Flower Net

by Lisa See

  Two hours later, as David stepped off the elevator and passed through the security door and into the halls of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was immediately aware of a difference around him. Walking to his office, he nodded to a couple of secretaries, who assiduously looked at the floor as he passed them. He passed two young attorneys who worked in Complaints. They stopped talking when he came into view.

  David poured himself a cup of coffee and went to the grand jury room, the only place in the courthouse large enough for Madeleine Prentice, the U.S. attorney, to hold her weekly meetings. When he entered, a lull fell over the conversation. Then Rob Butler, Chief of the Criminal Division, cleared his throat. “Here’s David. Back from his adventure at sea.” The other attorneys laughed, but David sensed their discomfort. Still, he was grateful to Rob for just putting his story out there. It was as though Rob were saying, “We’re not going to have gossip. We’re not going to show jealousy. We’re going to treat this case like any other.” Madeleine echoed these sentiments by immediately launching into the meeting and asking for an update on current narcotics cases.

  As David grabbed a chair and looked around the room, he saw that Rob and Madeleine’s desire to keep his case out of the realm of the extraordinary might be hard to accomplish. Most of the other assistants in this room had been around long enough to get big cases, but none of them had ever been almost lost at sea or come in contact with a dead body.

  One of the reasons David had left Phillips, MacKenzie & Stout was the comparatively collegial atmosphere the U.S. Attorney’s Office offered. The attorneys—to a man, to a woman—had deliberately chosen to pass on the major firms’ big salaries to work for government wages and go to court every day. The only true payoffs—aside from the sense of having done right—were good press and a possible judgeship. Clearly the former led to the latter. Yet there was a line that his colleagues didn’t like to cross. They all—David included—made fun of attorneys who sought the limelight. At the same time, they admired those who could handle the press effectively. And so, today, as David listened to Madeleine and Rob query the other attorneys on their cases, he was fully aware of the weird combination of awe, jealousy, and distrust that floated around him.

  Madeleine Prentice ran a manicured finger down her list. “What else have we got going to trial this week? Laurie?”

  Laurie Martin, seven months pregnant, opened her file and began her summary. “On September fifteenth, Customs officials became suspicious when a woman, Lourdes Ongpin, stepped off her United flight from Manila wearing a raincoat. Although it isn’t unusual for people to wear coats or sweaters while traveling, Customs thought that in this particular instance it was strange, since the temperature at LAX was about a hundred and five degrees.”

  According to Laurie, Customs began questioning the woman. Where was she planning on staying? Was she here for business or pleasure? As they were doing this, the inspectors noticed two things. First, the woman had a peculiar odor about her. Second, her raincoat seemed to have a life of its own. The woman was taken into an interrogation room, where inspectors found fifteen giant snails, weighing a pound or more apiece, sewn into the lining of her coat.

  The other assistants fidgeted during Laurie’s recital. They knew the way to make a name was by landing a conviction against a corrupt senator or a notorious drug dealer, not by going after penny-ante wildlife smugglers. Even though they were protected by international treaty, giant snails would never make page one of the Times.

  Madeleine, with her sense of the dramatic, saved David’s case for last. After his synopsis, Madeleine asked, “Do you think the murder is related to the Rising Phoenix gang, or did someone on the boat simply kill the man?”

  “The triads have never shied away from murder. Can I tie them to this case? I don’t know.”

  “It could be the break you’ve been looking for.”

  “That’s right. If I can’t get them on racketeering or immigration violations, maybe I’ll get them on murder.”

  “I’d like to get the Justice Department, maybe even the State Department, in on this,” Madeleine said. “Let’s see what assistance they can give us. To my knowledge, we don’t work with China, but maybe there’s a way we can get unofficial help.”

  “I’ll take whatever help I can get, so long as this stays my case.”

  “It’s yours as far as I’m concerned.” Madeleine gave a cursory glance around the room. “Anyone else? No? All right then, let’s go get some convictions.”

