River of Glass (25 page)

“You sure you want to read that?” I said.

She looked up, eyes wet. “No. But I read anyway. Make me strong for Tuyet.”

“You’re plenty strong already.” I took the booklet from her, put it back on the rack. “Some things you don’t need to think about.”

“Think about already,” she said, and picked it up again. “Nothing so bad I not think about already.”

M
ARLEE CAME
into the conference room alone, wearing a wary expression and an oversized Tweety Bird T-shirt over denim cutoffs. She slid into the chair across from Khanh and me and said, “Mr. Talbot said you want to see me.”

“We have a picture I’d like you to look at. See if you saw this man when you were with Helix.”

“Like a john?”

“Or someone Helix did business with. Maybe a partner.”

“He don’t believe in partners. Says you can’t trust ’em.”

“He’s right about that,” I said. Karlo Savitch had turned his back on a partner and been rewarded with a bullet to the head. “But could you take a look anyway?”

I opened the folder to the picture of Sun and handed it to her.

She looked at the photo. Drew in a long breath and touched her index finger to her lower lip. “No. No, I’ve never seen him.”

“You’re sure?”

She slapped the folder shut and slid it across the table at me. “I told you, I’ve never seen him. You got any more guys to show me?”

“No.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

Khanh turned her head away, covered her eyes with her hand.

I stopped back by Talbot’s office, where he sat behind his computer, hard at work again.

“Any luck?” he said.

“She didn’t know him.” I held up the folder. “Can I leave this with you? It’s a picture of the guy who brought Tuyet to America. Maybe you could post it with the others?”

“Of course.” He stood up and held out his hand for the folder. “I’ll leave it for Claire to post.”

He walked us out, and as we passed Claire’s desk, he laid the folder in the center of the desk. “So she’ll be sure to see it,” he said. “Let us know if there’s anything else we can do.”

33

I
mperial Sun Imports was in a Brentwood strip mall near Interstate-65 and Old Hickory Boulevard, an area with an eclectic blend of high-and lowbrow-businesses and restaurants. Sun Imports exemplified this by selling expensive Asian furniture and accessories, along with an assortment of cheap toys, spices, and souvenirs.

His car, a pale green Cadillac with vanity plates that said SUN, was parked in front, at the edge of the lot nearest the road. According to the website, Thursday hours were ten to seven, so if he worked the full shift, he should be there for at least four more hours.

I parked a few spaces away from his car and pulled my Fast Trak Pro GPS tracker out of my equipment bag. A sweet little device with a ninety-day battery and forty-pound magnets for serious holding power. Foot traffic was light, and when the coast was clear, I curled the device into my palm, climbed out of the truck, and sauntered past Sun’s car, pausing just long enough to attach the tracker inside his rear wheel well.

Back in the Silverado, I pinged the Fast Trak from my cell phone and got a strong signal in response. A few minutes later, we were out the other side of the lot, and fifteen minutes after that, I pulled onto his tree-lined street. Between my database and Google Earth, I’d gleaned that Sun lived alone in a two-story Tudor mansion with an eight-foot privacy fence and a kidneyshaped pool in the backyard.

I parked a few doors down and on the other side of the street. Checked to see if anyone was watching. For once, the weather was in our favor, the damp chill keeping the neighbors in the house.

“Nice house,” Khanh said, wryly. “Big money in Asia import.”

“I guess it depends on what you’re importing.”

“You think Tuyet inside?” Her left hand moved across her lap toward the door handle. “Tuyet inside, I go with you.”

“If you’re with me, who’s going to warn me if he comes home?”

“Store close seven
P.M
.”

“And if he gets a stomach ache and decides to come home early?”

“Why we not go in, he come home, we grab him?” Khanh asked. “You make tell where take Tuyet.”

“Because that’s called kidnapping, and we tend to avoid it, unless we want to go to prison.”

“Break in house, go prison too.”

“A guy has to draw the line somewhere.”

I
LEFT
her with my laptop, the Fast Trak’s satellite map on the screen. Sun’s position was a red X on the map. “He starts to move, you buzz me on my cell.”

She nodded.

“He’s probably got a security system, so I’ll only have a few minutes before the cops get here. He’ll know somebody’s been inside, but that’s okay. He’s been comfortable a long time. We shake him up, maybe he’ll jump. Lead us to Tuyet.”

“You not think Tuyet here.”

“If it were me, I’d have another place. Someplace that would be hard to connect to me. If it’s a big operation, that’s definitely how they’d do it, but if it’s only him and Karlo . . . they could have the women in a crawl space or a cell of some kind in the basement.”

