River of Glass Read online

  “Big world,” Khanh repeated. She hugged herself with her good arm and whispered, “Too big, sometime.”

  6

  “What now?” Khanh asked. She hauled the duffel bag across the passenger seat and into her lap. It was too big, but she propped it on her thighs and wrapped her arms around it as if it were a child. Her left hand cupped her other elbow, just above the stump.

  I said, “You heard her. They’re looking for your daughter. They have more resources than we have.”

  She glared at me through narrowed eyes. “You give up.”

  “Nobody’s giving up. I’m just saying, this is a homicide investigation. Leave it to the professionals.”

  “These professional,” she said, “how hard you think they look?”

  As hard as they can, I wanted to say, but she was right. Nashville detectives were good, but what did they have? A dead girl they couldn’t identify and a missing foreigner they couldn’t prove was missing. My father’s photograph linked them, but how many links might be in that chain was impossible to tell.

  “This sigh-ko-pat,” Khanh said. “Maybe hurting her right now.” She gave me a pleading look. Big brown eyes like Maria’s, with epicanthal folds like Paul’s. This was not my problem, but I felt my resolve faltering. Something skittered at the edges of my mind. I pushed it down, thought of my father and the Vietnamese family in front of that shack in the rice fields. No. I don’t owe her anything. I don’t owe either of them anything.

  I wasn’t sure if I meant Khanh and her daughter, or if I meant Khanh and my father. The thought made me feel petty, but there it was.

  “Please,” she said, maybe seeing something in my face, some sudden coldness. “I know we nothing you, but for you father . . . for you ancestor . . .”

  “I’m not feeling very chummy with my ancestors right now. You were doing better when you said she might be being tortured somewhere.”

  “That still true. Please. I read you sign. You find lost people. My daughter lost.”

  Another lost teenager. The weight of it was a pressure in my gut, a clamp around my chest. Frank had it right. All those months when I’d been dodging cases more complex than faithless spouses and skip tracing for bill collectors, I’d been running from a deeper question:

  What if I wasn’t good enough?

  For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I gripped the steering wheel, found my voice, and said, “I find people who have credit cards, driver’s licenses. People who leave trails, even if they don’t mean to.”

  “You hear police lady,” she said. “Tuyet grown woman. Maybe go away. Maybe meet man, fall in love.”

  “Maybe she did.” At her baleful expression, I held up a hand and said, “I’m not saying that’s what happened. I’m saying, isn’t it possible?”

  “No. Not possible.”

  I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. With the Murder Squad defunct and the department understaffed, the Cold Case division was Khanh’s best hope of solving the unidentified Asian woman’s murder and finding Tuyet. They were among the best in the country. But it would be a year before the case would be officially cold, and by then it would be too late for Tuyet.

  If it wasn’t already.

  I weighed the options, came up empty. Khanh and her daughter needed help. Good enough or not, I was what they had.

  “I’ll look for her,” I said, finally. “But just until we figure something else out.”

  “We look for her.”

  “I work alone.”

  She stared straight ahead, not frowning, not smiling. “Okay. You work alone. I come with you.”

  I started to tell her it was too dangerous. Whoever had killed the girl in the dumpster wouldn’t hesitate to kill again. And Occam’s Razor said that whoever had killed the girl either had Tuyet or knew the men who did. Then I thought about the wind tree and the long trek into the jungle. I thought about vipers. Bandits. Tigers.

  “Fine,” I said. “But if you get in my way . . .”

  “Not get in way,” she said. A smile flitted across her lips. “Where we start?”

  “We canvass the neighborhood. My building first.”

  This was ground Frank and Harry had already covered, but I wanted to ask my own questions, hear the timbre of voices, watch for physical reactions. Witnesses were sometimes more relaxed and therefore more forthcoming with civilians than with police. And sometimes less, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. The hunger to gossip might make up for my lack of a badge.

