River of Glass

by Jaden Terrell

  She lowered her head. “Not mean that,” she whispered. “I very grateful your help.”

  “That’s the trouble with words,” I said. “You can’t unsay them.”

  “I not-”

  I held up a hand, cutting her off. “Just stop,” I said. “Before we both say things we don’t mean.”

  But what I meant was, before we both say things we mean but shouldn’t say.

  This time, the silence was uncomfortable. The air felt thick and heavy, and I was glad when Malone came down forty minutes later and made a beeline for my truck. I got a couple of paper clips out of the glove compartment, straightened them out, then told Khanh to stay and climbed out to meet Malone, who stopped, crossed her arms, and said, “Okay. Tell me what happened.”

  “We’d been staking this place out since Monday. Yesterday, we started thinking something might be up. Today when Savitch still hadn’t come out, I called you.”

  “And I told you he was probably out getting laid. Christ, what a nightmare.” She rubbed at her temples. “Go on.”

  “When he still hadn’t come out by nine, I went up and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so I put an ear up to the door and caught a whiff of decomp.”

  “You should have called right then.”

  “I figured you’d say it was just a dead rat in the walls or something.”

  A muscle in her jaw pulsed. “You’ve had a hard-on for Savitch since before we knew who he was. How do I know you didn’t kill him?”

  “Because you have a brain. The guy could have held the Alamo with the firepower he had in there. He would never have let me get behind him.”

  “God.” She ran her hands through her hair. “We pick up this guy on your say-so, and no sooner do we let him go than somebody offs him. We might have gotten this guy killed, McKean.”

  “We didn’t get him killed. He got himself killed when he started dealing with killers. That’s the problem with being a villain. Your partners are all bad guys.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “You homicide guys . . . you don’t let anything get to you, do you? What did you do when you smelled the decomp?”

  “I thought again about calling you, decided I didn’t have enough to go on. So I picked the lock instead.” I showed her the paper clips. Misdirection, but not an outright lie. “You can see it would take awhile.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to ask the security guard to let you in?”

  “No, actually it didn’t.”

  “You picked the lock. Then what?”

  “I saw a guy on the couch. Confirmed it was Savitch and that he was dead. I did a quick pass through the apartment to make sure there were no more victims and that the killer wasn’t still there.”

  “And then . . .”

  “I went across the hall and gave Mrs. Wentworth some coffee and a piece of carrot cake.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Dead guy on the couch, and you did what?”

  “He wasn’t exactly going anywhere.”

  “When did you finally decide to call it in?”

  “Right after the carrot cake.”

  “Jesus.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out an evidence bag with a couple of buckskin-colored hairs in it. Each was about two inches long. “Same length and color as yours. Found it in the bedroom.”

  “I just told you. I cleared the apartment.”

  “And then you delivered carrot cake. I swear, I’ll put you away for obstruction. Breaking and entering. Maybe worse, if I find out you’re lying to me.”

  “Courtroom evidence, Malone. As a wise woman once said, call me when you’ve got some.”

  29

  “She like you,” Khanh said, when I got back into the truck. “But not much.”

  “She loves me like a brother.” I grinned. “She just hasn’t figured it out yet.”

  Still wired from finding Savitch, I turned on the radio and punched through the channels until I found a local talk station. The good news was, the Executioner had racked up no more victims. The bad news was, they still hadn’t caught him. No one mentioned Savitch’s murder. Too soon to have made the airwaves, or maybe just not sexy enough.

  It was after midnight when we got home, but the downstairs lights were all on, and Eric’s car was parked beside Jay’s. Khanh beat me up the porch steps and pulled open the door, and the smell of seafood and spices poured out. Jay stepped out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel, and said, “Cua Rang Me. It means Tamarind sweet crab. I had a little trouble finding the tamarind, and Eric had to clean the crabs, but somehow we managed.”

  Eric gave him an indulgent smile. “He doesn’t have the stomach for mayhem.”

