Flower Girl: A Burton Family Mystery (4 page)

Taking his black coffee in hand, Reddy flashed his new dentally repaired movie star smile. "By the way Matte, thanks for the dental recommendation." 

On the flight to Skeleton Lake Matte did her shrink thing and began a systematic questioning of Reddy's background. I still think this was what Reddy had previously anticipated, knowing that there is a catch to our being here.

I took it all in, learning more about Reddy, and putting it together with the bits and pieces I already knew about him, including details courtesy of the CIA. Information works both ways.

If Reddy is going to protect Rhyly and investigate her shootings, Matte wanted to be damn sure he was suited to the task. Until out recent Skype session I had never said much about Reddy to her other than that he was ex-military and disappeared a lot. Matte guessed that he wasn't the type to reveal much about himself to anyone, but rescuing Shannon, his daughter, seemed like a good icebreaker.

"I think it's fantastic that you were able to locate and repatriate Shannon after so many years. How old was she when you found her?" Matte asked, keeping the tone conversational and trying not to sound like a shrink pumping info out of a patient.

"I see, Shannon has spoken to you after all." Reddy said, adding, "She was twelve and it's been fifteen years since I rescued her from a child bride slavery ring on Cheju-do Island off the southern coast of South Korea," Reddy answered in a matter of fact tone.

"My colleague Sara-Clare O'Callahan has started working on a TV documentary on child slavery, and she's anxious to meet you and get some first-hand details. I have a preliminary video you might find interesting; it's on my laptop. I'll show it to you when we get to the cabin," Matte said. Reddy did not look anxious to be a part of any public production that involved his private business.

Even so, as a professional interviewer, Matte managed to get Reddy talking in a way I had never seen, describing what had happened to my mother and to me in more detail than I had heard before. Still, his tone remained matter of fact, even when he revealed some rather painful details.

"On 2 June 1986," Reddy began, "only twenty-four hours after admitting my wife Anne, the doctors at Parks OB/GYN Clinic in Seoul told me that she was fighting for her life and that her six month fetus had succumbed in the night to malarial complications. Over the years since, I've carried around the images of the wife I had known for less than two years and the daughter I had never seen. I dreamed of them roasting in what Dr. Evel Park, the clinic's owner, said was a fever of over 105 degrees. The doctor said the baby was still-born and that the mother's heart gave out from the fever."

Reddy paused and I thought he wasn't going to continue.

Dr. Matte said, "That must have been a living hell for you ?" It was a rhetorical question. Damn I thought, she's good.

"I lived in this hell from 1986 to 1997. I nearly went berserk with grief for most of that period, and then slowly I worked my way back to purgatory. Someday I'll tell you more about how and why I made my way back. For now let's say I had some help.

Matte nodded, not wanting to interrupt.

"My enlistment in the Marines was up a few weeks after Anne's and my daughter's deaths. I hadn't decided on whether to re-up. Meanwhile, I was flying back stateside with a stop-over at Hickam Air Force Base near Pearl Harbor. Never have thought of Hawaii as stateside. That's when the government approached me and, after contemplating their offer for a few days on the beach while downing a case of San Miguel beers, I signed on as a sniper and weapons instructor for the CIA. In-between training classes, I was assigned other duties."

When Reddy mentioned the date of 2 June, I froze, I think my heart stopped and I ceased hearing the rest of what he said. Instead, my head was flooded with my memories of a dream that has reoccurred every 2 June since I was four years old, the dream of the man in black climbing a mountain to lay flowers at two graves on the mountainside.

As I came out of my fog, Reddy was continuing his story. "My interest in rescuing children from slavery and worse began when a friend of mine from the PI came to me out of desperation. His wife and daughter had been kidnapped from a Christian mission in the jungles of one of the southern islands, and he feared that they were being sent to Macau or Hong Kong. That's how I first got into the child rescue business."

It took a lot of coaxing, but Matte finally got Reddy to tell a bit more about the two years he spent searching for the lost girl and her mother in the brothels of Hong Kong and Macau.

