The Dark Root

16

Tony Brandt banged his coffee mug down on the counter with a curse and sucked on a scalded finger, checking his clothing for stains.

“Now you know why people say the stuff’s a health hazard,” I told him as I poured myself a cup from the officers’ room urn.

“I don’t have time to drink it anyway,” he muttered, now inspecting his finger. “Just force of habit.”

“Got a date?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He glanced up at the wall clock. “Early-morning head-bashing session over at the high school. All this talk of gangs has got them worked up, just like we hoped. Shit-I’m running late.”

He abandoned his mug on the counter and walked quickly toward his office. I took a side door into the hallway that separated the main part of the department from the detective squad across the way. For the second day in a row, the hall was empty of reporters. The last of the TV trucks had left the night before. As ironies would have it, the press had put us on the back burner just as our momentum was building.

Dennis DeFlorio hailed me from the short flight of steps that led to the Municipal Building’s rear double doors and the parking lot beyond. He was carrying a bulging, battered briefcase in one hand, and the ubiquitous donut in the other.

“Joe, where were you last night? I was looking for you.”

“I went to visit Ron.”

He walked down the hallway to where I was waiting, taking another bite along the way. “I got some good news about the gunman with the tattoo-the one they called Ut. And Dan Flynn called late-said his INS contact confirmed that Sonny and Truong are one and the same. No doubt about it.”

Down the hall, near the rear steps, Tony Brandt burst from the department’s main entrance. He was wrestling into his jacket, holding a folder in the other hand. “See you later,” he called over his shoulder and promptly fell headlong down the stairs.

Dennis and I broke into a run to see what was left of him.

Brandt was curled up against the double doors, clutching his ankle. The floor was littered with the oversized confetti that had exploded from his folder. “Jesus H. Fucking Christ. I think I broke the goddamn thing.”

We clattered down the steps to his side. I gently pried his hands away from his ankle, undid his shoelaces, and removed both the shoe and sock underneath. Dennis, looking a little hapless, began gathering the sheets of paper.

“Can you wiggle your toes?” I asked. “Hurts like a bitch,” he said between clenched teeth, but the toes moved slightly.

I felt around the ankle, which was beginning to feel warm and spongy. There were no hard bulges or any signs of a broken bone. “You may have broken it-but it could just be a bad sprain.”

By this time, several people had collected at the top of the small stairwell. “Better call an ambulance,” I suggested.

“No. Out of the question,” Brandt half yelled.

Everyone stared at him. “I’ll go to the hospital, but in a car. I don’t want an ambulance.”

“That’s crazy. They…”

He grabbed my arm with an unmistakable ferocity. “No ambulance. They’ll turn this into a goddamn circus. I’m sick of being front-page news. Besides, what the hell can the ambulance do now? Slap some ice on it and make a lot of noise? Just put me in my car.”

I glanced out the glass doors at the parking lot and the department’s four-wheel-drive Jeep station wagon, generally reserved for the shift patrol lieutenants. “All right. We’ll take you in the Jeep. You’ve got to keep that foot elevated and your car’s too cramped.”

The crowd thickened measurably, and Tony capitulated. “Fine-whatever. Just get me out of here.”

I yelled over my shoulder for someone to call the ER and let them know we were coming, and then I helped Dennis form a chair with our interlocked hands. We lifted Tony up and out the door, carrying him to the waiting Jeep with as much speed and gracefulness as possible.

We’d just gotten him settled into the front, with the seat tilted back and his foot propped up on a folded jacket on the dashboard, when Harriet appeared by my side with a bagful of ice cubes. “There’s someone on the phone for you,” she added, “from the Montreal Police.”

“Damn.” I’d forgotten I’d left a message last night for Jean-Paul Lacoste-Dan Flynn’s Montreal contact-asking him to call me as soon as he could.

“Go ahead, Joe,” Tony told me, “I’m all set.”

Dennis was already sliding in behind the steering wheel. “I’ll drive. Harriet, could you make sure they meet us with a wheelchair?”

