River of Glass (24 page)

Tuyet.

30

T
he next morning, I left Khanh at home and drove across Percy Priest dam to Frank’s place on the lake. The water was a muddy umber, swollen and white-capped by wind. From the driveway, I could see Frank’s fishing boat pitch and tug against its tethers. Patrice’s flowers rimmed the yard, Heirloom and English Legend Roses with names like Blushing Bride and Danny Boy and Coronation. White wooden trellises covered in climbing roses flanked the front door.

Frank’s Crown Vic sat in the driveway between Patrice’s faithful Honda Accord and a patrol car with two uniformed officers in front.

I showed the officers my ID, and went to the front door, where I punched the bell with more force than was necessary. Patrice answered the door dressed in baggy jeans and a loose sweatshirt. Her face looked drawn, her complexion sallow. A pale blue bandanna was wrapped around her head, but no wisps of hair curled around her ears or along the nape of her neck. Her eyebrows were gone.

I kissed her on the cheek and smelled shampoo and lavender, and beneath it a slightly sweet, slightly acrid smell that reminded me of nursing homes. I said, “What’s going on? Besides the two guards out front.”

“And two more in the back.” She hugged me a little longer than usual. “He hasn’t told you?”

“You know Frank.”

“Breast cancer.” She stepped out of the hug, gave her scarf a self-conscious pat. “With everything that’s happened lately, he probably didn’t want to worry you. Go talk to him, lovey. He’s downstairs fussing with his trains.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. How long have you known? What’s the . . .?”
What’s the prognosis?,
I wanted to say, but the words stuck in my throat.

“I have an enzyme that makes the cancer more aggressive. But they say I’m doing well.”

“What does that mean, doing well?”

She forced a laugh. “I think it means I’m still above ground. Don’t look so stricken, lovey. I have a long road ahead, that’s all. I have to be able to laugh about it.”

I gave her another squeeze. Then she shooed me down to Frank’s basement, where he stood at his worktable holding a miniature red maple in place while the glue dried.

I pulled a metal folding chair over and said, “You should have told me.”

He hunched a shoulder. “You’ve had a lot on your plate. Besides . . . talking about it . . . it makes it seem real.”

I nodded. That, I understood. “Need me to do anything? Mow your grass? Trim your hedges?”

“We’re doing okay.” He lifted his finger, and the maple held firm. “Get you a beer?”

“Sure.”

He went to the fridge, grabbed a couple of Czech brews, and handed me one. “I’m going crazy here. I thought about what you said. About taking Patrice off the board.”

“You should take both of you off the board. This guy—this Executioner—he’s either very good or very lucky.”

“Maybe both. I’m thinking of sending her to her sister’s in Knoxville for a few weeks. Just until this is all over. But she has chemo on Wednesdays. There are logistics involved.”

My mother had gone through three surgeries and two rounds of chemotherapy and radiation before the cancer beat her. They’d poisoned her, then carved her up a little at a time, and still the disease had eaten her alive.

I said, “What can I do?”

“There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing anybody can do. It’s up to God, and he doesn’t share his plans with me.” He set his beer on the table and took a pine tree from a plastic bin on the floor. “Let’s talk about your missing girl.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. I’m running out of leads.”

I told him about Savitch. He clicked his tongue against his teeth and said, “The problem is, your suspect pool is basically everybody in the world.”

“It’s not everybody in the world. Just the ones who came through Nashville by way of Vietnam in the last few weeks. It shouldn’t be that big a pool.”

“We checked the manifests for a full week on either side of Tuyet’s disappearance, just in case the grandmother got the date wrong. No Mr. Mat, no Mr. Troi, no Mr. Mat Troi. No Mr. Matthew Troy. No Tuyet. But if you widen the net to any flight that might have connected to a flight that might have connected to a flight that originated in Vietnam . . .” He spread his hands in a helpless gesture.

“I’d still like to get my hands on those manifests. Khanh might recognize something.”

