Kel folded his face into a question.
“You got a couple of young boys, don’t you?” Deveroux responded, reaching for the cell phone in his pocket. “Ever tempted to strangle ’em?”
“All the time.”
“Me too,” Deveroux said as he opened his phone and pressed the talk button. “Yeah, Chief Deveroux speakin’.”
CHAPTER 44
Rolla, Missouri
MONDAY, APRIL 21, 2008
Jimmy Lee Tenkiller had been living in his brother’s faded-red Ford pickup truck and his own clothes for the last four days. An odd assortment of soft drink cans and paper fast-food wrappers with gray, translucent grease stains lay stratified on the floor of the passenger side, and even with the windows rolled down, both the cab and he had taken on an awkward smell. He’d driven up from Oklahoma late last Thursday afternoon and had spent nearly two hours finding and then verifying the house. After that it was simply a matter of waiting. And watching.
It reminded him of a beaver den he’d seen as a boy, constant activity here and there and an unceasing, rolling bustle. At first he’d thought it might be a funeral, as there seemed to be one florist truck after another, but as he continued to watch, the picture clarified and he realized that it was most likely a wedding. Wedding or funeral, whatever it was, it was a complication.
Too many people.
Too many witnesses.
Jimmy Lee Tenkiller didn’t want witnesses. He’d spent the last thirty-eight years of his life avoiding people; avoiding their constant questions and their prying minds and the looks that tried to discern too much.
Thirty-eight years, and now, after all that time he found himself run to ground by a single telephone call. It had come late one Saturday night last October. Jimmy Lee was watching wrestling with his brother when the phone in their den rang. They’d looked at each other for several rings, as neither one of them was accustomed to receiving nighttime calls, or daytime calls for that matter, and there was an unspoken sense of uncertainty about how to respond. In fact, Jimmy Lee had spoken on the phone only twice in the last thirty-eight years; once from a pay phone at a cheap motel outside Travis Air Force Base in 1970 when he’d called Eddie and asked him to wire some money, and once again twenty-eight years later when his brother had experienced his first heart attack and needed an ambulance. Other than those two instances, Jimmy Lee Tenkiller had avoided any two-way electronic contact with the world, and the world had avoided him. Eddie Tenkiller had cocooned himself almost as well, though the everyday mechanics of life required some interaction with the outside, but together, the two men had intended to coast into old-age anonymity, content with their own company and confidence.
Until the phone rang and everything changed.
Actually, neither Jimmy Lee nor Eddie was surprised by the voice on the other end of the line; both had been living in daily anticipation of its awaited intrusion and had simply pondered what form it would take, what accent, what tone, what words it would begin with, and of course when it would come. When Jimmy Lee heard his brother say into the receiver, “I’m sorry, sir, you must be mistaken. I have no brother. My brother is dead,” he knew that it had finally come, and when his brother had added, “I know nothing of Five Brothers,” he knew that the past had returned to collect its overdue toll. Oddly, it had settled as much as upset. Like a man who has held his breath to the limit and must finally gasp, Jimmy Lee Tenkiller realized that the phone call was his gasp; the painful relief so long anticipated. The inrush of oxygen made him dizzy.
I know nothing of Five Brothers.
As he sat parked in front of the red-brick colonial house of Ngo Van Thu, he couldn’t help but think of a future, both his and Eddie’s, that had been not so much deferred as deflected and compromised and destroyed. He looked into the rearview mirror of the truck, at the dark brown eyes so rimmed with black that the irises weren’t discernible, and at the deep, concentric creases that sun and sorrow had carved around his eyes, and couldn’t help but wonder why? Not why the call had come, but why now? What was the trigger after so many years? Was it just time? Was it fate? Was it God?
Jimmy Lee Tenkiller had spent thirty-eight years ducking around corners and living by cash transactions; leaving no trail, no scent. So had his brother. And where had it gotten them? What had it gotten them? Nothing. No family. No friends. No security. Thirty-eight years came crashing down upon him with the ring of a telephone.
