Fools' River

by Timothy Hallinan

  “What does ‘good prospect’ mean?” Edward says.

  “That they frequent places like Soi Cowboy or Nana, where an observer could hide in a crowd. That they come back often to give the watcher a look at their routines, that they flash money around and wear nice clothes. And that most nights they get drunk enough to be—by normal standards anyway—impaired.” He looks up. “That doesn’t mean the killers couldn’t also have recruited the victims through escort services, massage parlors, the Internet—you name it. That’s why we’re checking those. The length of time between the date the missing men disappeared and the date on which they were found suggests to me that the casts on the perfectly good legs are primarily a means of immobilizing the victims. Also, they all had enormous amounts of dope in their systems.”

  “What kind?” Rafferty says.

  “Pain medication, by which I mean opioids, muscle relaxants, tranquilizers, sleepers—pretty much anything on the downer end of the spectrum.” He glances over at Edward. “If it helps at all, they were probably barely aware of what was happening to them.”

  “The people doing this are doctors?” Edward sounds incredulous.

  “I doubt it. Doctors make a good living, and they’ve probably got too much to lose. I suppose one of them could be a doctor who was driven out of practice. But whoever they are, they seem to have some medical experience. The casts are apparently professionally done, and as much dope as the victims had in their systems, they also had water in their lungs, which means they were alive when they were thrown in. A male nurse, maybe, some kind of orderly, someone who’s done these things professionally.”

  Rafferty says, “You said that the places some of the victims lived in were broken into later, like Edward’s house was. Only some of them?”

  Arthit flips through his notes for a moment. “It might have been all of them, but we don’t know. The two who lived in apartments, yes. The ones who stayed in hotels—most of them, in other words—well, after a few days the hotels figured they’d ducked out or had a heart attack or something, so the rooms got cleared out and other people moved in. They might all have been searched, rather than just the two we know about, but neatly enough that the maids didn’t realize it. If the stuff the killers wanted was clearly visible or in the room safe . . . well, most of those are just the little tin cans where you can enter a four-digit code. About half the people who use those enter numbers based on their birthday or address, so if these guys were walking around with, say, a driver’s license, their kidnappers would have that information. Eventually the hotels just bagged up the victims’ stuff and put it in storage. There was no way later for us to know what was missing and what had been pocketed by the staff.”

  “Auntie Pancake,” Edward says, “my father’s live-in girlfriend, said it wouldn’t do any good to talk to the cops. And from what you’ve said about them—”

  “Your auntie was probably right. But I’m not just ‘the cops,’ and Poke, who’s not a cop at all, doesn’t need approval from anyone in the department. And through me he can access some of the information we—the police—have.”

  “You’d do that?” Edward says to Arthit. “You’d break the rules like that?”

  “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” Arthit says. Edward looks down at the table, as though he’s checking his reflection, but Rafferty can see how fast he’s blinking.

  Arthit stands, saying, “How about a full cup of coffee, Edward?”

  Rafferty stirs what’s left in his cup, which has gone cold, with his index finger and then licks his finger, trying to think of a new question, but Arthit speaks up first.

  “Several of the victims, all farang, left in their rooms cards and handwritten notes that suggest they might have used massage parlors and outcall services in addition to hitting the bars. If that’s true, and if we can establish that there’s one or more services they all used, then there’s probably a source there somewhere, someone who tipped off the killers. Or maybe even lured them in in the first place.”

  “What about laptops?” Miaow asks.

  “I’ll check,” Arthit says, making a note in the scruffy book. “You’d think they’d be taken, but who knows? Maybe they were ratty and old.”

  “Or ran Windows,” Miaow says.

  “Edward,” Rafferty says, “do you know whether your father used outcall services, massage parlors, places like that?”

  “I don’t think he missed a bet,” Edward says. “I think he’d check out skywriting.”

  There’s an awkward pause. It’s Miaow who takes the leap. “Did women come home with him? I mean, women who weren’t your aunties?