  David poured himself another cup of coffee and headed for his office, where Jack Campbell and Noel Gardner were already waiting for him. Their haggard faces and rumpled clothes showed that neither of them had slept much.

  As David sat down, Campbell cocked an eye and said, “Man, you really blew us away last night.”

  David shook his head. “I was scared like everyone else.”

  “No, you rose to the occasion, and it was one hell of an occasion.”

  “I only did what I thought was right,” David said sheepishly. He rearranged a few papers on his desk, then asked, “So, what’s happening with the immigrants?”

  Campbell explained that of the 523 immigrants on board the Peony, 378 had already been deported thanks to the Chinese government providing an empty freighter for the return voyage. This was primarily due to the efficiency of INS officials, who had made sure that the immigrants were isolated as much as possible when they first landed. “That way they didn’t have an opportunity to communicate with one another, concoct stories, even rebound enough from their ordeal to think clearly.”

  “No one wants a repeat of the Golden Venture disaster,” Noel Gardner added. “It’s been close to three years since that ship ran aground in New York, and we’re still housing over fifty of those Chinese. At fifty-five dollars a day, that’s cost us well over ten million. The INS wants to get the Peony’s immigrants processed and out of the country before the human-rights groups can get mobilized.”

  During the late afternoon and through the night, Campbell recounted, the ill, the infirm, and the weak had been separated from those who were healthy and showing high spirits. By midnight, even before David had checked out of the hospital, dozens of immigrants had showered and eaten a simple meal of beef stew. They were hastily advised of their rights to counsel and a hearing, but INS officials had stressed the benefits of accepting clean clothes, food, and passage home rather than a protracted jail stay with no guarantees of freedom. Then the immigrants were taken to courtrooms at the Terminal Island detention facility, where judges—cranky themselves for having been roused out of bed—repeated this advice. At this point, most of the immigrants chose to waive their rights and were processed with alacrity. Most of these had left the port two hours ago.

  David switched gears. “Any word on the crew?”

  “The Coast Guard has been watching the beaches,” said Campbell. “No bodies have washed up, but they really don’t expect to see any. The storm was severe, and when the crew abandoned the Peony, it was still far out to sea.”

  “I think you’ll have better luck looking in San Pedro, Long Beach, or Chinatown.”

  “Those are great ideas, Stark, but let’s be realistic. There’s Gardner and there’s me. This case doesn’t have high priority. The Bureau isn’t going to give us the manpower we need to check out every bar and fleabag hotel. Noel and I are trying to do what you want, but we still have to prioritize. You wanted me down at Terminal Island talking to those immigrants, and I went. You wanted Noel to stick with the body, and he did.”

  “Jesus, the body!” David turned his attention to Gardner. “How’s my body? Better yet, who’s my body? Hey! And weren’t you supposed to stay with him?”

  “Don’t worry,” Gardner soothed. “He’s locked up in the morgue down in Long Beach. He isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Gardner gave him the full FBI treatment,” Campbell boasted.

  Gardner beamed. “I only told the M.E. that this was a federal matter of life and
death. He agreed to do the autopsy right away, but I can’t take any credit for that. Our John Doe has been dead for some time. It behooved the M.E. to get the body into cold storage as quickly as possible.”

  “And?”

  Gardner flipped open his notebook and began to read with mathematical exactness. “The victim is a male, early twenties, weighing a hundred and twenty pounds. The hair tells us that he’s Chinese.” Gardner and the coroner agreed with David’s assumption that the victim wasn’t one of the immigrants or one of the crewmen. “Our guy’s had some pretty expensive dental work done, although the coroner couldn’t explain the present condition of the teeth, which were…”

  “Black, I remember.”

  “And then there’s the Rolex,” Gardner went on. “It was real.”

  “What killed him?”

  “That’s where it gets interesting. You know that thing with the hands and feet? The skin comes off like gloves and socks if a body’s been submerged in water for a long time. I can also tell you that our John Doe was tortured before death.”

