by Lis Wiehl
“One vote might as well be a million if he won’t change his mind.”
Just as they reached the sidewalk, Charlie’s phone buzzed and he pulled it free. “This is Carlson,” he answered. Mia was about to turn away when she saw the expression on his face turn serious. He asked a few questions, then slid his phone back into its holster.
“A runner just pulled a body out of the Sound.”
“So it’s a murder victim?”
“They don’t know yet.” He looked up at the gray sky. “But it’s not exactly the time of year when people go swimming.”
CHAPTER 11
Kenny Zhong sat in his office. On the desk in front of him were a white takeout box, his red-capped bottle of baijiu liquor, his calculator, a pen, and the small notebook he carried everywhere. Not only was it written in Chinese characters, it was also in a code he had invented himself, in case it should fall into someone else’s hands.
Back when he was a little boy, when he was still called Kang, his grandmother used to tell him, “You can’t catch a cub without going into the tiger’s den.” She was full of old sayings like that. Old, but true.
When he became an adult, Kenny realized he wouldn’t be satisfied with just a single cub. He wanted the whole litter, and the tiger’s skin as well. But in China that would never happen. Not in his province. Not with his provenance.
If you really desired to make a fortune, if you were really willing to take risks, then the place to be was America. Yes, you had to work hard, but your hard work would be rewarded. People said that American markets sold a thousand types of bread. That the very tap water tasted sweet. You could gain weight just by drinking it.
His family had paid the snakeheads to bring him here. It had taken all of them—every last auntie and cousin—to come up with the money. Despite how much it had cost, the trip to the United States had been hellish. He and twenty-three others had been smuggled in a forty-foot-long cargo container. The trip had taken five weeks. Each day they were given only a few mouthfuls of rice and some pickled vegetables. A single glass of water. If you wanted more than that, you had to buy it at twenty times the price it would cost on land.
Even though he had felt his stomach start to eat itself, Kenny had not spent a single extra yuan. He had curled up in the stinking, stifling space, laying his head on a tape recorder, half dozing, listening to tapes to help him learn English. He knew it would all be worth it: the sacrifice, the danger, the hunger and thirst, the seasickness and storms.
Thinking of food reminded Kenny of the fish in the tank behind him. It was time to feed them. There were seven of them, silver teardrops with red bellies, each about the size of his hand. Picking up the white takeout container, he took a pair of wooden chopsticks from his desk drawer.
He hadn’t become acquainted with the English phrase “supply and demand” until his third year in America, but he had understood it on a visceral level even before he left China. If you had something someone wanted, wanted desperately, you could charge whatever people were willing to pay. Just as he had paid to come to America.
Like every other Chinese person on that cargo ship, once he was in Seattle, Kenny went immediately to work without one day of rest. Unlike the others, who could expect to work eight or ten years to pay off their debts, Kenny was making his own money from the start. First he had been a bus boy at a restaurant, then a waiter, then a manager, then the owner. All through a judicious combination of hard work, bribes, threats, and, when it was called for, unexpected violence. After buying the restaurant, he added three more.
As he slid the lid from the fish tank back, he could hear the din of customers out in the restaurant, crowding in for the lunch buffet. General Tso’s chicken, stir-fried rice with pork, sweet-and-sour shrimp. None of it tasted anything like what he had eaten at home, but it was what the Americans liked.
Slowly he had adjusted to how different life was here. In China it was simple. If you had a business, you had to bribe everyone just to survive. You paid off the health department, the license bureau, and the tax office. You entertained the police and members of the neighborhood committees and did not charge them for their meals. Here, while you could do many of the same things, you had to be much more subtle. Still, they had a saying in America: “One hand washes the other.”
About the time he bought his first restaurant, Kenny had hired his own snakeheads back home. They smuggled people into Mexico or Guatemala or Canada and then into the US, or created false passports and elaborate travel itineraries with “stopovers” in the United States, stopovers that became permanent once the traveler left the plane and never came back.
Everyone dreamed of coming to America, so much so that they were willing to pay the equivalent of $40,000 with just $1,500 down, the rest to be paid upon arrival. That meant that just twenty-five people were worth a million dollars. They looked at the cost the way an American parent might view taking out loans to pay for Harvard—expensive, but definitely worth it in the long run.
And if they had no relatives in the States—and many did not—they could borrow the balance once they arrived and work it off over time. As a result, Kenny’s restaurant workers cost him next to nothing. Most of their wages went to repaying him for the privilege of being in America. And of course he charged them for food, rent, and transportation.
He even supplied workers to other businesses, where they did the kind of work that wouldn’t require them to fill out a W-2 form. Menial laborers doing tasks that could be explained through gestures and maybe a few words of English. They sewed clothes, washed dishes, cooked, did domestic work, harvested crops, or worked in construction. But no matter where his people worked, Kenny’s enforcers made sure that no one forgot about the money they still owed. The reminders came in the form of threats and, when necessary, something as persuasive as a lit cigarette. One especially valuable technique involved the enforcer striking the person’s back with a hammer, just below the shoulder blades. The cracked ribs did not substantially affect the ability to work, but they were extremely painful, especially when a person tried to lie down to rest at night.
