River of Glass Read online

  The cap and glasses made it hard to tell if it was the same guy, but the age and build were right, and the mouth and jawline looked the same. I sent Sun’s profile picture to my phone and laptop, then printed it out and put it in the folder with Tuyet’s photo and Eric’s drawing of Savitch.

  A quick call to Beatrice gave me Sun’s tag number, along with the make and model of his car. Then I called Malone and read off the information Jay had given me about the website.

  When I told her about the connection Khanh had made to Sun, she said, “I don’t know. It’s thin. Kelly means church, but that doesn’t mean if I’m looking for a Kelly, I pick up all the Churches too.”

  “I know it’s thin. I’m just calling because I promised to keep you posted.”

  “You know what you’re asking me to do? What if Lipschitz means sun in Yiddish? Do I pick up all the Lipschitzes too?”

  “Was there a Lipschitz on the plane?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then why are we talking about him? This guy Sun is in the import business. Gives him a legitimate reason to go back and forth to Asia.”

  “Every guy on that plane had a reason to be in Asia. Most of them do business there. That’s why they were on the plane.”

  “You’re not exactly making me chomp at the bit to keep you in the loop.”

  “I don’t want you in the loop. I especially don’t want you in the loop with hunches and intuition.”

  “You told me you wanted everything I found.”

  “Do you know what things are like around here? Everybody who’s not on that fucking list is protecting the guys who are on the fucking list or hunting down the guy who wrote it.”

  “And everybody else can go screw themselves?”

  “He’s not just targeting our guys, McKean. He’s killing their families. Wives. Kids. Everybody. What would you do?”

  “Exactly what you’re doing. But that’s why you should work with me on this trafficking thing.”

  “Work with you.”

  “You guys are spread thin. I can throw everything I have at it. I have sources you can’t get to. You have resources I can’t access. Quid pro quo.”

  “Quid pro quo.” She gave a sharp little laugh. “Who said that?”

  “Hannibal Lecter,” I said. “But don’t let that influence you.”

  WHILE WE waited for Malone to think it over, Khanh and I went back and pushed through the doors of Hands of Mercy. We could have gone straight to Sun Imports, but Hands of Mercy was closer. Besides, I would have liked a stronger connection to Savitch than a bad photograph and a hunch.

  The lobby was empty, no one behind Claire Bellamy’s desk. I left Khanh in the waiting area and wandered around the corner, where I found Talbot on his office phone. He held up a finger: Just a minute.

  I stepped back into the hall, and a few minutes later, he came out and shook my hand. “Sorry for the delay. Fund-raising is a never-ending job. Sometimes I feel like Sisyphus, pushing the eternal stone. Any luck finding the girl?”

  “Not yet, but we have a new lead.” I held up the folder. “Any chance we could talk to Marlee again?”

  “Sure. You can speak with her in here.” He gestured down toward the conference room where we’d met him before.

  While he went upstairs to get Marlee, I went back for Khanh, who sat in one of the stiff plastic chairs, reading a booklet from the rack beside Claire’s desk. Trafficking in America: The Brutal Truth.

  “You sure you want to read that?” I said.

  She looked up, eyes wet. “No. But I read anyway. Make me strong for Tuyet.”

  “You’re plenty strong already.” I took the booklet from her, put it back on the rack. “Some things you don’t need to think about.”

  “Think about already,” she said, and picked it up again. “Nothing so bad I not think about already.”

  MARLEE CAME into the conference room alone, wearing a wary expression and an oversized Tweety Bird T-shirt over denim cutoffs. She slid into the chair across from Khanh and me and said, “Mr. Talbot said you want to see me.”

  “We have a picture I’d like you to look at. See if you saw this man when you were with Helix.”

  “Like a john?”

  “Or someone Helix did business with. Maybe a partner.”

  “He don’t believe in partners. Says you can’t trust ’em.”

  “He’s right about that,” I said. Karlo Savitch had turned his back on a partner and been rewarded with a bullet to the head. “But could you take a look anyway?”