"I spent months at Chung King Mansion in Hong Kong. It's a notorious eight city blocks district in Hong Kong where crimes of all sorts are conducted under the not so watchful eye of local officials," Reddy told us. "I suspect the place will be shut down by the communist government sometime in the near future, but for now it's notorious as the world's center for drugs, especially heroin, prostitution, child slavery, and pirated/ bootlegged/ knock-off products from Pink Floyd albums to thousand dollar Italian leather purses." Reddy waited as if that was all he was prepared to disclose, at least until he got to know how trustworthy we all were. Matte prodded him, but to no avail.

I decided to deflect the situation a bit and started on a slightly different track. I'd take the pressure off Reddy and tell Matte some of our story, mine especially. As I talked, Reddy looked a bit relieved not to be the only one telling Matte about our past.

"For the first few years after Reddy rescued me and enrolled me at the Bush School for Girls in Seattle, I resented his taking me from the only home I had ever known. When he registered me at the school as Shannon Lee Burton, and not as Carrie Lee, I was really belligerent and I told all the girls, ‘My real name is Carrie Lee or if you prefer, Carrie Li.' Even so, I was clearly not Korean.

Frankly, I was finding it easier to talk about my feelings with a third party monitoring the conversation.

“It wasn't until the man-in-black, that's how I referred to Reddy back then, told me about his own years in foster homes that I started to accept the name Shannon Lee Burton. Burton was the family surname of one of Reddy's foster families, and he didn't even know what his real surname was. His story about being an orphan swayed me. I also eventually learned to appreciate his knowledge of the Cheju-do culture and his descriptions of the beauty of my former home. Someday I'll go back there and see my mother's grave."

I risked glancing at Reddy with a look of anticipation. No acknowledgement.

Still staring at him, I said, "I remember during my second year at the Bush School in Seattle, you sent me a package of counterfeit music albums. The Fleetwood's 'Come Softly Darling' was the first American recording I ever heard. My roommate Angie insisted that we go to sleep by that song every night.

"Angie and I were the only orphans at the girls' school. Okay, so technically I wasn't an orphan. Until the man-in-black busted me out, I had been told I was an orphan, so I still felt like one. No one visited us on holidays or picked us up for a family weekend. I remember many a weekend when the two of us were the only girls in the dormitory. The other girls taunted us almost daily: ‘You don't have a father! You don't have a father!' To combat their incessant teasing, we developed a secret language drawing on the Arabic and Chinese we knew.

"For five years, including summers, Angie and I bonded. And, frankly, I didn't miss the man-in-black all that much. However, he occasionally sent a postcard from some exotic place like Macau or Singapore or Hong Kong and he did show up for my graduation from the Bush School. To celebrate, Reddy took Angie and me out to dinner at Ivar's Acres of Clams. What a place!

“Ivar was a Seattle icon, a notorious promoter in the vein of a P.T. Barnum and was eventually called the ‘King of the Seattle Waterfront.' He opened a clams and seafood restaurant on Seattle's Pier 54 where his waterfront promotions included clam eating contests and an octopus-wrestling contest. Some say that the octopus-wrestling event was held next to where a child fell into the water and was pulled under by a giant octopus. They roped off the area and it became an instant tourist attraction, rather macabre I thought, but hell I was only sixteen at the time."

Reddy broke his silence and piped in, "I remember when Angie leaned over the rope railing, daring the octopus to show itself and reach out to grab her with one of its tentacles. She was laughing all the while. She enjoys tempting the fates which reminds me of another teenage girl, who has the same walking on the edges spirit."

"Tell us about her," Matte said, seizing the opportunity to get him to tell us more about his child rescue cases.

Reddy almost grinned at Matte's less than subtle tactics. Then he said, "The story began a few weeks before I liberated Shannon. And, it involves one of those friends that helped bring me back from the depths of purgatory. I met Hamish MacIntosh at Chung King Mansion. He's a short, portly man of Scottish decent, a proud wearer of the Macintosh plaids, kilt and all, barrel chested and a rotund 280 pounds, shaved head, a pencil mustache, and wire-rimmed blue tinted glasses. Only the careful observer would notice his hands. They bore the calluses of a trained martial arts expert. He was an extraordinary fixer, trader, art broker. He was my number one source in my recovery of a kidnapped Philippine girl. You'll meet him some day."

