The Dark Root

by Mayor, Archer

  “Three.”

  “Okay—as far as we know, he’s alone.” I paused to check out the lot while Sammie, having parked, made a big show of pulling a map out and spreading it across the steering wheel. “I don’t see anyone in the ER parking area, either on foot or waiting in a vehicle. The subject is supposed to be wearing a bright-red windbreaker and a dark-blue baseball cap.”

  “10-4. We’ll advise when we reach Belmont,” came the reply.

  The reason for borrowing Maxine’s van, instead of grabbing our far more ostentatious emergency-services truck, was that my plan—such as it was—called for surprise and an overwhelming show of force. The anonymity of her vehicle, along with its darkly tinted windows, allowed for both.

  “We’re coming up Belmont now,” came from the speaker under the dash.

  I keyed the mike. “10-4. Come partway up the driveway and wait at the curve where you’re still out of sight of the ER door. When I give the signal, approach at normal speed, and try to place the subject between the van and the building’s north brick wall—that’s the best backstop we’ve got. No rifles, okay? Handguns and shotguns only. I don’t want any bullets reaching New Hampshire.”

  “You got it,” Marshall Smith’s voice answered, taking advantage of the restricted frequency to both relax on radio protocol and cut the tension a bit.

  We sat there a few minutes more, feeling the weight of each second. My brain was working in overdrive, sorting through every scenario I could imagine. I knew from experience almost anything could happen, from Nguyen suddenly rumbling to his exposed position and grabbing Elizabeth as a hostage, to a carful of his buddies arriving to pick him up.

  Finally, almost mercifully, we saw the glass doors of the emergency room slide open.

  “Get ready,” I said on the radio.

  A man, his face slightly turned away, stepped out onto the ambulance loading dock and paused there, apparently surveying the distant rooftops to the east. He was wearing a white shirt and no cap.

  “Damn,” Sammie murmured, her gun already resting in her lap.

  Slowly, as if stringing us along, the man removed a rolled-up bundle from under his arm and shook it out, revealing a bright-red windbreaker, which he slipped on. As his hands came through the sleeves, I could see the flash of a bandage on one of them. He pulled a blue cap from one of his pockets, adjusted it neatly on his head, and began walking toward the wheelchair ramp leading off the dock.

  “Here he comes, off the loading dock. Go at a normal speed and pinch him off. Good luck.”

  Almost immediately, we both became aware of movement behind us. Maxine’s van slid silently around the curve of the driveway, entered the small parking lot, and headed straight at Nguyen Van Hai. Sammie pulled the latch back on her door and opened it just a crack.

  Nguyen, now crossing the lot, looked up without much curiosity as the dark van gradually approached, running perpendicular to the row of parked cars. Then he slowed, noticing it was not pulling into one of the open slots. From a distance, I could see his expression change—from passivity, to surprise, to downright alarm. He stopped dead in his tracks and quickly glanced around.

  “Come on, come on,” Sammie muttered under her breath.

  Suddenly, the van twisted to the right, presenting a broadside to the man almost right next to it, and simultaneously all doors to the vehicle flew open. The van hadn’t rolled to a complete stop before three heavily armed men came flying out of it, screaming orders at the top of their lungs. Dressed in black body armor stenciled in gray letters spelling Police, they circled Nguyen like nightmarish Dobermans, two of them with their legs planted and their pistols drawn in the classic shooter’s stance, the third with his hands free to move in with terrifying speed and take the man down as fast and as hard as he could. In less than five seconds it was over. Nguyen Van Hai lay flat on his face, his wrists handcuffed behind his back.

  “Clear,” Marshall Smith said into his portable radio, “clear and secure.”

  Sammie and I got out of our car and walked over to the group. The officer with the handcuffs was carefully searching the suspect. Looking around, I saw a few faces appear at the nearby windows. Behind us, a patrol unit appeared from its hiding place down the street.

  “Nice job, folks—picture perfect,” I said as I reached them. “Marshall, why don’t you and Pierre put him in the unit and escort him back to quarters. I’ll be right there.”

