I couldn’t take it, and I bear-hugged him again and then told him to get going before I became a total, blubbering mess. He laughed. We bumped fists. And he was gone, into the place that had cut and sharpened me into a man.
Driving away was bittersweet; I was happy beyond words for his achievements but already mourning a part of my life that had begun in the loving care of Damon, my helpless infant boy, and ended just a few moments before, when my young man had walked confidently away.
Part Two
A Vigilante Killing
Chapter
13
I left the Johns Hopkins campus, drove around the corner, stopped, and put my head on the wheel. I’d known my son was leaving for months, but it had still flattened me.
My cell rang. John Sampson. I answered on the Bluetooth.
“You like pho?” he asked.
“If it’s made right,” I said, putting the car in gear. “Why?”
“Because one of O’Donnell’s sources puts Thao Le at Pho Phred’s in Falls Church at one o’clock this afternoon. Can you make it back in time?”
I looked at the clock, said, “With the bubble and siren, yes.”
“I’d cut the siren when you get close,” Sampson said, and he hung up.
I got back onto 295, put up the bubble, and took the car up to eighty-five, tapping on the siren to get folks out of the way and thinking about Thao Le.
He’d been a gangbanger from the get-go. Son of a California mobster, he’d come east at eighteen and formed his own criminal enterprise that focused on the trade in heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, but he’d later branched out into human trafficking.
He’d been arrested twice on racketeering charges, and twice he’d walked because of insufficient evidence or, depending on your source, because of the money Le paid in bribes. Soon enough, though, Le came on the radar of Detective Tommy McGrath and his partner at the time, Terry Howard.
A year into the investigation of Le, Internal Affairs caught Howard with cocaine and money taken during a drug bust. Howard had always maintained his innocence, even tried to blame it on McGrath, but in the end, he’d been fired, and it had been ugly for him ever since.
McGrath believed Le had framed his partner. But six years after the fact, Tommy had not turned up enough evidence to exonerate Terry Howard because, as he’d noted in the file O’Donnell found, the Vietnamese gangster was slippery and careful. The most time Le had ever served was three and a half years for assaulting two police officers attempting to take him into custody. Both cops had ended up in the hospital.
Which is why I decided that if we were going to talk with Le, we would bring a small army with us. I started making calls.
At ten minutes to one, I pulled into a lumberyard just down the street from Eden Center, a Vietnamese and Korean entertainment and shopping hub in Falls Church. I found Bree, Sampson, and Muller waiting for me as well as four SWAT operators, two patrol units, and a sergeant detective named Earl Rand whom I’d worked with successfully before. All were with the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Department.
“How’d it go?” Bree said. She’d already armored up in the sweltering heat.
“Heartbreaking in some ways, the proudest moment of my life in others.”
“Good for you. You should be proud of him. He’s an amazing kid.”
“He is that,” I said, and I put on my own armor as Detective Rand placed a map on the hood of one of the cruisers. It showed the Eden Center, a mall laid out in a lazy U shape with a large parking lot in the middle.
Pho Phred’s was near the Viet-Royale restaurant in the northeast corner of the U, part of a section called the Sidewalk Stores that was set up to resemble an outdoor market in old Saigon. Rand showed us the access to the area from the south off the main parking lot and from the north off a smaller parking lot that abutted Oakwood Cemetery.
Rand said we’d want to cover both entrances as well as send in Fairfax officers familiar with the center through both ends of the bottom of the U.
“You’ll have him cut off in four directions,” Rand said. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
“Let’s do it,” I said, and I got in a car with Sampson.
“It’d be nice if Le’s good for McGrath, Kravic, and Peters,” he said.
“It would be,” I said. “I could take some time off, go watch Jannie run.”
“No reason that can’t happen,” Sampson said, starting the car and heading for Eden Center.
From there, everything went downhill fast.
Chapter
14
We were all in contact over the same radio frequency. Two Fairfax County officers entered Eden Center through Planet Fitness, on the far west side of the Sidewalk Stores. Two more came in from the east.
Bree and Muller came in the north entrance. Sampson, Detective Rand, and I went in through the south door. This section of Eden Center was painted light blue, which Rand said was believed to promote prosperity.
The area was certainly doing a thriving business. At one o’clock on a Friday afternoon, there were hundreds of Vietnamese Americans roaming around, shopping for fresh fish in one store, embroidered silk dresses in another, taffy candy in a third. And the air smelled savory and sweet.
Sampson and I stood out like sore thumbs, but being tall among short people had its advantages. We later figured that one or all of us must have been seen entering the center, because we were inside for no more than ninety seconds before, not fifty yards away, Thao Le blew out of Pho Phred’s, looked around, and saw us.
Le was wiry, fast, and agile. He turned and ran north.
“He’s coming right at you, Bree,” I said, breaking into a run.
“I see him.”
Detective Rand said, “Take him clean if you—”
Le must have spotted Bree and Muller, because he suddenly darted into a packed restaurant. Bree left Muller in the dust and dashed in after Le, her badge up. We heard screaming.
