River of Glass (23 page)

“Right across from . . .”

I watched him put it together. “That’s right. He hadn’t come out in a couple of days, so I went up to check on him, and when I knocked on the door I smelled it.”

“Smelled . . . oh, my God. Oh, my God.” He sank back in his chair, color seeping from his face. “Tell me it was a heart attack.”

“Gunshot.” At his dismayed expression, I added, “It wasn’t your fault. Whoever did it, it was someone he knew. Someone he let in. Can you think of anybody like that?”

“He never got visitors. Never.” The shock on his face gave way to indignation. “If I’d known you were here about Mr. Savitch, I wouldn’t have let you in.”

“Of course you wouldn’t. Why do you think I didn’t tell you?”

“I can’t believe this.” He blew out a long breath, then yanked open a desk drawer and scooped in the empty cake box, the Hot Fries, and the Tabasco sauce. I left him brushing crumbs from his desk and went out to the pickup to fill Khanh in, then called Billy and said it all again.

“Me and Tommy might go ahead and bug out,” he said. “It ain’t like we saw anything.”

“Go ahead. I’ll explain about the crap in front of the back door, how we knew he hadn’t gone out that way. And thanks, Billy.”

When I shut off the phone and looked up, Khanh had gone pale.

“What is it?” I said.

“This man all we have. Now . . .” Her eyes glistened. “Nobody left take us Tuyet.”

“Whoever killed Savitch knows where she is. We just have to find them. Nothing’s changed, except they’re spooked, and that could be a good thing. Maybe it’ll make them careless.”

“Maybe make them kill her.”

“We can’t think about that. Picking her up in Vietnam, offering her a ticket here, like Frank said, that sounds like trafficking, and if it is, it’s just business to them. They’ll keep her alive as long as she has value to them.”

She looked up at Savitch’s window. “We make trouble. What happen we make more trouble than Tuyet worth?”

I couldn’t answer that. We sat in silence, waiting for the sirens. Then I got out of the truck and went to meet them.

F
IRST CAME
the emergency vehicles, then the police cars, then the coroner’s van. Malone squealed to the curb in a sporty little red car and pushed her way through the crowd until she stood nose to chin with me. “What the hell did you do?”

“I didn’t do it, Malone. I called it in. I told you something was wrong.”

“And I told you to call me.”

“You told me to call you when I had something. Well, now I have something.”

She blew out an exasperated breath. “I’m going up to look at the scene. When I come back, you’re going to spill your guts to me. Is that clear?”

“Crystal.”

“Am I going to find pick marks on the locks?”

“Probably,” I said. “It depends how good you are.”

There were four steps in front, and she took them two at a time. I went back to the truck to wait and found Ashleigh Arneau leaning against the front bumper of the Silverado. No entourage, not even a cameraman. Khanh was standing beside her, and Ash was handing Khanh a linen business card with gold lettering.

“You don’t need that.” I plucked it out of Khanh’s hand and walked around to the driver’s side, fishing my keys out of my pocket.

Khanh reached for the card.

“No.” I crumpled it into a ball and tossed it into the bed of the truck.

Her eyes slitted. “How you know I not need?”

“Years of experience.” To Ashleigh, I said, “What are you doing here? Don’t you have a story to butcher?”

Ashleigh pushed herself away from the bumper and said, “Are you going to stay mad at me forever?”

“At least.”

“I don’t blame you for being upset. I took advantage of you.”

“You have an infinite capacity for understatement.”

“I know it was wrong. Sometimes I start thinking about us, the good times, you know, and I can’t believe I let things get so out of hand.”

“Nice speech, Ash. Must mean you want something.”

Her cheeks pinked. “There’s a story here, maybe a big one, and you know what it is. The dead woman in your dumpster, the murder here tonight. Is this related to the Executioner? And why is Frank Campanella on the Executioner’s list? Is he dirty?”

