by Shane Lusher
“No offense, Dana,” Percy said, “But you and wonder boy Rassi were the ones who thought that all of this was connected. Now we got Stevens, Sweeney and Roe killed with the same weapon, same MO, and Tuan Nguyen not far behind. We have to follow that route right now,” Percy said. “Get in here as quick as you can.
“And Dana?”
“Yeah.”
“Find Rassi.”
Forty-Five
“Child pornography,” Tuan said. “That’s a good one. What’s next, terrorism?”
Both of the cops wore navy suits with striped red ties. The ties were different, but somehow the same. Tuan looked at the one he’d started thinking of as the good cop. He figured the good cop was the one to watch. The bad cop was just there to get you riled.
The good cop was there to get under your skin, to pretend to be your friend, to whatever.
The bad cop, whose name was Calvin Jerkowitz or Jackowitz or something like that, leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. He stood six feet something, with short, blonde hair, a mustache and sideburns. He’d hung his suit coat on the back of one of the chairs at the table in the interview room.
“We got enough on you, Tuan, you can believe that,” he said.
Tuan spread his arms wide. “Hey, what happened to Mr. Nguyen?” he said.
“Mr. Nguyen,” the good cop said. “If that’s what you prefer.” This guy’s first name was something Tuan had already forgotten but what he believed to be Miguel. He did possess, at any rate, a Hispanic name that fit with his face only in that his hair and sideburns were black. He, too, stood six feet something, though he was sitting at the table just across from Tuan.
“It doesn’t matter to me what you call me, actually,” Tuan said. “I already told you, I’m waiting on my lawyer. That will be just as valid six hours from now as it is now. Maybe we should just call it a night.”
Miguel nodded. “That’s exactly what I was just thinking. What about you, Cal? You tired, too?”
“Exhausted,” Calvin said. His efforts at scowling were so effective he looked as if he were going cross-eyed. “I would love nothing better than to get back home and hit the hay.”
“Thing is, Tuan,” Miguel said. “We can’t do that. We’re just doing what we have to do. It’s our job. A lot of it has to do with the media—you can appreciate that, can’t you? After all, you’re the editor of the town newspaper.”
He waited for a response, and when he did not get one, he continued.
“So our bosses, being elected officials, get all worked up when stuff like this starts picking up, and when we hit on you, and your associate Jasper Stevens was killed, then we had to move in. You know what I’m saying?
“It’s not like we can ask all you guys to stop printing that kind of information.”
Tuan looked up at the bad cop and then back down at the good one. “What are you saying? Jasper’s dead?”
Calvin cracked a brief smile and then bit his upper lip. This was where they would think they had him. Knowledge he had not previously been a party to. Power. Idiots.
“When? I mean—how?”
“So, you did know him, then,” Miguel said quietly.
“Know him,” Tuan said. “I knew of him, sure.”
“Ever talk to him?”
“Sure, back when I was running the youth group. He was a friend of Darren Roe’s. I-”
“Would that be the same Darren Roe who happens to be dead as well?”
This was Calvin, the bad cop. He pushed himself away from the wall with his shoulder blades and turned one of the chairs around. He sat, and leaned forward on the chair back so that his face was inches away from Tuan’s.
“How come all your friends are winding up dead?”
Tuan leaned back and considered the man. He didn’t feel a bit afraid, not just yet. He wanted to see what they had first.
“Are you trying to claim that I murdered Darren Roe and Jasper Stevens?” he asked.
“Did you?” Miguel asked, leaning back to match Tuan’s body language. “Look, Tuan, I can see how their chosen lifestyle might have been upsetting to you. You try to help people, and then they go and throw everything away on drugs. But the answer is no. We’re not interested in that. That’s Tazewell County’s beef.”
“Although we should inform you that if drugs were involved in any of those deaths, and you sold them or provided them with whatever drugs were involved, then you can be charged with the murder whether you were there or not.” This was Calvin. “Isn’t that right, Miguel?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Miguel said. “Is it really that bad? They keep changing the laws on us.”
This time Tuan did laugh. “Are you guys for real?” he asked. “Seriously. Where did you learn your interrogation techniques? I thought we were talking about pornography. Now you’re mentioning drugs.”
“It’s not an interrogation, Tuan,” Miguel said, his eyebrows knitting together. He clasped his hands on the table in front of him. “We’re just having a conversation.”
Calvin spoke up. “And we were talking about child pornography,” he said. “Big difference.”
“Am I under arrest?” Tuan asked. “Because I don’t recall anyone reading me any Miranda rights.”
The two cops looked at each other briefly, but didn’t answer. Tuan waited, and eventually Miguel spoke.
“You came with us willingly, remember? We didn’t cuff you, we didn’t drag you here.”
“You came to my house with a search warrant in the middle of the day, for the entire world to see. What was I supposed to do?”
Tuan laced his hands in front of his stomach and said:
“I’m not talking. Unless you have any evidence of anything, I don’t see what it is you have me here for. And I also know that you can’t hold me for longer than 48 hours before I see a judge. Is it even legal for you to question me without my lawyer being present?”