He couldn’t let that happen. Whatever he’d done in the past—or not done—he’d paid for it; they’d both paid for it, Eddie and he. Men with no pasts have no tomorrows. They have only todays. That was the price he’d paid in a thirty-eight-year installment, and he had no intention of having it all repossessed now. There could be no disclosure now, no matter what it took to ensure that.
No matter what.
Jimmy Lee Tenkiller looked at the shiny blue-black Ruger .22 as he turned it over and back in his right hand. Eddie had bought it years ago to plink at cottonmouths when they were fishing, but it had never been used with any regularity, and it had taken Jimmy Lee quite a while to locate it. Now he held it tightly in his hand and thought back to a small grass hut in a small abandoned village in a country that he couldn’t even believe existed anymore. There’s more than one kind of snake, he caught himself thinking as he pulled on the door handle and swung a leg to the pavement.
Just then a dark-blue Cadillac Seville pulled quickly into Ngo’s driveway and stopped. A middle-aged Asian female got out of the driver’s side, followed by a younger, quite attractive Asian female from the passenger side. They were laughing and talking animatedly as they walked up the brick sidewalk to the front door. Jimmy Lee had seen them off and on before and had finally assumed them to be Mrs. Ngo and one of her daughters. A family. A family like that he’d never had. A family and a future that General Ngo had enjoyed. He watched them, the young one’s long, glossy black hair bouncing with each step, as they opened the front door and went into the house.
Jimmy Lee Tenkiller hesitated and then pulled his leg back into the cab and shut the truck door. He stared at the front door of the house for a minute and then opened the glove box and stowed the pistol before cranking the ignition. His business was with the general, not with his family. There were already too many people who knew, and more witnesses were a problem, not a solution. He checked the rearview mirror as he put the vehicle in gear and pulled away from the curb. The two five-gallon gas cans in the truck bed slid back and banged loudly against the tailgate.
“I’ve waited thirty-eight years, General, another day or two won’t matter now,” he said.
CHAPTER 45
Interstate 40, Oklahoma/Arkansas Line
MONDAY, APRIL 21, 2008
“Say again,” Shuck Deveroux said into his cell phone. The quick look he caromed off Kel forecast an imminent change in plans. “When did the call come in? They sure? Um-hmm. Hmm. Got it, got it. We are…we’re on I-Forty ’bout to hit the Arkansas state line. Yeah…no…far side. The Oklahoma side.” He twisted his left wrist on the steering wheel so that he could see the face of his watch in the gathering darkness. “Hold one,” he said as he tucked the cell phone into his neck and swiveled his torso to better address his partner. “This is your neck of the woods, isn’t it?”
“Sort of,” Kel responded. He’d been trying to guess the unheard part of the conversation, without much luck. “Long time ago. Why?”
“You know where Warrensburg, Missouri, is?”
“Sure. Up near Knob Noster. Off of I-Seventy, little ways east and south of Kansas City.”
“How far?”
“Hmm, you mean from here? Ahhh…don’t know…maybe…maybe six hours, give or take—dependin’ on how you drive. They’ve straightened the road some since I lived here.”
Deveroux re-engaged his phone. “Can be there in five hours. Do me a favor. Make a couple of motel reservations, one for me and one for Doc McKelvey. Oh, yeah? Thanks. Good man.” He pointed at the glove box,
made writing motions in the air, and waggled his fingers to indicate he needed either a pencil or paper or both. “Yeah, yeah…slow down. Say again.”
Kel provided a pen from his pocket and opened the glove box and rummaged until he found a crumpled old Jiffy Lube receipt. Deveroux grabbed it from him and pinned it to the seat between them with his right hand.
“Okay, gimme that address again,” Deveroux said into the phone as he awkwardly wrote on the back of the receipt. “Good, good. I’ll give y’all a call when I get there. Yeah. Okay. Gracias, mi amigo. Out here.” He pressed the off button and returned the phone to his shirt pocket.
“Let me guess, you’re supposed to pick up a loaf of bread?” Kel asked.
“Yeah, and a gallon of low-fat milk.”
“Thought so.”
“And while we’re at it, we need to take a look at another body.”
“A third?” Kel asked. “Mercy, but they do seem to be pilin’ up on you.”
