The Dark Root

4

Chief Tony Brandt stared into the bowl of his ever-present pipe. The conversation with Sally Javits and the Beauprés had triggered an intense investigation into the last days of Ben Travers, but forty-eight hours later, we still had little to go on.

“Does Sonny have a last name?”

"Not that we know of. Even the Sonny part might be bogus, as well as his actually being Chinese. That was Sally’s opinion, but she’s probably met all of three Asians in her life. Nobody else we’ve interviewed has set eyes on him, although the paranoia on the street’s making him look like Fu Manchu. Everyone’s keeping very quiet on this one.”

Tony frowned and shoved the pipe back into his mouth. He’d recently had the flu and was looking run-down. He was not in the mood for a publicity-grabbing major case. “You quoted one of the boys saying, ‘Maybe Sonny did it.’ Do we have any evidence pointing one way or the other?”

“Supposedly Sonny made a move on Benny’s drug business. A meet was arranged between principals and seconds. Everybody puffed out their chests and strutted around and Travers was dead within twenty-four hours. People drew whatever conclusion suited them.”

“But Sonny hasn’t swooped in to grab Benny’s business?”

We were sitting in Tony’s office, and he, as usual, had his long, thin frame draped along an old tilt-back office chair, his legs extending across a paper-strewn desk. The smoke from his pipe hovered like a fog bank a couple of feet above us.

“Not visibly,” I answered. “But I don’t think drugs are Sonny’s only interest anyhow. Sally told us he’d made a move on Scott Fisher’s burglary operation, and supposedly Alfie Brewster’s worried Sonny’s been hustling some of his girls. Maybe Benny overreacted to the same kind of overture and Sonny got rid of him. Or maybe he was killed because he was the toughest of the locals, and Sonny needed to set an example. There’s talk of a real gang being formed, with guns, money, and fast cars-a lot more sophisticated than the bands of kids we have roaming around here now. It wouldn’t take much to win a lot of them over.

“I’d love to chat with Sonny-just to introduce myself, if nothing else-but I was told he’s out of town, and the people he’s left behind aren’t talking.”

“They Asian, too?”

“His head lieutenant is-named Michael Vu-a graduate of the Dragon Boys gang in California. He has a rap sheet for sexual assault and extortion, but he’s clean right now. He prides himself on being inscrutable, and he’s got an ironclad alibi for when Travers went for his drive.”

Tony let out a sigh. “Sounds like he may be a dead end, at least for now.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. Tony and I had known each other for decades, and he’d been chief for much of that time. We were also close friends, so I empathized with his unhappiness. The ticking clock I’d worried about when Alice Sims approached me at the crash site had recently gotten louder. She had finally connected the hot-rodder ploy with Benny’s death, and she’d even ferreted out his name by talking to some of the same kids we’d interviewed-although not Sally Javits-so the pressure on Tony to explain a few things had suddenly become greater.

I therefore tried to give him something hopeful. “There may actually be more to this. Remember that home invasion about a month ago-Thomas Lee? I went back to the neighbor who saw a car squealing away from there just before we showed up that night. At the time, she said she knew the car wasn’t from Vermont because the plates had dark numbers on a light background. Last night, I parked opposite the Lee house and held up a variety of license plates against my own car-from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Québec-and had her stand in her window to see if any of them rang a bell. She pegged the one from Québec.”

He looked at me quizzically. “So?”

“So it was an Asian-style crime against an Asian family. That vehicle stop Marshall Smith did on the interstate in late January was a carful of Asians, all of them with contradictory stories, no luggage, an empty secret compartment on board, and heading for Montreal. And now this thing with Sonny… All Asian-related. All with ties to Montreal.”

“The vehicle stop had nothing to do with us. It was dumb luck Smith was out there.”

I conceded the point with a wave of my hand.

“I’ll go along with the other two, though,” he added. “You call Montreal?”

“They never heard of Michael Vu or any of the boys we’ve identified, and they said ‘Sonny’ is a common pseudonym. Of the hundred-and-some-thousand Asians they’ve got in their town, maybe two dozen rap sheets have that name, and they didn’t sound too interested in mailing me pictures of them.”

“I wouldn’t have either,” Tony murmured. “How ’bout Thomas Lee. You speak with him after that night?”

“Yup. Still won’t talk.”

