by Shane Lusher
He’d been dishonest with me, and I wasn’t very happy about that, but I needed his help in trying to get close to Trueblood without showing up on anyone’s radar. Though I was sure Trueblood had murdered Colby, I still didn’t have any hard evidence to back that up. A statutory rape charge at nineteen wasn’t exactly proof that someone killed his daughter at the age of sixty-three.
I also knew that Rassi was holding something back, and I suspected it was big.
Most of all I needed Alden Corcoran to call me back about Trueblood’s alibi, but when you overextend your favor system, I always felt it wasn’t polite to push, no matter what the circumstances.
By the time we pulled into the driveway at Lake Windsor, the girls were awake, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. I opened the garage door with the automatic button and pulled inside and then sent them in.
I was shivering in my silly golf pants, my skin clammy and damp. With the storm, the temperature had dropped to about seventy degrees, but for the way I felt, it might have been fifty.
I unloaded the suitcases and shopping bags and deposited them in the hallway beyond the door to the garage.
Leaving them there, I walked through the dining room-living area, where the girls had already positioned themselves in front of the television, and into the kitchen.
Where I waited. I put on a pot of coffee and glanced at the digital time on the machine—five o’clock—and stood in the doorway while I waited for it to brew.
The girls were watching a show in the next room that had something to do with groups of babies crawling across a mat toward their mothers. High-pitched voices were screaming in the background.
“Dana, can you make us some popcorn?” Erin called from the couch without looking away from the television.
Happy to have something to do, I got a bag from the box in the cabinet above the counter and popped it into the microwave. The turntable inside began moving, and the bag inflated gradually.
I went over and picked up my phone off the table and dialed Rassi’s number.
Voice mail. I sent him a text message telling him to call me and then put the phone back down on the table.
I didn’t need to be tying it up, anyway, not with Kelly, Percy and Corcoran all apt to call at any time.
I went out and got my laptop from the car. On the way back, I stopped by the bathroom to get aspirin for the headache I’d started to develop from the volume of beer I’d had at Dapper’s a few hours before, and returned to the kitchen.
The popcorn was finished, and I put it into a bowl and took it into the living room to the girls.
“Can we have something to drink?” Erin asked.
I looked at her. “Don’t push it,” I said. Still, I went into the kitchen and returned with two plastic bottles of Coke.
“Anything else, Madam?” I asked as I set the bottles down on the coffee table with a flourish.
“No,” Erin mumbled. “Thanks.”
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down. Then I opened up my laptop, hooked the power cable to the socket next to the table, and turned it on. The machine whirred and booted, and after I logged in I pulled up Google and sat there looking at the search box.
What did I have to look for? I thought about Diane Trueblood for a moment, who’d told me to talk to Vic Daniels, and I started to check him, but then I remembered that I already knew the official reason for his disbarment: conversion—theft—from a client.
Tuan Nguyen. I typed that in, enclosed in quotes, and came back with nearly two million hits. None of them on the first results page had anything to do with Tuan Nguyen, the newspaper editor from Pekin.
Who knew that he shared a name with half the world?
I added Pekin to the search, and that narrowed it down quite a bit—only fifty pages, but all of the links on page one were related to the newspaper.
“Tuan Nguyen,” Pekin NOT “Pekin Observer”
That left me with three pages. Still a pretty popular guy. You Google my name, and you might find a tiny newspaper article about a four hundred dollar scholarship I’d won for being really good at math once, and the information that some asshole had punched a doctor in the ICU at Northwestern Hospital.
Tuan had won the County Spelling Bee four times, been runner up at State twice. Nestled near the bottom of page two was an obituary for a Catholic priest who had apparently been his adoptive father. The man had died in 1982.
Again I marveled that someone had taken the time to enter so much information from back issues, but when I clicked on the link, I saw that the article was grouped together with a standing column that ran daily and which detailed life in Pekin twenty, forty, and sixty years prior to the day’s date.
1982. Tuan would have been eleven or twelve years old, I thought. I skimmed through the final page, which were more links to spelling bee winners.
I tried again with a different list of search terms: “Tuan Nguyen,” Quiverfull, Adoption.
Came back with another three pages, with many of the same links as before, but a few that were new: information about the youth group at the Quiverfull, which took me right to the adoption agency’s website. A line at the bottom informed me that the youth group was no longer meeting.
According to the page, it had last been updated in 2004.
I typed in 2004, “Tuan Nguyen,” and came up with just one entry: Nguyen’s official resignation as the youth group leader for the Quiverfull.
On a hunch, I went into the Illinois State list of registered sex offenders and searched on Tazewell County, but found nothing. The same for court records.
I’d hit a dead end.
I was just getting another cup of coffee when the phone rang. I spilled some all over my hand in my rush to get back to the table, and, wiping it on my shorts, I swiped the screen to pick it up.
“Dana?” Percy said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Tell me something.”
“Kelly fill you in on everything?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re going after Nguyen?”
