by Dean Koontz
“Yes,” Lee said, but didn’t elaborate. After a pause, with his eyes still hidden by the patterns of reflected color that glimmered in his eyeglasses, he continued: “The larger a government, the more likely it is to be riddled with such covert organizations—some small but some not. We have a very big government, Mr. Grant.”
“Yes, but—”
“Direct and indirect taxes require the average citizen to work from January until the middle of July to pay for that government. Then working men and women begin to labor for themselves.”
“I’ve heard that figure too.”
“When government grows so large, it also grows arrogant.”
Louis Lee did not seem to be a fanatic. No anger or bitterness strained his voice. In fact, although he chose to surround himself with highly ornamented French furniture, he had a calm air of Zen simplicity and a distinctly Asian resignation to the ways of the world. He seemed more of a pragmatist than a crusader.
“Ms. Keene’s enemies, Mr. Grant, are my enemies too.”
“And mine.”
“However, I don’t intend to make a target of myself—as you are doing. Last night, I didn’t express my doubt about their credentials when they presented themselves as FBI agents. That would not have been prudent. I was unhelpful, yes, but cooperatively unhelpful—if you know what I mean.”
Spencer sighed and slumped in his chair.
Leaning forward with his hands on his knees, his intense black eyes becoming visible again as the reflections of the lamp moved off his glasses, Lee said, “You were the man in her house last night.”
Spencer was surprised again. “How do you know anyone was there?”
“They were asking about a man she might have been living with. Your height, weight. What were you doing there, if I may ask?”
“She was late for work. I was worried about her. I went to her place to see if anything was wrong.”
“You work at The Red Door too?”
“No. I was waiting there for her.” That was all he chose to say. The rest was too complicated—and embarrassing. “What can you tell me about Valerie that might help me locate her?”
“Nothing, really.”
“I only want to help her, Mr. Lee.”
“I believe you.”
“Well, sir, then why not cooperate with me? What was on her renter’s application? Previous residence, previous jobs, credit references—anything like that would be helpful.”
The businessman leaned back, moving his small hands from his knees to the arms of his chair. “There was no renter’s application.”
“With as many properties as you have, sir, I’m sure whoever manages them must use applications.”
Louis Lee raised his eyebrows, which was a theatrical expression for such a placid man. “You’ve done some research on me. Very good. Well, in Ms. Keene’s case, there was no application, because she was recommended by someone at The Red Door who’s also a tenant of mine.”
Spencer thought of the beautiful waitress who appeared to be half Vietnamese and half black. “Would that be Rosie?”
“It would.”
“She was friends with Valerie?”
“She is. I met Ms. Keene and approved of her. She impressed me as a reliable person. That’s all I needed to know about her.”
Spencer said, “I’ve got to speak to Rosie.”
“No doubt she’ll be working again this evening.”
“I need to talk to her before this evening. Partly because of this conversation with you, Mr. Lee, I have the distinct feeling that I’m being hunted and that time may be running out.”
“I think that’s an accurate assessment.”
“Then I’ll need her last name, sir, and her address.”
Louis Lee was silent for so long that Spencer grew nervous. Finally: “Mr. Grant, I was born in China. When I was a child, we fled the Communists and emigrated to Hanoi, Vietnam, which was then controlled by the French. We lost everything—but that was better than being among the tens of millions liquidated by Chairman Mao.”
Although Spencer was unsure what the businessman’s personal history might have to do with his own problems, he knew there would be a connection and that it would soon become apparent. Louis Lee was Chinese but not inscrutable. Indeed, he was as direct, in his way, as was any rural New Englander.
“Chinese in Vietnam were oppressed. Life was hard. But the French promised to protect us from the Communists. They failed. When Vietnam was partitioned in nineteen fifty-four, I was still a young boy. Again we fled, to South Vietnam—and lost everything.”
“I see.”