Tony removed the pipe and tapped its contents out into a large ashtray, shaking his head and looking doubly glum. “Well, until you prove otherwise, that’s all beside the point anyhow. Concentrate on nailing whoever killed Ben Travers. I’ve been stalling the press on whether this car crash was youthful high jinks gone wrong or murder, but if they get a whiff of Montreal hit teams and the ‘Heathen Chinee,’ we’ll be knee-deep in shit in no time. Who do you have working the case now?”

“Besides me, Ron Klesczewski and Sammie Martens. J.P.’s wrapping up the forensics, but that’s mostly logging whatever comes back to him from the crime lab.”

He looked slightly puzzled. “That enough people?”

“For what we’ve got to work with, yeah. Benny’s inner circle was small, and they’re all playing dumb. We haven’t even been able to track what he did between getting out of bed that morning and getting himself burned to death seven hours later.”

I got to my feet and moved toward the door.

Tony aired a possible alternative. “If I were one of Ben’s more ambitious lieutenants, hungry to grab his turf and not get caught, Sonny and his Chinese tough talk would have seemed like the perfect combination of an opportunity and an alibi.”

I paused at the door and looked back at him. “Good point.”

“Put on more people and get clear on where you’re headed. The answer to your problem may be less complicated than you think.” He patted the pile on his desk. “And this is thick enough without any race-discrimination suits added to it.”

I didn’t have long to wait for the Benny Travers case to open up slightly.

J.P. Tyler was waiting in my office, much happier than when I’d seen him last and holding a long, thin, shiny piece of twisted metal in his hand.

“Going in for dowsing?” I asked as I circled my desk and scanned the messages that had been left there.

J.P. twirled the piece between his fingers like a baton. “It came off the burned car. Just got it back from Waterbury.”

I smiled at him and waited as he carefully placed it before me. Waterbury, Vermont, was the home of the state police crime lab, where all the local police agencies sent their evidence for detailed forensic scrutiny. Most departments our size and larger had specialists like Tyler who had some scientific training, but none of us had the money for the schooling and equipment that would have made them real experts.

“It’s a strip of aluminum molding from the A-post on the driver’s side. See that hole?”

I looked at where he was pointing. The hole looked like it had been made with a heavy-duty paper punch, but with a small, dark smear on one side. “That stain is a copper-zinc mix left behind by a bullet. The hole would fit a nine-millimeter, a thirty-eight, or a three-fifty-seven.”

A small chill tickled my neck. There could be several explanations of why Benny’s car had a bullet hole in it, but the obvious one was what Sally had already prophesied-which meant that both Tony’s dour mood and the media’s enthusiasm would soon be further stimulated. “This the only one you found?” I asked.

His eyebrows rose at my seeming lack of gratitude. “There might’ve been holes in the windows, but the heat and the crash took care of them.”

“I’m not complaining,” I said soothingly, pawing through the papers on my desk. I finally located the file I was after and flipped it open. “The one witness who reported hearing gunshots was walking his dog about a mile shy of where Travers went over the edge… Here it is: ‘Three shots-sounded like firecrackers.’ As usual.”

I handed the file to him. “If the bullet’s a nine millimeter, chances are it came from an automatic, which means there might be shell casings somewhere along that stretch of road.”

He took the file, smiled happily, and headed out the door. “I’ll rally the troops.”

“Keep this as quiet as you can, okay?” I called after him.

He’d left the aluminum strip in my care while he made his phone calls. I picked it up and looked at it more closely. It was stained and scarred by the heat, but unlike its owner, it must have broken free of the actual wreck.

Except that Ben Travers hadn’t actually been the owner. I reflected on that for a moment, realizing that the car might be more informative on Travers’s last day than his associates had been.

I picked up the phone and dialed Willy Kunkle’s extension, taking advantage of Tony’s advice to bring on more people.

“Yeah?” His voice, predictably, sounded both bored and surly.

“You want some action?”

“Probably not.”

“Good. Don’t move.” I left my office for the squad room outside, dropping the metal strip off at Tyler’s desk, and walked around the sound-absorbent panels that separated four work areas in the room’s center. On the far side, I found one of the most effective-and least appealing-of my subordinates. Willy Kunkle was an unrepentantly sour, recalcitrant, difficult human being with whom nobody liked to work, but whom everybody respected for the results he brought in. He was a cop from the old school, who missed the rubber hoses and hot lamps, hated Miranda and all lawyers, and longed for a more liberal department policy on stun guns and nightsticks.