I half smiled at this unusual show of foresight. “All right. I’ll also have someone call the school and tell them not to expect you.”

“Yeah, right,” Tony growled, half to himself. “They’ll be impressed how far I’ll go to avoid a meeting.”

I laughed. “I’ll come see you later.”

Dennis dropped the key as he was about to put it into the ignition. He was groping around near his feet when I told him, “You can fill me in on what you found out when you get back.”

“Right-if I can ever get out of here,” he muttered irritably.

I hurried back to the building, glancing over my shoulder at the door just as Dennis shouted, “Found it.”

He leaned forward slightly to turn the ignition; Tony’s foot was propped up on the dash, looking comically out of place.

What happened next froze me where I stood. A flash of angry red light arrowed up from under the steering wheel, enveloping Dennis’s still-passive face in a demonic flame. A sudden and terrifyingly large burst of white smoke then erupted from the Jeep, accompanied by the concussion of a short, deep-throated explosion. Just before it was enveloped in a curling white wreath, I saw Dennis’s head snap back, his mouth torn open by the shock of the impact. An instant later, I was pelted by a rain-like shower of debris landing all around me.

My nose stinging with a sulfurous stench, I saw the hulk of the car emerge from the smoke, looking normal below the window sills, but like a smashed aquarium above-dominated by a menacing white cloud that hung in the air like a nuclear mushroom.

I broke into a run, calling out, slipping on the glistening, still-spinning litter covering the asphalt. A glance at Dennis told me he was dead. Not just the blood, which painted the inside of the car, but the way his head was tilted back-flopped over the headrest.

Tony, on the other hand, was still moving.

I skidded around to the passenger side and tore open the door. Tony lay reclined on his seat, writhing in pain, moaning softly. His clothes were burned and torn, covered with blood; he was littered with chunks of flesh, mostly from Dennis, whom I now saw was missing both legs. Gingerly, I leaned closer to Brandt. “Tony, Tony. Can you talk to me?”

Blood was running from both his ears, which I knew was due to the compression of the blast. His eyes, when he opened them, made me catch my breath. They were bright crimson, red from the inside, as if something had exploded in his brain and his eyes had been made clear windows to the mayhem within.

“Jesus Christ” was all I could say, before reaching out tentatively to see if somehow I could help.

I stood by the window of the ER waiting room, looking out at the parking lot where we’d arrested Nguyen Van Hai the day before, knowing somehow that that event and the reason I was here now were directly connected. Throwing political correctness to the wind, along with some basic civil-rights tenets, I’d ordered Sammie to organize a canvass of every Asian we knew of or could find, even before Tyler had finished roping off the explosion site.

I was having difficulty settling down, accepting that Dennis was dead and Tony badly hurt. I kept having to batten down spasms of anger that burst like firecrackers inside me, and to quell the impulse to lash out at something, or someone. I knew that now, possibly more than at any time in my career, the coolheadedness I preached about to others was going to be crucial-to the department, to the public’s perception of it, to the people we were paid to protect, even to the surviving members of Dennis DeFlorio’s family.

Furthermore, I knew that although Billy Manierre had automatically become acting chief the moment that blast had gone off, he was in no position to afford me the protection from both press and politicians that Tony routinely had.

Despite the clarity of these insights, however, the whole notion of grinding away on the case as I had been, nibbling at the edges when I knew it would finally extend beyond my jurisdictional reach, was anathema. In the same way that I wanted to kick a chair or punch a wall to blow off steam, I also wanted to be cast free of having to depend on disinterested, overworked cops, hundreds of miles away, to dig into details that mattered so little to them.

Dr. James Franklin, the hospital’s primary general surgeon, stepped into the waiting room and looked around to see if we were alone. Infamous for an irreverent sense of humor that popped up at even the darkest times, he was deadly serious now, perhaps sensing just how far the ripples of this assault were already reaching.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

Franklin joined me at the window and spoke softly. “Better than he should be. It’s lucky that bomb wasn’t filled with shrapnel. As it is, he still caught several pieces of metal and debris-nothing too serious, though. I gather his seat was completely reclined?”