  “All the time. Whenever Auntie Pancake was gone.”

  “So,” Arthit says, “can I send someone over to look through his things?”

  “Sure,” Edward says. “Just call me so I’ll be there. After school.”

  Rafferty says, “I’ll do it.”

  “You can’t do them all,” Arthit says. “There are apparently some boxes of stuff at various stations that belonged to some of the victims. I’ll put someone on those, either Anand or Clemente.”

  “Clemente? That’s the half-Filipina with the amazing eyes?”

  “It is.”

  “Are she and Anand . . . well, are they?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “Young love,” Rafferty says. “I remember it distantly.”

  “You’re not that old,” Miaow says.

  “Yes he is,” Arthit says. “But to get back to the topic, I’ll put Clemente on going through all the effects of the other victims. If she can find an overlap, a possible connection at an outcall service or a massage parlor or even a bar, it might move things along. But, Edward, remember that while Poke and my handpicked people will be working on this, we’ve got hundreds of cops doing the routine. Among the lot of us, we’ll work it out. We’ll find the killers.”

  Rafferty says, “You keep saying ‘killers.’”

  “At least two, probably more,” Arthit says. “If we’re talking about the canal deaths, I mean. The victims couldn’t have walked down to those canals even if their legs hadn’t been in casts. The ones who were subjected to tissue samples, including the one who’s brain-dead, had so much dope in them you could have nailed them to a tree and they wouldn’t have noticed. So they were all both heavy and limp, essentially deadweight. And awkward with those rigid legs. Probably took two people, at a minimum, to get them down to the klong and toss them in and a third to drive, since this isn’t the kind of thing you flag a cab for. My guess is the driver got them to the drop-off point and then took a couple of runs around the block so the car, just idling by the canal, wouldn’t attract attention. And there’s a certainty, as far as I’m concerned, that one of them, probably the driver, is a black widow, the woman who gets them to go with her in the first place, probably gives them the mickey that lets the others come in and get him, take him wherever they take them and dope them while they siphon off their lines of credit.”

  Rafferty says, “Jesus.”

  “And what I started to say about the casts. They’re weighted, to make sure the victims sink. Later, of course, as the gases build up, they float, but.”

  He stops talking. Edward is rocking back and forth in his chair, his eyes on the table. It’s cool in the house, but there’s perspiration on his upper lip.

  Miaow says, “Hey,” and leans over to put her left hand over Edward’s right. He stops suddenly and looks up at them, then shakes his head.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t . . . I don’t like my father very much, but . . . but ummm . . .” He closes his eyes.

  “Nobody deserves this,” Miaow says.

  “No,” Arthit says briskly. “Nobody. And they might not have your father at all.”

  “The burglaries,” Edward says.

  “Could be coincidence,” Arthit says. “Poke, w
hy don’t you and I finish—”

  “Please,” Edward says. “I need to know all this.” He eases his hand out from under Miaow’s gently, and she snatches hers back as though unaware she’s touched him. He uses both palms to wipe his face, and then he dries his hands on his shirt and puts his right hand back where it was when Miaow covered it with hers. Then he moves it a little closer to her, and after a moment she touches him again.

  “So,” Edward says, “if this is what happened, my father was out doing what he calls ‘tomcatting,’ when he met a woman who sweet-talked him, or something more basic, to get him to go with her somewhere, and she drugged him, and then they put him someplace, and he probably woke up with casts on his legs and all fucked up—excuse me—from the dope, and they’re keeping him that way while they steal his money, is that about it?”

  “Yes,” Arthit says.

  “And then they’re going to kill him.”

  Arthit hesitates and then nods. “So far that’s how it seems to have gone.”

  Edward starts to say something, clears his throat, and says, “He must be frightened.”

  “Arthit,” Poke says. “A while ago you said something about how long the men were held between the disappearance and the finding of a body? What’s the longest period you know about?”