  Since it was too early for the Strip-o-Gram ladies, I knocked on the door across the hall. Shawna Reese, said the placard on the door. Counselor for Abused Women. She answered the door, scowled when she saw me, and talked to us in the hall, arms crossed tightly across her chest, one knee jiggling as she talked. She kept regular office hours and hadn’t been there at the time of the murder, she said, then went on at length about the Asian woman’s tragic death and the perfidy of men. She punctuated her speech with hard looks in my direction.

  Pretending not to notice, I thanked her for her time and turned toward the stairs.

  “Wait,” she said, touching Khanh’s elbow with her fingertips. “I hope you find your daughter. If you find her, she’ll need to talk to someone. You know where to find me.” She shot me a final glare, stepped inside, and closed the door.

  “No help,” Khanh said.

  “Onward and upward.” I led her up one level and tapped on the psychedelic poster on the door of the Society for the Legalization of Controlled Substances. No answer. The door was locked, and a faint odor of marijuana hovered in the hall. I knocked again, and finally the chain rattled and a barefoot, bleary-eyed guy in faded jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt opened the door. A haze of cannabis smoke boiled from the room. I coughed and waved the smoke away.

  “Dude,” he said.

  “I’m following up on that murder from last week.”

  His eyes cleared a little. “I thought you weren’t a cop no more.”

  “Private.”

  “Can’t help you, man. We was crashed out in the back when it went down.”

  “How do you know when it went down?”

  “Cops asked where we was between midnight and five a.m., wasn’t too hard to figure. We worked late stuffin’ flyers into envelopes, had some pizza around nine, crashed around eleven. Didn’t hear nothin’ until we woke up around noon the next day. Well, except for the big crash.”

  “Big crash?”

  “Sometime between two and three. Sounded like it came from next door.”

  “Warfield’s office?”

  “Naw, more like outside. But then it got real quiet again and we went back to sleep.”

  “You tell the police about this big crash?”

  “Hell, no, and I ain’t gonna, neither. Too bad about that chick, though.”

  I glanced at Khanh as the door closed. “Yeah, too bad.”

  The last occupied office belonged to Casey Warfield, a nondescript man who shuffled nondescript packages to and from Tokyo, Bangkok and Shanghai. I’d never noticed any postmarks from Vietnam, but then, I hadn’t had reason to look for any. Suddenly he seemed a lot more interesting.

  His door opened as I lifted my hand to knock. His eyes widened, and he stumbled backward a few steps, shielding his body with his briefcase and an oversized presentation folder. Recognition seeped into his eyes, and he lowered the briefcase a few inches.

  “Dear God, you scared the life out of me.” His gaze moved past me to Khanh, lingering on her scars a little longer than was polite. He was a few inches shorter than me, with prematurely thinning hair and a pasty complexion. He tucked the folder under one arm and used his free hand to straighten his tie. “I don’t have time to talk. I’ve already missed one meeting because of you.”

  “Me?”

  “Don’t tell me that dead girl in the dumpster didn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “A little respect.” I nodded toward Khanh. “Next of kin?”

  “No
, but her daughter’s missing. There’s a good chance it’s connected.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?” The folder slipped, and he propped the briefcase against his calf while he adjusted the folder. “But I can’t help you. I already told the police everything.”

  “You do a lot of work in Asia, right?”

  “With, not in. I’ve actually never been out of the country.” He stopped suddenly, eyebrows lifting. “You’re not thinking I had anything to do with—”

  “I’m not thinking anything. Yet.”

  “Look. Finding that . . . seeing her . . . that was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I hurled my lunch all over the alley. It’s burned on my retinas, man.”

  “You’re the one who found the body?”

  “I was just about to leave. To another meeting. And somebody knocked on the door. It was that hot-looking blonde stripper, and she had a trash bag in her hand, you know? And she said she was going out back to put it in the dumpster and would I mind going with her, since she didn’t like going in the alley all by herself. I was running late, but I said okay, because . . . well . . .” He gave an embarrassed laugh.