  “True.” Jay’s smile seemed genuine, but his eyes looked tired. “Anyway, I hope I got it right.”

  Khanh’s mouth broke open in the first genuine smile I’d seen. “Smell very fine. Like home. Thank you.”

  It had been days since we’d had more than coffee and takeout in the truck, and suddenly, I realized I was ravenous. We sat around the kitchen table, cracking crab claws and dipping the meat into little bowls of lime juice and chili salt.

  “Better than a cheese sandwich,” Eric said, grinning. “Maybe even better than pizza.”

  Khanh smiled. “American food no taste. This . . . very good. Almost good like Vietnam.”

  “The chef is honored,” Jay said, “having never been to Vietnam.”

  When supper was finished and the dishes done, Khanh went upstairs to bed. Jay and Eric exchanged meaningful looks, and Eric retreated to the living room. Jay said to me, “There’s something I need you to see.”

  I picked up the Papillon pup and followed Jay to his room, where he tapped something into his computer. A website came up: Chinese dragons and cherry blossoms on a red background. It asked for a password, and he typed one in. A second later, a welcome page filled the screen.

  He turned it toward me, and I skimmed the text. For discerning men . . . for centuries, Asian women have been renowned for their lovemaking . . . treated with the respect and deference a man deserves . . . sample a variety or enter into a recurring relationship. Ultimate fantasy, ultimate discretion.

  He clicked on Catalog, and a page of photographs sprang up, all Asian women and girls, each with a number and a veiled description of each woman’s special attributes and the fantasy she supplied. I pointed at a picture of a girl who couldn’t have been more than ten. The tag below her number said, Available for adoption to LOVING parent.

  “They don’t have names,” Jay said, “in case there’s a special name you like. Then you can call her that and not spoil the fantasy.”

  “Where did you find this?”

  “I’ve been looking ever since you told me you suspected trafficking, but it took me a long time to find the right one and hack in.”

  “Good God. There are more of these?”

  “Enough to make you sick. A lot of them are just a slappedtogether catalog of crappy photos. This one’s pretty elaborate—professional photos and layout, a chat room for the members. The fantasy’s a big thing with these guys, and they have these opaque ways of saying things, kind of like a secret code. I’ve found some of these guys on other sites, and from what they say there, I’m starting to figure it out. I haven’t been able to track it back to the source yet.”

  “Is this what you’ve been working on every night? I thought it was the Christmas game.”

  “I put that on the back burner, but I didn’t want to tell you in case I came up empty.”

  “How close are you to finding the source?”

  “Hard to say. They’ve diverted through a lot of different servers in different states and countries.”

  “I’ll get the web address to Malone. She can get their guys on it too.”

  “Of course.” He looked back at the screen and clicked to the next page. “There’s one more thing.”

  He scrolled down, clicked on the center photo, turned the screen so I could see.

  Tuyet.


  30

  The next morning, I left Khanh at home and drove across Percy Priest dam to Frank’s place on the lake. The water was a muddy umber, swollen and white-capped by wind. From the driveway, I could see Frank’s fishing boat pitch and tug against its tethers. Patrice’s flowers rimmed the yard, Heirloom and English Legend Roses with names like Blushing Bride and Danny Boy and Coronation. White wooden trellises covered in climbing roses flanked the front door.

  Frank’s Crown Vic sat in the driveway between Patrice’s faithful Honda Accord and a patrol car with two uniformed officers in front.

  I showed the officers my ID, and went to the front door, where I punched the bell with more force than was necessary. Patrice answered the door dressed in baggy jeans and a loose sweatshirt. Her face looked drawn, her complexion sallow. A pale blue bandanna was wrapped around her head, but no wisps of hair curled around her ears or along the nape of her neck. Her eyebrows were gone.

  I kissed her on the cheek and smelled shampoo and lavender, and beneath it a slightly sweet, slightly acrid smell that reminded me of nursing homes. I said, “What’s going on? Besides the two guards out front.”