  Arthit glances at Edward very quickly and turns to Poke. “Fourteen days.”

  Miaow says, “But Edward’s father has been—” She breaks off and looks down at the table.

  “Twelve days,” Edward says. “Tomorrow it’ll be thirteen.”

  “We’ll do all we can,” Arthit says. “All over the country.” They’re standing in the living room, on the way out. “And here in Bangkok I’ll see that Poke gets everything Clemente and I can find, and I can lend him Anand and one or two other people, off the record, if it looks promising.”

  Edward nods. He seems remote, even stunned. There’s a possible time limit now. He tries to say something and clears his throat instead. Says, “Thank you.”

  “And you need to call the American embassy tomorrow,” Rafferty tells him. “They can put some pressure on the cops.”

  “Although the response,” Arthit says, “will be mostly cosmetic.”

  They all hear the front door open, and Anna calls, “Hello? We’re home.”

  “We have guests,” Arthit says, a trace of warning in his tone. The door snicks closed, and Anna takes a few tentative steps into the room. She smiles a hello and raises her eyebrows at Arthit, a gesture that says, Anyone else?

  “Just us,” Arthit says.

  “It’s Poke,” Anna announces to the air, stressing the name as though it’s the information that will clinch a difficult deal. “And Miaow.”

  A moment passes, and then Treasure peers around the corner. She smiles at Miaow, nods to Rafferty, and then her eyes stop on Edward. She blinks so heavily that Rafferty can almost hear it.

  “This is Edward,” he says. “A friend of Miaow’s.”

  “Hello,” Treasure says. It’s the only time in Rafferty’s memory that she’s been the first to speak to anyone.

  “Hi,” Edward says.

  Treasure comes all the way into the room, and Rafferty’s breath snags in his throat. When he initially saw her, in the house of her abusive, probably insane father, she’d been ghostly: tenuous, terrified, and almost emaciated. In the seven or eight weeks since he’s been in the same room with her, she’s gained weight. Her bone structure no longer pushes aggressively against her skin, and the mask of controlled muscle that defined her face for so long has relaxed, at least a little. She’s straightened her spine. Her shoulders are no longer hunched protectively. She looks healthier and younger than she did that night in the home of her father. Whom Rafferty killed.

  He says, “Seeing you here makes me very happy.”

  Arthit says, “She’s making all of us happy.”

  Treasure’s head is tilted down, eyes on the carpet, but she might be smiling, a little.

  “Okay,” Arthit says briskly, taking the spotlight off Treasure. “We’ve got a plan, of sorts, and we’ll talk in the morning, yes, Poke? And Poke’s right, Edward—call the embassy first thing tomorrow. It can’t hurt, and you never know, it might even help.”

  “Treasure,” Miaow says, “can I come over someday?”

  Treasure nods. She glances up at Miaow quickly and says, “Yes.” Her eyes skitter to Edward for a second and then away, toward an unoccupied spot in the room. “I’d like that.”

  “Done, then,” Arthit says. He touches Edward on the arm. “We’ll do what we can.”

  “Thank you,” Edward says. “I’m sorry I was—”

  “Forget it,” Arthit says. “You had good reason.” He’s looking at Treasure, who has glanced back at Edward. Edward is studying the carpet, clearly somewhere else.

  Miaow looks from Treasure to Edward. She says to Poke, “Let’s go.”

  10

  Chewing through a Wall

  This is wrong. Every instinct she has is scrabbling for attention, like rats chewing through a wall.

  Five thousand baht, she recites to herself. Five thousand—

  He has his arm around her. He smells, a little, of meat.

  She’s told him her name three times now, in about twelve minutes.

  Tonight is the night the bar was supposed to pay her. She has only 212 baht. Where can she sleep?

  He’s strong. When she tried to loosen his grasp on her shoulders, he didn’t even use his arm strength to keep her in tow. He just tightened the fingers around her left shoulder and propelled her along.