So debts to Kenny tended to get repaid.
He opened the takeout box. A single goldfish filled it from corner to corner, barely covered with water.
Kenny was a practical man. Just as a sly rabbit would have three openings to its den, he made money in as many ways as he could. If one source was briefly blocked, there were other avenues.
One of those avenues turned out to be steroids. Americans were a strange people. Many of the men wanted to look like action hero manga characters with grotesquely bulging muscles. And they would do whatever they could to get them. Luckily for Kenny, hundreds of factories in China made steroid liquids or pills and were happy to ship to him. They came labeled as floral essences, packed inside bottles of Chinese herbs, mixed in with dried mushrooms, or stuffed in the hollow bodies of Buddha statues. The restaurants offered the perfect cover for sales. The red-topped vials and blue pills could be tucked in takeout orders, and the money he made could be rung up as food sales if he needed to launder it. His clientele included high school kids and security guards, gym rats and even a few cops. All of them sure they could avoid the side effects, that they could get something for nothing.
It was a customer who had given him the idea of expanding into girls. The man had asked to rent one of his prettier waitresses. It had started as a little joke and had ended with the man and the girl emerging from a back storeroom, her weeping and him grinning. Prostitution was illegal in Seattle, but nail salons and massage parlors were not, and they made the perfect fronts for both offering girls and laundering the money that resulted.
His girls had all left China of their own free will, sent off with the best wishes of their communities. They came over here with their ears filled with tales of wealth. No matter the reality, every immigrant who came back to China claimed that they had become rich in America, wanting to save face, to show that they had made their dreams
come true, even if it was all a lie. Now that he lived here, Kenny knew that some of the big shots who had returned to Fuzhou for a visit actually worked as kitchen help, seventy-hour weeks for a thousand dollars a month, and lived in cellars.
Once they arrived, the girls felt duty bound to repay the debt they were told they owed. Besides, they could not bear to tell their families what they were being forced to do. To make sure, Kenny had his enforcers make videos of the girls at work. Any girl who protested was told the video could be sent to her parents.
As a result, none of his girls would consider turning witness against their controllers. Their heads were also filled with horror stories of how they would be raped by the police and thrown into prison, how their families back home could be killed. If a girl did attempt to run away, she was hunted down and abducted from wherever she had gone to ground, whether it was a hospital or a foster home. She was brought back, beaten, and raped. Locked up until she saw reason. And then set to work again.
The only time he let his girls go was if they were too damaged to work. Then they might be abandoned on a street corner, injured, sick, and/or pregnant. Still, they knew to keep their mouths shut.
With the chopsticks, he picked up the fish. He had learned the hard way that it wasn’t a good idea to dangle food over the tank, not when fingers could also be thought of as food.
He held it over the tank. Below, the silver fish began to nose the water.
He opened the chopsticks and let the goldfish fall.
Kenny didn’t know and he didn’t care what had gone wrong with Dandan. All he knew was that he had spent perfectly good money on the girl and she had hardly earned him anything. Instead, he had had to clean up the mess she had left behind. He hadn’t had time to make her body disappear, and so one of his best customers had been arrested.
The goldfish swam to a bottom corner of the tank, the other fish following close behind. He had heard that piranhas had an amazing sense of smell.
Leacham’s wife had made it clear that if Leacham went to prison, Kenny would go down as well. He had sent someone to deal with Sindy, but even after she disappeared, the trial had still gone forward.
At first it looked like the piranhas were simply bumping the goldfish as it swam back and forth, more and more frantically. Then suddenly its tail was half gone, disappearing into a piranha mouth. In seconds, the other fish dismantled the goldfish piece by piece, until it was simply a floating lump of orange flesh.
Then even that was gone.
One of Kenny’s people had found a juror who was willing to say no and stick to it. To never change his mind no matter how much anger or hostility or arguments were directed his way.
It seemed to be working. The jury had reported it was hung. The judge had instructed them to go back, try again, see things through each other’s eyes. Kenny just hoped that the juror who had been more than happy to take a bribe could hold up to the pressure.
Because if this guy cracked, Kenny thought as he slid the cover back on the tank, he might just take his whole empire down with him.
CHAPTER 12
Golden Gardens Park hugged the shore of Puget Sound, not far from the Shilshole Bay Marina. The park’s trails wound through the woods and past a pond. For the less able-bodied or adventurous, paved pathways offered easier access to nature. And then there was the beach. Out here, Seattle felt miles away, especially on a blustery day when the parking lot held only a few cars.
Gulls squawked overhead. The bright-blue tarp that lay next to the gently lapping water added a jarring note to the serene environment. So did the yellow crime scene tape that now blocked access to the beach.
“Whatcha got?” Charlie asked Carson Werther, who had been the first officer on the scene. The uniform didn’t look old enough to shave, let alone to be dealing with a murder.
Werther nodded at the tarp. “A runner was going along the beach here when she spotted something in the water. It turned out to be a leg.”