“No. You begin to perceive. But you don’t yet see. Within a year, civil war began. In nineteen fifty-nine, my younger sister was killed in the street by sniper fire. Three years later, one week after John Kennedy promised that the United States would ensure our freedom, my father was killed by a terrorist bomb on a Saigon bus.”
Lee closed his eyes and folded his hands in his lap. He almost seemed to be meditating rather than remembering.
Spencer waited.
“By late April, nineteen seventy-five, when Saigon fell, I was thirty, with four children, my wife Mae. My mother was still alive, and one of my three brothers, two of his children. Ten of us. After six months of terror, my mother, brother, one of my nieces, and one of my sons were dead. I failed to save them. The remaining six of us…we joined thirty-two others in an attempt to escape by sea.”
“Boat people,” Spencer said respectfully, for in his own way he knew what it meant to be cut off from one’s past, adrift and afraid, struggling daily to survive.
Eyes still closed, speaking as serenely as if recounting the details of a walk in the country, Lee said: “In bad weather, pirates tried to board our vessel. Vietcong gunboat. Same as pirates. They would have killed the men, raped and killed the women, stolen our meager possessions. Eighteen of our thirty-eight perished attempting to repel them. One was my son. Ten years old. Shot. I could do nothing. The rest of us were saved because the weather grew so bad, so quickly—the gunboat withdrew to save itself. The storm separated us from the pirates. Two people were washed overboard in high waves. Leaving eighteen. When good weather returned, our boat was damaged, no engine or sails, no radio, far out on the South China Sea.”
Spencer could no longer bear to look at the placid man. But he was incapable of looking away.
“We were adrift six days in fierce heat. No fresh water. Little food. One woman and four children died before we crossed a sea-lane and were rescued by a U.S. Navy ship. One of the children who died of thirst was my daughter. I couldn’t save her. I wasn’t able to save anyone. Of the ten in my family who survived the fall of Saigon, four remained to be pulled from that boat. My wife, my remaining daughter—who was then my only child—one of my nieces. And me.”
“I’m sorry,” Spencer said, and those words were so inadequate that he wished he hadn’t spoken them.
Louis Lee opened his eyes. “Nine other people were rescued from that disintegrating boat, more than twenty years ago. As I did, they took American first names, and today all nine are partners with me in the restaurant, other businesses. I consider them my family also. We’re a nation unto ourselves, Mr. Grant. I am an American because I believe in America’s ideals. I love this country, its people. I do not love its government. I can’t love what I can’t trust, and I will never trust a government again, anywhere. That disturbs you?”
“Yes. It’s understandable. But depressing.”
“As individuals, as families, as neighbors, as members of one community,” Lee said, “people of all races and political views are usually decent, kind, compassionate. But in large corporations or governments, when great power accumulates in their hands, some become monsters even with good intentions. I can’t be loyal to monsters. But I will be loyal to my family, my neighbors, my community.”
“Fair enough, I guess.”
“Rosie, the waitress at The Red Door, was not one of the people o
n that boat with us. Her mother was Vietnamese, however, and her father was an American who died over there, so she is a member of my community.”
Spencer had been so mesmerized by Louis Lee’s story that he had forgotten the request that had triggered those grisly recollections. He wanted to talk to Rosie as soon as possible. He needed her last name and address.
“Rosie must not be any more involved in this than she is now,” Lee said. “She’s told these phony FBI men that she knows little about Ms. Keene, and I don’t want you to drag her deeper into this.”
“I only want to ask her a few questions.”
“If the wrong people saw you with her and identified you as the man at the house last night, they’d think Rosie was more than just a friend at work to Ms. Keene—though that is, in fact, all she was.”
“I’ll be discreet, Mr. Lee.”
“Yes. That is the only choice I’m giving you.”
A door opened softly, and Spencer turned in his armchair to see the napkin folder, his polite escort from the front door of the restaurant, returning to the room. He hadn’t heard the man leave.
“She remembers him. It’s arranged,” the escort told Louis Lee, as he approached Spencer and handed him a piece of notepaper.
