”

  “You’re a desperate man,” I said. “What did you do with Courtney?”

  “I got nothing to do with that.”

  “With what?”

  But he refused to reply, his thin lips pressed together.

  I turned, hearing footsteps on the stairs, and saw Detective Markel carrying a laptop encased in a plastic bag, his thousand-mile stare gone. He was almost smiling. Ngo followed him, face still unreadable, and behind him the SWAT agent carried a small file cabinet.

  “Do the girls have visas?” Detective Markel asked Suggs.

  “Visas? They’re citizens.”

  The detective looked at Ngo. “Ask the girls how old they are.”

  “You’re fishing here!” Suggs yelled.

  The girls from the bedroom sat beside each other on the leather couch, leaving the other girl alone. Ngo spoke to them in the strange-sounding language, his tone rising at the end of each burst of words. Before answering, the two girls whispered, still ignoring the other girl, and finally they said something to Ngo.

  “They won’t tell me their ages,” he said.

  “Take them all down to the station,” Detective Markel said.

  “Hey, what—”

  But Suggs stopped. The detective turned to me.

  “The Cougar Mountain trail connects to this subdivision. It’s less than a quarter-mile walk from here,” he said. “It’s the same trail that goes directly to the parking lot where we found Courtney VanAlstyne’s car.”

  “I’m calling my lawyer!” Suggs said.

  “You can use the phone down at the station,” the detective said.

  chapter seventeen

  That afternoon Jack and I walked through the casino to the management’s offices downstairs from the gaming floor, where a receptionist honed her long nails with a glass file shaped like a butter knife. We asked her who was in charge and she said, “Second shift starts in fifteen minutes. You can wait here for the floor manager.”

  “Would that be Ernie Suggs?” I asked.

  She was a chubby girl with hair that fell like ironed sheets of onyx down her back. When she ran the perfect nails through her hair, sparks seemed to dance from her fingertips. “You know Ernie?”

  “We sure do,” Jack said. “And Ernie won’t be in today.”

  She frowned. “He’s on the schedule. He didn’t call in sick or anything.”

  “You probably weren’t his one phone call,” Jack said.

  “His what?”

  Jack flipped open his Bureau credentials. “Ernie’s in jail. We’re looking for whoever’s in charge around here. I know that’s you.” He smiled. “But who do they say’s in charge?”

  The girl picked up the phone on her desk and punched in four numbers using a pencil eraser. She said, “Tell Mike to come to the office. Police-type people are here. Something about Ernie.”

  She hung up.

  “Thanks.” Jack sat on the edge of her desk and asked her name. I turned away. The walls were painted bright salmon and held shadow boxes that displayed Native American artifacts. Or what I thought were artifacts. Stepping closer, I realized the arrow-heads had the milky texture of plastic and the masks showed the mechanical uniformity of crushed sandstone. Behind me, the receptionist said her name was Gayle.

  “One of my favorite names,” Jack said.

  I was restraining my gag reflex when a lumpy man walked through the office’s glass door. He wore a dark brown suit and the left pocket flap folded halfway inside as though he were the recent victim of an amateur pickpocket.

  “Can I help you people?” He looked from Jack to me, then back to Jack.

  I held out my Bureau credentials along with the search warrant.

  Jack stood up from the desk and said, “We’re going to search Ernie Suggs’s office. We can hunt around for it or you can make it easy for everybody and show us where it is.”

  The man took the warrant from my hand. His ruddy eyes scanned the type quickly, blindly.

  “Sir, may I ask your name?” I said.

  “Mike.” He looked up. “Mike Holland.”

  Jack said, “Okay, Mike, here’s how this works. The warrant’s legit, so don’t bother spouting off about that. We’re not asking, we’re telling. Take us to Ernie Suggs’s office.”

  Mike Holland looked panicked. “You’re investigating us?”

  Before Jack jumped in, I said, “We can’t discuss that, sir. But we would appreciate your cooperation in this one matter.”

  “What did Ernie do?”

  Jack said, “Let me put it this way. If you don’t take us to his office, we’ll definitely want to investigate this whole place. So you decide how you want to play it.”

  Mike Holland glanced at Gayle. His left hand reached back, touching the half-folded pocket flap, rubbing the brown cloth. The material had the waxy and threadbare appearance of an adored stuffed animal.

  “Can I call my boss?” he asked.

  Gayle picked up the phone.

  “No,” Jack said.

  Gayle hung up.

  I said, “You can call him later, Mr. Holland. Your cooperation won’t go unnoticed by the Bureau.”

  He glanced once more at Gayle and then we followed him out of the office. I didn’t need to turn around to realize Gayle was burning up the phone lines as we walked down the subterranean maze of hallways and Mike Holland stopped at a simple hollowcore door with a black sign that read ERNEST SUGGS, MANAGER. Pulling a metal ring from his belt, hands shaking, he tried several keys before opening the door.

  The compact room smelled acrid and poisonous, like carpet glue. Jack walked over to a pressed board desk, sat in Suggs’s chair, and turned on the computer. Holland watched him, eyes jumping, glancing at me, still beside him, then back at the computer, back at me.

  Fear had so many permutations, so many nuances, that deciphering the root was always a challenge. From what I was seeing, Mike Holland’s fear seemed natural. The Feds came to search, he might lose his job for helping us, might go to jail if he didn’t, and unlike people with real crimes to conceal, he didn’t attempt any nonchalance. He was scared. It showed. When I touched his forearm, he startled.

  “Let me ask you something, Mike. Can I call you Mike?”

  He nodded.

  “Does the casino keep film of the poker area?”

  “Film?” His upper lip beaded with sweat. “Film?”

  “Any visual record of the poker area, for instance. Our search warrant covers recorded material. It needs to be turned over to us.”

  “But, but—but we tape
over every thirty days.” His eyes widened, as if we would ask him to reconstruct every scene from memory.

  “Let’s start with this month,” I said. “It’s October 17, so where would you keep those seventeen days of film?”

  His hand reached back, waxing the suit flap. “Down the hall?” he said, as if I knew better than he did.

  I turned to Jack. Ernie Suggs kept his rolling chair ratcheted down for a meerkat’s short legs and elongated torso, and the chair placed Jack so far below the computer screen that his face was tilted up, childlike, as he clicked the mouse, a blue light from the monitor flashing across his face.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  He glanced over. “Huh?”

  “I’m going to get the film.”

  “Yeah, sure.” His eyes were glazed.

  Mike Holland walked with extraordinary speed, particularly for a heavy guy, but I suspected he crossed the casino this way all the time, his job one brush fire after another. We turned down a hall, the white sheet linoleum squeaking under his rubber soles, and passed walls of black metal lockers. He stopped suddenly, pulling out the key ring again, unlocking a dead bolt on a steel door. The room was nothing more than a storage closet with metal racks of CDs in clear jewel cases. White labels taped to their spines gave the locations: Slots, Roulette, Restaurant, Bar 1, Bar 2 . . . I walked over, pulling out the CDs.

  “They start over at the first of the month?” I asked.

  Holland’s hand remained on the doorknob. He offered a weak sigh. “Somebody reviews this stuff daily, but they keep it here for thirty days in case something comes up.”

  “These say ‘September.’” I picked up a bundle of CDs. There were at least a dozen, rubber-banded together, set on the upper shelf above the October CDs.

  Holland almost ran over. I showed him the bundle, but didn’t let go.

  “I guess—I guess they didn’t erase those yet. Or—” He stopped.

  “Or what?”

  “Or they wanted to look at something again,” he said.

  “That happen often?”

  He shook his head. “Are you taking them?”

  “Yes.”