The Dark Root

5

Gail's voice was clear enough on the phone to be coming from the room next door, which made it all the more disappointing that she was instead back at the Vermont Law School in South Royalton, where she was auditing a course on advanced criminal procedure. “You sound tired.”

“A little frustrated maybe. I just found out that the body has a bullet in it.”

“I was wondering about that. Tony’s comments in the paper today sounded a little cagey. Who was Ben Travers anyway? The article said he’d been the driver, but they didn’t go into details.”

I took my shoes off awkwardly, cradling the phone in the crook of my shoulder, and lay back on the bed, conscious of how empty the house seemed without her.

A half year ago, Gail had been a victim of sexual assault. That had put us both through an emotional wringer-and forced us to reexamine a long-standing but oddly tentative monogamous relationship. Now, having abandoned our separate homes and bought a house together-something both of us had resisted for over fifteen years-I for one was realizing the downside to the move. During the few months we’d lived together, before she’d gone back to school to brush up an old law degree in an effort to switch careers, I’d become used to having her as an intimate part of my everyday life. A widower of almost three decades, I’d been anticipating a reawakening of long-dormant sensations, and now found myself lonely and disappointed by her absence.

I kept all this to myself, addressing her question instead. “Benny was one of our regulars. Stole a car or two, knocked off a gas station, did a little pimping, fencing, vandalism, and general mayhem, and served about eight years total for it all. Lately, he’d been trying to corner the local drug market. He ran a small outfit-not really a gang-but they were tough and well-organized by our standards.”

“And you don’t have any leads?”

I smiled at that. After a double career as a successful Realtor and an outspoken town selectman, Gail was returning to more conservative interests of yore, hoping to pass the bar and eventually clerk for a state prosecutor. I sensed some of her newfound enthusiasm in the question.

Unlike many of her liberal friends, most of whom had viewed our relationship skeptically, I hadn’t been too surprised at her desire to pass the bar. Not only had her interest in my world been growing steadily over the years, but the rape had developed in her a strong desire for a hands-on role in law enforcement. I did wonder sometimes, however, how our life together might be affected in the long run, with one of us a cop and the other a state’s attorney.

I answered her indirectly. “The natives are restless, worried about old alliances. Nobody wants to talk to us until they get a better sense of where the power’s shifting.”

“All because of Travers?”

“Somewhat-he did leave a small vacuum. Mostly I think they’re afraid of some mysterious Asian named Sonny. He’s the one who’s really stirring up the pot, but he’s very coy-working by remote control.”

“And killing Travers was part of some grand strategy?”

“The locals see it that way. They smell an organized outsider trying to push his weight around-and they’re wondering where they stand. In their eyes, Benny’s fate was a demonstration of what happens to those who don’t submit. ’Course, people like Travers don’t tend to live forever in any case. Tony thinks one of his own people did him in, and that they’re using the Asian angle as cover.”

“You don’t agree?”

“I don’t have enough to agree or disagree. I’ve just got a feeling it’s bigger than that. Hillstrom gave me an idea of what Travers went through before he died. You were right about that part-it wasn’t just a joyride gone bad, like we implied to the paper. He was tortured, beaten, shot, and finally rear-ended off the Upper Dummerston Road at a hundred miles an hour. He must have been terrified-running for his life. Ben Travers was known to stand up to anyone, including us, so the question that keeps running around my brain is: Who was it that got him so scared? And the only answer I come up with dates back several months and shouldn’t have anything to do with Ben Travers… Although it may involve Sonny…”

I could visualize Gail shaking her head as my voice drifted off and my mind began outdistancing my words. “You want my input,” she broke in, “you better think out loud.”

I shifted my position on the bed. “The last time I saw someone that frightened was after the home invasion I told you about. Do you know if Amy Lee ever contacted Women for Women? I phoned her about a week later to check up on her, and she told me she had, but I never called the center to confirm it. It never occurred to me she might be lying.”

“I don’t know,” Gail answered. “I can find out for you. You think Sonny did that, too?”