“Yeah,” Percy said. “Who would’ve ever thought that?”
“Child Pornography?” I said. “Should be nothing new around here.”
“Yeah, but that guy?” I thought I heard Percy swear in the background. “Yeah,” he said to someone on the other end. “Yeah. Hey, Dana, you want to come with us on this? You can’t go inside, but I thought you might like to be there.”
Kelly had just started the autopsy. It would be hours before she returned. “When are you going?”
“Right now,” Percy said. “It would be nice to have somebody other than these guys in suits sitting in the car with me. They want to take this for themselves, but they need me. Only they won’t tell me shit. Anyway, once we get him, Nguyen’s going to stay here for the time being. Murder trumps kiddie porn any day.”
I winced at the comment. “You really think he killed three people? Doesn’t seem the type.”
“Yeah, well, he doesn’t seem the type for a lot of things he’s apparently into,” Percy said. “But I have more than what I think. I have the list.”
“The arrowheads?”
“That one,” Percy said. “I drove about two hundred miles yesterday, running around taken women’s fingerprints. Turns out Nguyen was right there, on the list. He bought a package of—wait-”
There was the sound of paper rustling in the background, and then Percy said something to another person, something about having some goddamned patience, and then he was back.
“A package of Thunderbird 200‘s, bought in November of last year,” he finished. “Sounds like a brand of cigarettes.”
“That was two months after Roe was killed,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s a bit problematic,” Percy said. “So’s the urine on Sweeney. But I’m going to hold him for murder just the same.”
I took a drink of my coffee and thought about it for a moment.
“Okay,” I said. “I want to go. Thing is, Kelly’s do
ing the autopsy right now and I don’t have a babysitter.”
“Ah, fuck,” he said. “I almost forgot about that. I got to go now, though.”
“Can’t you hold them off?”
“That’s what I’ve been doing,” Percy said. “Anyway, I’ll just give you a call when we got him.”
Sitting around and waiting for things to go down with Nguyen was not what I wanted to do. Just then I had an idea.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You guys wear cameras when you go in, right?”
“Uh, yeah,” Percy said. “It’s mandated by the state, so these guys will want to do it by the book.”
“Can you stall them for a minute so I can talk to your IT guy?” I asked.
“These guys are all a-rarin’ to go,” Percy said. “We’ve got an unmarked car sitting down the street from his house, and they’re worried he’ll bolt.”
“Why would they be worried about that? Somebody tip him off?”
“My sentiments exactly,” Percy said. “Hold on. The IT guy is at home. Let me get his number for you. Dana?”
“Yeah?”
“Hurry.”
The technician Percy hooked me up with sounded as if he’d just woken up, but when I told him what I needed, he was more than willing to oblige. My request was a bit far-fetched, and I wasn’t even sure that it would work, but he seemed to be the kind of guy who appreciated a challenge.
When I got off the horn with him, Percy rang back.
“We have to go now,” Percy said. “They don’t seem to think your involvement is that necessary. Do you, Weird Al? He’s standing right next to me,” Percy said, and I could imagine his smirk right through the telephone. “His last name is Yankowics. Like that guy Weird Al?”
Percy, the dickhead. I was beginning to appreciate the nickname. “You got your thing figured out?” Percy asked.
“Almost,” I said. “You just turn on your camera when you go in, and set your phone to vibrate. I’ll send you a text if I see anything worth looking at.”
“Don’t do that,” Percy said. “My impression of Nguyen has always been that the guy’s pretty normal, but it’s the normal ones you have to watch out for. I don’t want to get caught somewhere and have the vibration give me away.”
“Are you going in personally?” I asked. “Don’t you have guys trained to do that? SWAT or whatever?”
Percy chuckled. “SWAT is for big city cops,” he said. “Down here, we do most things ourselves. Anyway, I got to go. I’ll give you a call before we leave the scene. You see anything interesting, you let me know then.”
I put down the phone and waited again. I knew from my earlier search that Nguyen lived over behind the bowling alley on Sunset, so it would take the police a maximum of ten minutes to get there. I had no idea how long it would take them to get into place and make their move.
So once again, I sat and drank my coffee and waited.
Within five minutes, Art Sheldon, the IT guy from the sheriff’s office, called me back.
“Alright,” he said. “I got it. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. Each camera is a transmitter with an IP address. I just had to configure it so you could get in. Can you give me your IP?”
I unlocked my laptop and gave it to him, and he came back.
“Good to roll,” he said. “When you get in, the password’s still set to ‘admin.’ It will ask you to change it, so go ahead and do that, but it’s only open until midnight tonight, so you don’t need to remember it, unless you log out on accident or something.
“Oh, and you’ll get a message indicating that the camera is off. That’s normal. You’ll have that until they turn it on.”
He read off the camera’s four-number IP address, which I typed into the address line of my browser. When the login screen appeared, I typed in admin, set the new password to my last name, and then hit ENTER.