Charlie looked at the blue tarp with more interest. “So all you’ve got is the leg?” The lump looked bigger than that.
Red splotches of color appeared on Werther’s cheeks. “No, no, it’s the whole thing. She saw the leg first, but then she realized it was a body. She dragged it up on the beach, called 911, I was dispatched, and then I notified Homicide.”
“Where’s the runner?”
Werther pointed. Charlie turned and saw a woman in her forties clutching her elbows. She was pacing back and forth on a stretch of grass on the far side of the parking lot. She wore black running leggings, and her shoes and lightweight jacket were both neon green.
“The criminalists and the medical examiner will be here soon,” Charlie told Werther. “You did a good job of setting up the perimeter. If anyone shows up, keep them well back. We’re just lucky it’s not a nice day.” Six months from now there would be hundreds of people in this park.
He walked over to the witness and held out his hand. “Charlie Carlson. Seattle Homicide. I understand you’re the one who found the body.”
Although she had the twig-like body of a dedicated runner, the woman still had a firm handshake.
“Dee Sandoval.” She mimicked his no-nonsense delivery. “Seattle runner.” She had bright blue eyes. Her straight dark hair fell to her shoulders and was threaded with a few strands of gray. Now that he was closer to her, he could see that her shoes were sopping, her leggings wet to the thigh.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened this afternoon?”
“I went for a run. Part of it was along the beach. I like it because it’s such a good workout. The sand is always shifting under your weight. I saw something bobbing in the water, and I thought it might be a harbor seal. I’ve never seen one up close. Then when I came down to the water’s edge, I couldn’t figure out what it was. I was wondering if it was some kind of octopus.” She colored. “I guess that was dumb.”
“Why did you drag the body out of the water?” It would take a certain amount of courage.
“When I saw it was a person, I knew that whoever it was had a family. And that they deserved to know what had happened, even if the answer was terrible. I think he’d been in the water for a while.”
“What makes you think that?”
Her shoulders hunched. “His skin was . . . loose. At first I thought it was his shirt. But then I realized he wasn’t wearing one.” She shivered and rewrapped her arms around herself.
The wind was picking up, slicing over the water like a cold knife.
“I’m glad you towed him in. Otherwise he might not ever have been found.” Charlie took his notebook from his pocket. His memory was good enough that he didn’t often take notes, but when it came to strings of numbers, he needed pen and paper. “About all I need from you right now is your name, address, and phone number.”
After Dee reeled off the last digit of her cell phone number, she added, “It’s been awhile since a man asked me for that.” She tilted her head to one side, making her hair swing back and forth.
Charlie let out a startled laugh. The old Charlie might have taken Dee up on her hint. The new Charlie, well, he wasn’t quite sure what the new Charlie was all about. Just that he had lost interest in any woman who wasn’t Mia Quinn.
He still wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
It was getting dark and the fog was starting to roll in. “Do you need a ride home?”
“I’d love it, but I actually drove here.” Her grin was mischievous. “But if you have any further questions about anything at all, Officer, you know where to find me.”
“That I do,” Charlie agreed. And just stopped himself from tipping her a wink.
Dee was getting into her car when the medical examiner drove up and parked a few spaces over. He got out and walked over to Charlie, pulling on purple vinyl gloves as he went.
“Hey, Doug,” Charlie said with a nod. Doug’s last name, Pietsch, was pronounced like the fruit. But with his bald head and stocky body, Doug
looked a lot more like a fire hydrant.
“What have we got?”
“A floater. Runner spotted the body and dragged it onshore.” They walked over to the tarp. Charlie tried to step lightly over the sand, but he could already feel grains trickling into his shoes.
Doug lifted a corner, and they regarded the corpse.
The man was naked, half sprawled on his back. His build was slight, his complexion dusky. The mottled skin was beginning to decompose. His thick black hair had fallen over his eyes.
“He’s not Caucasian,” Doug said, folding the tarp back all the way, “but I’m not sure of the ethnicity. Maybe Latino?”
“I’d bet he’s Asian,” Charlie said.
“You’re on. A pint of the winner’s choice?” Doug was something of a beer nut, always going on about ABVs and IBUs. Charlie just liked the taste and wasn’t too picky.
“How long do you think he’s been dead?” Charlie asked as the medical examiner continued to circle around the body, looking but not touching. Not yet.
“Ten days? In the Sound, it takes about that long for someone to come bobbing up, and he looks fairly fresh.” He made a humming sound in the back of his throat.
“What?” Charlie asked.
“This guy has got contusions in various stages of healing. And it doesn’t look like they’re from running into things or being hit by objects.” He pointed at some of the spots Charlie had thought were postmortem damage. “The edges are soft but the shapes are distinct. I think someone’s put their hands on him. Multiple times, multiple ways. See on his upper arm, those are fingertip bruises. Someone grabbed him. Squeezed hard.”
Charlie could see them now, oval dots.
Doug touched the ribs next to the spine. “I bet that one’s from a fist.”
“So given all those bruises, what do you think?” Charlie still hadn’t seen any obviously fatal wounds. “Murder? Suicide? Accident?”
