Perfect Justice (18 page)

Mike pointed toward the north end of the house. “You take that end; I’ll take this end.”

Ben started on the outside perimeter and slowly moved inward. He was glad he bought some gloves; these charred embers were still hot. He pulled out some tattered clothes and a few bits of plastic that might have once been records or tools or someone’s favorite toy. How awful to have your home consumed by fire, he thought. To have everything you hold most dear go up in smoke.

“I don’t really know what I’m looking for,” Ben admitted. “You’re the expert, Mike. Clue me in.”

“Well, the first item on an arson investigator’s wish list is evidence of a criminal design. Proof that the fire was not an accident.”

“Are we looking for liquids … solids … ?”

“Both. Or neither. A liquid inflammatory agent is probably most likely here. They’re cheap and easy to come by. Alcohol. Kerosene. Ether. Gasoline.”

“What would a solid inflammatory agent be?”

“Well, there are dozens, but one I’ve seen in good supply around this town is coal dust. Mix it with air and ignite it and that’ll start a fire in nothing flat. Some grains will do the job, too.”

“What about chemicals?”

“Harder to come by, but not impossible, even in Silver Springs.”

“ASP probably keeps a stockpile in their ammunition dump.”

“Probably so. Sodium and potassium are both common chemicals, and both ignite upon contact with water. ASP could claim they keep them for, oh, excavation purposes, and then use them to make a heck of a good bomb.”

“Any news on that blood sample you sent in for testing?”

“I Fed Ex’d it to Tulsa and asked the lab to give it Priority One treatment. Even so, it’ll be several days before we get the results.”

“Okay.” Ben paused. “You’re a real friend in need, Mike. I appreciate your help.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“This is way beyond the call of friendship—”

“When I said, don’t mention it, I meant, don’t mention it!”

“Okay, okay.” Ben resumed his search. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to suggest you might have a sensitive side.”

“I don’t. By the way, did I tell you I saw your sister last week?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yeah. Julia and I had a long talk. Well, longer than a minute, anyway.”

“For you two, that’s an eternity.”

“She has a baby now. By her second husband.”

“So I hear.”

“But she’s divorcing him. The husband, I mean.”

“Seems to be a habit with Julia.”

“Yeah. I told her you were on vacation. She was glad you were getting away for a while.”

“That’s nice.”

“Then I told her you went camping. And she just started laughing hysterically.”

Ben concentrated on his examination of the debris. “Julia always did have an odd sense of humor.”

“Yeah. She was real nice to me, though.”

“Well, hot dog. Maybe you two will patch it up yet.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid. I don’t give a flip about her anymore.”

“Uh-huh. That’s why you get all moony-eyed and morose every time her name comes up. Even after she divorced you.”

“You should talk. You’ve been all screwed up about Ellen for years! That’s—” He stopped himself in midsentence.

A deadly silence descended upon them.

“Hey, I’m sorry, Ben. I shouldn’t have brought that up—”

“Just forget it,” Ben said, not looking at him.

“Right. Sorry.”

Ben didn’t say anything for a long time.

Half an hour later Ben shouted, “Hey, I think I found something!”

Mike ran over to examine Ben’s discovery. It was a broken glass Coke bottle, blackened and charred, but still recognizable.

Mike took the bottle shard and held it up to the light.

“Is that what started the fire?” Ben asked. “Or just leftovers from the Truongs’ lunch?”

“Dollars to doughnuts, this bottle delivered a liquid inflammatory agent.” He held the bottle to his eye and peered inside. “I can’t believe you found it so soon.”

“It’s a gift,” Ben said modestly. “You should treat me with more respect.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.” He handed the bottle back to Ben. “Notice the charring on the inside. If the fire had started from a pipe, or any other external agent, the outside of the bottle would be blackened, but not the interior. That tells me the fire started right in there. It was probably filled with gasoline. A Molotov cocktail. It’s easy enough to make. Now we look for the wick or fuse, if it still exists. Probably an oily rag, or perhaps wadded paper. If we can find that, we’ll have a case of arson.”

Ben resumed the search.