Just as Sol Stennis specialized in Brattleboro’s troublesome kids, Willy had monopolized the town’s hardcore underworld. He was intimately connected to the activities, it seemed, of every deadbeat druggie, child molester, wife beater, and thief in town. Asked to enter that arena and extract information, he was almost invariably successful where none of us could scratch the surface. Rumors had it his track record was directly related to some flagrantly illegal interrogation techniques, but no one I knew had ever actually witnessed him crossing that line, and no single complaint had ever surfaced from the social swamp he frequented.

Of course, he may not have needed such methods. God knows, we found him unpleasant enough to give him what he wanted just to get rid of him.

Which had nothing to do with the arm.

Disabled by a sniper’s bullet years ago, Willy Kunkle’s left arm hung shriveled and useless by his side, its hand usually stuffed into his pants pocket so it wouldn’t flop around. He used it often to grim advantage, pulling it out on appropriate occasions like a veiled threat of the horrors he could deliver if provoked, or playing it for sympathy with women he was targeting. His was truly a twisted talent to behold, although my being his sole admirer was probably the only reason he was still employed as a cop.

“So what wonderful opportunity you dumpin’ on me now?” he asked as I approached.

“It’s right up your alley. Find out what happened to the car Benny was driving after it was stolen. J.P. says it had just been repainted, and Benny didn’t do paint jobs. That suit your fancy?”

Kunkle gave a disgruntled half shrug. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Harriet Fritter, the squad secretary, poked her head around the corner. “There you are. Call on line two-Beverly Hillstrom.”

Vermont’s medical examiner and I had become old friends ever since we’d discovered a shared propensity for taking no situation at face value-a prejudice we’d often either separately or together stuck our necks out to satisfy. While we’d never met socially, and still referred to one another by our respective titles-largely because of her oddly formal style-we’d formed a trusting relationship I doubted she had with many others.

As a result, Beverly Hillstrom was often the first and most elucidating sage I consulted in a homicide investigation, as well as the one I could count on to keep digging until she’d found every nugget a corpse had to offer.

I therefore settled down with some anticipation to hear her cool, almost aloof assessment of the charred corpse I had sent her, hoping that I would at last learn a little more of how Benny Travers had met his fate.

“I must say, Lieutenant, you certainly redeemed yourself for not having sent me anything for quite a while. Thank you for the dental records, by the way. They were a definite necessity.”

“So it’s one-hundred percent that the body is Ben Travers?”

Even here, I noticed with a smile, her scientifically suspicious nature stirred uncomfortably. “My X-rays of the teeth match the records.”

I allowed her that, without comment. “And what did he die of, officially?”

There was a moment’s hesitation, during which I subconsciously braced myself. Hillstrom was usually not one to equivocate on such matters. “Given the state of the body, I’m going to have to hedge my response a bit.”

“You mean given the crash and the fire?” I asked hopefully.

This time the answer was familiarly quick in coming-and forever put to rest any chance that Benny might have just fallen asleep at the wheel. “No-given the beating, the bullet, the crash, and the fire, in that order.”

“The beating?” I repeated inanely, having already been subliminally warned about the bullet by Tyler’s discovery.

She laughed softly, obviously pleased. “Let me start backwards. With a body this badly charred, the natural assumption is that the fire was the lethal agent. That’s what I first wanted to determine, therefore, and indeed it proved easy to do. Mr. Travers’s air passages showed little soot or searing; his carboxyhemoglobin concentrations were only slightly elevated; he showed none of the subendocardial left-ventricular hemorrhaging that is common to death by fire; and while his skull was blown apart by intracranial steam pressure, most of the fractures were unaccompanied by cerebral contusions or signs of hemorrhaging, as would have been present with immediately lethal blunt violence to the head.”

“I’m not sure what that all means.”

“It means your Mr. Travers sustained significant trauma at several stages, any one of which might have done the trick all by itself-given enough time. The problem is that, since they all followed one another in rapid succession, it becomes difficult to name a single absolute cause of death.”

“If this is going to get complicated, could you humor me by not going backwards? I’m getting nowhere on this case, and I’d appreciate at least one straight answer from someone.”

She was immediately sympathetic. “Of course, Lieutenant, but let me preface my statement with a warning that some of it will be educated conjecture. When you have these many layers of successive damage, it becomes like an archaeological dig, and the margin for error increases.”