  I jumped up onto the loading dock and headed into the ER. Elizabeth Pace was standing in the middle of the hall, looking anxious. “Is everyone all right?”

  “Everyone’s fine. I just wanted to thank you and find out how you were.”

  She gave me a lopsided smile and took my hand in hers, her eyes still glued to the scene outside. I turned slightly and watched with her as the take-down team pulled Nguyen to his feet and piled him into the back of the waiting patrol car. “It was so fast, after all that waiting. What did he do?”

  “We have to determine that legally, but it isn’t nice. I can tell you that much.”

  She shook her head slightly. “Thirty years working in Boston, I never saw anything like that. So much for country living.”

  · · ·

  The police department’s interrogation room, complete with the obligatory one-way mirror mounted into the wall, was as miniaturized as the rest of the department, compared to a big-city force. The room itself was six feet by eight, and the observation cubicle was too narrow to hold a chair. The whole thing was tucked into a corner of the detective squad room.

  I stood next to Tony Brandt, staring through the smoke-colored glass, watching Willy Kunkle trying to extract some information from our guest. So far, it had been an exercise in futility. Nguyen Van Hai hadn’t said a single word since uttering yes to whether he understood his rights.

  “Does he speak English?” Tony asked.

  “He spoke it fine to the doctor. I called and asked. We’re trying to locate a translator, but I doubt it’ll make any difference.”

  “But he is the man we’re after, right?”

  “Circumstantially, he is. If we’re lucky, we’ll have the preliminary blood analysis back by tomorrow or the next day. If that works out, then DNA will put his blood and Benny’s in the same place at the same time.”

  “Maybe the same time,” Tony amended.

  “That’s up to the lawyers. According to J.P., it’s a fact—the coagulation rates were the same on both samples.”

  “You search his house yet?”

  “I just came from there. J.P. and his crew are still at it, but I don’t expect much—mattresses on the floor, piles of clothing, smell of food and unwashed bodies. They were having a hard time telling this guy’s junk from everyone else’s.”

  “Any help from the other residents?”

  “Minimal.”

  “I got a call from the governor this morning. Since the media’s been speculating about organized Asian crime, he was wondering if we might need some help. I lied. I told him we were right on top of things.”

  I laughed softly. Twenty-four hours earlier, I thought, and we would’ve been handing Nguyen Van Hai over to the feds—with Tony’s blessing. I slid out of the narrow cubicle to appear at the door to the interrogation room. Willy glanced over his shoulder and gave me a grim smile. “He’s all yours.”

  I took my time getting comfortable in the molded plastic chair, placing it just so at the small table between us. I finally sat back, crossed my legs, and put my hands in my lap—the perfect image, I hoped, of imperturbable permanence. “We were wondering if you’d like to have an interpreter.”

  Nguyen just looked at me.

  “We know you speak English. You were speaking it to the doctor not twenty minutes ago. But we thought we’d make it as convenient as possible. Would you like us to call you a lawyer?”

  He remained silent, his eyes watching me closely, utterly without expression.

  “I hope you understand that you’re not here just for an inter
view. We know what you’ve done. We know you tortured Benny Travers, we know you and your two buddies chased him down after he tried to escape, and forced him off the road and killed him. We know one of you shot at him during that chase, and who was driving the car. We even know the gun was a Glock. This is not a situation where we’re hoping you’ll slip up and say something incriminating.”

  He didn’t speak, he didn’t move. I had to watch him closely to even see him breathing.

  “You’re in serious trouble, whether you talk or not. You can keep quiet through the arraignment, through every conversation with your lawyer, through the trial, and even when they throw the book at you. The end result will be the same—you’ll be in jail, where you’ll stay for a very long time.”

  He blinked—once—which made me wonder if that had been the first time his eyes had moved since I’d sat down, or just the first time I’d noticed it. The very question irritated me, and made me realize just who was psyching out whom.

  I shifted in my seat lazily, recrossing my legs. “Of course, that’s the worst-case scenario. It doesn’t have to be that bad. Unlike in the old country, we tend to bargain with our prisoners… Something,” and here I pulled the rap sheet out of my pocket we’d just been wired from NCIC, “I see you already know about.”