  “And two more in the back.” She hugged me a little longer than usual. “He hasn’t told you?”

  “You know Frank.”

  “Breast cancer.” She stepped out of the hug, gave her scarf a self-conscious pat. “With everything that’s happened lately, he probably didn’t want to worry you. Go talk to him, lovey. He’s downstairs fussing with his trains.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. How long have you known? What’s the . . .?” What’s the prognosis?, I wanted to say, but the words stuck in my throat.

  “I have an enzyme that makes the cancer more aggressive. But they say I’m doing well.”

  “What does that mean, doing well?”

  She forced a laugh. “I think it means I’m still above ground. Don’t look so stricken, lovey. I have a long road ahead, that’s all. I have to be able to laugh about it.”

  I gave her another squeeze. Then she shooed me down to Frank’s basement, where he stood at his worktable holding a miniature red maple in place while the glue dried.

  I pulled a metal folding chair over and said, “You should have told me.”

  He hunched a shoulder. “You’ve had a lot on your plate. Besides . . . talking about it . . . it makes it seem real.”

  I nodded. That, I understood. “Need me to do anything? Mow your grass? Trim your hedges?”

  “We’re doing okay.” He lifted his finger, and the maple held firm. “Get you a beer?”

  “Sure.”

  He went to the fridge, grabbed a couple of Czech brews, and handed me one. “I’m going crazy here. I thought about what you said. About taking Patrice off the board.”

  “You should take both of you off the board. This guy—this Executioner—he’s either very good or very lucky.”

  “Maybe both. I’m thinking of sending her to her sister’s in Knoxville for a few weeks. Just until this is all over. But she has chemo on Wednesdays. There are logistics involved.”

  My mother had gone through three surgeries and two rounds of chemotherapy and radiation before the cancer beat her. They’d poisoned her, then carved her up a little at a time, and still the disease had eaten her alive.

  I said, “What can I do?”

  “There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing anybody can do. It’s up to God, and he doesn’t share his plans with me.” He set his beer on the table and took a pine tree from a plastic bin on the floor. “Let’s talk about your missing girl.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m running out of leads.”

  I told him about Savitch. He clicked his tongue against his teeth and said, “The problem is, your suspect pool is basically everybody in the world.”

  “It’s not everybody in the world. Just the ones who came through Nashville by way of Vietnam in the last few weeks. It shouldn’t be that big a pool.”

  “We checked the manifests for a full week on either side of Tuyet’s disappearance, just in case the grandmother got the date wrong. No Mr. Mat, no Mr. Troi, no Mr. Mat Troi. No Mr. Matthew Troy. No Tuyet. But if you widen the net to any flight that might have connected to a flight that might have connected to a flight that originated in Vietnam . . .” He spread his hands in a helpless gesture.

  “I’d still like to get my hands on those manifests. Khanh might recognize something.”

  “And Malone would kill anybody who gave them to you.”

  “Malone has her hands full.” I took a sip of beer. “We could do each other some good.”

  He touched the pine tree to a patch of open turf, picked it up and moved it a few inches to the left of an acrylic pond. “Use that silver tongue of yours. Maybe you can convince her.”

  The thought of tongues and Malone took my mind in an unwelcome but not unpleasant direction. I banished the image and said, “She’s immune to my charms.”

  He laughed. “Go figure.”

  “What are you going to do, Frank?” I asked. “About Patrice? About the Executioner?”

  He opened his beer. Took a long swig. “Patrice is tough. We’ll get through. As for the Executioner, he has a long list. They’ll catch him before he gets to us.”

  “Unless he goes alphabetically. ‘C’ is pretty close to the beginning of the alphabet.”

  “I’m ready for him, Mac. Those other guys, they didn’t know he was coming, but now he’s tipped his hand.”

  “Why you? What case could you have worked on with all those other people?”

