The Dark Root

by Mayor, Archer

  “Sure,” one of her friends answered. “And on TV. You were the one that got knifed last year—the one that got that rapist.”

  I signaled to the bartender and ordered another round, “for the ladies.” I could feel Rawlings wilting beside me as I fed their curiosity about the case they’d alluded to.

  “So now you’re working on a homicide?” asked the blonde sometime later. She’d introduced herself as Kim, and her friends as Mona and Candy. “That car bombing?”

  “It’s connected to it.”

  Rawlings let out a small sigh. Rule one in law enforcement—among dozens of others—was not to show your cards unless absolutely necessary, especially to civilians. It was, however, one I broke often to great benefit. Since the public had come to see us as tight-mouthed and generally aloof—answering every question with a question—I’d found the best way to win them over quickly was to be just the opposite.

  The proof that it worked, at least occasionally, was evidenced by Kim’s understandable delight. “No kidding? That made the national news.”

  I now reached for Chu’s photograph and laid it face up on the table. “Does he look familiar?”

  Kim made a face. “Ooh, he looks dead.”

  “I know him,” said Candy, who up to now had been the quietest of the trio. “I went out with him maybe a month ago. He was a creep.”

  Everyone turned toward her, and she seemed momentarily tongue-tied at her abrupt notoriety.

  “Could you tell me about it?” I asked.

  “Not that much to tell. A bunch of them came in here one night. Mona and Kim weren’t around, and I was feeling lonely. They were throwing lots of money around, and this guy started buying me drinks. It was fun for a while. They sang at the machine—got me to do it, too…”

  “Candy,” Kim burst out, almost in outrage, “you always hated that thing.”

  “Well,” she came back defensively, “I was having fun. Anyway, after a while, he said he had a real nice car, and maybe I’d like to drive around a little. I knew what he was after—I mean, I’m not that dumb—but I thought he was pretty cute, and he talked funny, and the car was beautiful. I should’ve known it was going to get weird when his two pals came along…”

  “Candy, you jerk,” Kim broke in again.

  She didn’t argue the point. “Yeah—a drunk jerk, too. It started out okay, though. We did just drive around at first.” She gestured to the mug shot. “He found some back roads out of town and really opened that car up. It was fun. But they had a bottle with them and they started showing off, and next thing I know there was a gun being passed around…”

  “Oh, my God,” Mona murmured. “You never told us any of this.”

  Candy looked down at her lap. “I was embarrassed—maybe a little scared. There were three of them, after all. I know I shouldn’t have gone.”

  “What happened with the gun?” I asked gently.

  “I didn’t show I was getting nervous. I pretended to be impressed. They even let me hold it once. Then this guy here asked me if I’d ever shot one before. I had shot a twenty-two when I was little—my daddy’s gun—so that’s what I told him. He laughed and pulled over and fired the stupid thing right out the window. Scared the crap out of me. He tried to get me to shoot it and I wouldn’t. That’s when things kind of got bad. He put the gun away and made a pass at me, but I wasn’t in the mood anymore, and the other two being there put me off, too. It got a little rough, then. They started pawing me, ripping my clothes, trying to get at me…”

  “Oh, my God,” Mona repeated. Kim was rapt, her mouth slightly open.

  “I was fighting them off, and doin’ all right, since the car was too small for the guys in the back to do much, but then one of them hit me on the back of the head—maybe with the gun, I don’t know—and that sort of took the fight out of me. I figured, you know, what the hell? Just lie back, let ’em do it, and that’ll be that. What’s the fuss?” She added as a face-saving joke, “It’s not like I haven’t faked it before, right?”

  But her eyes were brimming with tears, and Kim wrapped an arm around her.

  “It didn’t happen, though,” she continued. “I guess I ruined it for everybody, ’cause they just threw me out of the car and drove off. So, other than a bump on the head and a ruined blouse, I was okay, except it took me over an hour to walk home. My feet ended up hurting worse than my head.”

  Mona rubbed her friend’s back, repeating that she couldn’t believe Candy hadn’t shared this with them before.