  “Pretty little thing,” he says for the third time, and she remembers the slow, disconnected way his facial expressions had changed, and she thinks, Get out of here.

  And then she remembers she’s not that frightened little boy anymore. She hasn’t run away from anyone in months and months. She broke Ying’s nose. That cow. She tightens her grip on the backpack. He’s tried to take it, to help her, he said. She doesn’t need help.

  No, she decides, her nervousness isn’t hard to understand. What she’s nervous about is the job she lost and the area they’re in, a dim snarl of streets between Silom and Surawong, in which the only lit doors seem to open into bars featuring boy shows. It’s not anywhere she’s been before, not anywhere she’d have reason to go. And she’s nervous about the identity card she’ll have to leave with the security man who will be stationed in front of the elevators at the man’s hotel. Since she’s in Thailand illegally, she had to pay more than six thousand baht for it. It looked fine, it was a careful job that layered her face over a copy of another girl’s card, and she hadn’t noticed until the first time a guard pushed it back at her, shaking his head, that the other girl was twenty-nine years old. Lutanh is barely eighteen and doesn’t look even that. After that she’d started wearing heavier makeup, and the card hasn’t been refused since. So, she decides, that’s all it is. The job. The neighborhood. The card.

  At that moment the man, whose name is a syllable she’s never heard before, maybe “Stan” if that’s a name, takes a sudden left. He’s pushing her up a couple of broad stairs and through a glass door and into a large, twilit room that seems to be the lobby of a small hotel, one she’s never seen.

  There’s no one behind the desk. She’s revising her guess—might be an apartment house or a cheap condominium—as he leads her across the room and toward a corridor, and she slows. He slows with her, looking down with his eyebrows raised.

  “I think I change mind,” Lutanh says.

  “Just be nice,” he says. “Half an hour, six thousand baht.”

  “Seven,” Lutanh says. Maybe he’ll say no. But with seven thousand she could pay all the rent she owes on her room and have enough left over to stay there for a week or two, maybe even negotiate a third while she figures out what to do next. Where to go.

/>   “Seven,” he says. “Because you’re so pretty.” He guides her into the even dimmer corridor, where she sees an elevator, its doors closed. In front of it is the security man’s desk, and she’s surprised at the disappointment she feels when she sees there’s no one there. “Magic,” the man says, making a show of pressing the button. The doors slide open. He puts his hand on the back of her neck to lead her in.

  She simply stops moving, just puts her feet together in their rubber-soled running shoes and digs in. He tugs at her once, and when she resists, he drops his arm, steps back into the elevator, and runs the tip of his tongue over his upper lip. “Well, if you don’t want to come . . .” he says. He lets his gaze fall to the elevator floor for a moment and takes his finger off the button. The door starts to slide closed, but he puts a foot out and stops it. “Wait a second.” He rummages through his trouser pocket and brings out a wad of thousand-baht notes, maybe thirty of them, and he flips slowly through the bundle until he comes up with a five-hundred. He holds it out to her. “At least,” he says, “get something to eat. And you need to clean up here.” He touches her scratched cheek gently.

  “I sorry,” Lutanh says. She shrugs the pack over her free arm so it’s no longer dangling from one shoulder, gently pushes the hand aside, and gets in. “I come with you.”

  “Good girl,” he says. He steps back to give her more space and lets the doors close. “So,” he says for the fourth time, “what’s your name?”

  Lutanh gives him her sweetest smile and says, “Sally.”

  He holds her eyes, and one muscle at a time as the elevator rises, he builds a smile. “Sally,” he says. “Pretty Sally.”

  The hallway is dim, and it smells like wet paper. The carpet squishes underfoot as they pass beneath the dripping overhead air conditioners. She can hear the plop of water farther down the corridor, and the odor makes her want to choke. The air is cold on her bare legs. Why does someone who carries around thirty thousand baht, who handles the bills like they were toilet tissue, stay in a place like this?