  I opened the folder to the picture of Sun and handed it to her.

  She looked at the photo. Drew in a long breath and touched her index finger to her lower lip. “No. No, I’ve never seen him.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She slapped the folder shut and slid it across the table at me. “I told you, I’ve never seen him. You got any more guys to show me?”

  “No.”

  “Then I can’t help you.”

  Khanh turned her head away, covered her eyes with her hand.

  I stopped back by Talbot’s office, where he sat behind his computer, hard at work again.

  “Any luck?” he said.

  “She didn’t know him.” I held up the folder. “Can I leave this with you? It’s a picture of the guy who brought Tuyet to America. Maybe you could post it with the others?”

  “Of course.” He stood up and held out his hand for the folder. “I’ll leave it for Claire to post.”

  He walked us out, and as we passed Claire’s desk, he laid the folder in the center of the desk. “So she’ll be sure to see it,” he said. “Let us know if there’s anything else we can do.”

  33

  Imperial Sun Imports was in a Brentwood strip mall near Interstate-65 and Old Hickory Boulevard, an area with an eclectic blend of high-and lowbrow-businesses and restaurants. Sun Imports exemplified this by selling expensive Asian furniture and accessories, along with an assortment of cheap toys, spices, and souvenirs.

  His car, a pale green Cadillac with vanity plates that said SUN, was parked in front, at the edge of the lot nearest the road. According to the website, Thursday hours were ten to seven, so if he worked the full shift, he should be there for at least four more hours.

  I parked a few spaces away from his car and pulled my Fast Trak Pro GPS tracker out of my equipment bag. A sweet little device with a ninety-day battery and forty-pound magnets for serious holding power. Foot traffic was light, and when the coast was clear, I curled the device into my palm, climbed out of the truck, and sauntered past Sun’s car, pausing just long enough to attach the tracker inside his rear wheel well.

  Back in the Silverado, I pinged the Fast Trak from my cell phone and got a strong signal in response. A few minutes later, we were out the other side of the lot, and fifteen minutes after that, I pulled onto his tree-lined street. Between my database and Google Earth, I’d gleaned that Sun lived alone in a two-story Tudor mansion with an eight-foot privacy fence and a kidneyshaped pool in the backyard.

  I parked a few doors down and on the other side of the street. Checked to see if anyone was watching. For once, the weather was in our favor, the damp chill keeping the neighbors in the house.

  “Nice house,” Khanh said, wryly. “Big money in Asia import.”

  “I guess it depends on what you’re importing.”

  “You think Tuyet inside?” Her left hand moved across her lap toward the door handle. “Tuyet inside, I go with you.”

  “If you’re with me, who’s going to warn me if he comes home?”

  “Store close seven P.M.”

  “And if he gets a stomach ache and decides to come home early?”

  “Why we not go in, he come home, we grab him?” Khanh asked. “You make tell where take Tuyet.”

  “Because that’s called kidnapping, and we tend to avoid it, unless we want to go to prison.”

  “Break in house, go prison too.”

  “A guy has to draw the line so
mewhere.”

  I LEFT her with my laptop, the Fast Trak’s satellite map on the screen. Sun’s position was a red X on the map. “He starts to move, you buzz me on my cell.”

  She nodded.

  “He’s probably got a security system, so I’ll only have a few minutes before the cops get here. He’ll know somebody’s been inside, but that’s okay. He’s been comfortable a long time. We shake him up, maybe he’ll jump. Lead us to Tuyet.”

  “You not think Tuyet here.”

  “If it were me, I’d have another place. Someplace that would be hard to connect to me. If it’s a big operation, that’s definitely how they’d do it, but if it’s only him and Karlo . . . they could have the women in a crawl space or a cell of some kind in the basement.”

  “Be careful.” She touched the back of my hand lightly with her fingertips. “Be lucky.”

