City of Strangers (Luis Chavez Book 2)
Read City of Strangers (Luis Chavez Book 2) Online
Authors: Mark Wheaton
ALSO BY MARK WHEATON
Fields of Wrath
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Mark Wheaton
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503935938
ISBN-10: 1503935930
Cover design by Damon Freeman
For Brother Andersen
CONTENTS
PART I
I
The music started first, a folk number performed by a quartet shrouded in darkness alongside the outdoor stage. The dancers, illuminated by colorful footlights, followed seconds later in a slow-moving line. They were all women with their hair tied up in gold, wearing long pink shirts and traditional patterned
sinh
skirts. The women elegantly raised and lowered their right arms as they promenaded across the stage, fingers gently elevated in a pantomime of refinement. By contrast, their left arms were almost stiff to their sides.
The annual Thai Cultural Day festival, an all-day affair celebrating Thailand’s rich and storied history, had moved to Downtown Los Angeles in the recently opened Grand Park. The dance being presented now, according to Father Chang’s program, dated back to when Thailand was part of a larger empire that included Indonesia and Malaysia. As the number of dancers grew, little girls and even elderly women joined the line of brightly costumed women now snaking around on stage.
The audience was rapt. Chang, however, was not. For him the music was little more than a whine of tortured strings accompanied by an irregular drumbeat. It irritated his senses and reminded him of music he didn’t miss from his own upbringing in Guangzhou. He rose from his perch alongside a large fountain opposite the stage and wandered to a row of food stalls, the smells of which had been calling to him all afternoon. He selected a vendor that seemed to value authenticity over décor and ordered boat noodles with beef and holy basil chicken over rice. When the proprietor passed it to him, Father Chang dressed the dishes with gusto from the stall’s homemade condiments. The vendor nodded appraisingly when he made liberal use of the green curry.
“Are you Indonesian?” the vendor asked.
“No,” Father Chang admitted. “Just spent a lot of time in Jakarta. Dressing it right makes all the difference, no?”
“Once you’ve done it the right way, there’s no going back,” the vendor agreed.
A few satisfied bites later, Father Chang glanced back at the stall to note the name of the restaurant it represented.
I should take Nan there,
he thought.
And Suyin, of course.
When he finished his meal, he left the festival and retrieved his car from the parking garage across the street. As he pulled his Lincoln up the ramp, he marveled at the park and all that had sprung up around it. Downtown Los Angeles, once considered a wasteland of street crime and derelicts after the sun went down, was evolving into something else entirely.
The old things passed away; behold, new things have come.
To return to his parish in San Gabriel, Father Chang cut through Chinatown. He typically avoided it not simply because of the plastic pagodas and faux-Buddhist iconography he found garish and offensive, but also for the reminder that at one time the Chinese in Los Angeles were considered as undesirable. Of course, almost any race had been thought of this way by Americans, and in some cases continued to be so.
And those are the kinds of injustices that get a priest up in the morning,
he mused.
The heavily Chinese-populated city of San Gabriel lay just a few miles east of Los Angeles. Here, the signage was bilingual and most of the restaurants and businesses catered to a Chinese clientele. No builders mimicked out-of-date Chinese architecture or felt the need to create picturesque tableaus to backdrop tourists’ selfies. The people who lived here were done living in China’s imagined past. They were Americans now, though many had dreams of returning home once they’d made their fortune.
Father Chang didn’t share these fantasies. Rather, he imagined one day retiring to Rome, perhaps becoming a chaplain at Thomas More College in Trastevere or teaching at some remote priory in Porto Venere.
Live like Lord Byron, but without the excess or scandal,
he mused.
Maybe a
little
excess.
Chang reached St. Jerome’s Chinese Catholic Church, located on the south end of San Gabriel’s main thoroughfare, a moment later and parked in the spot closest to the rectory door. The church, built in the seventies, was perfectly round, with a spire that rose straight up from the middle like a Roman candle. The cross on top was so small, it looked like an afterthought.
Father Chang fumbled for his keys as he jogged the few yards to the rectory. He almost reached the door when he heard footsteps behind him.
“Father Chang?”
He didn’t recognize the voice. He turned and found a wiry, middle-aged Chinese man behind him. His accent was thick and his facial hair in patches. His clothes looked pulled from a donation box. But it was the gun in his hand that Father Chang’s eyes were drawn to, particularly as it was aimed at his heart.
“Can I help you?” Chang asked, his voice calm and even.
“You are a monster!” the gunman roared, though the words sounded awkward and rehearsed. “You are a vile creature who has no business wearing the robes of the clergy!”