The combination of the morning sun and the heat rising from the charred ruins made the search increasingly unpleasant. Time after time Ben wiped sweat off his brow and out of his eyes.

After a while he lost track of the time. Providence appeared to be balancing the scales. Since he had found the bottle almost immediately, it was going to take him forever to find the fuse. The black soot rubbed off on his clothes and face; soon he was covered.

Ben began to wonder if this was even possible. He couldn’t identify most of the debris he sorted through. He could be holding the fuse in his hand and never know it.

“What if the fuse was made of paper? Wouldn’t it have been consumed in the fire?”

“Possibly,” Mike answered. “Even then, though, we should be able to find—”

Midsentence, Mike’s voice simply disappeared. There was no interruption. He just wasn’t talking anymore, as if the air had suddenly been sucked out of his throat.

“Mike?”

Ben glanced back over his shoulder. Mike was still there, but his face was pale. “What’s wrong? Did you find the fuse?”

“I found—” Mike pressed the back of his hand against his lips. “Not the fuse,” he whispered. “A body.”

“Oh—God.
No.
” Ben was torn between wanting to ask and not wanting to know. “A … body?”

Mike nodded. He looked as if he might be sick at any moment. “What’s left of it. Skeleton, mostly.”

Ben eased to his feet. So they didn’t get everyone out after all. What a hideous way to die. “A man? Woman?”

Ben was astonished to see tears spring from Mike’s eyes. He shook his head slowly back and forth.

“A baby.”

B
ELINDA WAS INTRODUCING JONES
to the computer setup in the Hatewatch office. “Now, I think this gizmo is the disk drive. …”

Jones waved her away. “Thanks, I can take it from here.” He booted up the computer and accessed the communications program stored on the hard drive. “I don’t suppose you know what your communications protocol is?”

“Well … actually, John handles most of the computer work.”

“No sweat. I’ll work it out.” He tapped a few more keys, then pulled up a blue screen with
PROCOMM
in big red letters. “Here we go.”

“I should warn you,” Belinda said. “We’ve tried to get documents from ASP before in litigation discovery. They claim they lost almost everything in a fire. They claim an electromagnetic discharge erased all their computer disks. To make a long story short, they never have anything you want.”

Jones noted. “So we won’t waste time asking them.”

“Maybe I’m not making myself clear. If they won’t produce the documents during a lawsuit, when a judge is breathing down their necks, I don’t think you’re going to find them in a computer database.”

“How much do you think it cost Dunagan to move all these men out here and set up that camp?” Jones said abruptly.

“I don’t know. Twenty, maybe thirty thousand dollars.”

“You think Dunagan has that much loot at his personal disposal?”

“I’d be very much surprised.”

“Then he had to take out a loan. And bank records can be accessed.”

“What good will that do you?”

“The loan records will tell me how much money they got, and who the sureties were. I can use that to trace credit records, for ASP and Dunagan and any other principals. Keep following those leads, and I’ll soon have a financial trail that will tell me who ASP is, how much money they have at their disposal, where they spend it, and what they spend it on.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. It’s time-consuming, but it works. And I can tie the financial records to parallel cities in newspaper and magazine databases. When I’m done, I’ll be able to give Ben a reasonably accurate account of every major ASP activity for the last three years.”

“You’re amazing.”

“Well, yes.” Jones punched a few more keys. “I need to know all the names ASP does business under, and all the officers who represent ASP. I’m going to enter a legal database.”

Belinda laid her hand on the terminal. “Oh, sorry. We don’t subscribe. Those pricey legal services aren’t in the Hatewatch budget.”

“They’re not in the Ben Kincaid budget, either. But I know a few tricks.”

“A few—” Belinda watched admiringly as Jones continued to work. “Wait a minute. This doesn’t involve anything illegal, does it?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Well … as an officer of the court, I suppose I should ask if this activity violates the lawyer’s Rules of Professional Conduct.”

Jones hit Enter and brought up the Secretary of State’s records on the Anglo-Saxon Patrol. “Beats me,” he answered. “I’m just a secretary. Excuse me. Executive assistant.”