“And Malone would kill anybody who gave them to you.”

“Malone has her hands full.” I took a sip of beer. “We could do each other some good.”

He touched the pine tree to a patch of open turf, picked it up and moved it a few inches to the left of an acrylic pond. “Use that silver tongue of yours. Maybe you can convince her.”

The thought of tongues and Malone took my mind in an unwelcome but not unpleasant direction. I banished the image and said, “She’s immune to my charms.”

He laughed. “Go figure.”

“What are you going to do, Frank?” I asked. “About Patrice? About the Executioner?”

He opened his beer. Took a long swig. “Patrice is tough. We’ll get through. As for the Executioner, he has a long list. They’ll catch him before he gets to us.”

“Unless he goes alphabetically. ‘C’ is pretty close to the beginning of the alphabet.”

“I’m ready for him, Mac. Those other guys, they didn’t know he was coming, but now he’s tipped his hand.”

“Why you? What case could you have worked on with all those other people?”

He reached into the box and pulled out a couple of little plastic deer. “There’s not one. We’re thinking maybe it’s one perpetrator, not one case. We’re narrowing those down.”

“They cross precincts. So either some of the cops on the list have moved or whatever he’s pissed about happened before the restructuring. Or you’ve got one issue that carries over.”

“Some of each, maybe. And whatever happened, he thinks it was a miscarriage of justice. Maybe somebody he thought was innocent went to prison.”

“Or maybe somebody got off he thinks shouldn’t have.”

“Scumbags get off every day.” He touched a bead of glue to the deer’s feet and placed them carefully beside the pond. “That would be a long list, for sure.”

“For Justice,” I said. “I knew a guy named Justice once. Billy Justice. He was a sculptor.”

“This guy thinks he’s an artist, the way he poses the bodies.”

“Performance art?”

“Be something if that was it, wouldn’t it? Your friend Billy ever get himself arrested?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Too bad. Wouldn’t that make things a lot easier?” He touched his beer bottle to mine. “To catching the sons of bitches.”

31

O
n the way home, I stopped at Office Depot and picked up a map of Nashville, pushpins, a three-by-five-foot whiteboard, and a set of dry-erase markers. The whiteboard went on one guest-room wall, divided into columns:
time line, Mat Troi, Karlo Savitch, trafficking
. The map went on the other wall, pushpins marking Karlo’s house, the airport, and my office.

Khanh came in while I was working. I handed her the pen. “You write down everything we know about each of these things. Maybe something will come together.”

While she made notes, I went upstairs and printed out the photos of everyone who’d gone into or out of Karlo Savitch’s house since Monday afternoon. Savitch had been killed by someone he trusted enough to let in his apartment. Someone he’d trusted enough to turn his back on. Someone who was probably in one of these photos. I spread them out on my bed and started sorting. When I was finished, I had several possibles and one that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

A man in jeans and a windbreaker, sunglasses, cap. Just like the man Malone had described from the airport security footage. Average build, athletic. Average height. Age could have been anywhere from midtwenties to forty. The hair that fell over his ears was dark, the skin tone golden. The sunglasses obscured the shape of his eyes, but he might have been Amerasian. He’d gone in with the woman who lived in Apartment 421, and their body language said they were intimate. But there was a hesitance in her manner, a curiosity in the way she looked at him, like whatever was between them was still new. Maybe he’d cultivated it to give himself an excuse—an excuse besides Karlo—to be there.

I felt a familiar vibration in my chest.

We were closing in on him.

My fax machine began to hum. Over the next few minutes, it spat out a sheaf of airline manifests—page after page of passenger lists, along with the flights they’d been on. On the cover sheet, Frank’s hasty scrawl read:
Guess I’m the one with the silver tongue.

I texted a thanks and went back into the bedroom, where Khanh stood in front of the poster board marked
Time line
, purple marker in her hand. Below the header, she had scrawled,
Tuyet call from America
.