“Yeah. Pushed and tilted back, both. We wanted to give him as much room as possible to prop the ankle up.”

“Right,” Franklin said, half to himself. “The ankle. I didn’t even look at that. The seat position saved him-took him out of the lateral blast path. With Dennis’s seat upright, it shielded him pretty effectively. Jesus, what a mess.”

“Is he going to be all right?”

Franklin didn’t respond as readily as I would have liked. “Probably. Not that you could tell it looking at him now. He can’t speak because of some minor searing of his airway. He’s also stone deaf as a result of dual fractured eardrums, and his vision is cloudy. He’s got several fractured ribs, a fractured leg, a few burns, the puncture wounds I mentioned from the debris, and a headache to beat the band-all of which will probably heal with time.”

“Including the hearing?”

“A little intervention might be called for there. I’m shipping him up to Mary Hitchcock Hospital today or tomorrow so they can check him over. He’ll be out of circulation for at least a month, although partly as an outpatient.”

“Can I see him?”

“You can look at him, through a window, but he’s out like a light. We gave him some meds to make him sleep.”

“Did you take a look at Dennis?” I asked after a slight pause.

Franklin’s tone became a shade more formal. “The ME brought me in for a quick consult, just to help me in my treatment of Tony.”

“What did you find?”

Franklin sighed.

“I could tell you the old cliché that he didn’t feel a thing. That wouldn’t be far off the mark. Gould said the metal cap of the pipe bomb hit him like a slug from an elephant gun, right under the xiphoid process, through the diaphragm, and totally bisecting the aorta. There are few better ways to almost instantly kill a man.”

“So it was a pipe bomb?”

“Definitely. But like I said, the only shrapnel came from the pipe casing itself and odd pieces of…” He hesitated.

“What?” I asked sharply.

“I was going to say debris again. But in case you come across it in one of the reports, you ought to know I found bits of Dennis’s bone in Tony. That’s going to entail some blood work we normally wouldn’t do-just in case somebody asks.”

“Like an HIV test?”

He made a sour face. “Among others. I know it’s not likely, but better safe than… Well, you know. That would be a hell of a note, wouldn’t it?” Then he repeated, “God, what a mess. Does this have anything to do with that little show you put on for our patients yesterday?” He motioned with his chin toward the parking lot.

I shook my head. “Who the hell knows?”

Morningside Cemetery occupies the top and eastern slope of a hill overlooking the broad Connecticut River, contoured so that to stand in its middle is to be utterly alone among its hundreds of variously sized gravestones. The curve of the hill masks all other signs of civilization-the town to the west and north, the railroad track and the road paralleling the river below disappear beyond the close horizon. It is an island of utter calm, gazing out at the area’s two most prominent features, which the rest of Brattleboro routinely ignores: the river, to which all of downtown turns its back to face Main Street; and Wantastiquet Mountain in neighboring New Hampshire, most often screened from view by buildings, but looming from such a height, and from so nearby, that when it occasionally catches the eye, through an alley or over a low rooftop, it does so like an eminently threatening thundercloud.

Dennis DeFlorio’s grave was to enjoy this dramatic, beautiful, neglected view forever.

There were hundreds of people at the burial-most of them in uniform-fanning out in concentric circles from the awning-shaded casket and the decorously camouflaged hole beside it, unhampered by the walls of the small church that had excluded all but a few of them at the service earlier.

The killing of a police officer does that to other men and women who wear badges for a living-stimulates them to convene as they never will for other occasions. They will travel hundreds of miles, from several states away and from Canada, to pay their respects-not so much to a person they never knew, but in homage to an exclusive, lonely, tribal occupation that no one besides them fully understands. Every cop who dies in the line of duty does so alone-in surprise; and perhaps for that reason, every other cop who can do so attends the interment, if for no other reason than to atone for arriving too late.