  I loped across Sun’s lawn and let myself into the backyard. He had sliding glass doors in the back, easy to pick, and a sticker that named the security company he used. It was a good system, hard to disarm. I could get in, but after that . . . it was a different story.

  I took a deep breath. Rolled my shoulders to release the tension. Less than a minute later, I was in. I moved fast, checked the basement, attic, closets, opened each door to see if there was a prisoner inside. Remembering a pair of killers who kept their captives in a cabinet under the bed, I gave a quick glance under each bed and tapped the floor checking for hollow spaces.

  On some level I noticed the high-end Asian artwork, the quality furniture, the books on Eastern culture, but there was no sign of Tuyet, and by the time I heard the sirens, I was out.

  ON SATURDAY morning, a few patches of blue broke through the clouds. To the east was the promise of sunshine. To the west, the sky was a mass of roiling gray.

  Sun still hadn’t jumped.

  He’d come home, gone to work, come home again. Grabbed a few meals at nearby restaurants. Nothing out of the ordinary, no movement at all since dinner Friday night. Khanh and I had gotten a motel room nearby, and I’d set up my laptop so we could take turns keeping an eye on the screen. My watch ended, and I nudged Khanh, who lay fully clothed on the bed closest to the window. She yawned and stretched, pressed her fist into the small of her back, then padded to the window, blinking the sleep away.

  Her skin looked strained and gray in the diffused light.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “Too much wait.”

  “I know.”

  “You say make jump. He lead us Tuyet. Maybe he wrong guy.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Her chin quivered, and she fingered the jade monkey at her throat. “Maybe he sell her, we never find. Maybe he kill her already.”

  “Let’s hang tight for a while longer. If he still doesn’t lead us to her, I’ll go talk to him. Stir the pot.”

  “What mean stir the pot?”

  “It means change things up, make him uncomfortable. Make some trouble for him so he has no choice but to react.”

  “Stir pot,” she said, and nodded. “Hope we stir pot soon.”

  34

  Sunday and Monday were more of the same. Then, on Monday afternoon, my cell phone buzzed. The ID window said Ash. My thumb hovered over the Cancel button, but curiosity got the better of me, and I punched Talk instead.

  Before I’d gotten out a greeting, she interrupted. “You’ve got to get down here.”

  “Get down where?”

  “The girl who found the body in your dumpster. She had a scar like a double spiral, right?”

  “More insider information?”

  “Let that go, already, would you? The important part is that her pimp? D’Angelo What’s-his-name? He just got blown to kingdom come.”

  “Whoa, wait a minute, hold on there. Who got blown where?”

  “Just get down here, now. You know where it is?”

  “I do. But why are you telling me this?”

  “Call it a gesture of good faith.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  I killed two of those minutes telling Khanh about the explosion. She took a step back and said, “I stay here. Watch Sun. In case he jump.”

  “And if he does, what will you do? No, you’re coming with me.”

  She crossed her left arm over her stump and jutted her chin. “I stay here.”

  “Think about it, Khanh. You don’t have a car. If he did go somewhere, you couldn’t follow.”

  “Why this matter? This explosion?”

  “It’s connected somehow. Just like Savitch. Why kill him if he wasn’t involved? Somebody was afraid Helix—or one of his women—would talk. Which means at least one of them knows something.”

  She bent her head and put her hand over her face. “We go, maybe miss Sun. We stay, miss something else. Either way, miss something.”

  “We lose Sun, we’ll pick him up with the tracker,” I said. “We miss this, we miss it.”

  THE SMOKE guided me in, a dirty gray haze that hung in the air and reflected the flashing lights of emergency vehicles jamming the street. I parked the Silverado at the end of the block and Khanh and I wound our way through sidewalks crowded with gawkers. The air smelled foul and chemical, an unholy blend of charred wood, plastic, hair, and human flesh. An acrid smell like charcoal and burned beef liver, with an overlay of sulfur. It filled the nostrils and seeped into the skin, a smell so thick and greasy you could taste it. My eyes watered and my throat burned, and Khanh retched and covered her nose and mouth with her hand.

