Strong Darkness

by Jon Land

  “That’s because she probably saw you as a mark, income for the evening.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Then what was it like?” When Dylan remained silent, Cort Wesley decided to fill in some of the blanks for him. “You made the first contact but the night you got jumped, she texted you. Your friends from that fraternity said it seemed important. I’d like to know what changed, why she reached out to you if it wasn’t about money.”

  “It wasn’t about money.”

  “Then what?”

  Dylan blew out his breath and then sucked in some air to replace it. “She called me after that first night, wanted to meet up. Said she wanted to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “About you, Dad, but Caitlin mostly.”

  “Me? Caitlin?” Cort Wesley managed, trying to make sense of that. “What’d you tell her about us?”

  “Nothing, nothing at all.”

  “That means Kai must’ve checked you out, found the two of us in your background.”

  “She saw your pictures in my room, and on my phone too. Caitlin really interested her, the fact that she’s a Texas Ranger and all. Then the night she texted me she mentioned some of the things the two of you had done, the bad guys you’d taken on.”

  “What else did Kai tell you that night, son?”

  “That she wanted me to take her home with me to San Antonio. Said she had a job only the Texas Rangers could handle. Something about a serial killer.”

  44

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “I’m a little busy here in case you didn’t notice, Ranger,” was how Doc Whatley greeted Caitlin the next morning when she showed up unannounced at the Medical Examiner’s Office inside the Bexar County Forensic Science Center, which occupied three floors near the Merlin Minter entrance to the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

  “Looks like you didn’t get any more sleep last night than I did.”

  Whatley frowned at her. “I was just about to go home and try to steal a few hours when you showed up.”

  “Then let’s make this fast, Doc. What can you tell me about the case I didn’t know yesterday?”

  “Which case would that be?” he asked with a sigh, the strain and pressure cracking his voice more than the fatigue. “We got a whole buffet line to choose from, Ranger. I was already trying to find some link between those serial killings,” Whatley continued, “other than the fact that all the victims were Chinese, when the bodies of four homeless men showed up. All found within the jurisdiction of this office and all four without a mark on them. No visible cause of death to make things any easier on me either.”

  “Did you say four?”

  Whatley nodded. “Is that important?”

  “Just tell me how this is our problem?”

  “It isn’t our problem, it’s my problem. I haven’t been able to ascertain a cause of death yet, other than just to tell you whatever it was killed all four of them in a virtually identical manner. So if you want to know why I haven’t got the answers you came here for, blame the San Antonio Police Department and sheriff’s department for carting the bodies over.” Whatley shifted about uneasily in his desk chair, searching for a comfort that eluded him. “What was it you wanted anyway?”

  Caitlin sat down before him, so Whatley wouldn’t have to look up at her. “You were gonna look into those flower petals found in the clown gunmen’s pockets last night.”

  “They’re camellias,” Whatley told her. “But what’s even more interesting is that I found oil from the flowers in the stomachs of all four of those Chinese gunmen from the train shooting.”

  “You mean they ate them?”

  “Drank, probably. In some kind of elixir, tincture, or even tea. The Chinese have these things called tea ceremonies, you know.”

  “I’ve heard of the Japanese doing that, not the Chinese.”

  “Well, the Chinese do it too. They have ceremonies for pretty much all purposes, so I imagine partaking in one prior to going out to kill a Texas Ranger may be among them. And there’s something else that might interest you. See, the camellia is a fairly familiar flower in the south, particularly in southern Louisiana where the climate is perfect for it. But the flower is native to China.” Whatley paused here, as he always seemed to do just before making his point. “And that’s where this particular strain originated.”

  “You mean it was imported?”

  Whatley nodded, his face brightening with color in the sun starting to burn stronger through his office window. “And, of course, such imports, even of seeds, need to be registered and inventoried in order to make it through Customs. As far as I can tell, Ranger, only one such entry in all of Texas has been made in the past two years.”

  “Care to tell me where I can find these flowers, Doc?”

  45

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  “You see what I’m getting at here?” Cort Wesley said to Theo, the stout, burly manager of Spats and the other establishment across the street where Dylan had first met Kai.

  “I’m glad to hear your son’s doing better,” Theo said, continuing to remove the chairs from atop the tables to ready the sports bar for lunch. The wall-mounted widescreen televisions were tuned to an assortment of sports channels, on mute right now.

  “It seems you’re ignoring me, Theo.”

  “You’re not a cop, Mr. Masters. You’re not even a customer.”

  “My son is. And I’m the one who pays the credit card bills he’s been racking up here, on booze mostly thanks to that fake ID he’s got now.”

  Theo lowered another chair to the floor and then regarded him. “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “No, you haven’t. But that’s about to change. We’re going to talk some about Kai, you and me.”

  “Kai?”

  “The Chinese girl’s name. You didn’t know it?”

  “I never asked.”

  “Well, you might not have known who she was, but you pretty much admitted you knew what. Yet you still let her patronize both establishments.”

  Theo lowered another chair to the floor. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Mr. Masters.”