  “Because she was hot.”

  “Hot and a stripper, you know?”

  “She ever ask you do to anything like that before?”

  “Hell, no. Thought it was my lucky day.”

  “And in the alley, you didn’t see anything else out of place?”

  “You mean, besides the body? Man, I couldn’t see anything but that. I couldn’t get that picture out of my head. While I was puking, the stripper called 911, and then we went inside to wait for the cops and I canceled my meeting. It was an important one too, but what can you do, right?”

  “What about earlier that morning? Or the night before? See anything unusual then?”

  “I come in at nine, leave at five. And no, I didn’t see anything. Do you mind?” He held up his watch. “My client was gracious enough to reschedule, and I can’t afford to be late.”

  I stepped aside, and Khanh moved with me, her presence an angry heat behind me, her breath between my shoulder blades quick and shallow. I said to Casey, “What is it you do, exactly?”

  He locked the door behind him and held up the presentation folder. “Comics. Anime. That sort of thing. I’m a procurer.”

  I wondered if he procured other things, but that was a question for another time. Beside me, Khanh cocked her head and listened to his footsteps clatter down the stairs. “He very big creep,” she said. “Woman die, Tuyet missing, he only care about stupid meeting.”

  “He cared about the stripper,” I said. “For what it’s worth.”

  “Not worth much,” she said. “Not even know her name.”

  We stepped out into the cool, gray morning and made our way up my street and down the next, alternating sides, covering the apartment complex on the corner and the row houses that backed the alley. All dead ends. Not even old Mrs. Corcoran, who lived three doors down and spent her nights watching classic films and peering out the curtains at her neighbors, had seen anything out of the ordinary.

  A little after one, Pat Freeman’s Chrysler pulled into the driveway next door. The driver’s door popped open, and Pat leaned his seat back so he could pass his wheelchair, sans wheels, across his body and onto the driveway. Standing, Pat would have been around six-four, with broad shoulders and a heavily muscled torso, but a bad tackle in his senior year had left him paralyzed from the waist down. Now he made his living freelancing for sports magazines and spent his off-hours kayaking and training for the Paralympics. Like Mrs. Corcoran, he was a night owl.

  By the time Khanh and I got there, he had pulled both wheels out of the back seat. He looked up at us and grinned. “Hey, Cowboy,” he said. “Who’s your friend?”

  I didn’t ask if he needed a hand. I knew he didn’t. Instead, while he reattached the wheels, I said, “Her daughter, Tuyet, is missing. Nineteen years old. Maybe related to the murder last week.”

  He regarded her for a moment, then stuck out his left hand. She clasped it awkwardly with her good hand and gave him a self-conscious smile.

  With the chair assembled and the right brake on, he lifted each leg out from under the steering wheel, then swung himself into the chair. “So you’re tracking down the missing daughter?”

  “Something like that. Any chance you saw anything that night?”

  “Only thing I saw was that little Strip-o-Gram girl. I don’t know when she came in, but she left around two thirty. I know because I heard a crash outside my garage, and when I looked out the window, I saw her hightailing it across the yard. She’d knocked over my garbage can.”

  I turned it over in my head. “She didn’t find the body until that afternoon. So what scared her at two thirty that morning?”

  He paused, hand stretched toward the chair arms in the passenger seat. “She didn’t find the body.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw the news. It was a blonde girl found the body.”

  “Bridget. Right. That’s not who you saw running across your yard?”

  “No. It was the little Mexican. Lupita. You’ve seen her. Petite. Hair like a black silk curtain, ass that won’t quit.” He glanced at Khanh and slid the chair arms into place. “Beg pardon, Ma’am. Talked to her a couple of times, but her English isn’t too good.”

  “You describe her to the police?”

  “I haven’t talked to the police. I was away all weekend, covering a wheelchair basketball tournament. I’m just now getting back.”

  He couldn’t add anything more, so we shot the bull for a few minutes, and then he said, “You guys want to come in for lunch? I make a mean PB and J.”

