Blood Passage (12 page)

Hank nodded. “My name’s Donaghue. We spoke on the phone.”

He thought his voice sounded a little high-pitched and reedy. It was like finding a brand-new Maserati parked out front of a tenement building down near the docks and he was uncharacteristically flustered. She was 46 years old. She had wavy shoulder-length blond hair with a few stray threads of grey, a wide face with prominent cheekbones and a high forehead, blue eyes and impeccable white teeth that showed briefly between full lips as she forced a smile in acknowledgement. She picked up the telephone with a long-fingered, elegant hand and pressed a button.

“
Mrs. Delahunty? My appointment’s here. Thanks.” She cradled the phone and stood up as a large African-American woman in a brightly colored print dress entered the reception area and came around behind the counter.

“
I appreciate this,” Meredith said. “It won’t take long.”

“
That’s all right, hon, do what you have to do.” Mrs. Delahunty settled down and looked up at Hank.

“
Thank you,” Hank said, trying out his most charming smile.

Mrs. Delahunty blinked back at him without expression.

“
This way.” Meredith Collier indicated a doorway on the left.

The room was small, cluttered with equipment and dominated in the center by a brown vinyl-covered padded examination table with a u shaped cushion at one end. Hank had never been inside a chiropractor’s office before and he imagined that patients were required to lie face down on the padded table with their head wedged into the u. He looked for straps to hold a person in place while their bones were being twisted out of joint, but saw none. The whole thing made him feel very uncomfortable. He sat down in a chair next to a tiny cluttered desk and looked at a calendar on the wall featuring a picture of an erupting volcano. He took out his notebook and opened it on his knee. Karen sat on a little stool with wheels that presumably was used by Dr. Delahunty when he wasn’t required to be on his feet for extra leverage. Meredith Collier leaned back against a green filing cabinet, folded her arms and crossed her ankles. Hank’s pulse jumped again and he looked at Karen.

She rolled her eyes at him. She looked at Meredith, decided that she didn’t like being below the eye level of the person she was interviewing, and stood up, sliding the little stool back out of the way with her foot.

“
Thanks for taking the time to see us, Ms. Collier,” she began. “We’ll try not to take very long.”

“
What’s this all about?” She looked at Hank. “You said on the phone you wanted to ask me questions about my late son.”

“
That’s right,” Karen said. “We have a couple of questions about your son’s activities before his death.”

“
Why? I mean, why now? Has something happened? Has new information come to light?”

“
We’ll get to that in a moment,” Karen said. “We understand you met with a student from Memphis named Josh Duncan, is that correct?”

“
Duncan?” Meredith frowned. “Yes, that’s right.”

“
When was that, Ms. Collier?”

“
This Saturday just gone by.”

“
What did you talk to him about?”

“
He explained the research he was doing, something related to reincarnation. He wanted to know how often I visited with my late husband’s cousin Grace and her family, if I’d spent much time with their little boy, Taylor.”

“
And you said….”

“
That I never see them. I’ve never seen the boy.” She glanced at Hank. “I don’t have anything at all to do with my late husband’s family. The last time I saw Grace was at Stephen’s funeral and that was for ten seconds while she expressed her condolences. The boy was at a babysitter’s, so I didn’t see him then. I was never very close to anyone in Stephen’s family, and once he was gone there was nothing there. I sold the house and let all the former connections drop.”

Hank tore his eyes from a large colorful illustration of the autonomic nervous system on the wall behind Meredith. “Do you ever go by the name Merry?”

“
Only with family and very close friends.”

When I was Martin you didn’t like my mama because her name was Merry and she had blue eyes. And I had green eyes.

Hank looked into those blue eyes now and tried to smile. “What else did you and Josh talk about?”

“
He asked me if I’d be willing to meet with the child. He said the child seemed to be recalling memories associated with Martin. There was something about him saying his name was Martin, and this Josh wanted me to meet with Taylor and see whether it would spark any other memories.”

“
What was your reaction to his request?”

“
I refused.” She spread her hand flat on her thigh and arched it so that she could look at her nails. “I found the whole thing rather absurd and unpleasant. Frankly, I’m surprised that Michael Chan would go along with it.” She frowned at Hank. “Why are you interested in what I may or may not have said to this student?”

“
He was assaulted in Chinatown on Monday,” Karen said. “Someone else didn’t like him poking around your son’s murder. You talk to anyone about Duncan’s visit afterwards? Maybe pass the word along that he was trying to stir things up?”

Hank watched Meredith look at Karen quizzically, as though not understanding the reason for her aggressive tone, before a different set of emotions passed across her face that Hank could see in the softening of her eyes, the parting of her lips and the gradual disappearance of the little frown lines across her forehead.

“
My circle of friends is very small, Detective, and I don’t discuss the past with them. No, I didn’t talk to anyone about his visit. I thought it would be better to try to forget about it. I’m very sorry he was assaulted. Was he badly hurt?”

“
Concussion,” Karen said. “Some abrasions and contusions. He was kicked around by someone with cowboy boots.”

Meredith winced. “That’s awful.”

“
Was your son very close to his cousin, Peter Mah?” Hank asked.

Meredith sighed. “He liked to spend time with him, yes. For a while I tried to discourage it, but I really didn’t have much say in what Martin did or didn’t do.”

“
You’re aware of Mah’s Triad connections?” Karen asked.

Meredith nodded. “Stephen did his best to keep a distance between our family and his sister Mary. She was the oldest of the three children and when she married Jerome Mah it apparently created quite a controversy among the Lius. Stephen’s younger sister Anna also put some distance between herself and the rest of the family after she married Warren Wong and had Grace. Everyone understood that Jerome Mah was powerfully connected and no one really wanted to have anything to do with that. And it was evident very early that Peter was heading down a road that was not very desirable. The stories began circulating when he was twelve or thirteen and got steadily worse as he grew older. We did everything we could, Stephen and I, to keep Martin away from it all.”