"I would hope so," I replied. "What about the Philippine girl's mother?"

"I suspect that her mother is working as a household servant somewhere in Saudi Arabia," Reddy replied. "A Saudi colleague of Hamish's is investigating that further."

"Anyway, no one knows the dark side of Asia's port cities of Incheon, Busan, Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore better than Hamish. He has all the contacts: port authority officials, dock workers, moneylenders, knockoff importers and manufacturers, art dealers and counterfeiters, drug dealers and drug manufacturers, pimps, casino and brothel owners, and street people. Once, when the U.S. Embassy failed to take an interest, he brokered the recovery of an American merchant marine who was imprisoned for two years in Pusan's notorious prison, simply for being an American in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"I discovered the first clues about a young girl working in a brothel in the Casino Royale Hotel in Portuguese Macau. At the time, there was no system to my search for the wife and child of my friend from Manila. I simply followed a lot of dead-end leads. In the process, though, I stumbled across a fifteen year old Amir-Asian girl in Macau who had been everywhere in Asia since she turned eleven. She had been sold by a Korean doctor who had stolen her after she was ostensibly stillborn as a six-month-old fetus. I told Hamish and that was when he found the name Dr. Evel Park and located Park's OB/GYN Clinic in Seoul. Hamish put a 7/24 surveillance on the Clinic. Eleven months later, Hamish tracked down a rumor of a white slave trade being run out of the Parks' Home for Girls and Women's Clinic on Cheju-do Island.

"The mere mention of Dr. Evel Park and his clinics lit a spark in me. At first, it was a small spark. After eleven years of hell, I was pessimistic about the possibility that the bastard might have faked Shannon's death. However, he was the same doctor who had treated Anne and declared my daughter still-born, if treated is the right word." Reddy's jaw muscles tightened.

"Coincidentally, Hamish has had one of his agents glued to Edvard Grey and more recently his cousin Courtney Blaine Grey every minute during their visits to Seoul. They also tracked both Greys to Cheju-do Island. They went there to discuss their partnership with the Parks' Clinics and their planned expansion to Dubai. However, Edvard and Courtney are addicted to chasing virgins, and this droit du seigneur propensity was observed and photographed by Hamish's agents."

Matte said, "I told Shannon about Edvard Grey's propensity for virgins, it was all over the news. He got in some trouble when he was a graduate student at RVU."

"What had been a rumor about a child slavery operation soon became a reality," Reddy continued. "Hamish's agents managed to break-in to the Park's Seoul Clinic and photograph a series of documents that included death certificates for several mothers and infants. One of these records reads: ‘Father unknown- Mother (North American) died of malaria complications, 5 and ½ month old fetus still-born, 2 June 1986. Attending Physician: Dr. Evel Park, Sr." Reddy hesitated. Matte sat patiently. I fidgeted.

Then he continued. "Hamish had discovered that my daughter's death fit the same pattern as the Philippine girl's case. The clues being that both were declared still-born at Asian clinics owned by the Park family; however, the Philippine girl had survived. Shannon Lee would be twelve years old. I thought, so who the hell did I put in the grave next to Anne's on the side of the volcanic crater on Cheju-do Island? Then it dawned on me like a light shining through the darkness of my purgatory. My daughter might be alive."

When Reddy disclosed this, all I could think of was the image of the man in black trekking up a volcanic mountainside on every second of June, to place flowers at the site of two graves.

"It isn't just a reoccurring dream," I blurted out to Matte. "Now I know why he never showed up for my birthdays. He was at my mother's and my graves on the island of Cheju-do every second of June. 2 June is my birthday and the date of my death as well as my mother's death."

"I'm a shrink, not a fortune teller," Matte smiled.

 Once again, Reddy halted and seemed reluctant to continue. Perhaps this was the point where Reddy's own sense of revenge reached a crescendo, at least I should have recognized his anger. It just wasn't in his make up to reveal personal history to others, even friends. I sensed he had already divulged more than he wanted to and that we had opened up old wounds. However, it wasn't his fault. Dr. Matte was great at this sort of interrogation.