The Canton Connection

by Fritz Galt

  What readers are saying…

  Intriguing.

  Informative.

  Well written.

  Fun.

  Marvelous.

  Great mystery.

  Surprising.

  Compelling.

  I want to keep reading.

  Suspenseful.

  Page-turner.

  Impressive.

  I like Maguire.

  What is Hollywood waiting for?

  Irresistible!

  Also by Fritz Galt

  Mick Pierce Spy Thrillers

  Double Cross

  Thunder in Formosa

  The Geneva Seduction

  Fatal Sting

  Brad West Spy Thrillers

  Destiny of the Dragon

  Mind Control

  The Shangri-la Code

  International Thrillers

  The Trap

  China Gate

  Comoros Moon (short stories)

  International Mysteries

  The Accidental Assassin

  The Maltese Cross

  The Canton Connection

  Other Novels

  Summerville

  The Adventures of Buttons Burnside

  The Canton Connection

  A Jake Maguire Mystery

  © Copyright 2013 by Fritz Galt

  All rights reserved.

  Sigma-Books.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The names, incidents, dialogue and opinions expressed are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Nothing is intended or should be interpreted as expressing or representing the views of any U.S. government department or agency of any government body.

  “Computer intrusions and network attacks are the greatest cyber threat to our national security.”

  —FBI Director

  Chapter 1

  Jake Maguire got the call at two p.m. on Friday. Homicide wasn’t his specialty, and viewing a bludgeoned body didn’t sit easily with him.

  He was a young, good-looking FBI special agent, and had his whole life ahead of him. The fatherly Asian victim did not.

  The summer heat and humidity were sweltering, even by Virginia standards. Taking a deep breath, Jake plunged in and did what had to be done. He consulted with Red Stokes, a police detective for Arlington County, and took notes about the scene of the crime.

  If the police saw a possible federal case, they brought the FBI in, and Jake was the Bureau’s point man in the Northern Virginia area.

  Wearing vests and sterile gloves, the crime scene investigators hadn’t disturbed the body lying in the bushes just off the Washington and Old Dominion Trail. One could easily have jogged or cycled past the corpse without seeing it. Several poles driven into the soil held back shrubbery for a better view.

  The bruise to the forehead had barely broken the skin and begun to bleed. “The blunt blow may have been enough to knock the victim unconscious,” Stokes explained to Jake.

  Stokes, a red-haired detective in his forties, shoved aside a nearby branch. An aluminum baseball bat lay on a bed of dry leaves. It was a kid’s bat, but was dangerous nonetheless.

  “Is this what killed him?” Jake asked.

  Stokes lifted a flap of the victim’s cotton print shirt. A hunting knife had been jabbed into the hairless chest. The entire blade pierced up through the diaphragm and into the heart.

  “That killed him,” he said.

  The victim was middle-aged. He was plump and flabby with a round, hairless face, bristly black hair and the stretched eyelids of an Asian. His expression was peaceful despite the brutal attack.

  “A wallet was found in his pants pocket,” Stokes said. “We’ve dusted it for fingerprints.”

  “Any money or credit cards left inside?”

  “Both. It wasn’t robbery, Jake.”

  Jake looked at the driver’s license. It was issued by the Commonwealth of Virginia. The name was Han Chu and the man was born in 1958.

  “What do you know about the witness?” Jake asked the detective.

  “Nothing. It was a 9-1-1 call, and we have the recording, but no name. Just the mile marker where the police could find the body.”

  “Why did the witness seek anonymity?”

  Stokes shrugged.

  Jake studied the police detective. He had a lot in common with the cop. They were the same age and unmarried. “Forty and still single,” Jake’s mother had said with a shake of her head.

  Red Stokes wore cargo pants and a navy blue polo shirt with his department’s logo embroidered on it, typical of a homicide detective processing a scene. Jake’s tie and off-the-rack coat were his uniform.

  Both men dealt with the dark side of human behavior. Yet the detective’s blue eyes were shining.

  “Why so happy?” Jake asked, wiping off a bead of sweat that oozed from his hairline.

  “Because there’s a good chance this won’t be my case for long,” Stokes said.

  “You thinking about the tattoo?” There was a blue tattoo on the victim’s upper chest.

  “A dragon’s head in a triangle?” Stokes said suggestively.

  “It’s a Triad gang.” Jake knew about the ruthless street gangs based in Hong Kong. Many had formed large syndicates that dealt in every type of crime from robbery to extortion and gambling, backed up by the threat of torture and death.

  He looked at the plump body lying in the bushes. It was hard to believe that the victim played any part in organized crime.

  “If this stiff turns out to be a foreign citizen or have syndicate connections,” Stokes said, poking Jake in the abdomen, “this will be your case.”