My mind was off running again, filled with images not of Ben Travers or a traumatized Amy Lee, but of the malevolent Truong Van Loc-and the recently met, cocky Michael Vu. “Maybe it was someone Sonny hired.”

We hung up so she could check with her contacts at Women for Women. I sat staring at the opposite wall, my loneliness supplanted by the hope that I’d finally shaken the right tree branch. Tony Brandt had cautioned me against pursuing the “Heathen Chinee,” as he’d put it, but I was becoming convinced that therein was hidden what I was after.

Asian crime was a growth industry-rising with a bullet on every metropolitan police chart in this country and Canada, especially since one of its global strongholds-Hong Kong-was going back to the Communist Chinese in 1997. Asian criminals were well-organized, well-financed, ruthless, and highly mobile, and they favored urban centers with large Asian communities. Marshall Smith’s discovery of a carful of young Asian men who didn’t know each other, and were driving through the middle of the night for a vague and ominous-sounding rendezvous in Montreal, fit the traditional profile for an Asian hit squad. The fact that rural, thinly populated Vermont had so far been left on the sidelines of this latest criminal trend didn’t mean that things couldn’t change.

Policemen by their nature tend to be professional paranoids-that’s what helps keep them alive, or at least relatively healthy. So it was no stretch for me to connect a suspected hit team we’d met by accident, to another we believed had visited the Lee family, to yet a third we were only hypothesizing had murdered Ben Travers. Coincidences were not something I trusted at face value, so three in a row struck me as too much to ignore. Despite Tony’s advice that I concentrate on who killed Travers, I was starting to think I might have better luck broadening my horizon.

Gail called back ten minutes later. “If Amy Lee ever contacted Women for Women, they don’t have a record of it. Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Now I can do something I should’ve done a while ago.”

Amy Lee did not look good. She walked with her head down, her feet shuffling along the sidewalk. She was much thinner than the last time we’d met, and her clothes hung on her awkwardly. Her hair was dirty and unkempt, and she had a habit-a virtual twitch-of looking furtively about her, as if something invisible and malevolent were stalking her, which I didn’t doubt it was.

I swung out of my car and approached her gingerly, my expression open and friendly. She hesitated at the bottom of the path leading to the high school’s front door, obviously considering flight as an option.

“Amy?” I called out softly. “Remember me?”

She looked at the ground as I stopped before her, and nodded silently.

“I was wondering if we could talk a bit.”

“I don’t want to be late for class.” Her voice was a monotone.

“You won’t be. This’ll only take a couple of minutes.” I gestured to a grassy area off the path, where the building’s corner provided a little privacy. “How ’bout we go over there?”

Students were parking their cars in the lot across the street, shouting and laughing at one another as they headed for the building. No one gave us a glance as I gently steered her to the spot I’d indicated. Still, I made sure to position her with her back to the passing crowd.

“How have you been?” I asked.

“Okay.” I could barely hear her.

“You didn’t call that place I told you about, Women for Women.” She shook her head silently, her eyes still glued to the ground.

I crouched down, pretending to pluck absent-mindedly at the spring-fresh grass, but actually so I could look up into her face without challenging her. “Amy, what happened to you was a crime, and you were its victim. In that way, it was no different than if you’d been hit by a drunk driver. Both things come out of nowhere and leave you shattered. The difference is you haven’t done anything to help yourself get back on your feet. You might as well be still out there, in the middle of the road.”

Her lower lip was trembling. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, like a child, and murmured, “It’s hard.”

I reached out and touched her other hand with the tips of my fingers. “You not getting much support at home?”

“They’re angry that I can’t let it go.”

“But you need help to do that, don’t you?”

She gave a small shrug. “I guess.”

“Amy, if I drove you there, would you be willing to meet with the people at Women for Women?”

She looked at me for the first time. “My parents would kill me.”

“They don’t need to know-not at first. This would be just for you.”

She rubbed her forehead and glanced at the entrance to the high school.

Interpreting the gesture, I said, “I can take care of them. I know the principal.”

“Will you tell him?” she asked, suddenly alarmed.