  He reached into the box and pulled out a couple of little plastic deer. “There’s not one. We’re thinking maybe it’s one perpetrator, not one case. We’re narrowing those down.”

  “They cross precincts. So either some of the cops on the list have moved or whatever he’s pissed about happened before the restructuring. Or you’ve got one issue that carries over.”

  “Some of each, maybe. And whatever happened, he thinks it was a miscarriage of justice. Maybe somebody he thought was innocent went to prison.”

  “Or maybe somebody got off he thinks shouldn’t have.”

  “Scumbags get off every day.” He touched a bead of glue to the deer’s feet and placed them carefully beside the pond. “That would be a long list, for sure.”

  “For Justice,” I said. “I knew a guy named Justice once. Billy Justice. He was a sculptor.”

  “This guy thinks he’s an artist, the way he poses the bodies.”

  “Performance art?”

  “Be something if that was it, wouldn’t it? Your friend Billy ever get himself arrested?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Too bad. Wouldn’t that make things a lot easier?” He touched his beer bottle to mine. “To catching the sons of bitches.”

  31

  On the way home, I stopped at Office Depot and picked up a map of Nashville, pushpins, a three-by-five-foot whiteboard, and a set of dry-erase markers. The whiteboard went on one guest-room wall, divided into columns: time line, Mat Troi, Karlo Savitch, trafficking. The map went on the other wall, pushpins marking Karlo’s house, the airport, and my office.

  Khanh came in while I was working. I handed her the pen. “You write down everything we know about each of these things. Maybe something will come together.”

  While she made notes, I went upstairs and printed out the photos of everyone who’d gone into or out of Karlo Savitch’s house since Monday afternoon. Savitch had been killed by someone he trusted enough to let in his apartment. Someone he’d trusted enough to turn his back on. Someone who was probably in one of these photos. I spread them out on my bed and started sorting. When I was finished, I had several possibles and one that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  A man in jeans and a windbreaker, sunglasses, cap. Just like the man Malone had described from the airport security footage. Average build, athletic. Average height. Age could have been anywhere from midtwent
ies to forty. The hair that fell over his ears was dark, the skin tone golden. The sunglasses obscured the shape of his eyes, but he might have been Amerasian. He’d gone in with the woman who lived in Apartment 421, and their body language said they were intimate. But there was a hesitance in her manner, a curiosity in the way she looked at him, like whatever was between them was still new. Maybe he’d cultivated it to give himself an excuse—an excuse besides Karlo—to be there.

  I felt a familiar vibration in my chest.

  We were closing in on him.

  My fax machine began to hum. Over the next few minutes, it spat out a sheaf of airline manifests—page after page of passenger lists, along with the flights they’d been on. On the cover sheet, Frank’s hasty scrawl read: Guess I’m the one with the silver tongue.

  I texted a thanks and went back into the bedroom, where Khanh stood in front of the poster board marked Time line, purple marker in her hand. Below the header, she had scrawled, Tuyet call from America.

  I said, “Look what I have.”

  She turned, and I held up the manifests.

  “Let’s see what we can find.”

  We pored over them, every incoming flight to Nashville with a connection that had originated in Vietnam. As Frank had said, there was no Tuyet. No Mat Troi and no permutation thereof.

  I ran my finger down the column, estimating how many men were on the list. It would take time to investigate them all, but it could be done. What did we have but time?

  Khanh’s finger stabbed at the page. A man’s name. Harold Sun.

  “Mat troi,” she said, a quaver in her voice. “It mean ‘sun.’ ”

  32

  There were eleven Suns in the Nashville white pages, a few more in the surrounding areas, but only one with the first name Harold. I punched him into background database and found the thirty-two-year-old owner of an Asian import store, Imperial Sun Imports. The company website had a photo of a smiling Sun in a suit. I compared it to the photo I’d taken at Savitch’s—the one of the man in the ball cap and sunglasses.