  “Tortured?”

  “Even with the decomposition, the coroner found deep burns on the victim’s arms and neck. Either he was tortured or he had a very strange way of putting out cigarettes.”

  “Did he drown?”

  “The fluid in his lungs is purely postmortem.”

  “Where did he die?” David queried.

  “I think a better question might be, when did he die?” Gardner rejoined.

  “Okay, then, when?”

  “Let me jump in here for a minute,” said Campbell. “The captain left the Peony so fast that he forgot his log. We found out that the ship left the port of Tianjin on January third. We faxed authorities in Tianjin, and they sent us back copies of the Peony’s bills of lading. I’m sure it will come as no surprise that immigrants were not listed on the manifest. What is a surprise is that a ship of this sort would leave Tianjin at all. Usually these ships leave from Fujian, Zhejiang, or Guangdong Province.”

  “Where is Tianjin?”

  “I didn’t know either, but it’s in the north near Beijing. It’s China’s third-largest city.”

  “And what was on the manifest?”

  “The Peony was supposed to carry needlepoint and Aubusson-style rugs, electronic gadgets, and ceramics from the interior.”

  “So why have an immigrant ship leave Tianjin?”

  “We don’t know. What we do know is that the victim has probably been dead since January third,” Campbell said.

  “So back to my question. If it’s not death by drowning, what killed him?”

  “You told me to stay with the body and I did,” said Gardner. “I’m telling you, Stark, you owe me big time. The pathologist cut that guy open from stem to stern. I don’t know what I was looking at. I don’t want to know. But the whole time the pathologist is talking, narrating. Our guy’s liver had gone to mush. His kidneys…” The FBI agent cringed at the memory. “His large and small intestines were eaten up with sores. His mucous membranes—I’m talking about inside his mouth and down his throat—were covered in blisters. Whatever killed him entered his body through his mouth and lungs, then systemically destroyed every single organ.”

  David and Campbell looked at each other, then waited as Gardner took a sip from his coffee.

  “The pathologist ran a toxicology scan. But let’s face it, Long Beach doesn’t have the most sophisticated equipment. A city pathologist isn’t going to be able to sort this out. This thing is weird.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did the pathologist put it? ‘We’ve got an organic toxic critter thing going here.’”

  “So whatever it is—this poison—came from an animal?”

  “An animal, an insect, a snake, a spider—the pathologist wasn’t sure. I had him draw tissue samples. They’re on their way to Washington to the FBI crime lab with everything else.”

  “What ‘else’?”

  “Dental impressions, the contents of his wallet, the gloves. Unfortunately, when a body’s been submerged, we lose fibers that we could tie to a crime scene.”

  “Hang on! Hang on! What’s all this?”

  “I forget you aren’t used to dealing with murder victims.”

  “You’re damn right.”

  So Noel Gardner explained how the FBI would work in this situation. Given time, the local M.E. might be able to identify the compound of the poison and still not know what it came from. He would have the expertise to take dental impressions and fingerprints from the gloves, but he wouldn’t have the resources to make any matches.

  “As for the wallet,” Gardner continued, “it was in the water a long time. But it’s amazing what our guys in Washington can do. They may be able to pick up traces of ink or an official stamp.”

  “Good work, Gardner,” said Campbell.

  “Great work,” added David, “but how long will all this take?”

  “Who knows? Days? Weeks? Months?”

  “I keep coming back to his identity,” David reflected. “If he wasn’t one of the immigrants, who was he? A crewman? A gang member?”

  “Poison isn’t a typical modus operandi for Asian organized crime,” said Campbell. “If the victim is one of their own—say, someone who betrayed them—you’d expect to see his arms and legs cut off—”

  David’s phone rang. Lynn Patchett, an INS lawyer, was on the line.