“There’s got to be a back way out of there!” I yelled, dodging into a fish store forty yards shy of the restaurant.
With my badge up, I yelled at the startled merchant and his customers, “Back door!”
His eyes got big and round, but he gestured to rubber curtains behind the counter.
I heard Rand calling for patrol cars as I went through the rubber curtains into a cold storage area off a small loading dock. The overhead door was raised. A wholesale-seafood truck was backing up.
I jumped off the dock before the truck could block it, landed in a putrid-smelling puddle, and stumbled. Sampson was right behind me; he grabbed me under the arm and got me upright just as we heard a crotch-rocket motorcycle start up and then saw it squeal out from behind a dumpster fifty yards away.
Helmetless, Le handled the bike like an expert, rear wheel drifting and smoking before he shot north and away from Bree, who had her gun up but wisely held her fire. Le accelerated toward the corner of the mall, then downshifted, braked, and disappeared to our right.
“I’ve got cars coming right at him!” Rand gasped as he caught up to us.
We were all running now. Bree got around the corner and held her ground. We reached her just in time to see the Fairfax patrol car turn Le.
The gangster came right back at us with the patrol car in pursuit. Another patrol car was entering the hunt from behind us. I was thinking Le was as good as in cuffs.
Le stopped about halfway down the parking lot, near another dumpster and a haphazard pile of wooden pallets stacked by the rear chain-link fence. The first cruiser was almost to Le when he looked our way and smiled.
He flicked the accelerator on the motorcycle, covered fifteen yards in a second, shot up that pile of wooden pallets, and was in the air for maybe ten feet before he landed almost sideways on the dumpster.
Le buried the throttle the instant he touched down, then he shot across the dumpster lids diagonally, jumped up on the pegs as the bike went airborne again, and sailed over the chain-link fence that sepa
rated the parking lot from Oakwood Cemetery.
The motorcycle landed on a service road and almost tipped, but Le got his foot down, righted it, and sped off, leaving us angry at losing him and slack-jawed at his mad skills.
Then a Fairfax patrolman still inside Eden Center came over the radio and said, “I’ve got Le’s girlfriend here at Pho Phred’s. You want to talk to her?”
Chapter
15
We found the officer and a zip-cuffed Michele Bui outside Pho Phred’s. Ms. Bui was, to put it mildly, unhappy.
“I got my rights,” she said. “I’m U.S. born and raised, never put a toe in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. So I don’t have to say a thing because I have not done a thing other than order lunch. This is harassment, pure and simple.”
Bui was tall for a Vietnamese female, almost five six, and slender. Her hair was shaved on one side and long on the other. She sported tattoos of yellow butterflies on her left arm, and red ones swarmed on the right. Two hoops in each nostril completed the look.
Bui began to shout in Vietnamese, and many people in the halls and other stores came to the doorways and looked at us.
“We just want to have a chat,” Bree said calmly.
“You usually bring guns and zip cuffs to a chat?” Bui asked.
“When Thao Le is who we want to chat with, yes,” I said.
“When are you guys going to leave Thao alone?” she said. “You arrest him, he gets off. You arrest him, he gets off. When you going to figure out that he can’t be had?”
She watched our faces and smiled knowingly. “You don’t have him, do you? You didn’t catch him!”
Bui started laughing and then called out something in Vietnamese that got the other people there laughing.
She looked at me. “You in charge?”
I jerked my head toward Detective Rand.
Bui rolled her eyes, said, “Can you take the cuffs off? They’re starting to hurt, and I smell a lawsuit coming on.”
Bree said, “If we take them off, you’ll talk to us?”
“Why would I do that?” Bui asked. “I am under zero obligation to talk to you because I have done nothing wrong.”
“How about aiding and abetting a cop killer?” Sampson said.
That seemed to come out of nowhere to Bui, and her chin retreated fast.
“Thao’s no cop killer,” she said.
“We think he is,” Bree said. “The cop was Tommy McGrath, a guy who had a jones to put Thao away for the rest of his life.”
Bui said nothing, her eyes darting back and forth.
“You’ve heard the name before? McGrath?” I asked.
The way she shook her head said she had heard of the late COD.
Bree picked up on it too. She said, “When someone kills a cop, the net gets big and wide. That net is forming around your boyfriend. Question is, which of his fish will get caught in the net with him?”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means your boyfriend is disloyal,” I said. “He keeps three different women in three different apartments, rotates among them.”
Bui’s face hardened, but she said nothing.
“How’s that make you feel, sharing him with two others, good for only one night in three?”
Le’s girlfriend blinked, stared at the floor, and said, “If that.”
“Right. And suppose his other two girlfriends decide it’s better to tell us what they know than get caught in Thao’s net. Where’s that going to leave you?”
Tears began to well in her eyes. “Up a creek,” she said. “Take off the cuffs, and I’ll tell you what I can.”