“
But it didn’t work out that way,” Karen said.

Meredith looked down at her shoes. “Martin was a typical teenager. He went through a rebellious stage where he wanted to experience things on his own terms rather than those of his parents. In high school he became very interested in his Chinese heritage. It was difficult for him, you understand,” she glanced up at Hank and then looked away, “because he was only half Chinese. It upset him that his eyes were green, his hair was a little wavy, and his mother was Caucasian. He threw himself in the opposite direction and began to associate with Peter because of the traditional leanings of the Mah family. He wanted to learn everything he could about being Chinese.”

“
Including Triad business?” Karen asked.

Meredith shook her head. “No, I’m sure it never went that far. Certainly not the drugs and gangs and all that.” She looked at Hank again. “There was never anything like that in Martin, not even after he started attending college at State. He was a boyish, good-tempered, kind and generous young man. Even though we argued and fought at times, there was never any meanness or hardness in him, never any sneakiness or lying or any of the other things that a parent recognizes in a child going bad. I know he was…” she paused for a moment to collect herself, “I know he was found with packets of heroin and that the police believe he was trying to sell drugs in the wrong neighborhood, but that’s just not possible. He wasn’t that kind of person.”

“
You’d be surprised the kind of person who ends up selling drugs,” Karen said.

“
No,” Meredith shook her head. “You don’t understand. He had a thing about drugs. He was against them. Prescription drugs, hard drugs, designer drugs, hash, ecstasy, you name it. All the stuff that swirls about our kids out there, he felt that it was wrong to get involved with them. He even refused to take pain relievers when he had a headache. He was very careful about what he ate or drank. No alcohol, no drugs, no nothing. Tea, rice, fish, vegetables, bottled water. He was very, very particular.”

“
So why would somebody kill him?” Karen asked. “Why would somebody shoot him and plant heroin on him to make it look like a botched drug sale?”

Meredith’s eyes grew moist. “Don’t you think I’ve asked myself the same question every night for the past four years? Don’t you think I’ve gone over and over in my mind everything that he said or did before it happened? Searching for a clue, a hint of what might have caused it?” She brushed at her eyes and drew a deep breath, pulling herself together. “I’ll tell you one thing: it had something to do with Peter Mah.”

Hank picked up a box of tissues on the desk beside him and held it out to her. “Why do you say that, Ms. Collier?”

“
Thank you.” She took a tissue from the box and patted her eyes lightly, then balled it up in her fist. “He spent a lot of time with Peter in the months before it happened. He’d graduated from State the year before and his part time job at Dicam had become full time and permanent.”

“
Dicam,” Karen repeated.

“
Yes, Dicam International, or whatever they’re called.”

“
What did he do there?”

“
Computer programming. Martin was a genius with computers, he loved working with them. He earned a B.Sc. in Computer Science at State and while he was a student he worked part time at Dicam in their IT division. When he graduated they hired him on full time. Martin was thrilled.” She rolled her eyes. “It was another tie to Peter, of course, since he’d helped Martin get in there to begin with.”

“
Oh?”

Meredith shrugged. “Well, the company’s owned by the Mahs, of course.”

Hank and Karen exchanged looks. Hank knew she hated it when someone knew something she was also supposed to know and didn’t. He clasped his hands between his knees and leaned forward.

“
You were saying he spent a lot of time with Peter before his death.”

“
That’s right, Lieutenant Donaghue.”

He bit his tongue just before telling her that she should call him Hank. Hank is fine, he was going to say. Instead, he said: “What sort of things did they do together?”

“
Martin spent a lot of time just hanging around with him, like a cousins thing. Family’s extremely important to Peter and he’d make time for Martin because they were cousins. They played pool in a billiards place downtown and Martin became addicted to the Chinese gambling games, pai gow in particular. He met Peter at a place called the Golden Dragon quite a lot. I mentioned that to Josh Duncan, actually. And also the restaurant, the Bright Spot, which is Peter’s headquarters or whatever.” She looked at Hank. “Martin told his father everything he did. He never hid anything; he was always very forthright with Stephen. He didn’t tell me these things because I was becoming rather … marginalized in his life by this time, but he kept his father up to date. I think he was trying to appeal to his father to relax some of his restrictions against the Mahs, to come closer to them for the sake of family tradition.”

“
And what about his activities the last day or two?” Hank asked.

“
Before he was murdered,” she finished, as though it were important to her to say the words rather than tiptoe around them. “The day he was murdered I didn’t see him. He had his own apartment, I guess you know that, and there were stretches of time when I didn’t see him or speak to him. But the night before he was murdered he stopped by the house to see Stephen. He and his father watched a baseball game on television and talked for a while. I sat in the next room and read, because this is what Martin preferred me to do, but I could hear their conversation.”

“
What did they talk about?” Hank asked.

“
Martin talked about his job. He was very proud of it. He liked working at Dicam, the people were very nice to him and he liked what he was doing. They were apparently doing a major overhaul of their computer systems and Martin was very much involved in the programming end of it. He was also getting a chance to help design the systems architecture and he was excited about that.” Meredith smiled. “I don’t really know what that means, because I don’t know much about computers, but it was very important to Martin.”

“
Anything else they talked about that might be relevant?”

“
Yes. He was upset about one of his friends.”

“
Oh?”

“
Yes, I heard him say to his father he thought this friend was in trouble and he didn’t know what to do about it. He was asking his father for advice.”