  They met in a small conference room at Terminal Island. Lynn Patchett, who’d postponed her day’s calendar of hearings for Peony immigrants, paced along the length of one wall. She was dressed in a square-cut navy-blue suit, a white blouse buttoned to her neck, and blue flats. Jack Campbell paced against the adjacent wall. In the corner where they should have met in their nervous wandering sat a court reporter, who waited patiently for someone to speak so she might do her job. At David’s side, Noel Gardner scratched geometric designs on a yellow pad.

  Mabel Leung, a court interpreter who spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, and several other Chinese dialects, had pulled her chair a foot away from the table and industriously knitted on what looked to be a sleeve. So far no one had needed her linguistic skills. Milton Bird, a court-appointed immigration attorney, checked his notes. Next to him sat Zhao, his arms hanging limply at his sides. He wore a red jumpsuit with black numbers stenciled on the back and bright white tennis shoes—the official uniform of those incarcerated at Terminal Island.

  It was now late afternoon. They hadn’t broken for lunch, although Mabel had ducked out for a few minutes and come back with her arms full of diet Cokes and bags of potato chips bought from a vending machine. This strange repast combined with the stress had left them all jittery.

  So far the meeting had been an exercise in perseverance. Zhao wanted to buy his freedom; David desperately wanted information. Zhao reminded David that he had promised to help; David struggled with the definition of “help.” They had talked over terms: identification of the body in exchange for Zhao’s freedom. If the case ever came to trial, David expected Zhao to appear as a witness. The government wouldn’t pay Zhao any money, but the INS would agree to give him a green card. David could see that Zhao wanted to take the deal. At the same time, David could see that the immigrant was even more frightened now than he had been aboard the Peony.

  As the day wore on, David read through Zhao’s file a couple of times. According to his INS interview, Zhao Lingyuan—who, according to Chinese custom, placed his surname first—had once been a student at Beijing University, which explained his fluency in English. In 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, he’d been sent to the countryside. A decade later, when other students went home, Zhao stayed behind. All these years later, with the market economy sweeping China, Zhao had decided to come to the United States to start over.

  Campbell suddenly stopped his pacing and burst out, “Look, Zhao, we’re going to have to fish or cut bait. You know what that means? It means either you talk or forget it!”

  When Zhao didn’t move
, Campbell growled in frustration, hit the wall with his fist, and resumed his metronomic gait. David flicked his pen open and shut. Then Zhao said in a flat voice, “I don’t know how to say these words.”

  Mabel set down her knitting, and the two of them spoke for five minutes in Chinese. Occasionally, Mabel would say a word in English—dragon, bear, phoenix, rat, mole—and Zhao would repeat it. As their chattering came to an end, it seemed as though the two of them had reached some sort of agreement. David looked questioningly from Mabel to Zhao, then back again. Mabel wordlessly picked up her knitting and Zhao hunched back down in his chair, his eyes focused on the bare table in front of him. Milton Bird pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. Gardner stretched his neck from side to side, then flexed his arm muscles.

  “We have a saying in China.” Zhao’s voice was heavy with resignation. “Dragons bear dragons, phoenixes bear phoenixes, and moles bear sons good at digging holes.”

  David waited.

  “This man, he is a dragon’s son,” Zhao continued. “I am a mole’s son. Do you understand?”

  “No, no, I don’t.”

  Now that Zhao had broken his silence, he couldn’t stop. “On the ship, we know the man is in the water. That water was for drinking. By the time the crew tells us to get our water from that place, that man is stinking inside there. We open the water crank at the top of the tank and that smell comes out. Most of us are peasants. A farmer, he floods his fields to grow rice. There is no way to warn the animals that the water is coming. Animals sometimes get trapped in there. Sometimes they swim away. You see rats swimming with their noses just above the water. Sometimes a rat gets caught in the plants. Days later, weeks later, I would smell it. This happens sometimes, so on the boat we know something dead is in that place.”

  “What did you do?”

  Zhao slowly lifted his eyes to meet David’s. “No one wants to look inside that place. Some people, they are afraid of ghosts. Some people, they are afraid of the crew.”

  “Did the crew know?”