Chapter
16
Bree built up a quick rapport with the twenty-four-year-old, so we decided to let her and Muller run the questioning when we returned to DC.
I went back to the office I share with Sampson and found a GoPro camera in a sealed evidence bag along with a note from the medical examiner Nancy Barton.
From the Maserati, she’d written. You’ll find it interesting.
Barton had included a cable to hook up the camera to my computer. I attached it and turned the camera on. I had to fiddle until I got it in playback mode, and then Sampson and I watched the most recent MPEG file.
We watched it again. We talked about what we’d seen, and then we watched it a third time.
“I think we need to tell Michaels sooner rather than later,” Sampson said.
“Agreed,” I replied.
Ten minutes later, we were in the office of DC police chief Bryan Michaels. A welterweight fighting a paunchy belly, Michaels took a sip from his coffee cup and made a sour face.
“Damn it, I’ll never get used to this,” he said, shuddering and setting the cup down on his desk. “Hot lemon water. Supposed to be good for me, change my alkalinity.”
“Add honey,” I said.
“But first call up that video we sent you,” Sampson said.
“I could use a latte.” Michaels sighed, put on reading glasses, and turned to his computer.
A few keystrokes later, the MPEG video appeared.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Film of the last minutes of Aaron Peters’s life,” I said. “He had a GoPro Hero mounted in a fireproof housing on his dashboard. He must have hooked it up to his speedometer somehow, because—well, you’ll see.”
The chief clicked on the video, blew it up to full screen.
The camera gave us a view from the center of the dash, looking over the sleek hood and down along the headlight beams of the Maserati. In the lower right corner of the video, there was a digital speedometer. Lower left, a timer set at 0.
“Here we go, epic run,” said Aaron Peters off camera as he left Beach Drive for Rock Creek Parkway.
The timer started running as the engine roared, and the Maserati accelerated from thirty to seventy-five in under four seconds.
Peters laughed and then said, “Sonofa—”
The sounds of downshifting and brakes squealing filled the chief’s office.
“Watch for it, Chief,” Sampson said.
Coming out of a backward S curve, a single headlamp cut the pavement beside the Maserati.
“Motorcycle?” Michaels said.
“What the…hey, asshole!” Aaron Peters said.
The headlights slashed again to the right, and you could hear the powerful whine of the motorcycle over the Maserati’s engine. But then Peters began cutting back and forth, trying to keep the motorcyclist from passing. He braked poorly in the next curve and tried to accelerate.
“Catch me if you can,” Aaron Peters said, and his speed climbed to ninety.
It didn’t seem to matter. The single headlight swung, and the motorcycle’s engine sounded almost as loud as the Maserati’s before two shots rang out. The sports car went out of control, smacked a guardrail, and did a whip-fast 360-degree skid that almost lit up the escaping motorcyclist for a split second before the car vaulted into the woods, hit the trees, and exploded into flames.
“Jesus,” Michaels said. “The guy shot from a motorcycle as he was going ninety?”
“Exactly our reaction,” I said. “Now call up the pictures I sent you.”
A minute later, the screen split into two photographs. One showed the wounds on COD Tom McGrath as photographed during his autopsy earlier in the day. The other picture was a close-up of Peters’s two head wounds.
“Okay?” Michaels said.
“In both cases, the shooting was extraordinary,” I said. “And in both cases, every bullet fired was a forty-five, perhaps from a Remington model 1911.”
Chief Michaels squinted one eye. “You think it’s the same shooter?”
“We have two slugs from Peters’s Kevlar helmet. We should have solid comparisons to the bullets that killed McGrath, but in the meantime we have to consider the possibility of one shooter, and I thought you should know.”
The chief thought a moment, said, “I don’t want any of this getting out until we’ve g
ot a confirm or no-confirm on the ballistics. Are we clear?”
“We are,” Sampson said, and I nodded.
“Any connection between Peters and McGrath?” the chief asked.
“Nothing yet,” Sampson said.
“Keep me posted.”
“Every few hours, sir,” I said.
When we turned to leave, Michaels said, “Alex, could I have a word with you?”
I glanced at Sampson, said, “Sure.”
When the door closed behind my partner, Michaels said, “I need a chief of detectives.”
“Who are you considering?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“Who better?”
I felt all sorts of conflicting emotions roil through me.
“Well?” Michaels said.
“I’m flattered, Chief,” I said. “And humbled that you think highly enough of me to offer me the job. But I need some time to think, to talk to Bree and my family.”
“You’d have more regular hours. Be able to see them more consistently, if that matters to you.”
“It does, but I still am going to need some time to—”
“Take all the time in the world. Just give me an answer by eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Chapter
17
Nana Mama was in rare form that night. She’d seen Rachael Ray make chicken Provençal and decided to make it herself, doctoring the dish a bit by adding a little of this and a little of that until it was the kind of meal where you fought for seconds.
“Good, isn’t it?” I said.
“I’ll say,” Ali said.
“More, please,” Jannie said.
“Is that cumin?” Bree asked, smacking her lips.
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