  “Candy,” I said, “are you up to answering a few questions about these guys?”

  She nodded. “Sure. It actually feels pretty good getting it out.”

  “Okay—easy ones first. What did this man call himself?”

  “Bobby.”

  I straightened slightly, caught off guard, and repeated inanely, “Bobby?”

  “Well,” she amended, “he started out with something I didn’t understand—something Chinese or whatever—and then when I couldn’t get it, he said, ‘Just call me Bobby.’ And he introduced his friends the same way, as Frankie and Tommy, I think. I’m not positive about that.”

  “Do you think you could describe either of the other two, including things like scars, tattoos, unusual eye color, anything like that?”

  She hesitated and finally shook her head. “I was pretty far gone when I met them, and all four of us left almost right after. Plus they ended up in the back seat.” She grimaced apologetically. “I’m sorry, Joe, all I can say for sure is that they were Oriental and didn’t have any beards or mustaches.”

  “They never said if they were Vietnamese or Chinese or something else?”

  “No.”

  “That’s all right. Did they say where they were from? Or what they did for a living? Places they’d been recently? Any kind of chitchat you can recall.”

  “Bobby did all the talking, I remember. The other two just laughed or said stuff in Chinese or whatever. He said they traveled around a lot, but when I asked what they did, he just said they were traveling businessmen.” Her face became suddenly animated, and she leaned forward. “That’s how the gun came out. Bobby was talking about business, and how he was going to make a lot of money soon. I was getting scared and pretty drunk, so I don’t remember exactly how it all fit together, but there was a definite connection—the gun was going to make him a lot of money.”

  I couldn’t suppress a pleased smile. Just like Henry Lam, Chu Nam An seemed to be playing a bigger role in death than the one that had cost him his life. We still had one missing player in Benny Travers’s death, and if Chu was him—and had been paid for his services—that made it murder for hire, which was a federal crime, and yet another tidbit I could use to interest the FBI.

  “Okay. Can you remember exactly where you were when Bobby did his target practice? Did he hit anything?”

  She broke into a smile. “That’s easy. After they threw me out, I remember actually laughing about it. He’d shot at the broad side of a barn.”

  “Did he hit it?”

  “He couldn’t miss—that was the joke. We were parked right next to it.”

  · · ·

  The next morning, I steadied the ladder as J.P. Tyler carved away at a post in the dimness of an old broken-backed barn on the outskirts of Rutland. Sandy Rawlings watched from the side, along with the quizzical owner of the property.

  Following Candy’s directions the night before, I’d driven Sandy out to the barn to confirm her story and had found that Chu Nam An had done much better than hit the “broad side of a barn.” Clearly visible in my headlights, we’d found a tight, ragged cluster of five bullet holes puncturing the old boards.

  J.P. pocketed the chisel he’d been using and began descending the ladder. “Aside from the fact that it made for a hell of a lot of digging, you couldn’t have asked for a better target.” He paused halfway down and pointed to the opposite wall, where the group of bullet holes sparkled with the morning sun behind them. “Firs
t those boards slowed the bullets down, and then that beam was so rotten, it was like hitting cotton wool.”

  He continued down and, at the bottom rung, held out his hand. Two slugs were nestled in his palm. “Almost perfect condition. The other three rounds missed the beam and went out the other side.”

  “Can you tell what they’re from?” I asked, sure I already knew.

  “A Glock—no two ways about it.”

  19

  WALTER FRAZIER'S VOICE WAS FILLED with mock incredulity. “I guess this proves how crazy they are at headquarters.”

  “You’re kidding,” I burst out, tightening my grip on the phone. “They bit?”

  “All the way to the sinker. ’Course, matching the Rutland bullet to the one from Travers’s body and faxing the news to DC was a nice piece of work. They loved it, and to be honest, losing one of your own men had a big impact.”

  I didn’t miss the irony of Dennis’s newfound stature in death. “So what’s next? A background check from the U.S. Marshals?”

  “That’s pretty much done. I asked them to get it started after you and Dan left my office. A little unorthodox, but I thought it would help you hit the ground running.”