  “So what if he looks foreign,” Jake said. “He could be an American. And so he has a Triad tattoo. It looks faded.”

  “See?” the detective said, grinning. “You’re being observant. The gears in your head are working already. You want this case.”

  “Homicide is your job.”

  “Jake, you still haven’t gotten that big break in your career.”

  “I’m busy enough. I don’t need to go slumming at the morgue.”

  “Yeah, but this one smells like it could be big,” Stokes said, indicating the body. “And if I know you, Jake, not only do you want this case, you need it.”

  “You can cover him up now.”

  Jake returned through the shrubbery to the bike path. Several cyclists in skin-tight outfits glided by the crime scene without altering their speed.

  He left the police to finish their work.

  “You need this case, buddy,” Stokes called after him.

  Jake got in his official Ford sedan that was parked on the grass and turned on the air conditioning. Stokes was right in several respects. Jake could use a big case at that point in his career. Stokes had already moved up from line squad detective to Homicide. Jake was stuck in field duty like a rookie special agent.

  Stokes was also right about how Jake’s mind worked. He liked to solve puzzling cases. And this one raised more questions than it answered.

  First was the witness. Why had the caller refused to give a name or describe the crime? Had the witness seen the murder take place? If not, how had the body been discovered?

  Second was the perpetrator. How well had the assailant planned the attack? Who would have expected the middle-aged, plainly dressed victim to be on the bike path that Friday afternoon?

  And third was the victim, Han Chu. How did his flabby body and peaceful expression fit w
ith the fierce ruthlessness that lay at the root of the Triad culture?

  Jake shrugged off the knotty questions. They were for the police to solve.

  He backed off the grass and headed for Washington Boulevard.

  He had a boss to please, a backlog of federal cases to work on, and a stagnated career to resurrect.

  Chapter 2

  It was Friday afternoon and Jake would have preferred steering home to his apartment, but he had to file a report in case the murder blew up into a federal investigation.

  So he turned onto I-66 heading downtown, while commuters and those starting their weekend getaway were streaming west into the late August sun. He followed his shadow to his Arlington office, a small satellite of the Washington Field Office.

  Part of a commercial building, the office was just closing by the time he yanked the glass door open and headed for his desk.

  “Still need me?” Maria Rivera, the petite young office manager, asked, her eyes sparkling.

  “Naw. Go home and enjoy the weekend.”

  She looked disappointed, but Jake didn’t need office staff. He just needed to write the incident report.

  By the start of work on Monday, the police could have determined that a federal crime was committed or that Han Chu was a foreign national and called in the FBI. At that point, it would be up to him and his staff and the FBI Laboratory to assist the county police in pursuing clues and to develop evidence for a federal case.

  He never met a detective that didn’t ask for federal assistance when it was needed. And he never met a police department that couldn’t wait to shove a case onto the feds.

  He turned his computer on and dutifully typed in his notes about the murdered man by the bike path.

  He had a weekend to forget the gruesome scene and ignore all the nagging questions he had developed.

  Chances were, it wouldn’t become his case anyway. How could this possibly become a federal case?

  While he was at the office, he couldn’t resist exploring that last question. He pulled his computer and telephone close and began to research the witness and the victim, Han Chu.

  Five hours later, he turned off his computer and desk lamp and headed through the deserted office. He hit the light switch by the door and made sure the door was locked behind him.

  He trotted down the outside steps, hopped into his car and started the engine.

  His movements were mechanical, but his mind was fully engaged.

  First, he had logged into the local police data center and listened to a recording of the frantic call from the witness.

  It was a young woman who had called 9-1-1. He could relive the horror of the event through the tremble in her voice. She had been specific about the time and place, but didn’t identify either the victim or the perpetrator, and avoided saying anything about how the crime was committed.

  The emergency operator had been unable to get the woman to reveal her name. It was frustrating to be unable to interrogate a material witness, but it was not uncommon for a witness to seek anonymity to avoid retribution or the inevitable hassle of a police investigation and possible courtroom appearance.

  However, this witness had gone further than most to preserve her anonymity. The 9-1-1 system could record the originating number of a phone call or log the GPS coordinates of a cell phone. But the witness hadn’t used either a land line or a cell phone. She had called via a computer.

  He made a note in his report that investigators would not be able to follow up with the witness.

  Then he had turned his attention to the victim of the crime.

  He switched databases and logged into U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to look up background information on the victim.

  It turned out Han Chu was an American citizen. He had immigrated to the U.S. in 1979 as a young man from Taishan in southern China.

  Further searches on the internet revealed that he had built a career in the high-tech industry that was just taking off in the early ’80s. He founded a company, Quantum, Inc., that made graphics cards for personal computers. Then he got into networking hardware and software, and his business had expanded into defense contracts for anti-virus software, computer security and encryption services.