Gail was there with me, coming down once more from her studies in South Royalton. As an ex-selectman with an unusually high profile, her presence was noticed by a department that had once perceived her as one of the bosses, and was all the more appreciated given the slant of her politics.

Not that politics came into it here, as it might have in another town, where finding fault or gaining advantage are often knee-jerk reactions to crisis. For a place as culturally diverse as Brattleboro, there was still an intense sense of community, heightened in such times because people felt it slowly eroding away despite the high pitch of their well-intentioned nostalgia.

Unlike in Boston, or even many of its neighboring communities, this town’s civilian population did not take the death of one of its police officers in stride. It was as stunned and bewildered as the tiny group weeping by the side of the casket. Dennis’s wife, Emily, and his two young children, were like the splash in the center of a sun-dappled pond, where the reflections came not from rippling water, but from the rows upon rows of parade-ground uniforms, from gleaming buttons, belt buckles, and badges stirred in among the dark-clad citizens of the town. The small family’s sorrow spread out to the farthest reaches of the crowd, to be absorbed, reproduced, and offered up for public scrutiny by a semicircle of cameramen, photographers, and reporters.

After it was over, after the ritual salute by weapons fire, the folding of the flag, the speaking of words that didn’t remotely reflect the man in the casket, the crowd melted away over the monument-studded horizon and abandoned the cemetery workers to their practical work with shovel and backhoe.

Gail and I went for a walk among the gravestones, some of which dated back two hundred years. We walked without speaking, holding hands, until we found a comfortable-looking marker, wide enough for us to lean against, facing the enormous, silent mountain across the water.

“What are you thinking?” she asked after a while.

“That of all the cops in the department, Dennis was the one guaranteed to die in his bed-probably from choking on a donut. I was the one who suggested taking the Jeep. Why did he offer to drive? He normally didn’t volunteer for anything. I guess he’d gotten into this case-something about it had caught him up-made him enthusiastic…”

“Not a bad time to go, if you have to. That’s something.”

But I shook my head emphatically. “He didn’t die at the right time, or for a noble cause. He was butchered. The poor dumb son of a bitch was blown apart by some bastard who didn’t give a shit who he killed. Dennis DeFlorio is a monument to somebody’s twisted pride-a status symbol, like some fucking tattoo.”

I paused to pluck at a few tufts of grass. “Worst part is, I’d been told a cop was being targeted. I just didn’t take it seriously.”

Then I returned to a sore that had been festering in me for days. “Same thing with Vince Sharkey. Alfie Brewster might’ve set up that shoot-out, but I was the one who got Vince all worked up. And then I canceled the tail we had on him.”

“None of this is your fault, Joe.”

I didn’t argue with her. “Tony told me the post-shoot investigator thought we’d played a little loose going into that deal. He was right. It wasn’t Ron’s fault we both almost got killed. I’m his boss. It was mine.”

Gail was not cooperating. “You’re feeling sorry for yourself. You didn’t kill Dennis. And Ron would’ve been dead, too, if you hadn’t been there. Ask yourself instead, ‘What do I do now?’ The department’s in shock, and with Tony out of commission, you’re the one they’ll be looking to for leadership. You’ve got to give them something to focus on.”

It was then, as if responding to some oddly theatrical cue, that Billy Manierre found us.

He came obliquely, his uniform hat in hand, as if ready to shy off at the slightest notice. His eyes were fixed on Gail, his old-school training sensitive to any hysterical feminine outburst she might spontaneously indulge in.

Instead, she smiled warmly, as most people did on greeting Billy-the living embodiment of the round, friendly, cop-on-the-beat.

“Have a seat.” She patted the thick grass next to her.

He predictably demurred, standing awkwardly instead, looking around as if in fear of an ambush.

I got to my feet to make him feel more comfortable. “What’s up?”