“Frank Campanella is the most honest cop—the most honest man—you’re ever going to meet. Leave Frank the hell out of this.”

“He’s on the list for a reason.”

I blew out a frustrated breath. “Where’s your shadow?”

“My shadow?”

“Cute blonde. She got the break on the Executioner story.”

Her lip curled. “Portia. She’s a speed bump, that’s all, barely a blip on the radar. But if there’s anything you can tell me . . . Jared, I really need this.”

“Stay away from Frank,” I said, and climbed into the truck.

Ashleigh’s jaw tightened, but the smile held. “You’ve got the number.”

Khanh stood on her tiptoes and stretched her arm over the side of the truck bed until her fingertips brushed the crumpled card. She rolled it toward herself and curled it into her palm.

“Don’t use that,” I said, as she clambered into the passenger seat. “Or I swear I’ll-”

“What? Not find Tuyet? You not find her anyway.”

The words hung between us for a moment. There was no echo in the cab of the truck, but the sound seemed to reverberate all the same. A hundred responses swirled through my mind, a hundred chances to say the wrong thing. I clenched my teeth until my jaws ached.

She lowered her head. “Not mean that,” she whispered. “I very grateful your help.”

“That’s the trouble with words,” I said. “You can’t unsay them.”

“I not-”

I held up a hand, cutting her off. “Just stop,” I said. “Before we both say things we don’t mean.”

But what I meant was,
before we both say things we mean but shouldn’t say.

This time, the silence was uncomfortable. The air felt thick and heavy, and I was glad when Malone came down forty minutes later and made a beeline for my truck. I got a couple of paper clips out of the glove compartment, straightened them out, then told Khanh to stay and climbed out to meet Malone, who stopped, crossed her arms, and said, “Okay. Tell me what happened.”

“We’d been staking this place out since Monday. Yesterday, we started thinking something might be up. Today when Savitch still hadn’t come out, I called you.”

“And I told you he was probably out getting laid. Christ, what a nightmare.” She rubbed at her temples. “Go on.”

“When he still hadn’t come out by nine, I went up and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so I put an ear up to the door and caught a whiff of decomp.”

“You should have called right then.”

“I figured you’d say it was just a dead rat in the walls or something.”

A muscle in her jaw pulsed. “You’ve had a hard-on for Savitch since before we knew who he was. How do I know you didn’t kill him?”

“Because you have a brain. The guy could have held the Alamo with the firepower he had in there. He would never have let me get behind him.”

“God.” She ran her hands through her hair. “We pick up this guy on your say-so, and no sooner do we let him go than somebody offs him. We might have gotten this guy killed, McKean.”

“We didn’t get him killed. He got himself killed when he started dealing with killers. That’s the problem with being a villain. Your partners are all bad guys.”

She wrinkled her nose. “You homicide guys . . . you don’t let anything get to you, do you? What did you do when you smelled the decomp?”

“I thought again about calling you, decided I didn’t have enough to go on. So I picked the lock instead.” I showed her the paper clips. Misdirection, but not an outright lie. “You can see it would take awhile.”

“It didn’t occur to you to ask the security guard to let you in?”

“No, actually it didn’t.”

“You picked the lock. Then what?”

“I saw a guy on the couch. Confirmed it was Savitch and that he was dead. I did a quick pass through the apartment to make sure there were no more victims and that the killer wasn’t still there.”

“And then . . .”

“I went across the hall and gave Mrs. Wentworth some coffee and a piece of carrot cake.”

Her mouth dropped open. “Dead guy on the couch, and you did what?”

“He wasn’t exactly going anywhere.”

“When did you finally decide to call it in?”

“Right after the carrot cake.”

“Jesus.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out an evidence bag with a couple of buckskin-colored hairs in it. Each was about two inches long. “Same length and color as yours. Found it in the bedroom.”

“I just told you. I cleared the apartment.”