“Listen here,” Calvin said, leaning forward once again. “You may or may not think you know anything about the law, but we have probable cause. In case you didn’t know it, you have to have that in order to get a search warrant. You’ve been peddling child porn, online and off, for at least ten years, maybe longer. This case is probably going to go Federal, and when it does, we can’t protect you.”
That was a lie, about selling, but even if Calvin had been talking about someone else, Tuan would have been able to see that he was lying. His eyes had started blinking the moment he began speaking.
“And that’s what you’re here for?” Tuan asked finally. He was still smiling. “To protect me?”
Calvin stood up and walked back over to the window. He glanced over at Miguel, who seemed at a loss.
Tuan thought about coming clean, just then. There was really no reason to keep everything secret any more. He thought about Father Marin, and being true to the self, and then he remembered where he was.
“You know what?” Tuan said. “I’m going to be out of here on Monday. My lawyer will get back from Branson, and then I’ll be out of here, and then you won’t have jack.”
“We took your computers,” Calvin said. “Anything on there you should be worried about?”
There wasn’t. Tuan had made damned sure of that. All they would find would be a fresh installation from the day before and a shitload of meaningless pictures and tax records.
He didn’t say anything for a while, and then he looked up at them.
“Really,” he said. “I do know how this works. I could say anything. I could say that I killed everybody who’s been killed in Tazewell County over the past ten years, even those gang bangers on the South Side of Peoria that pop each other every week or so, and you couldn’t use any of it, because you haven’t read me my rights. So, I’m figuring that the reason you haven’t even bothered to do that is that you don’t have shit. Am I right?”
Miguel glanced at Calvin. “I’m afraid you are right, my friend,” he said. “Unless there’s something on that computer we foun
d in your safe room.”
“What about that?”
Calvin stood up and resumed his cross-armed post against the wall. “Now you’re worried,” he said. “You think we don’t know how to crack password-protected files? Shit, none of that is even encrypted. My twelve-year-old kid could get through that in twenty minutes.”
“That computer doesn’t belong to me,” Tuan said. He felt weak all of a sudden.
“Whose computer is it, then?” Calvin asked. “Or did you steal it?”
Tuan didn’t answer.
Calvin smiled. “Not bad,” he said. “Possession of child pornography and felony theft.”
Forty-Six
Kelly called at eight to let me know she would be done with the autopsy within an hour, but she gave me some preliminary findings, most of which I already knew from Percy.
Stevens had been killed with an arrow, the same as Roe and Sweeney, through the back of the neck and into the brain stem.
He had been found sitting on his couch, and blood pooling in his buttocks and his legs indicated that he more than likely had not been moved postmortem.
“Time of death was sometime early Thursday morning, middle of the previous night,” she’d said.
“Anything else?” I asked.
Kelly sounded tired, which wasn’t surprising. “Well,” she said, “He was obviously a meth freak. Didn’t have many teeth left, unusual for a man his age otherwise, and he had needle tracks between his toes.”
“Between the toes?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And on the bottom of his feet. The guy had a job, right? You can’t show up for work when you’ve got festering sores all over your arms.
“That being said, it’s so obvious the guy was a meth user it’s a wonder he passed any of the drug tests his company made him take.”
“Maybe they don’t do that,” I said.
“It’s possible,” she said. “But I think the state may be mandating that nowadays, for anybody driving heavy equipment.”
“He was a forklift driver,” I said. “Does that count as heavy equipment?”
She didn’t know. I pressed her for more information, but she said that she was trying to lift fingerprints from the body, which was guesswork in the best of situations.
“I’m not going to find anything,” she finished. “Decomposition was too far along already, and anyway, I found traces of latex on the body. Whoever killed him was wearing gloves.”
“So, maybe it wasn’t Nguyen?” I said.
“Yeah, or maybe he put on the gloves before he killed Stevens,” she said.
“After he went into the house and got him to turn around for him?” I asked. “He’d have to have turned around for him to get him in the back of the neck. Any signs of a struggle?”
“Not on the body,” Kelly said.
“Doesn’t sound plausible to me.”
I changed the subject. “Did you hear about Dubois?” I asked.
“Percy mentioned it in passing.”
“And?”
“What?” she said. “It’s not like his detective work will be missed.”
“Why am I the only person who finds it strange that he’s skipped town?”
She took a drink of something. I listened to her swallow, and then she answered.
“I don’t think it’s so much that nobody thinks it’s strange as that we’re so undermanned,” she said. “I know that’s a lame thing to say, but with everything burning on the stove, well, who knows if he really left town? It’s the weekend. Just because he’s not home doesn’t mean-”
She trailed off, and I didn’t push the subject. After we’d gotten off the phone, the pizza I’d ordered arrived, and once I’d gotten back into the kitchen, I texted Rassi. I figured if he wasn’t picking up then maybe he would read the text.
I thought about what I’d learned from Diane, and from Corcoran’s background check. Trueblood, picked up on statutory rape, with a girl way too young to have been able to chalk it up to the ignorance of youth.