“I understand.”

“I think Mr. Travers was in a fight to begin with, one in which he used his fists and wherein he sustained his first severe trauma, to wit, a severely fractured left zygomatic-that’s the bone around the eye socket-with resulting damage to the sphenoid-the bone lying behind the eyeball. He also had a left-temporal fracture which I believe could have eventually led to intracranial bleeding and death.”

“He couldn’t have gotten all that in the crash?”

“Technically, yes, but for reasons I’ll explain later, I don’t believe he did. I should add that he also sustained two broken teeth and a broken knuckle at this point, all of which indicate the beating I alluded to earlier.

“Next, we have the bullet, which entered the body from behind, just above the left scapula. It nicked the subclavian artery, ricocheted off the clavicle, fracturing it, and was thereby redirected downward into the left lung, where I found it.”

“Was it a nine-millimeter?”

“It could be. I sent it to Waterbury for analysis. I can tell you it was fairly intact. But the damage to that artery, which as you know is a major blood vessel, was severe enough that he would have bled to death eventually.”

“How eventually?”

She hedged a little. “That’s difficult to say, given the subsequent damage to the body, but if the subclavian is totally severed, life expectancy usually doesn’t exceed a minute. Mr. Travers’s wound wasn’t quite that bad, so in my estimation, it would have proved lethal within fifteen minutes.”

“Doctor, we have witnesses saying the shooting occurred during a high-speed car chase. Assuming that’s when Travers got hit, could he have kept driving, and for that matter, could he have been driving at all with his head smashed up?”

Here, there was no hesitation. “Absolutely. Some head injuries take hours to days before rendering the patient unconscious, and since this man was already driving at the time he was shot, I see no reason he couldn’t have continued some distance before the blood loss took its toll.”

“But still, basically, flying off that cliff was pure gravy.”

"Yes and no. Remember when I said there was but a little soot in his airway, that his carboxyhemoglobin concentrations were only slightly elevated? Well, the fact that I found even those traces tells me he was still alive-if barely-when the car caught fire.”

“Jesus,” I muttered.

The sympathy in her voice matched my own for a moment. “Yes. He didn’t have an easy time of it. Anyhow, his barely being alive at the end is why I suspect the specific cranial damage I highlighted earlier was inflicted well before the crash. If you break a man’s bone and kill him immediately thereafter, there will be some evidence of bleeding at the site of the fracture, but-and here is the important point-that evidence will be scant, difficult to detect, and similar to if the bone had been broken following death. Do you follow me?”

I merely nodded at the phone.

“In fact,” she continued, “that was the case with the explosive fractures resulting from the built-up steam inside the cranium, along with the heat-related fractures of many of the long bones of his arms and legs. By their very nature, all of those obviously occurred after death, and therefore showed no signs of contusions or bleeding. Similarly, the few fractures I have connected to the crash preceding the fire showed slight hemorrhaging, which is again consistent with the scenario we’ve established. Only those breaks to the left-temporal and zygomatic bones, and to the teeth and knuckles, show extensive post-traumatic bleeding. That’s why I believe he got them in a fight.”

There was a slight pause while we both contemplated all she’d told me. She was no doubt thinking of anything she might have left out. I was wondering if any of it would do me any good, including the recovered bullet.

I therefore fished for more. “Did he have any drugs in his bloodstream?”

“Not there, but there were residual traces of cocaine in his organs, dating back a day or more.”

“Alcohol?”

“Some, but below the legal limit.”

“How ’bout stomach contents?”

“Pepperoni pizza and chips, recently consumed.”

That grabbed my interest. “Within an hour of death?”

“I’d say so.”

I made a mental note to follow up on that. If we found who’d sold the pizza, we might also discover what Ben Travers had been up to shortly before his death, and perhaps with whom.

“Could you do me an enormous favor and hold off releasing the cause of death to the press for a bit?”

“Maybe a couple of days. Will that be enough?”

I certainly hoped it would, and that his death-even though a homicide-would be proven the result of an altercation with some long-standing local rivals. But I couldn’t imitate Tony Brandt’s trick of ignoring the larger implications before me.

Unlike him, I was conscious of something larger stirring in the background-a growing threat that was going to make Ben Travers’s death look like a small, initial skirmish between two large opposing forces.

“It’ll have to be.”