“Be careful.” She touched the back of my hand lightly with her fingertips. “Be lucky.”

I loped across Sun’s lawn and let myself into the backyard. He had sliding glass doors in the back, easy to pick, and a sticker that named the security company he used. It was a good system, hard to disarm. I could get in, but after that . . . it was a different story.

I took a deep breath. Rolled my shoulders to release the tension. Less than a minute later, I was in. I moved fast, checked the basement, attic, closets, opened each door to see if there was a prisoner inside. Remembering a pair of killers who kept their captives in a cabinet under the bed, I gave a quick glance under each bed and tapped the floor checking for hollow spaces.

On some level I noticed the high-end Asian artwork, the quality furniture, the books on Eastern culture, but there was no sign of Tuyet, and by the time I heard the sirens, I was out.

O
N
S
ATURDAY
morning, a few patches of blue broke through the clouds. To the east was the promise of sunshine. To the west, the sky was a mass of roiling gray.

Sun still hadn’t jumped.

He’d come home, gone to work, come home again. Grabbed a few meals at nearby restaurants. Nothing out of the ordinary, no movement at all since dinner Friday night. Khanh and I had gotten a motel room nearby, and I’d set up my laptop so we could take turns keeping an eye on the screen. My watch ended, and I nudged Khanh, who lay fully clothed on the bed closest to the window. She yawned and stretched, pressed her fist into the small of her back, then padded to the window, blinking the sleep away.

Her skin looked strained and gray in the diffused light.

“You okay?” I said.

“Too much wait.”

“I know.”

“You say make jump. He lead us Tuyet. Maybe he wrong guy.”

“I don’t think so.”

Her chin quivered, and she fingered the jade monkey at her throat. “Maybe he sell her, we never find. Maybe he kill her already.”

“Let’s hang tight for a while longer. If he still doesn’t lead us to her, I’ll go talk to him. Stir the pot.”

“What mean stir the pot?”

“It means change things up, make him uncomfortable. Make some trouble for him so he has no choice but to react.”

“Stir pot,” she said, and nodded. “Hope we stir pot soon.”

34

S
unday and Monday were more of the same. Then, on Monday afternoon, my cell phone buzzed. The ID window said
Ash.
My thumb hovered over the
Cancel
button, but curiosity got the better of me, and I punched
Talk
instead.

Before I’d gotten out a greeting, she interrupted. “You’ve got to get down here.”

“Get down where?”

“The girl who found the body in your dumpster. She had a scar like a double spiral, right?”

“More insider information?”

“Let that go, already, would you? The important part is that her pimp? D’Angelo What’s-his-name? He just got blown to kingdom come.”

“Whoa, wait a minute, hold on there. Who got blown where?”

“Just get down here, now. You know where it is?”

“I do. But why are you telling me this?”

“Call it a gesture of good faith.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

I killed two of those minutes telling Khanh about the explosion. She took a step back and said, “I stay here. Watch Sun. In case he jump.”

“And if he does, what will you do? No, you’re coming with me.”

She crossed her left arm over her stump and jutted her chin. “I stay here.”

“Think about it, Khanh. You don’t have a car. If he did go somewhere, you couldn’t follow.”

“Why this matter? This explosion?”

“It’s connected somehow. Just like Savitch. Why kill him if he wasn’t involved? Somebody was afraid Helix—or one of his women—would talk. Which means at least one of them knows something.”

She bent her head and put her hand over her face. “We go, maybe miss Sun. We stay, miss something else. Either way, miss something.”

“We lose Sun, we’ll pick him up with the tracker,” I said. “We miss this, we miss it.”

T
HE SMOKE
guided me in, a dirty gray haze that hung in the air and reflected the flashing lights of emergency vehicles jamming the street. I parked the Silverado at the end of the block and Khanh and I wound our way through sidewalks crowded with gawkers. The air smelled foul and chemical, an unholy blend of charred wood, plastic, hair, and human flesh. An acrid smell like charcoal and burned beef liver, with an overlay of sulfur. It filled the nostrils and seeped into the skin, a smell so thick and greasy you could taste it. My eyes watered and my throat burned, and Khanh retched and covered her nose and mouth with her hand.

Ashleigh stood just outside the police line, mic in hand, her back to the smoldering ruin. A few feet away, the cameraman trained the camera on her, while the blonde reporter, Ashleigh’s blip on the radar, watched with hunger in her eyes.

“Over to you, Rob,” Ashleigh said, and flipped off her mic. She shouldered past the cameraman and came toward me. “They were cooking meth, and it went up like a volcano.”