“At one o’clock,” Louis Lee said, “Rosie will meet you at that address. It’s not her apartment—in case her place is being watched.”
The swiftness with which a meeting had been arranged, without a word between Lee and the other man, seemed magical to Spencer.
“She will not be followed,” Lee said, getting up from his chair. “Make sure that you are not followed, either.”
Also rising, Spencer said, “Mr. Lee, you and your family…”
“Yes?”
“Impressive.”
Louis Lee bowed slightly from the waist. Then, turning away and walking to his desk, he said, “One more thing, Mr. Grant.”
When Lee opened a desk drawer, Spencer had the crazy feeling that this soft-spoken, mild-looking, professorial gentleman was going to withdraw a silencer-equipped gun and shoot him dead. Paranoia was like an injection of amphetamines administered directly to his heart.
Lee came up with what appeared to be a jade medallion on a gold chain. “I sometimes give one of these to people who seem to need it.”
Half afraid that the two men would hear his heart thundering, Spencer joined Lee at the desk and accepted the gift.
It was two inches in diameter. Carved on one side was the head of a dragon. On the other side was an equally stylized pheasant.
“This looks too expensive to—”
“It’s only soapstone. Pheasants and dragons, Mr. Grant. You need their power. Pheasants and dragons. Prosperity and long life.”
Dangling the medallion from its chain, Spencer said, “A charm?”
“Effective,” Lee said. “Did you see the Quan Yin when you came in the restaurant?”
“Excuse me?”
“The wooden statue, by the front door?”
“Yes, I did. The woman with the gentle face.”
“A spirit resides in her and prevents enemies from crossing my threshold.” Lee was as solemn as when he’d recounted his escape from Vietnam. “She is especially good at barring envious people, and envy is second only to self-pity as the most dangerous of all emotions.”
“After a life like yours, you can believe in this?”
“We must believe in something, Mr. Grant.”
They shook hands.
Carrying the notepaper and the medallion, Spencer followed the escort out of the room.
In the elevator, recalling the brief exchange between the escort and the bald man when they had first entered the reception lounge, Spencer said, “I was scanned for weapons on the way down, wasn’t I?”
The escort seemed amused by the question but didn’t answer.
A minute later, at the front door, Spencer paused to study the Quan Yin. “He really thinks she works, keeps out his enemies?”
“If he thinks so, then she must,” said the escort. “Mr. Lee is a great man.”
Spencer looked at him. “You were in the boat?”
“I was only eight. My mother was the woman who died of thirst the day before we were rescued.”
“He says he saved no one.”
“He saved us all,” the escort said, and he opened the door.
On the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, half blinded by the harsh sunlight, jarred by the noise of the passing traffic and a jet overhead, Spencer felt as if he had awakened suddenly from a dream. Or had just plunged into one.
During the entire time he’d been in the restaurant and the rooms beneath it, no one had looked at his scar.
He turned and gazed through the glass door of the restaurant.
The man whose mother had died of thirst on the South China Sea now stood among the tables again, folding white cloth napkins into fanciful, peaked shapes.
The print lab, where David Davis and a young male assistant were waiting for Roy Miro, was one of four rooms occupied by Fingerprint Analysis. Image-processing computers, high-definition monitors, and more exotic pieces of equipment were provided in generous quantity.
Davis was preparing to develop latent fingerprints on the bathroom window that had been carefully removed from the Santa Monica bungalow. It lay on the marble top of a lab bench—the entire frame, with the glass intact and the corroded brass piano hinge attached.
“This one’s important,” Roy warned as he approached them.
“Of course, yes, every case is important,” Davis said.
“This one’s more important. And urgent.”
Roy disliked Davis, not merely because the man had an annoying name, but because he was exhaustingly enthusiastic. Tall, thin, storklike, with wiry blond hair, David Davis never merely walked anywhere but bustled, scurried, sprinted. Instead of just turning, he always seemed to spin. He never pointed at anything but thrust a finger at it. To Roy Miro, who avoided extremes of appearance and of public behavior, Davis was embarrassingly theatrical.