C
OLONEL NGUYEN QUIETLY APPROACHED
the chicken house in the center of Coi Than Tien. Although he had been released from the clinic, he was still shaky and short of breath, and his head throbbed as if a dozen men were pounding it with sledgehammers.

Getting too old for these childish heroics, he told himself. And yet, what was he supposed to do? If he had not gone into the home, Maria Truong would be dead.

He had visited Maria on his way out of the clinic. It might have been better if he had let her die.

Lan had stayed at the hospital with him all night, after leaving the children with a friend whose home was not harmed by the fire. Lan said little, and she would not permit herself to cry, but her feelings were clearly expressed just the same. She was deeply worried about all the threats, all the danger—and the fact that whenever danger struck, her husband always seemed to be in the middle of it.

Each time the evil came a little closer to him, and as a result, a little closer to his family.

If some harm came to their daughters, Lan’s life would be over. She would never forgive him. He knew that now, with crystal clarity.

That night, as she had watched over him in the hospital, he had suspected for the first time that she realized he knew more about Tommy Vuong’s death than he had admitted. Had she found the papers? No, he checked as soon as he returned to his home—they were still where he had hidden them. Lan was very smart; she had simply figured it out.

And it worried her.

Colonel Nguyen eased through the entry doors and into the storage building where the chickens were kept. Dan Pham was there, with five of his closest followers huddled around him. Usually they held these meetings in the barn, but the barn was now a refugee camp, providing shelter to those the fire had left homeless until other arrangements could be made.

Nguyen couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it didn’t take a genius to determine the topic of conversation. Pham would not be cowed by this latest onslaught. He would never admit that they were outstripped, outmatched. He would retaliate.

Nguyen stole closer to them. The chickens clucked as he passed, but it was a sound they had all long since learned to ignore. From his new vantage point, he managed to overhear a few words. “Parade,” he heard Pham say several times. What could he possibly be referring to? “Surprise,” someone else said, followed by muffled laughter. Then he heard Pham distinctly pronounce the word
attack.

“Have you come to join us, Colonel Nguyen?”

He looked up and saw Pham staring directly at him. There was no point in pretending he was doing anything other than what he obviously was doing.

He walked into their midst and sat between Pham and his followers. “I have not.”

“Is it your assistance you offer? Your experience in battle?”

“I wish to know your plans.”

“I do not think that would be wise.”

“I must know if Coi Than Tien is in danger. Think of the others in our community, Pham. Think of our families.” His eyes narrowed. “Think of your grandmother.”

Pham’s face became rigid. “It grieves me to be unable to assent to any request from a great man such as yourself. But if you will not join us, I believe it is best we keep our plans to ourselves.”

“Your plans will bring great danger down upon us. And our families.”

“You do not speak the words of a great war hero.” Pham laughed derisively. “You sound more like the white meddler who came last night to pry into our affairs.”

Nguyen knew to whom Pham was referring. The white meddler—the lawyer. The one Nguyen had lied to. Or at the very least, had withheld the truth from.

Nguyen knew who the lawyer was, of course. The nimble words of the woman from Hatewatch had not fooled him. Unlike most in Coi Than Tien, the Colonel went into Silver Springs every day, and he usually read the newspaper as well. The white man was the attorney representing Donald Vick, the man accused of killing Tommy Vuong.

The man Colonel Nguyen was almost certain had not committed the crime.

The lawyer was undoubtedly seeking information to help his client, engaged as he was in the noble cause of seeking justice for an innocent man.

And Nguyen had refused to tell him what he knew.

“The young man who visited us last night was right when he said that violence only begets violence. Terrorism is no solution. It only fans the flames of hate.”

“Take your homilies and go,” Pham said bitterly.

“Will you not even hear me out?”

“The time for words has passed. It is time for action!”

“Will you not let your friends speak for themselves? We are in America now. Let us put it to a vote.”

“I speak for my people!” Pham jumped to his feet. “Fine. We’ll put it to a vote then. Who favors including the great Colonel Nguyen in our plans?”