  After calling Detective Red Stokes at the Arlington County Police Department, Jake learned that Chu was unmarried, but had many local employees. He took down some of their home and cell phone numbers.

  Jake also learned that an autopsy was scheduled for the next morning and a funeral on Sunday.

  Calls to Chu’s employees revealed a deep level of shock and disorientation. Many planned to attend the funeral and pay their final respects. From their names and the sound of their voices, all were Chinese.

  Why was Chu walking along that path that afternoon? Jake’s call to Chu’s business manager hardly answered the question.

  “That wasn’t his normal routine,” the man told Jake. “Chu rarely left the office until after nine p.m.”

  And what about the Triad tattoo?

  “Chu was orphaned at a young age,” the man said. “He may have hung out in tough circles when he was growing up. But he was a techie, not a street fighter.”

  The flabby physique of the dead man seemed to bear that out.

  And how about motives?

  “He had no debts,” the man said. “He didn’t even gamble.”

  “Women?”

  “His employees were the only people in his life. And there are few females in this business. He was like a father to us all.”

  Jake pulled onto the expressway, now free of traffic, and headed home.

  Chu’s harmlessness was the last element that didn’t add up. Who had a motive to kill him? Who was the assailant?

  But Jake had come to a critical decision midway through that evening’s investigation. Based on the online data and his calls, there was no federal case. Chu was an American citizen and any ties to organized crime were likely a part of his past. This was not for the FBI.

  Come Monday, the FBI would turn the case down.

  Jake wasn’t surprised to find his apartment lights on and his door open when his building’s elevator let him out on his floor. His neighbor was there feeding his cat.

  Amber wasn’t exactly his girlfriend. But if anybody wondered, including his mom, she qualified as a girlfriend.

  “Your cat would starve with the hours you keep,” she scolded him.

  He didn’t like the smell of cat food anyway.

  “How about you?” he asked.

  “I’m starving.”

  She stood up from her work dishing out the can of food. She was slim and elegant and dark.

  He hadn’t asked for a multi-racial affair. It had just happened. And it wasn’t exactly an affair. She was a neighbor who happened to spend the night occasionally. And who hung around to share dinner on weekends.

  “Care for a burger?” he asked, and threw his jacket over the back of his couch.

  It was one of those apartments that came fully furnished. The overstuffed chairs and sofa and burnished wood tables wouldn’t be his choice of furniture, but he had no taste in furniture anyway.

  Amber didn’t mind going out for a burger. She said she’d lock up her place and be right back.

  He changed into a T-shirt and jeans and flipped on the TV. The local news had a brief segment on the bike path murder. It was treated as street crime, and there were no suspects. They covered the story as yet more evidence of the nasty world we live in.

  Amber knocked and he turned off the TV.

  She wore a black outfit, much nicer than his casual getup. He paused a moment at the door to take her in. She was treating this like a date.

  So he ducked into the bathroom and ran a comb through his dark brown hair. He checked the effect in the mirror. He was what women might call tall and handsome in a clean-cut Irish sort of way, and it didn’t take much effort to make him look presentable.

  He just didn’t want to let Amber down.

  Fi
ve Guys was open as usual. It was late in the evening, but the line of customers was three deep. They had to wait fifteen minutes for their order to come up.

  Amber had scoped out a table by the window looking over Route 50. Across the street was the competition, an all-night IHOP.

  He set down their tray of food, his stomach already growling loudly.

  He started with the oversized cup of French fries. He had to get to them before the peanut oil soaked through. He would attack the big, sloppy burger later.

  “Why so late tonight?” Amber asked, and pursed her lips delicately around the end of her straw.

  “New case. But I think we’ll turn it down,” he said.

  “Terrorists?” she asked, barely changing expression.

  “Naw.”

  She nodded. “That’s good. I prefer when people kill each other for a reason I can understand.”

  “What makes you think it’s murder?”

  She looked at him, her large eyes amused. “I do watch the news, you know.”

  “Okay, then, which murder?”

  “Well, it could have been the drug bust that went south,” she began. “But I think that would involve the Drug Enforcement Agency. A cab driver went berserk over a bank foreclosing on his house, so that’s not you. There was a purse-snatcher out at Tyson’s, but that’s hardly a federal crime. So it had to be the Chinese man,” she said with a simple shrug.

  “What makes that an FBI case?”

  “He owned a computer firm. And a huge spike in cyber attacks, especially from China, has been making headlines lately.”

  “You think he was a hacker?”

  “If the shoe fits…” she said.

  “Well, you should be a detective.”

  “No kidding. I want to get into investigative journalism. I still haven’t heard back from my interview at NPR.”