The assistant—known to Roy only as Wertz—was a pale creature who wore his lab coat as if it were the cassock of a humble novice in a seminary. When he wasn’t rushing off to fetch something for Davis, he orbited his boss with fidgety reverence. He made Roy sick.
“The flashlight gave us nothing,” David Davis said, flamboyantly whirling one hand to indicate a big zero. “Zero! Not even a partial. Crap. A piece of crap—that flashlight! No smooth surface on it. Brushed steel, ribbed steel, checked steel, but no smooth steel.”
“Too bad,” Roy said.
“Too bad?” Davis said, eyes widening as if Roy had responded to news of the Pope’s assassination with a shrug and a chuckle. “It’s as if the damned thing was designed for burglars and thugs—the official Mafia flashlight, for God’s sake.”
Wertz mumbled an affirmative, “For God’s sake.”
“So let’s do the window,” Roy said impatiently.
“Yes, we have big hopes for the window,” Davis said, his head bobbing up and down like that of a parrot listening to reggae music. “Lacquer. Painted with multiple coats of mustard-yellow lacquer to resist the steam from the shower, you see. Smooth.” Davis beamed at the small window that lay on the marble lab bench. “If there’s anything on it, we’ll fume it up.”
“The quicker the better,” Roy stressed.
In one corner of the room, under a ventilation hood, stood an empty ten-gallon fish tank. Wearing surgical gloves, handling the window by the edges, Wertz conveyed it to the tank. A smaller object would have been suspended on wires, with spring-loaded clips. The window was too heavy and cumbersome for that, so Wertz stood it in the tank, at an angle, against one of the glass walls. It just fit.
Davis put three cotton balls in a petri dish and placed the dish in the bottom of the tank. He used a pipette to transfer a few drops of liquid cyanoacrylate methyl ester to the cotton. With a second pipette, he applied a similar quantity of sodium
hydroxide solution.
Immediately, a cloud of cyanoacrylate fumes billowed through the fish tank, up toward the ventilation hood.
Latent prints, left by small amounts of skin oils and sweat and dirt, were generally invisible to the naked eye until developed with one of several substances: powders, iodine, silver nitrate solution, ninhydrin solution—or cyanoacrylate fumes, which often achieved the best results on nonporous materials like glass, metal, plastic, and hard lacquers. The fumes readily condensed into resin on any surface but more heavily on the oils of which latent prints were formed.
The process could take as little as thirty minutes. If they left the window in the tank more than sixty minutes, so much resin might be deposited that print details would be lost. Davis settled on forty minutes and left Wertz to watch over the fuming.
Those were forty cruel minutes for Roy, because David Davis, a techno geek without equal, insisted on demonstrating some new, state-of-the-art lab equipment. With much gesticulating and exclaiming, his eyes as beady and bright as those of a bird, the technician dwelt on every mechanical detail at excruciating length.
By the time Wertz announced that the window was out of the fish tank, Roy was exhausted from being attentive to Davis. Wistfully, he recalled the Bettonfields’ bedroom the night before: holding lovely Penelope’s hand, listening to the Beatles. He’d been so relaxed.
The dead were often better company than the living.
Wertz led them to the photography table, on which lay the bathroom window. A Polaroid CU-5 was fixed to a rack over the table, lens downward, to take closeups of any prints that might be found.
The side of the window that was facing up had been on the inside of the bungalow, and the mystery man must have touched it when he escaped. The outside, of course, had been washed with rain.
Although a black background would have been ideal, the mustard-yellow lacquer should have been sufficiently dark to contrast with a friction-ridge pattern of white cyanoacrylate deposits. A close examination revealed nothing on either the frame or the glass itself.
Wertz switched off the overhead fluorescent panels, leaving the lab dark except for what little daylight leaked around the closed Levolor blinds. His pale face seemed vaguely phosphorescent in the murk, like the flesh of a creature that lived in a deep-sea trench.