The screen came up gray, with a simple text in the middle:
“Camera Disengaged.”
I hit the refresh button about twenty times and then walked over to get a beer out of the fridge.
I waited for a half hour, clicking incessantly every few seconds until my laptop crashed. When I booted it back up, I logged in to the camera again and got the same message.
Ten minutes later, I was about to call Art Sheldon to ask him if the link was bad, when Percy called.
“We got him,” he said. “Didn’t even put up a fight.”
“What happened with the camera?” I asked.
“Sorry about that,” Percy said. “Weird Al and the other State guy didn’t want you in on it.”
“Why’s that?” I stood up. The first beer was gone, and I wanted another one, but I took my coffee cup over to the counter instead and got a glass of water.
“I told you, they’re like the FBI,” he said. “They don’t want anybody not officially employed by the sheriff’s department involved.”
“I thought-”
“Hey,” Percy interrupted. “Not my call.”
“Fine.”
“Anyway, we got some stuff. Lots of electronics, and what I think might be Tad’s computer. He was running a password cracker on several files when we went in.
“He’s got a safe room in the basement. That’s where we found it, along with all the electronic stuff.”
“Can I have a look at it?”
“Can’t,” Percy said.
“Come on, I thought we-”
“State guys took it with them,” he said. “They seem to think Tad’s computer has child pornography on it.”
I stood up from the table and walked across the kitchen and then back.
“Dana?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Is Tad some part of this investigation?”
“I don’t know,” Percy said. “Like I told you. There were lots of image files on the drive. That’s all I know.”
“And they’re gone already?” I asked.
“They’re down the hall, talking to Nguyen,” Percy said. “After that, they’re going to clear out of here, wait until Monday, and start their processing-”
“Where’s the computer?” I asked.
“Right here, on my desk,” Percy said.
“You have an external hard drive?” I asked.
“One step ahead of you,” Percy said. “I already copied the C: drive. You can have a look at it, if you ever get to leave the house.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, but I had to get over there, had to see what files Tad had on his computer. I knew that my brother would never have been in possession of anything of that nature, unless it was part of an investigation.
I got another cup of water and sat back down. “So, what happens next? Am I allowed to talk to him?”
“Well, officially, he’s in our jurisdiction, and he’s going to be in our jail. We can only hold him for 48 hours before we hit him with anything, and who knows what the State boys have got on him.”
“You don’t know?”
Percy huffed. “What do I need to do to make myself clear about these guys? Two dudes with Chicago accents, anything south of Joliet is redneck. You dig?”
I smiled at the phrase. “I dig,” I said.
“Good,” Percy said. “Now. I have until Monday. I either build a murder case against him, or I have to turn him over to State. They wanted to call a session with the judge tomorrow, but the judge made it clear to them that he was doing some serious drinking, and that there would be no special session on Sunday, owing to his being a devout Christian.”
“What do you have on Nguyen?” I asked.
“Right now, not much. I have an eyewitness who saw him at the house the morning he was killed-”
“You know time of death?”
“Preliminary,” Percy said, “But Kelly says it’s pretty clear. Somewhere between Wednesday evening and Thursday morning.”
“Okay,” I said. “What else?”
“No sign of forced entry. Fingerprints on the door.”
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“Any on the body?”
“I don’t know yet,” Percy said. “But State has him linked to Stevens, ostensibly on the child porn charges. Maybe there’s a motive there.”
“Think he’ll confess to something?” I asked.
“Not a chance,” Percy said. “He’s not talking. Wants to see his lawyer, who happens to be indisposed. Weekend holiday to Branson, Missouri.”
“Okay,” I said. “What do we do now?”
“I need you to get over here as soon as you can,” he said. “I need you working on that hard drive.”
“I’m not a hacker, Percy,” I said.
“No, but you knew your brother better than anybody else. If anybody can figure out his passwords, then you can.”
“You know your dad wants me to stop the Colby investigation, right?” I asked. “That means I have no official standing with the sheriff’s department.”
“And?”
“And I’m wondering what Dubois has to say about all of this,” I said.
“Not much, probably,” Percy said. “Since he’s not here anymore.”
“Come again?”
“He quit,” Percy said. “Letter of resignation was in Janine’s mailbox this morning.”
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“The letter doesn’t say,” Percy said. “But I stopped by his house around lunchtime, and it looks like he’s cleared out. He left.”
I paused to digest the information. “You have to go after him,” I said after a few seconds.
“Based on what?” Percy asked.
“Well, you have to at least put out a bulletin, or whatever,” I said.
“Dana,” Percy said. “There is nothing I can do about that. You get over here as soon as Kelly hits the door. We need to concentrate on Nguyen. I’m in charge now,” he said. “At least until the County Board can organize a special session and vote on who’s going to be the new interim sheriff.”
“But what about Tad-” I was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, watching Erin and Casey, their heads pushed together above the flickering light of the iPad.