  “Next time, maybe. I need to confer with my client. And you might want to let the police know about Lupita.”

  He gave me a mock salute. “Will do, Captain.”

  As I walked Khanh back to my building, she poked me in the arm and said, “Client?”

  “You wanted me to tell him you’re my maybe-half-sister from when my dad screwed around on my mom during the war?”

  She shrugged. “Why not? Thing happen sometime. Nobody fault sometime. Get over it.”

  7

  I didn’t answer. My head knew she was right. My father had been a young man in wartime, a long way from home. Lonely, scared, not knowing if the next day would be his last. Who knew what I might have done, in his shoes? But knowing and believing were two different things. I’d spent my life trying to live up to him. Now it seemed like there were some things not worth living up to.

  It didn’t matter, in the long run. Khanh existed. She and Tuyet needed me, or someone like me, and whether or not any of us liked it, I was what they had.

  I nudged Khanh up the porch steps.

  Ina Taylor, owner of Strip-o-Grams, opened the door on my second knock. A cap of white curls framed a sweetly wrinkled face, and a pink sweater draped her bony shoulders, sleeves knotted at the chest. She looked like a kindly piano teacher—until you looked behind her wire-rimmed glasses into eyes as clear and cold as an Arctic winter.

  She gave Khanh a quick, appraising glance, then dismissed her and turned her attention to me.

  “Come in, Mr. McKean. Forgive the simple decor.”

  Simple was an understatement. Hardwood floors. Beige couch and a couple of chairs on one end of the room, an open space with a ballet barre and a stripper’s pole at the other. A crocheted afghan thrown over the back of the couch for a splash of color.

  I got down to business. “Ms. Ina, the girl who reported the body . . .”

  “Bridget.”

  “Tall, blonde, wearing jeans and a tank top when she talked to the police.”

  “All right, Mr. McKean, we’ve established you know who she is. What’s your point?”

  “She told police she found the body.”

  “She did find the body.”

  “She found it in the afternoon. But what about earlier? Say, ar
ound two thirty A.M.?”

  She tilted her head and scanned my face with narrowed eyes. “She was coming back from an appointment, wanted to shower before she went home. She heard something in the alley, like a scuffle. It scared her.”

  “Then later that day, she got Mr. Warfield to go with her to take out the trash, and that’s when she found the body.”

  “So?”

  “How many times you think she’s taken out the garbage around here?”

  She pursed her lips. “A few.”

  “She never asked Warfield for help before.”

  “I told you, she’d heard something out there that scared her.”

  “Or maybe she already had an idea what was in that dumpster because Lupita told her.”

  She sucked in a little gasp of surprise, then caught herself and raised a calculated eyebrow. “Lupita?”

  “She knocked over Pat Freeman’s garbage can. Pat recognized her. And then you staged it so Bridget would have a witness when she found the body later in the afternoon. Why wait so long?”

  She picked at the knotted sleeves of her sweater. I could see her weighing it—how much we knew versus how much we were guessing. Whether it would be more trouble to tell the truth or lie. Finally, she straightened her shoulders and went for truth. “We hoped someone else would find it and save us the aggravation.”

  “But no one did. Look, my—” I stopped, my client hanging on my tongue. “We don’t care about her immigration status. We’re just trying to find a missing girl. If Lupita saw something, she could maybe help us keep the same thing from happening to Khanh’s daughter.”

  Khanh leaned forward, left hand wrapped around the monkey pendant between her breasts. “Please.”

  The doorknob rattled, and Bridget strode in, her blonde hair pulled into two ponytails. She flashed us a smile, then tossed her gym bag into a corner, peeled off her sweatshirt and sweatpants, and began a series of dance stretches, clad only in a sports bra and a g-string.

  For a moment, I lost the power of speech.

  “Perk of sharing office space,” Ms. Ina said. “You’ve been a good neighbor, but that doesn’t mean I’ll sell out my girls for you.”