“I was going back to the station-see to the paperwork and all-but I thought maybe we ought to talk a little before. It’ll probably be a nuthouse back there-lot of media back in town, lot of people wanting to bend my ear…”

I helped him out. “You’d like an update?”

“If you’re up to it. I know this may not be the time or place.”

My eyes slid off his face and strayed across the river. Legend had it that once, years ago, there’d been a fire on top of Wantastiquet, and that when firefighters had started climbing its steep, tree-choked slopes, they’d been met and scattered by an avalanche of rattlesnakes, all fleeing downhill in a writhing mass. Apocryphal or not, the story had its own curious appeal to me right now.

“No-that’s fine. I can do that,” I began, and then, both stimulated by Gail’s pep talk and yielding to the smoldering frustration that Dennis’s death had finally made unbearable, I added, “I’m about to spring something on you, though. Something I kicked around with Jack Derby and Tony a few days ago. Tony wasn’t too keen on it. But I’d like to make a pitch to Walter Frazier that the FBI create a task force-involving me-to take this case over.”

Billy’s mouth opened slightly in surprise. “Boy, Joe. That’s a little out of the blue. I mean, I heard something about it, but… What would that mean for us?”

As I spoke, my determination grew, along with an intoxicating sense of relief. “That I’d be reassigned. The department would still pay my salary, and the FBI would pick up the expenses and overtime. That’s if Frazier’s interested. It would release our manpower to catch up on other work, cut down on the overtime we’ve been racking up, and allow you to tell the press that the whole mess is out of your hands and that they can serenade the FBI for further details.”

“Jesus, Joe. I don’t think Tony’ll go for this.”

“Maybe not, but he’s flat on his back with a nose full of tubes. You’re the chief now.”

His discomfort began to gel into opposition. “I’m acting chief. I can’t authorize something like this.”

I looked at him closely. “Billy, I talked to a cop in Montreal this morning named Jean-Paul Lacoste. He’s their Asian-gang expert up there. He told me the man who got whacked in Montreal right after we stopped that car with Truong and Lam and the other guy last winter worked for a Chinese leader named Da Wang, that he’d been Da Wang’s right-hand man in charge of the Montreal-Vermont-Boston illegal-alien pipeline. He was what they call a snakehead-a runner of illegals.”

“Okay,” Billy said cautiously.

“Dan Flynn says there’s been lots of new activity in illegal aliens-that the name ‘Sonny’ has been cropping up, as a rival snakehead. And using our photo of Truong, Dan’s also established that Sonny and Truong are the same person.”

“So Truong replaced Da Wang’s snakehead?” Billy asked, visibly confused.

I shook my head. “It’s more complicated than that. At first, I thought the snakehead had played a role in killing Truong Van Loc’s brother, and that he was killed for revenge. But as far as we know, the snakehead had never been to the U.S. Plus, if that had been Truong’s goal, why’s he still around? I think Truong is making a grab for Da Wang’s business, although I still don’t know why.”

“Making Brattleboro’s troubles part of an international conspiracy,” Gail spoke up from near our feet, “which is what would make this attractive to the feds.”

“We’re not going to be able to solve this case from here, Billy,” I pressed him. “And to keep trying is only going to frustrate our own people. But if I go federal and become a liaison to the department, I can keep them involved-give them a sense that Dennis’s death is something they’re still a part of, if only by proxy.

“Look at what we’re holding otherwise. We already swept the streets for every Asian we could find and got zip. J.P. checked every hardware and sporting-goods store within fifty miles of here for the type of pipe and powder used in that bomb and found nothing. And that’s because it was done by an outside team, just the way Da Wang’s snakehead was hit. Sally warned us they were going to take out a cop, and that’s exactly what they did. Now it’s our choice-we can either keep pissing around, putting names to people we can’t locate, or we can confront them on their own turf and use federal muscle to close them down.”

Billy shifted his weight and crossed his arms, staring out across the river. He finally shook his head in exasperation.

“What?” I asked, after he said nothing.

“I was just wishing I hadn’t walked over here.”