The Dark Root

by Mayor, Archer

  “I’m not sure what that all means.”

  “It means your Mr. Travers sustained significant trauma at several stages, any one of which might have done the trick all by itself—given enough time. The problem is that, since they all followed one another in rapid succession, it becomes difficult to name a single absolute cause of death.”

  “If this is going to get complicated, could you humor me by not going backwards? I’m getting nowhere on this case, and I’d appreciate at least one straight answer from someone.”

  She was immediately sympathetic. “Of course, Lieutenant, but let me preface my statement with a warning that some of it will be educated conjecture. When you have these many layers of successive damage, it becomes like an archaeological dig, and the margin for error increases.”

  “I understand.”

  “I think Mr. Travers was in a fight to begin with, one in which he used his fists and wherein he sustained his first severe trauma, to wit, a severely fractured left zygomatic—that’s the bone around the eye socket—with resulting damage to the sphenoid—the bone lying behind the eyeball. He also had a left-temporal fracture which I believe could have eventually led to intracranial bleeding and death.”

  “He couldn’t have gotten all that in the crash?”

  “Technically, yes, but for reasons I’ll explain later, I don’t believe he did. I should add that he also sustained two broken teeth and a broken knuckle at this point, all of which indicate the beating I alluded to earlier.

  “Next, we have the bullet, which entered the body from behind, just above the left scapula. It nicked the subclavian artery, ricocheted off the clavicle, fracturing it, and was thereby redirected downward into the left lung, where I found it.”

  “Was it a nine-millimeter?”

  “It could be. I sent it to Waterbury for analysis. I can tell you it was fairly intact. But the damage to that artery, which as you know is a major blood vessel, was severe enough that he would have bled to death eventually.”

  “How eventually?”

  She hedged a little. “That’s difficult to say, given the subsequent damage to the body, but if the subclavian is totally severed, life expectancy usually doesn’t exceed a minute. Mr. Travers’s wound wasn’t quite that bad, so in my estimation, it would have proved lethal within fifteen minutes.”

  “Doctor, we have witnesses saying the shooting occurred during a high-speed car chase. Assuming that’s when Travers got hit, could he have kept driving, and for that matter, could he have been driving at all with his head smashed up?”

  Here, there was no hesitation. “Absolutely. Some head injuries take hours to days before rendering the patient unconscious, and since this man was already driving at the time he was shot, I see no reason he couldn’t have continued some distance before the blood loss took its toll.”

  “But still, basically, flying off that cliff was pure gravy.”

  "Yes and no. Remember when I said there was but a little soot in his airway, that his carboxyhemoglobin concentrations were only slightly elevated? Well, the fact that I found even those traces tells me he was still alive—if barely—when the car caught fire.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered.

  The sympathy in her voice matched my own for a moment. “Yes. He didn’t have an easy time of it. Anyhow, his barely being alive at the end is why I suspect the specific cranial damage I highlighted earlier was inflicted well before the crash. If you break a man’s bone and kill him immediately thereafter, there will be some evidence of bleeding at the site of the fracture, but—and here is the important point—that evidence will be scant, difficult to detect, and similar to if the bone had been broken following death. Do you follow me?”

  I merely nodded at the phone.

  “In fact,” she continued, “that was the case with the explosive fractures resulting from the built-up steam inside the cranium, along with the heat-related fractures of many of the long bones of his arms and legs. By their very nature, all of those obviously occurred after death, and therefore showed no signs of contusions or bleeding. Similarly, the few fractures I have connected to the crash preceding the fire showed slight hemorrhaging, which is again consistent with the scenario we’ve established. Only those breaks to the left-temporal and zygomatic bones, and to the teeth and knuckles, show extensive post-traumatic bleeding. That’s why I believe he got them in a fight.”

  There was a slight pause while we both contemplated all she’d told me. She was no doubt thinking of anything she might have left out. I was wondering if any of it would do me any good, including the recovered bullet.

  I therefore fished for more. “Did he have any drugs in his bloodstream?”

  “Not there, but there were residual traces of cocaine in his organs, dating back a day or more.”

  “Alcohol?”

  “Some, but below the legal limit.”

  “How ’bout stomach contents?”

  “Pepperoni pizza and chips, recently consumed.”

  That grabbed my interest. “Within an hour of death?”

  “I’d say so.”

  I made a mental note to follow up on that. If we found who’d sold the pizza, we might also discover what Ben Travers had been up to shortly before his death, and perhaps with whom.

  “Could you do me an enormous favor and hold off releasing the cause of death to the press for a bit?”

  “Maybe a couple of days. Will that be enough?”

  I certainly hoped it would, and that his death—even though a homicide—would be proven the result of an altercation with some long-standing local rivals. But I couldn’t imitate Tony Brandt’s trick of ignoring the larger implications before me.

  Unlike him, I was conscious of something larger stirring in the background—a growing threat that was going to make Ben Travers’s death look like a small, initial skirmish between two large opposing forces.

  “It’ll have to be.”

  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?”