Corcoran had promised to get back to me on Trueblood’s alibi, and once he’d run all the names I’d given him, but I didn’t expect very much to come of it.
I waited another fifteen minutes, then Googled Vic Daniels' home number.
It rang and rang, and then an answering machine picked up, so I hung up and called back. Same deal.
“Vic, this is Dana Hartman,” I said. “I’m wondering if you could give me a call back. My number is-”
“Dana,” Vic answered. “What’s up?”
“Well,” I said. “I have a few questions for you.”
“Okay,” he said. “Can this wait? We all just sat down to dinner.”
For some reason, Vic had remained fixed in my mind as the man at Trueblood’s party, the nervous, solitary businessman next to me at the bar at the Wilson. I’d forgotten that he had a wife and a few kids as well.
“You have plans for later on?” I asked. “Can you meet me somewhere? It won’t take long. I could stop by your house, too, if that’s better.”
“Uh, I really would rather talk on Monday, in my office, if that’s alright with you,” he said.
“Normally it would be, Vic, but a few things have gone down and I think it would be good if we could get together this evening. Maybe tomorrow morning at the-”
“Wait a minute,” Vic said. “I’m going to call you back on my cell.”
I waited for five minutes, and was about to call him back when my phone rang.
“All right,” he said. “I just had to get the stuff off the grill.” His voice was subdued, quiet. “What things are going down?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure how much I should tell him, but considering that no one had sworn me to secrecy, I decided to fill him in.
“They just brought in the editor of the Pekin Observer on suspicion of child pornography. Or conspiracy. I’m not sure which one they’re looking at.”
“Tuan Nguyen? The Vietnamese guy?” Daniels asked. I heard a slider door open and shut, and then he raised his voice to a normal tone. “So, what does this have to do with me?”
“Wayne Trueblood took me off the Colby case yesterday,” I said.
“He did?”
“Well, more specifically, his lawyer.”
“Ulrich Anderson?” Vic said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not sure whether I can tell you this, but you’ve been up front with me.” I licked my lips. “I think Nguyen might have something to do with Colby Trueblood’s death.”
“You think he did it?” Vic asked. He’d lowered his voice again.
“I don’t know. No. Maybe. I was thinking it might have been Wayne, because of the insurance, among other things, but Colby had cocaine in her system when she died, and the guy who sold her the cocaine just got killed two days ago.”
“Jesus Christ,” Vic said.
“Yeah. When the guy got killed and they ran his name, the State Police showed up and took Nguyen in for questioning.”
“Wow,” Vic said. “Okay. Well, look, Dana, I’d like to sit down and talk about it, I really would, but I need to go join my family for-”
“I went up to Joliet, Vic,” I said. “I talked to Diane Trueblood. She told me a few things.”
“You talked to Diane?”
I waited a moment, because it seemed that he was about to say more, but when he didn’t, I went on.
“She claims that you’re her lawyer,” I said. “She said I should talk to you.”
“About what?”
I ignored his question. “Why did you tell me about the insurance? You know there’s a link between all of these cases. What else do you know?”
“Hey, man,” Vic said, and a woman’s voice murmured in the background. “I’ll be right in,” he said and then came back to me. “I told you everything I know.”
“Then why did Diane tell me to go talk to you?”
“Beats me,” Vic said. “Hey, I really have to-”
“Why did Trueblood get
you disbarred?” I still wasn’t sure that had actually happened, but I wanted to jostle him a bit, get him talking. “What, did they give you some money to hold and then turn it into a conversion charge?”
“That pretty much sums it up,” Vic said. “Look, I can’t really go into it. And I can’t talk to you about Diane Trueblood. That would be in violation of attorney-client privilege.”
“Even if you’re no longer a member of the bar?”
“Come on, Dana,” Vic said. “I don’t have anything to tell you. Diane Trueblood was a drunk then, and she’s probably still a drunk. You saw her. You know what she’s like.”
“She told me Trueblood is into S & M. I believe her exact words were that he’s a ‘sex maniac’.”
Daniels didn’t respond at first. I could hear him pacing, though, across what sounded like a wooden deck. I was about to say something when he spoke.
“So what, Dana?” Vic said. “Lots of people are. Who cares what the guy does in the privacy of his own home?”
“Why did you tell me about the life insurance, then, Vic?” I asked. I was growing impatient. “And why are you pretending like you don’t know anything now? What did you think I was going to do with that information?”
Vic sighed, and then said something to someone in the background. “I can’t talk about it, Dana,” he said. “It was a mistake to tell you about that. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what I tell you. I couldn’t even be forced to testify.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Who would you be testifying against?”
“Let’s just say that the issue falls closer to home than I realized at the beginning.”
“But Vic-”
“I’m hanging up now, Dana,” he said.
And then he was gone.
I settled down onto the couch in resignation and watched the television with the girls.
Couldn’t be forced to testify? What the hell was he talking about? As far as I knew, the only reason you didn’t have to testify was if you plead the 5th Amendment, which said you couldn’t be forced to testify against yourself.