“And then you delivered carrot cake. I swear, I’ll put you away for obstruction. Breaking and entering. Maybe worse, if I find out you’re lying to me.”

“Courtroom evidence, Malone. As a wise woman once said, call me when you’ve got some.”

29

“S
he like you,” Khanh said, when I got back into the truck. “But not much.”

“She loves me like a brother.” I grinned. “She just hasn’t figured it out yet.”

Still wired from finding Savitch, I turned on the radio and punched through the channels until I found a local talk station. The good news was, the Executioner had racked up no more victims. The bad news was, they still hadn’t caught him. No one mentioned Savitch’s murder. Too soon to have made the airwaves, or maybe just not sexy enough.

It was after midnight when we got home, but the downstairs lights were all on, and Eric’s car was parked beside Jay’s. Khanh beat me up the porch steps and pulled open the door, and the smell of seafood and spices poured out. Jay stepped out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel, and said, “
Cua Rang Me
. It means Tamarind sweet crab. I had a little trouble finding the tamarind, and Eric had to clean the crabs, but somehow we managed.”

Eric gave him an indulgent smile. “He doesn’t have the stomach for mayhem.”

“True.” Jay’s smile seemed genuine, but his eyes looked tired. “Anyway, I hope I got it right.”

Khanh’s mouth broke open in the first genuine smile I’d seen. “Smell very fine. Like home. Thank you.”

It had been days since we’d had more than coffee and takeout in the truck, and suddenly, I realized I was ravenous. We sat around the kitchen table, cracking crab claws and dipping the meat into little bowls of lime juice and chili salt.

“Better than a cheese sandwich,” Eric said, grinning. “Maybe even better than pizza.”

Khanh smiled. “American food no taste. This . . . very good. Almost good like Vietnam.”

“The chef is honored,” Jay said, “having never been to Vietnam.”

When supper was finished and the dishes done, Khanh went upstairs to bed. Jay and Eric exchanged meaningful looks, and Eric retreated to the living room. Jay said to me, “There’s something I need you to see.”

I picked up the Papillon pup and followed Jay to his room, where he tapped something into his computer. A website came up: Chinese dragons and cherry blossoms on a red background. It asked for a password, and he typed one in. A second later, a welcome page filled the screen.

He turned it toward me, and I skimmed the text.
For discerning men . . . for centuries, Asian women have been renowned for their lovemaking . . . treated with the respect and deference a man deserves . . . sample a variety or enter into a recurring relationship. Ultimate fantasy, ultimate discretion.

He clicked on
Catalog
, and a page of photographs sprang up, all Asian women and girls, each with a number and a veiled description of each woman’s special attributes and the fantasy she supplied. I pointed at a picture of a girl who couldn’t have been more than ten. The tag below her number said,
Available for adoption to LOVING parent
.

“They don’t have names,” Jay said, “in case there’s a special name you like. Then you can call her that and not spoil the fantasy.”

“Where did you find this?”

“I’ve been looking ever since you told me you suspected trafficking, but it took me a long time to find the right one and hack in.”

“Good God. There are more of these?”

“Enough to make you sick. A lot of them are just a slappedtogether catalog of crappy photos. This one’s pretty elaborate—professional photos and layout, a chat room for the members. The fantasy’s a big thing with these guys, and they have these opaque ways of saying things, kind of like a secret code. I’ve found some of these guys on other sites, and from what they say there, I’m starting to figure it out. I haven’t been able to track it back to the source yet.”

“Is this what you’ve been working on every night? I thought it was the Christmas game.”

“I put that on the back burner, but I didn’t want to tell you in case I came up empty.”

“How close are you to finding the source?”

“Hard to say. They’ve diverted through a lot of different servers in different states and countries.”

“I’ll get the web address to Malone. She can get their guys on it too.”

“Of course.” He looked back at the screen and clicked to the next page. “There’s one more thing.”

He scrolled down, clicked on the center photo, turned the screen so I could see.