I shook my head. “No. I’ll make something up and make sure he doesn’t contact your folks.”

There was a long silence.

“What do you say?” I finally asked, almost in a whisper.

“Okay” was her equally quiet response.

I stood up and grasped her hand in mine. “I’ll take you to my car first. You wait there while I set things up.”

Like an abandoned wanderer, she took me on faith.

Ten minutes later, after a chat with the principal and a quick call to Women for Women, I rejoined Amy Lee in my car, where she was sitting wedged into the far corner of the front seat, her body pressed against the door, her eyes fixed to the ground outside her window.

Now, I thought, comes the hard part, where I hoped I wouldn’t be seen as a manipulative and heartless hypocrite. I settled next to her and closed my door, adding to the sense of privacy, even though the human flood tide outside had dwindled to a few latecomers who were jogging across the school’s broad lawn.

“Amy, before I take you to Women for Women, can I ask you a couple of questions about that night?”

As small as she was, her body made a spontaneous effort to shrink even further, hunching over. She finally brought her knees up to her chest until she was sitting in a tight ball.

“I don’t want any details,” I added quickly, “nothing you’re not willing to tell me-just some general things. Would that be okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fair enough. Let me ask something to start, and you see if you want to answer. If you don’t, that’s fine.”

I paused, not really expecting a response, and then asked, “How many of them were there?”

There was an extended silence. Finally, just as I was about to move on, she murmured, “Three.”

“Good. Were they Asians?”

She nodded almost immediately.

“Did you or your parents know them?”

She shook her head vehemently. “No.”

“Do you know why they chose your home?”

Slowly, she covered her face. A moment later, her whole body began shaking with her sobbing.

I remained quiet for a while, trying to convince myself that what I was doing was for the good of all. Having failed that, I reached into my pocket and pulled out three photographs I’d had J.P. Tyler extract from the video of the speeding stop on the interstate during the winter, plus an old mug shot of Michael Vu.

“Amy, I’m sorry. We’ll go now. There is just one last thing. Will you look at these photographs and tell me if any of them look familiar?”

She took a deep breath and turned slightly toward me, her face flushed and streaked with tears. I held up a shot of Edward Diep, the driver of the Nova, using him to warm her up to the process and expecting to draw a blank.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Okay. That’s fine. Here’s another one.” I held up Henry Lam’s picture, saving Truong and Vu’s for last.

But my plan, and my hopeful expectations, were upended. Amy focused on Lam’s sneering, insolent face, let out a scream, and began grappling wildly with the door handle, trying to escape from the car, her body thrashing hysterically.

I dropped the pictures and grabbed hold of her, wrestling her arms to her sides to spare us both possible injury, and then gave her as comforting a body hug as I could in that awkward confinement, issuing soothing noises into her ear as I did so. Had there been any witnesses to all this, I knew I would have made immediate dual appearances before a disciplinary board and on the front page of the newspaper. As it was, we just sat there for several minutes, until I felt confident enough to release her.

I then surreptitiously locked her door, started the engine, and began to drive as quickly as I safely could toward Women for Women and whatever solace they could offer her. From what I had just witnessed, they had their work cut out for them.

During the drive, I kept up a steady patter, fueled partly by my own guilt, but also to keep her from doing anything drastic. Her reaction had made me wonder if this girl, traumatized and isolated and emotionally cast adrift, wasn’t veering precariously close to self-destruction.

I never did show her the last two pictures, as badly as I wanted to. But putting Henry Lam at the scene had convinced me that the three Asian-related events were interconnected-parts of something bigger. The trick was going to be deciphering the common connection.

Susan Raffner, the director of Women for Women, and one of Gail’s best friends, came out personally to greet us as I pulled into the center’s driveway. I’d told her something about the situation over the phone, but I could tell from her expression that she hadn’t been expecting the near-basket case I delivered. And yielding to a cowardly instinct, I didn’t confess how much I’d exacerbated the situation. Amy Lee would get the same supportive treatment either way, and I wouldn’t have to put up with the deservedly baleful comments I knew I’d get otherwise.