Deveroux nodded. “Found up in Warrensburg, Missouri. This one’s fresh, so maybe it’ll make more sense to start with it rather than the one in Nashville.”
“And how fresh is fresh?”
“Catch-of-the-day fresh. This mornin’. Some professor at a college up there…”
“Central Missouri State.”
“Ahh, I think they call it Missouri Central University, but that’s the one. Anyway, this professor finds a body out on a ball field, or somethin’. Thought it was a drunk student passed out. Frat thing.”
“Wasn’t?”
“Nope. Turned out to be a middle-aged Vietnamese-American gentleman, and he wasn’t passed out—at least not from drinkin’. Sound familiar?”
“Interestin’, but…” Kel commented.
“But…”
“It’s not on a military base.”
“True.” Deveroux shrugged. “But there do seem to be some similarities.”
“He missin’ the top of his head, too?”
“Yup, sort of. Actually his whole head seems to have gotten itself separated from his body. That was Gonzo…Sergeant Gonzalez…from my office. Seems he got a call from the cops at Whiteman Air Force Base—I guess that’s close to Warrensburg?”
“Yeah. Kinda on the outskirts.”
“That makes sense. We sent flyers out to some of the military installations in the Midwest concernin’ the cases we had at Knox and Campbell. Sort of an if-you-see-anythin’-related-please-let-us-know sort of thing. One of the SPs from Whiteman was at the Warrensburg police station this mornin’ on some other sort of business when the call came in. He thought it was mighty coincidental; middle-aged Asian, decapitation, proximity to a military base…”
“More like tri-incidental, at this point.”
“That’s right. If it’s connected, it makes three, doesn’t it? Anyhow, the locals are willin’ to let us take a look at it before they send it over to Kansas City. From what Gonzo said, I guess the local coroner doesn’t want to touch it and would be more than happy if someone took it off his hands. Not my jurisdiction, certainly, but maybe now we can lever the FBI into takin’ a serious interest in it. Everyone else in my office is tied up, so we’re all that’s available to run up there. Open that up, will ya?” Deveroux asked, pointing to a thick folder tied with string that rested on the seat between them.
“This?”
“Yup. That’s the file folder that General Fick gave me. The results of his investigation all those years ago in Vietnam. There’s a list of names on top. Should be in among the first couple of pages, or so.” He reached up and flicked on the cab’s overhead light.
Kel balanced the folder on his lap and worked through the contents. He paused and peered at some pages longer than others before finally extracting a single sheet of lined paper, now stained by time, with a series of names written on it with light-blue cartridge pen ink. There were lines connecting several names and stars drawn beside others. “This one?” he asked.
Deveroux took his eyes off the road long enough to verify that the paper was the one he wanted. “Yeah, yeah, that looks like it. See the names? Trinh Han and Linh Nhu Ngon?” His slow pronunciation left a great deal to the imagination.
“So that’s how you pronounce them; I always wondered.”
“Yeah, yeah. Cut me some slack, Kel; I’m just a dumb, country soldier. I pronounce ’em like I read ’em. You see ’em or not?”
“Roger. Trinh Han. Linh Nhu Ngon…” Kel tried to imitate Deveroux, making a point of pronouncing each name slowly and as if he had a head full of thick snot and nowhere to spit.
“Read the other ones.”
“Well,” Kel set the folder down on the seat between them but held on to the paper. He shifted into a normal voice. “In addition to Trinh and Linh—hmm, I seem to recognize some of these—there’s Tenkiller, he seems to have rated two stars in Fick’s mind. General Ngo Van Thu got a couple of stars and a whole big mess of arrows—whatever that signifies—a Colonel Pham Van…Van-somethin’. It’s kinda faded but looks like Pham Van Minh and a couple of arrows and lines but no stars, and a Major Doan Minh Tuyen…”
“That’s it,” Deveroux said excitedly. “That’s the one. The last one. I knew it was on there.”
“Doan? You mean your third victim?”
“Yup. At least the prelim suggests it. Sergeant Gonzalez said the body had a wallet on him, and they found a car parked nearby that was registered to a Doan Tuyen. They also found a head in a trash can nearby that they think matches his driver’s license photo. He was scalped like the other ones so they aren’t sure until they run down some dental x-rays, but, yeah, I mean, they’re sure.”