I said, “Look what I have.”

She turned, and I held up the manifests.

“Let’s see what we can find.”

We pored over them, every incoming flight to Nashville with a connection that had originated in Vietnam. As Frank had said, there was no Tuyet. No Mat Troi and no permutation thereof.

I ran my finger down the column, estimating how many men were on the list. It would take time to investigate them all, but it could be done. What did we have but time?

Khanh’s finger stabbed at the page. A man’s name. Harold Sun.

“Mat troi,” she said, a quaver in her voice. “It mean ‘sun.’ ”

32

T
here were eleven Suns in the Nashville white pages, a few more in the surrounding areas, but only one with the first name Harold. I punched him into background database and found the thirty-two-year-old owner of an Asian import store, Imperial Sun Imports. The company website had a photo of a smiling Sun in a suit. I compared it to the photo I’d taken at Savitch’s—the one of the man in the ball cap and sunglasses.

The cap and glasses made it hard to tell if it was the same guy, but the age and build were right, and the mouth and jawline looked the same. I sent Sun’s profile picture to my phone and laptop, then printed it out and put it in the folder with Tuyet’s photo and Eric’s drawing of Savitch.

A quick call to Beatrice gave me Sun’s tag number, along with the make and model of his car. Then I called Malone and read off the information Jay had given me about the website.

When I told her about the connection Khanh had made to Sun, she said, “I don’t know. It’s thin. Kelly means church, but that doesn’t mean if I’m looking for a Kelly, I pick up all the Churches too.”

“I know it’s thin. I’m just calling because I promised to keep you posted.”

“You know what you’re asking me to do? What if Lipschitz means sun in Yiddish? Do I pick up all the Lipschitzes too?”

“Was there a Lipschitz on the plane?”

“No, but—”

“Then why are we talking about him? This guy Sun is in the import business. Gives him a legitimate reason to go back and forth to Asia.”

“Every guy on that plane had a reason to be in Asia. Most of them do business there. That’s why they were
on
the plane.”

“You’re not exactly making me chomp at the bit to keep you in the loop.”

“I don’t want you in the loop. I especially don’t want you in the loop with hunches and intuition.”

“You told me you wanted everything I found.”

“Do you know what things are like around here? Everybody who’s not on that fucking list is protecting the guys who are on the fucking list or hunting down the guy who wrote it.”

“And everybody else can go screw themselves?”

“He’s not just targeting our guys, McKean. He’s killing their families. Wives. Kids. Everybody. What would you do?”

“Exactly what you’re doing. But that’s why you should work with me on this trafficking thing.”

“Work with you.”

“You guys are spread thin. I can throw everything I have at it. I have sources you can’t get to. You have resources I can’t access. Quid pro quo.”

“Quid pro quo.” She gave a sharp little laugh. “Who said that?”

“Hannibal Lecter,” I said. “But don’t let that influence you.”

W
HILE WE
waited for Malone to think it over, Khanh and I went back and pushed through the doors of Hands of Mercy. We could have gone straight to Sun Imports, but Hands of Mercy was closer. Besides, I would have liked a stronger connection to Savitch than a bad photograph and a hunch.

The lobby was empty, no one behind Claire Bellamy’s desk. I left Khanh in the waiting area and wandered around the corner, where I found Talbot on his office phone. He held up a finger:
Just a minute.

I stepped back into the hall, and a few minutes later, he came out and shook my hand. “Sorry for the delay. Fund-raising is a never-ending job. Sometimes I feel like Sisyphus, pushing the eternal stone. Any luck finding the girl?”

“Not yet, but we have a new lead.” I held up the folder. “Any chance we could talk to Marlee again?”

“Sure. You can speak with her in here.” He gestured down toward the conference room where we’d met him before.

While he went upstairs to get Marlee, I went back for Khanh, who sat in one of the stiff plastic chairs, reading a booklet from the rack beside Claire’s desk.
Trafficking in America: The Brutal Truth
.