  I paused and reexamined the contents of the sheet—a complete listing of increasingly nasty activity in California, Florida, Massachusetts, and Canada, which was mentioned as his initial port of entry. He was thirty years old, and yet had already spent more than half his life as a gang member. My private frustration was that the pure data of the report gave me no inkling of where he might have hooked up with Truong, Vu, or Henry Lam.

  I shook my head and whistled softly. “Boy, the State’s Attorney’s going to want to bury you alive. He’s a politician, after all, and putting you away’ll be like putting votes into the bank.”

  All of us had been through practice interrogations before where the fake suspect essentially plays dead. It was a good way for us to examine the various ways of getting under a suspect’s skin. But in none of those sessions had I ever received as little feedback as now.

  “Still,” I kept trying, “they say there’s always room to move, and we don’t have all the answers. For example, we’d like to take a look at the car you drove that day, and I wouldn’t mind having a chat with Truong Van Loc. Anything you could give us on him would help your case—perhaps a lot.”

  I was looking directly into his eyes as I said that name and saw absolutely nothing. My mind went back over what we’d learned of Benny Travers’s death, and of the role the man before me must have played in it. Standing in that kitchen days ago, seeing all that blood, the cut pants, the crimson outline of the fillet knife on the table—used again and again on a man who must’ve been screaming his lungs out, his head trapped inside a plastic bag—I’d been shaken at the cool savagery of it all, and I’d wondered about the men who’d acted it out. Now, looking at Nguyen Van Hai’s silent, unrepentant face, I was left baffled and disappointed—as if I’d just unwrapped a gift box and found it empty.

  I stood up. “Mr. Nguyen, welcome to the judicial process. I’ll get out of your way right now. But keep in mind, if you ever get the urge to make things a little easier on yourself, ask for me—the sooner the better.”

  His eyes didn’t even follow me as I left the room.

  15

  "SO," TONY BRANDT SAID, TAKING A seat in my guest chair. “What did you get out of Nguyen?”

  “Not a word,” I answered truthfully, counting on his good humor to still be intact.

  We were in my office for once, and he looked around uncomfortably for somewhere to stretch his inordinately long legs. He seemed chronically incapable of merely sitting in a chair with both feet planted on the ground. “Well, at least we nailed somebody. That might be enough to keep the wolves at bay.”

  “The governor call back?” I asked.

  He finally settled for resting his left leg along the top of a stacked row of cardboard file boxes lining the wall. “Closer than that. Having a special-weapons team land on a guy like a brick on a bug—in front of a building full of feeble-hearted patients—aroused some local attention. The newspeople are back on our doorstep, and the only selectman who hasn’t called me is out of town on a business trip.”

  He was smiling when he said it, so I wasn’t prompted to defend my actions. “What’re you going to do?” I asked instead.

  “Not much—stage an unscheduled press conference. I think this latest coup has made Mr. Derby a little more optimistic since our last chat, so he’ll probably be joining me in the limelight. Should be a good show, if I can think of something to say.”

  “Which is why you’re here,” I finished.

  “Just give me the good stuff.”

  I steepled my fingers in front of my chin, concentrating on how to reduce what I had to headline length. “First, on Benny’s murder, I think we can now publicly say it was committed by three Asian males. One of those, Nguyen Van Hai, is now under lock and key; another, Truong Van Loc, has been identified but is still on the loose; and the third is still unknown and at large. We have pictures if you want them. That ought to titillate the crowd.”

  Brandt shook his head. “They’ll want more about the shoot-out with you and Ron. Benny’s already old news.”

  “Okay. We have photos of those three as well. You can expand on Henry Lam a bit—I wrote up a report on his background. You can also milk…” I paused to paw through some papers on my desk, “Chu Nam An. He was the shooter Ron nailed. Dan Flynn reported a car crash in Rutland involving Asians, and Hillstrom picked up on a recent seat-belt bruise on Chu’s chest. I’m planning on going over to Rutland tomorrow to see what else I can chase down, but it looks good.”