  “You let her do business inside places you run because I don’t think you had much of a choice. You got something going with somebody and I want to know who that is.”

  Theo stopped his labors and backed off a bit, studying Cort Wesley as if seeing him for the first time. A ceiling fan twirled slowly over them.

  “You should get on a plane back to Texas,” Theo advised.

  “Sorry, no can do on account of unfinished business that starts with you. And if you don’t help me with my business, I’m gonna end yours by doing my own personal ID check starting tonight. I imagine your patrons would just love that. So what’s it going to be, Theo?”

  A thin shaft of light formed a dome around Theo’s bald plate down to his forehead, seeming to carve his face in two. “I’m protected, Mr. Masters, by the same people who handle high-end callgirl traffic like Kai. People you don’t want to mess with.”

  Cort Wesley took a step closer to him, blocking out the light. “I’ll be the judge of that. Why don’t you tell me where I can find them?”

  46

  NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Zhen,” Caitlin said to the founder of the Yuyuan Corporation, surprised that he was able to meet with her so quickly. “I appreciate the courtesy very much.”

  “No thanks are necessary, Ranger. Our policy is to cooperate in any law enforcement investigation fully and promptly. Our policy is to hold nothing back whatsoever.”

  “Would that be the company’s policy or your country’s, sir?”

  He smiled behind the bamboo desk in his sprawling office that might have matched the square footage of Caitlin’s entire house. The office was laid out in elegant but minimalist fashion. Yuyuan’s American corporate headquarters occupied all of an eight-story building on Old San Antonio Ro
ad just off Route 35, which connected New Braunfels to San Antonio thirty miles to the southeast. It was located on the grounds of what had been envisioned as a sprawling office park, abandoned when the economy cratered, leaving Yuyuan as the lone standing structure amid land cleared but never further developed.

  The building seemed a perfect blend for the tree-rich landscape, its modern design dominated by curved lines as opposed to the angular ones of typically generic office buildings. Yuyuan’s American headquarters seemed to grow out of the ground instead of being built upon it. The building’s ground floor was shaded to match the tan ground color, darkening with each successive level. Much of that was an illusion bred by the structure’s sloping design and reflective windows when struck by the harsh Texas sun tamed by its neutral colors.

  Long and rounded to follow the building’s exterior curves, Li Zhen’s office had been built to take advantage of the best of both the afternoon and morning sunlight—though if the currently raised rattan shutters were an indication, that light could be shut out in mere moments. Strange, then, how Zhen had placed his desk in the one corner of the office that didn’t get any sunlight at all. Even now he regarded Caitlin from a nest of shadows while three separate shafts of light joined up in the very spot she was seated.

  “Both, Ranger,” Zhen said, his smile holding. “I am at your service. Just tell me how I may serve you.”

  “Well, sir, this may sound a bit odd since it concerns flowers.”

  “Flowers, Ranger?”

  “Imported from China. I believe they’re called camellias, and I couldn’t help but notice that beautiful garden you’ve got on the grounds here from that glass elevator.”

  “Thank you,” Zhen said, no smile this time and his gratitude didn’t sound very genuine.

  Caitlin leaned forward. Her chair, one of four matching ones lined up in front of Li Zhen’s desk, was elegant but stiff and boasted no cushion. Already forcing her to shift about in search of comfort, however brief.

  She let her eyes fall on a series of very old black-and-white photographs set beautifully on the wall behind Zhen’s desk, all enlarged and displayed in elegant bamboo frames that were a perfect compliment for the remainder of the office’s decor. As the office’s sole wall hangings, Caitlin thought the pictures still looked out of place until she realized they featured various scenes from the mid- to late 1800s of work on the railroads that ultimately stitched the country together. The pictures were grainy, some of the clarity sacrificed in favor of size, but all featured a sampling of the Chinese workers greatly responsible for supplying much needed labor. One looked to be a posed group shot, the rest taken in the midst of heavy, backbreaking work, sometimes with Caucasian foreman and railroad men in suits caught in the frame with their expensive trousers tucked into boots.

  “Looks like we’ve got something in common, sir,” Caitlin said.

  Zhen cocked his gaze behind him to follow hers. “The railroad?”

  Caitlin nodded. “My great-grandfather was a Texas Ranger too, and William Ray Strong had occasion to cross paths with some pretty mean types who worked those camps.”

  “That name rings a bell,” he recalled. “Perhaps my ancestor crossed paths with yours.”

  “You had relatives here at the time?”

  “I did, Ranger,” he said, his eyes lingering on the old photographs. “My great-grandfather as well.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that,” she told him. “It wasn’t in any of the press materials I reviewed on you and your company before coming out here.”

  “Because such documents are propaganda, concerned only with the present.” Zhen stiffened ever so slightly. “And the truth is that part of my background is not a happy story.”

  “I suspect the same could be said for many who laid those rails, Chinese and Caucasian both.”

  He twisted back around, turning away from the photographs coldly as if they’d never hung there at all. “My great-grandfather came to America with an invention he sought to sell to the owners of the railroad. It took him months to get a meeting, only to have them steal it right out of his grasp. He was left with no recourse, no hope, no one to file charges with, no one even to listen to his story.”