  “Jesus, Walt, I’m really grateful. I know this only worked because you pushed it.”

  He laughed at the other end. “Don’t kid yourself. They’ll be dancing in the streets the day I retire. Anyhow, I thought you’d like to know. I’m generating the appropriate paperwork now, but you better call Dan and find out how their office is going to coordinate things as lead agency. Keep that in mind, by the way—if the state police don’t like you for some reason, either now or down the line, they’re higher in the pecking order than you are, and I’ll have to listen to them. So be nice.”

  “Does that mean you’re running the task force personally?” I asked, reading into his choice of words.

  He laughed again. “You think I’d risk putting one of my fresh young agents with you? Forget it—I have some loyalty to the flag.”

  I thanked him again and hung up, finally feeling the white-hot anger born of Dennis’s death beginning to cool—if only a little. There were no guarantees this task force would end in success, but at least a failure now wouldn’t be for lack of trying. That realization alone bore an element of peace.

  The Vermont State Police are headquartered on Route 2, between Montpelier and Burlington, in the village of Waterbury, about a mile from Exit 10 off Interstate 89. The most memorable detail about its location, however, is not that it’s part of one of the ugliest, antiquated state-office-building complexes I’ve ever seen, but that it shares a driveway with the state mental hospital—a geographical coincidence that has forced the VSP to put up with more than their fair share of bad jokes.

  Dan Flynn came down to the locked reception area to escort me up to his miniature empire on the second floor—two rooms crammed with computers and filing cabinets, manned by Flynn and a gnomish, silent man named William Shirtsleeve—a statewide phenomenon known to everyone as “Digger.”

  Digger was nearing retirement, after spending all but the last three years of his adult life as a patrolman. For decades, he’d driven the roads of Vermont, moving among the regional barracks as part of his organization’s standard rotation, but never moving up the ranks, never aspiring to, or even accepting, a single desk job.

  Unmarried, rarely socializing, William Shirtsleeve had lived to do one thing—be a street cop. Wherever he was stationed, he spent every hour he could away from the barracks, visiting people at their homes, dropping in on businesses—legitimate and otherwise—and visiting kids in schools, taking a special interest in the ones who showed the potential of becoming future clients.

  Without taking notes, or making a display of his intentions, Shirtsleeve slowly began to accumulate what keyboard operators now call data. He began linking names to families to places to events to organizations to trends, constantly soaking up knowledge, until he became a walking encyclopedia of Vermont’s less-than-genteel society. For this quiet prowess he was eventually nicknamed Digger, and relied upon by colleagues from around the state to come up with the answers they couldn’t discover on their own.

  When Dan Flynn was given permission to set up VCIN, he had only one man in mind to assist him—the one man he was told would turn him down cold. But Dan had asked anyway, and Digger had said yes without hesitation or explanation. For the past three years, as taciturn as ever, he’d plied his computers with the same dogged zeal he’d once applied to the communities he’d patrolled. Dan’s own personal theory was that, knowing his retirement was near, Digger had felt the need to deposit his hard-won knowledge someplace useful, and that VCIN had appeared as if by prophecy.

  Like some ancient elephant imparting wisdom to later generations, Digger was describing the world as he knew it to the memory chips of Dan Flynn’s electronic files.

  Knowing all this, however, never helped me in dealing with the man himself, who now—as in the past—responded to my greeting by keeping his eyes firmly glued to the monitor’s screen, and muttering, “Uh-huh.”

  Dan, the exact opposite in all ways, laughed, slapped me on the back, and steered me through to his inner office, a seven-by-nine-foot aggravated closet entirely decorated in Boston Bruins paraphernalia, from stuffed bears to pennants to magnetic hockey pucks to bumper stickers taped to the window.

  “Quite the character, huh?” he stated, as always not expecting a response. “Don’t know what I’d do without him. Three years into this project, and half our information is still inside his head.”

  He settled in front of a battered metal desk shoved up under the room’s one window and motioned to a chair wedged in between two tall filing cabinets. His face became suddenly serious. “I’m real sorry about Dennis. And I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the funeral—boss said he couldn’t spare me. How’s everyone taking it?”