It was with some relief, therefore, that I heard Dispatch trying to locate me over the car’s mobile radio just as I was wrapping up the introductions.

I leaned in through the driver’s window and unhooked the microphone. “M-80, this is O-3.”

“Could you hook up with O-10 at 234-B Canal?”

“10-4.”

I made the appropriate noises to the two women, neither of whom was paying much attention to me, and took my leave.

“O-10” was Willy Kunkle’s radio name, and the address I’d been given was one of a collection of more or less derelict buildings that were used as either storage units or auto-body shops, one of which I was hoping had painted the last car in Benny’s life.

I pulled up to a place advertising wheel alignments, body work, and while-you-wait grease jobs, and saw Kunkle leaning against the doorjamb of one of the bays, either enjoying the promising but still-anemic spring sunshine or trying to escape the screaming sounds of power tools emanating from within. He had the contented look of a truant officer who’d just nailed one of his worst offenders.

“You find the painter?” I asked as I walked up to him.

“Moe Ellis-body man by day, artist by night.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the gloomy interior of the bay behind him. “He’s inside.”

“You talk to him yet?”

“Nope. Thought I’d leave the honors to you. You want me to hang around?”

I nodded. “You’ll scare him a hell of a lot more than I will.”

“I scare everybody more’n you do,” he muttered as he abandoned his sunny spot to follow me inside.

The noise enveloped us like an ear-splitting fog, accompanied by the pungent odor of hot metal. One car occupied the center bay like a body stretched out on a morgue table, its paint either overcoated with red Bondo or ground away to bare steel, and completely covered with a layer of dark grit. One man, wearing ear protectors and a breathing mask, was leaning into a door panel with a sander, and another, partly obscured by the hood of the car, was sending up a shower of fiery sparks from a welding torch.

I glanced back at Kunkle, who pointed at the welder.

We stepped through the tangle of power cords and air hoses snaking across the floor and approached Moe Ellis from the front, struggling not to look at the mesmerizing, retina-burning chip of sun where the torch tip touched the metal. I stood patiently, waiting for him to finish his weld. Kunkle, true to form, killed the gas at the bottle. Behind us, the grinder suddenly died.

Ellis straightened, startled, and looked around, blinded by the dark lens of his helmet. “What the fu-” he began muttering as he lifted the visor, and then he froze, his eyes fixed on Kunkle, whose powerful right hand was still resting on the control knob of the acetylene bottle.

“Hey, Moe.” Willy gestured with his chin to the other man, who was staring at us uncertainly. “Go get some coffee.”

Ellis looked from one of us to the other. With a theatrical flourish, I pulled out my badge and wordlessly showed it to him, my expression as cold and still as Kunkle’s. Ellis’s companion quickly left the building.

“Been up to no good, Moe,” Willy said flatly.

“What? I haven’t done nothin’.”

“How ’bout an eighty-six Duster, with a brand new coat of midnight blue?” I asked.

There was a telling hesitation. “You got the wrong guy. I haven’t done a paint job in months, and that was an Olds-red.”

Kunkle shifted his weight. It wasn’t much of a gesture, but Ellis took a frightened step backward, bumping into a large tool chest on casters.

“Moe, there’s nothing illegal about painting a car, unless you know something about it you shouldn’t.”

Ellis licked his lips. “What do you guys want?”

“Tell us you painted it,” Willy said.

“Okay. I painted it.”

“For who?” I asked.

“I don’t know. It was delivered to my place when I wasn’t there, and the deal was done on the phone.”

This time, Kunkle stepped forward, took the welder’s helmet off Ellis’s head, and placed it on the tool chest behind him, bringing his face two inches from the other man’s. “Careful, Moe.”

“We’re digging into a murder case, Moe. Not car theft,” I added.

His eyes grew wider. “I don’t know nothin’ about murder.”

“So tell us about a hot car instead.”

There was a long, quiet moment while he considered his options.

“I want a lawyer,” he finally said.