  “So Chu wasn’t alone in the car?” Brandt asked.

  “No, he had someone with him—no name given or asked for. Chu’s license and registration listed an address in Lowell, Mass., but the Rutland investigating officer also got a local address. Sol asked them to check it out, but the place was empty. Still, I thought I’d poke around a bit. If Chu and some of his pals lived there long enough, maybe the neighbors can tell me something.”

  Brandt nodded. “Okay. What about the guy with the tattoo?”

  “Still checking. First name’s Ut, he’s got ties to California, but we haven’t heard back from the police there yet.”

  “Your last memo mentioned Truong got his start in California. You really think Truong and Sonny are one and the same?”

  I raised my eyebrows equivocally. “It’s pure theory right now, but it fits. Dan Flynn’s looking into it for me. It sure would explain what’s driving him.”

  “The dead brother?”

  “Yeah. But I’m still working on the whys—why here, why now, why this particular approach. If revenge instead of profit is his motive, I have no idea who his target is, and I can’t explain why he seems so profit-oriented.”

  “Which brings up the overriding question I’ll guarantee I’m going to hear—do we have a gang problem in town?”

  I thought about that for a moment. “The short answer is yes, which actually might stimulate people to face it. Besides, the grapevine has it that Alfie Brewster’s imported some muscle to watch his back, so if something blows up, your butt’ll be covered if you’re already on record.”

  Brandt looked at me closely. “Why’d he do that?”

  “I don’t know yet. Could be he used the Leung home invasion to set up Sharkey and Vu. That’s what Sally Javits thinks, more or less. I’ve got Willy looking into it, but as usual, he’s disappeared…”

  “Right.” He stood up, checking his watch.

  “That it?” I asked him.

  “Yup. I’m not going to complicate my life right now by mentioning the Canadian connection. The local angle’s enough. Besides, I’m due in ten minutes.”

  I shook my head at this blessedly familiar nonchalance, knowing full well how much he put into
protecting the department’s image. Years ago, I’d pulled a six-month stint as acting chief, and had hated it so much I’d insisted on a corporate shuffle that made Billy Manierre Tony’s next in line.

  Tony paused at the narrow doorway to let J.P. Tyler squeeze by, who muttered, “Hi, Chief,” with his eyes downcast. Tony was perpetually amused at Tyler’s discomfort around anyone with a title, and merely shook his head with a smile before giving me a small departing wave.

  “What’s up?” I asked J.P., once Tony had left.

  “I got a match for the MO used on Benny Travers—a man named Johnny Xi was killed in Vancouver one year after Truong On Ha’s death in San Francisco. Xi was the red pole for the Dragon Boys at the time. Red pole is the title the Chinese give their head enforcer. It actually applies to triads, but some of the gangs use it, too, for prestige.”

  Mention of triads made me think back to my conversation with Jason Brown. The FBI and other agencies were still hedging on whether the Hong Kong and Taiwan-based triads were officially on U.S. soil yet. Part of that may have been due to caution, and part to the constant blurring of distinctions among triads, tongs, and gangs.

  “I called San Francisco PD, and they confirmed the ID. They also told me that, at the time, Xi had been their primary suspect as the leader of the team that shot up the restaurant.”

  I sat back in my chair, pleasantly surprised. “You didn’t happen to ask how many other members of that team they’d identified, did you?”

  He smiled. “I did, actually.” The smile then faded a bit. “But none of them sounded familiar.”

  “Are they all still alive?” I asked, the question about Truong’s motivation still echoing inside my head.

  His eyes narrowed in surprise. “Oh,” he murmured after a pause, “I see what you mean. I’ll find out.”

  I gestured to him to stay put. “Tell me more about how Johnny Xi died.”

  “Right. It wasn’t an exact carbon copy. He was tied to a door, not taped to a chair; all his clothes were cut off, not just his pants. But the important details match—the bag over the head, the use of the knife… And how it was used. Lucky for Travers he got away, even if he did end up dying anyway—Xi was castrated and skinned alive.”