  I sat on the edge of my seat, leaning forward to avoid the feeling of being swallowed whole by my two looming metal neighbors. “Not very well. The worst part is, Dennis’s death was the one push we needed when it came to getting the go-ahead from the board of selectmen. Billy Manierre made a pitch to the board like a born-again evangelist—I’ve never seen him so passionate—and Tony weighed in from the hospital with a letter not only saying that I had his blessing, but forecasting the end of the world as they knew it if they didn’t go along. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Lucky they did. A lot of people would’ve had egg on their faces otherwise.”

  I sensed something beyond a colorful generalization in this. “You too?”

  His seriousness yielded to a smile. “Not me. I’m the knight in shining armor here, helping out a beleaguered colleague. You’re the one making my bosses feel queasy—hotdog local cop, hell-bent on becoming a federal officer so he can get revenge.”

  “And involving the VSP in his schemes?” I finished for him.

  He raised his eyebrows sympathetically. “You think they’re wrong to be concerned? The death of a colleague can cut pretty deep.”

  I conceded his point. “No. I’m amazed they went along with it.”

  He leaned back, his expression amused. “Right—the green and the gold, the stuffy Vermont State Police, the you-guys/us-guys of law enforcement. Surprised you, didn’t we? I won’t deny we deserved some of that in the old days, but times are changing.” He suddenly leaped to his feet and headed for the door. “And as further proof of it, I’m going to introduce you to your partner.”

  He was gone. I staggered to my feet, hitting a shoulder on one of the cabinets, and swung out after him, catching up as he strode quickly across the hallway to a closed door marked Conference.

  He paused there theatrically, and then threw the door open to let me in. Standing in the room, studying a wall map through gold-rimmed glasses, was a tall, sandy-haired, alarmingly skinny man in his mid-thirties. He turned as I entered and gave me a wide, crooked smile. “Hey, Joe—long time.”

  I laug
hed and crossed over to shake his hand, the sense of relief like a tonic. “Lester Spinney. I don’t believe it.”

  From the time Dan Flynn had first indicated an interest in joining forces, the question in my mind had always been who they’d team me up with. I’d expressed my concern to Flynn, of course, but he’d reasonably answered that it wasn’t his shot to call. Seeing Spinney, however, convinced me that if not Flynn, then someone in the state police had made sure personality conflicts were not going to be blamed if this task force fell apart.

  Spinney and I had first met years ago, when I’d been temporarily assigned to the Essex County State’s Attorney’s office as a special investigator. Ron Potter, the SA, was facing a tough murder case, and had pushed a little hard to make sure his investigator was fully included in what was a state police case.

  Despite the implied lack of trust, no blood had been spilled. With only a couple of exceptions, the state cops had made room for me, and relations had been civil enough. But even the most cooperative among them had taken their gauge of me before fully opening up—except for Lester Spinney. Whether because of his naturally trusting nature or a personality that just happened to perfectly dovetail with mine, Spinney and I had connected from the moment we’d met—a compatibility that, through a bruising, emotionally charged investigation, had only grown. His independence, sense of humor, and spontaneity had formed the perfect link between me and a state organization that in those days had not been famous for any one of those three traits, at least not outside their own ranks.

  But inevitably, that’s where it had ended. I’d returned to Brattleboro, and he’d continued working for their newly formed Major Crimes Squad—a mobile homicide unit of several specialists who traveled all over the state whenever they were called upon. We had exchanged phone calls a couple of times, he’d dropped by my office once or twice when he’d been in the area, and that had been it. We’d lost touch. The pleasure I felt at seeing him here, therefore, ran deeper than even I would have suspected.

  The three of us sat around the small conference table in the middle of the room and caught up, trading war stories and information about mutual acquaintances, with Dan using his own specialized knowledge to fill in the blanks Spinney and I could not. Just as Digger kept Flynn updated on the criminal elements, so the nature of Flynn’s job dictated that he know the whereabouts and activities of every trooper within the organization.