Kel was looking at the list and shaking his head. “Sure is shit to be you, partner. What’re you goin’ to do now? Looks like three down, two to go. Probably need to find these other two bubbas as soon as you can.”
“Roger that,” Deveroux replied. “Assumin’ they’re still alive, that is. Maybe those other two were really numbers one and two that we just don’t know about yet. We may have gotten a late start. They could all be dead by now.”
“Maybe, and maybe they didn’t survive the war, either.”
“Nope. Already checked. At least Ngo survived. INS has no record of that Pham Van Minh character, though.” Deveroux scrunched his face and twisted in his seat in a belated attempt to see a road sign that had flashed by in the darkness. He reached up and turned off the cab light. “Were we supposed to turn there?”
Kel also twisted around in his seat so that both men were turned looking out the back window at the quickly receding exit ramp. “Yeah, ahh…” He stalled as he turned back to the front. “Ahh, yeah, but it’s okay. You can catch Highway Seventy-one up here a little ways. Takes a bit longer. Scenic route—not that we can see much at night. So…you say our General Ngo is in this country. I kinda figured he’d be. A lot of the South Vietnamese generals ended up here.”
“There’s another piece of paper in the file.” Deveroux flicked on his turn signal and shifted lanes in preparation for taking the next exit. As soon as he had a hand free, he turned on the dome light again.
“This one?” Kel asked as he extracted a crisp piece of paper from inside the folder.
Deveroux looked over and nodded. “Yeah. That one isn’t Fick’s. Buddy of mine at the FBI ran those names. Believe it or not, there’s a couple dozen or so Ngo Van Thus in the U.S. and at least two more in Canada, one in Vancouver and another in Toronto. Goin’ to have to call each one of them and hope we get lucky. We can do that tomorrow after you take a look at the newest body. We’re goin’ to need some luck, though. That’s for sure.”
“Hmm,” Kel said, studying the list in the dim light. “Maybe. Maybe not.” He found the thought of somehow getting involved in any project that required the prolonged use of a telephone unsettling.
“You got another idea?”
“If it were me,” Kel answered, folding the paper so that one of the names about a third of the way down was now at the top of
the list. He underscored it with his thumbnail. “I’d start with this one.”
CHAPTER 46
Interstate 40, Oklahoma/Arkansas Line
MONDAY, APRIL 21, 2008
It took three tries before the cell phone connected. Kel’s cell phone, chronically low on batteries, dropped the signal twice before ringing through.
“Hello,” Mary Louise McKelvey answered.
“Hey, hon,” Kel replied. He half turned in his seat so that he was facing the passenger window. With the amber dashboard lights inside and the absence of any significant external illumination along the highway, his own reflection stared back at him from the darkened glass. It wasn’t so much that he was concerned about Shuck overhearing—there was nothing to be said that was overly private, and besides, the roar of truck’s tires on the warm asphalt made eavesdropping anything but a casual exercise. Kel hated using the phone so much that it seemed a gesture of courtesy to not thrust his conversation onto an innocent bystander.
“Well, this is a surprise. Everythin’ okay? You’re not hurt, are you?” Mary Louise had a soft west Arkansas drawl that was lazy, but not sticky like Deveroux’s eastern molasses.
“No, no. Everythin’ is all right,” Kel answered. The connection was poor and he found himself speaking louder than he wanted. “Just thinkin’ about you. Miss you is all.”
Mary Louise laughed. “Now, Kel. I don’t doubt for a minute you miss me, and for good reason, but I do know that no amount of missin’ me could get you to dial a telephone. Someone got a gun to your head?”
“Now that isn’t fair, and you know it,” Kel protested. It was a formality because he knew full well that his wife had called his bluff. “I was thinkin’ about you, and I was missin’ you, and—”
“And?”
“Well, and I wanted to tell you that I might be delayed a few days longer, is all.”
Mary Louise laughed again. “That’s more like it. What’s happenin’? Sure you’re okay?”
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