  Ashleigh stood just outside the police line, mic in hand, her back to the smoldering ruin. A few feet away, the cameraman trained the camera on her, while the blonde reporter, Ashleigh’s blip on the radar, watched with hunger in her eyes.

  “Over to you, Rob,” Ashleigh said, and flipped off her mic. She shouldered past the cameraman and came toward me. “They were cooking meth, and it went up like a volcano.”

  “Helix wasn’t cooking meth.”

  “No, he was, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  “And I’m telling you, I was in that house, and there was no meth lab there.”

  She glanced behind her, where Portia Ross was cocking her head to listen, then took my right arm and moved farther away. “This is bigger than a dead hooker in a dumpster. Jared, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know yet. Not completely.”

  “But you know something.”

  “I know I gotta talk to Malone.”

  “They aren’t going to let you in there.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I dialed Malone’s cell, and after a few rings, she picked up. “Damn it, McKean. I’m pretty busy here.”

  “I just talked to this guy, Helix, a few days ago. Let me in, maybe I can shed some light.”

  “You don’t want to see this. It’s awful.”

  “I’ve seen awful before.”

  There was a silence while she thought about it. Then, “Hold on. I’ll come and get you. Just you.”

  THE HOUSE had been reduced to rubble, ash, and a few charred beams.

  I breathed in through my mouth and said, “Did they get out?”

  “We recovered four bodies inside, two adult females and an adult male upstairs and another female in the basement. Sent one survivor to the burn unit. She didn’t even make it to the hospital.”

  “Got a name?”

  “No, but she had a lotus flower tattoo on her stomach.”

  “Ah, God. Marlee.”

  “What is it?”

  “I talked to her at Hands of Mercy a couple of days ago.”

  “What about?”

  “She was one of Helix’s women. I showed her a picture of Harold Sun. She said she didn’t know him.” I thought back to the way she’d averted her gaze and pushed the photo back across the table at me. “But I think she was lying.”

  “Why would she come back here?”

  “Maybe to warn Helix we were getting close? Or maybe she thought s
he could blackmail one or both of them. She said Helix didn’t believe in having partners, but she might have lied about that too.”

  She took a pack of cigarettes from her jacket pocket and tapped one out.

  “Jesus, there’s not enough smoke in the air?”

  “My little puff isn’t going to make a difference. Here, give me a light.” She handed me her lighter, and I lit the cigarette for her. We’d done this dance before, at her first murder scene.

  She took a long drag and held it, then blew the smoke out her nose. “You said you were going to shed some light.”

  “I am, but I want to ask you a question first.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How come you’re such an asshole when other people are around, but almost human when I get you alone with a couple of dead bodies?”

  She gave a funny little laugh and said, “You got me. It’s the bodies. Makes me feel all warm and fluffy inside.”

  “I think you’re not as tough and angry as you act.”

  “You’re wrong. I’m tougher and angrier.” She tipped back her head and blew a perfect smoke ring. “I know guys like you, McKean. Hell, I’ve dated guys like you.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “You saying I’m your type?”

  “Not even close. But now it’s your turn. Enlighten me.”

  “You still thinking they were cooking meth in there?”

  “That’s what it looks like. At first we thought it was the Executioner, but there was no note.”

  “But this wasn’t a meth lab.”

  I brought her up to date, and she said, “What, you have X-ray vision? We found the chemical residue and what was left of the gear in the basement. They were probably cooking it up there.”

  “I don’t think so. The house smelled bad, but not meth bad. The girl on the couch had track marks on her arms, but nobody had meth mouth or bugs under the skin. And Marlee said Helix didn’t let his ladies use meth. Said it made them ugly.”

  “Which it does.”

  “The timing’s too coincidental. This has to be connected to Sun.”

  “If you’re right, I don’t like where this is going. You finger Savitch, and they kill him. You connect Sun with Helix, and they kill Helix too.”