“You don’t need a lawyer, you stupid bastard,” Kunkle said in a near-whisper.

Ellis pulled at his ear nervously. “I don’t?”

“Who delivered the car, Moe?” I asked.

“You’re not looking to nail me?”

Neither one of us responded. He hesitated again and finally said, “Benny Travers?” as if it were a question.

“What did he tell you?”

“What he usually… I mean, he said he was in a hurry.”

Kunkle retreated to his previous position at the gas bottle. “So when did you do it?”

“The same night-the night before he died.”

“And when did he pick the car up?”

“Right after. He never left.”

Willy’s eyes narrowed. “What bullshit is that? He took it wet?”

Ellis looked slightly alarmed again. “Not wet-wet, but before it shoulda been moved.”

“Why, Moe? Why the rush?” I asked again, searching for the panic that had dogged Benny’s heels.

“I don’t know.”

Kunkle suddenly lunged forward and punched the helmet next to Ellis’s head, sending it clattering across the floor. “Stop fucking with us, asshole. You let him drive away without asking? Not even you’re that spaced out.”

Ellis actually cringed, crouching down near the car’s bumper, and raised his hand to shield his face. “Jesus Christ. What’s with you guys? I really don’t know. I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me. I told him it would screw up the job-that he was just pissing his money away-but he wasn’t interested. He told me to fuck off.”

“He was nervous?” I asked.

“That’s what I’m telling you. He hung around while I did the job-kept bugging me to hurry up… Not to worry about the fine stuff. Drank every beer I had in the goddamn house. He was wired.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

Ellis shook his head. “Nope. Just said he had to get movin’-not where, and not why.”

“You know where he was living?”

“I heard he had a place on Elliot once, but I also heard he moved. He did that a lot.”

That much we’d already found out. “And you never saw or heard from him again?”

He straightened up slowly, sensing the worst had passed. “Next I knew, a couple-a days later, I was readin’ he’d been the one that got fried in that crash. Was that the murder you talked about?”

Willy gave him a withering look. “Don’t think out loud, Moe. It doesn’t make you look good. We said a murder-not his.”

Ellis gave a small shrug.

“And don’t think,” Kunkle added, “that you’re still working part-time painting hot cars. That’s over. You’re on our shit list now, get it?”

He nodded silently.

“And don’t forget that we just did you a big favor. Right?”

He began looking thoroughly depressed, realizing what this favor might cost him someday. “Okay.”

We left him to contemplate life’s odd twists of fate.

Sammie Martens was waiting in her car when we stepped outside the body shop. “I heard you guys were here. Didn’t want to barge in and catch Willy torturing another witness.”

To my regret, Willy smiled with pride.

“You got something?” I asked, slightly irritated.

Sammie was looking pleased herself. “I found out where Travers ordered his last pizza, and where it was delivered.”

My mood thus brightened, I bowed theatrically and gestured to the street. “Lead on. We’re right behind you.”

We didn’t have far to go. We returned down Canal to Birge, along which the old Estey Organ warehouses stood side by side, clad entirely in dark slate-the latest in fire prevention well over a hundred years ago-and descended Baker Street to the bottom of a steep dead end.

Where Sammie eventually pulled to a stop was typical of Brattleboro’s eccentric layout. From being in the middle of Vermont’s fourth-largest town at the top of the hill, we were now in the dooryard of a rambling, sagging, decrepit old farmhouse, perched on the edge of a large, weed-choked field. Blocked from our view by trees and brush, our urban surroundings might as well have been a figment of imagination. Even its sounds were muffled by the distant rushing of nearby Whetstone Brook.

But the place held little charm. What some other town might have exploited as the sylvan setting for a condo project, or a pocket municipal park tucked away by the water’s edge, the powers here had left to rot. The building was deserving of an arsonist’s care, and the field had been scarred by a wide dirt road leading to a scattering of retired appliances, rusting car bodies, and assorted trash.

We assembled in front of the silent, abandoned-looking building.

“This is it?” Kunkle asked quizzically.

Sammie merely crossed the hardscrabble front yard and hammered on the door with her fist. The sound echoed dully throughout the house.