  “My great-grandfather would’ve listened.”

  Caitlin could see Li Zhen getting anxious, clearly pained by the story at which he’d only hinted. “And been helpless to act against the railroad, just like everyone else at the time.” He cleared his throat, closed his eyes briefly as if to wash his mind clear of the thoughts. “But I don’t suspect the fates of our ancestors is what brought you here today.”

  “It isn’t, sir,” Caitlin said, eyes straying yet again to the wall of perfectly arranged pictures.

  One especially, featuring a shot of rails being laid and ties pounded, caught her eye. It was a tall, angular shot that showed the line seeming to extend all the way to infinity. And something about the way the Caucasian work bosses were standing reminded Caitlin of pre–Civil War shots of Southern plantations.

  “What brought me here,” she continued, finally letting her gaze rest back on Li Zhen, “is that an oil from the strain of the camellia flower that’s native to China was found in an examination of the remains of four men, all Chinese, killed in a gunfight yesterday. Maybe you heard about it on the news.”

  “I don’t watch the American news, Ranger.”

  “Well, sir, I can’t say I blame you. But if you did you’d know the shoot-out happened at the Texas Train Museum located in San Antonio. And you’d also know that I was the one who killed them.”

  Zhen just looked at her, nodding almost imperceptibly. It looked as if he wasn’t going to say anything at all until he spoke without any gesture or signal.

  “I am relieved to see you survived such an attack, but don’t see what it has to do with your visit here to Yuyuan today.”

  Caitlin glanced out the window, in the garden’s direction as best as she could recall it. “A supply of camellia seeds from China was delivered to a Yuyuan address two years ago, sir. I was wondering if the flowers grown from them make up part of your company’s gardens.”

  “I’d have to ask our designer.”

  “You don’t know yourself, Mr. Zhen?”

  “Not within the degree of certainty you seek, Ranger.”

  Caitlin shifted in the stiff chair again. “Know what strikes me most about your beautiful office, sir?”

  His gaze gestured her on.

  “Its sense of order. Everything in its place, everything exactly where it’s supposed to be.”

  “A guiding Chinese principle in design,” Zhen affirmed, nodding, “undertaken in the hope it may extend to life itself. Imagine if we could arrange our lives as neatly and surely as we arrange our rooms.”

  “Well,” Caitlin said, coming to the very edge of her chair, “that’s exactly my point, sir. I need to tell you I find it strange that a man who values order to that degree wouldn’t know all the flowers contained in his garden.”

  “I didn’t say camellias weren’t present among hundreds of other species of flower. It’s the source of the seeds I can’t be certain of.”

  “So if it turns out flowers from your company gardens produced the oil that ended up in the stomachs of the four men I was forced to shoot yesterday, I’m sure your concern would match my own.”

  “It would indeed, Ranger. It could just as easily be that a company employee ordered the seeds for their own garden, of course, but we must be sure of our facts and not jump to any hasty conclusions.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Zhen seemed to be searching for a response when, again, his words emerged abruptly. “It is a good thing we understand each other, yes?”

  “It is.”

  He rose, polite hand extended stiffly toward the door. “Then I will check with my designer about the contents of the company gardens. Please leave a number where you can be reached with my assistant.”

  “Thank you, sir, I’ll do that,” Caitlin said,
rising too. She held her hat in her hand and Li Zhen seemed to be studying it for some reason. “I do have one more question, though, for you.”

  Li nodded a single time.

  “Do you know the significance of the number four in Chinese numerology?”

  “I believe it represents death.”

  “Because I couldn’t help but notice there are four chairs set before your desk, sir. Should I read anything significant into that?”

  * * *

  Caitlin had just reached her car when she felt her cell phone vibrating in her pocket.

  “I was just gonna call in, Captain,” she told D. W. Tepper, who was well aware of where he must have reached her. “Something about Li Zhen doesn’t sit right with me.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Maybe because you’ve come to trust my judgment in such matters.”

  “More likely because I felt the winds of Hurricane Caitlin blowing as soon as you told me where you were headed after you saw Doc Whatley. But save the dirty details for later, Ranger. I need you back here fast, so fast I’m gonna start smoking and not gonna stop until you arrive.”

  “I’m climbing behind the wheel now, Captain. What’s going on?”

  “Old friend of yours from Washington is on his way in for a visit and I don’t want you leaving me alone with him any longer than necessary.”

  “Oh, shit … Not him, Captain.”

  “Yup, it’s him all right, sure to be dragging the usual shit behind him on a chain. And I want him out of here before the stink sets in like it always does when he comes around.”

  “What’s it about this time?”

  “You’re not gonna believe this, Ranger.”

  “Try me, D.W.”

  PART FIVE

  “I reported to the sheriff that the enemy had crossed the river … gone to the La Parra and gathered these beeves, that I had found them at the marsh, they had fought, and that I would now place him in charge of their bodies.”

  —Captain Leander H. McNelly