“When did the delivery take place?” I asked, joining her on the rickety porch.

She was peering through one of the side windows. “A little over an hour before we found him in flames. I talked to the delivery boy and showed him Benny’s mug shot. No doubt about it.”

I stood beside her, shading my eyes with my hands to see through one of the dusty panes. “You know who owns this?”

“Gregory Rivière. He’s behind on his town taxes, and he comes up on our computer as a ‘known associate,’ but we’ve never actually nailed him for anything. From what I could find out, he’s originally from Wisconsin and did some drug time in New York. He’s supposed to be out of town right now.”

“Well,” I said, straightening up and wiping the dust from my hands, “I guess we better round up a search warrant.”

For the second time in a quarter hour, Sammie smiled with self-satisfaction, retrieving the very document from her back pocket and handing it to me. “Blessed by the Honorable Judge Harrowsmith himself.”

Kunkle laughed behind me and turned the doorknob. The door swung open without protest.

We crossed the threshold and paused. There is always a sense of trespass that accompanies an uninvited search, unabated by the knowledge that we are there by legal sanction. I can always feel the absent owner’s spirit cringing as we poke about, examining details unknown by even his or her most intimate friends. On the other hand, the uneasiness is counterbalanced by an intense curiosity, suddenly unleashed to run rampant to its heart’s content. All the taboos of closed doors and forbidden rooms, drummed into us from childhood, are removed. Armed with a search warrant, especially one worded as generally as what Sammie had secured, we were freer than thieves in the night.

The initial pickings, however, didn’t generate much excitement. Befitting a house with no lock on the front door, the place at first didn’t offer any more than the junk-clotted field below it. Sparsely furnished, evil-smelling, choked with dust and mildew, it appeared totally deserted.

Until Sammie appeared from around the kitchen door, pale and serious. “I think I got something.”

I’d been combing the contents of a box-strewn dining room, finding nothing but old clothes and unpacked household items. Willy appeared from the neighboring living room, attracted by the tone of Sammie’s voice.

We both joined her at the kitchen entrance. “I don’t think we should go much beyond here without calling Tyler,” she advised.

Over her shoulder, we could see the remnants of a bag of chips and the famous pizza, part of it still in its box, along with one half-eaten piece, draped like a Salvador Dalì imitation over the edge of the counter, its red drippings hard and dry on the floor beneath it.

As in some perverse parody, however, the floor and counter weren’t soiled only by old tomato sauce. There were large quantities of dry blood intermixed with it, extending far beyond the capabilities of a single pizza. A ragged trail of it led across the floor to a chair, which was daubed in enough dry blood to look sloppily painted with the stuff.

“Far out,” Kunkle murmured admiringly.

“What do you think?” Sammie asked. “Grabbed from behind as he stood at the counter, his back to this door, cut or hit hard enough to make him bleed, and then dragged to the chair?”

“By at least two men,” Kunkle agreed. “Benny was a big boy.”

Along the wall next to us there was a row of glass-doored cabinets over a second counter. Sammie pointed to shards of glass and more blood splayed across its surface, indicators of another wound. “He must’ve put up a fight.”

But I was looking at the chair, less interested in how he’d been brought there than in what had happened to him once he’d been seated. Against Sammie’s good advice, I carefully picked my way across the room, studying the floor as I went, making sure my feet disturbed nothing. The others stayed put.

The chair had been turned away from a small table shoved up against the far wall, to face the length of the room like a witness stand does a courtroom. From closer up, I could clearly see the chair’s two front legs were strapped with broken bands of blood-smeared duct tape, another length of which I found stuck horizontally across the chair’s back. There was a final, balled-up wad of tape lying under the table, presumably used to tie Travers’s hands behind his back, and a pair of blue jeans, blackened by old blood, slashed to ribbons. Across the top of the table were the oblong smears of a knife that had been repeatedly placed there-and obviously repeatedly used.

I began to understand why Ben Travers had been in such a hurry when he’d flown off the Upper Dummerston Road.