This is for show,
Father Chang realized.
He wants someone to hear.
No sooner had this thought crossed his mind than four bullets tore through his chest. Father Chang was launched backwards, the weight of his body cracking the rectory’s glass door.
As he fought for breath, agonizing pain pulsing through his body, Father Chang watched the gunman sink down into a cross-legged position and place the gun on the ground in front of him. He glanced at Father Chang as if only mildly interested in the priest’s plight, then bowed his head as if in prayer.
Ego te absolvo,
Father Chang thought.
“A priest?” asked Michael Story, almost dropping the phone. “Somebody murdered a priest?”
Though it was well past midnight, the now–chief deputy DA of Los Angeles was still in his office, as he’d been for much of the past couple of months. The upcoming Marshak court case, a headline grabber which exposed corporate malfeasance and murder in Southern California’s factory farm fields, had buried him in paperwork.
“This guy did,” replied the detective, Doug Whitehead, on the other end of the line. “Shot him four times in the chest at close range. Then the shooter—name: Shu Kuen Yamazoe—put the gun down and waited on the wet pavement for officers to arrive. The first on the scene said he raised his hand in surrender before they even got out of the car. We think the killing might’ve been caught on a security camera.”
“And he confessed?”
“Not precisely,” the detective admitted. “He invoked his right to an attorney before they even had the cuffs on him. Arresting officer said it was clear he’d been rehearsed. By the time they got him to the station, a lawyer was waiting with a typed-up confession.”
“Well, there’s your premeditation, too. Sounds open and shut.”
“Here’s where it gets strange,” the detective replied. “The lawyer is one of those back-of-the-bus, personal-injury-and-DUI types. Said he’s never met Yamazoe but got an e-mail from him at around the same time as the shooting and came to the station immediately. Time stamp suggests Yamazoe hit ‘Send’ just as the priest pulled into the parking lot.”
Hmm.
“And the lawyer just somehow knew it was time sensitive and didn’t shove it off until tomorrow?”
“Oh, but of course,” Whitehead replied. “The e-mail itself was in Mandarin Chinese, but the subject was in English. ‘Time Sensitive. Read Immediately.’ So he ran it through a web-based translator and came right over.”
Double hmm.
“Want to hear the kicker?” Whitehead asked. “Yamazoe accused the priest of molesting his daughter on four different occasions over the past two months. The shooting was revenge.”
“Oh Christ,” Michael said with a sigh.
“We haven’t informed the archdiocese yet, but there’s no way this isn’t going to be a public relations disaster for them, even if the allegations are false.”
“Understandable,” Michael said. “But I’m still waiting for the part where you need a deputy DA at this point. I’m pretty sure the department has its own liaisons with the diocese and the archbishop’s office.”
“Oh, we do. A bunch. That’s not the problem. We can’t find the girl.”
Ah.
“Neighbors? Other relatives?”
“Getting a whole lot of nothing. If the parish pastor hadn’t said he’d seen the girl a couple of times at Mass, we’d be wondering if she even exists. The confession explicitly states that she’s been packed off to China to keep her away from any questions or trial. And you know if we reach out to the consulate, we’d only be asking to be strangled in red tape.”
“Was he here legally?”
“Yeah. Resident alien. Arrived twelve years ago.”
“And the daughter?”
“No paperwork whatsoever. When he applied for his green card, he didn’t even list a family, though that’s hardly uncommon. Just based on what we found in his phone, he did regularly communicate with at least some people back home. A wife, a mother, who knows? But as far as a daughter goes, we don’t even have a name.”
Michael tried to remember what he knew of Detective Whitehead. He was persistent but wasn’t exactly well liked. If Michael didn’t give him what he wanted, there’d be a dozen phone calls every other day “just to follow up” until he did.
“So, how can I help? You need a look at passenger manifests back to China around the dates in question? Help with LAUSD to see if she was attending any classes?”
The detective went quiet for a moment, as if unsure how to frame his request, but then bulled on ahead anyway.
“I don’t think we’re going to find documents tied to him. If she came in illegally, there aren’t going to be any records, and if she left the same way, that’s the case twice over. On top of that I don’t see a scenario in which we get Yamazoe talking. I think he’s said what he’s going to say in the confession and that’s it. So it’s the neighbors and the other parishioners, but even if you’re fresh off the boat and can’t even open a checking account or get car insurance, you’re still not going to talk to cops. So given the church angle, I thought maybe you could give your guy a call.”
And there it was. Michael might have gotten all the attention and glory for the Marshak case, but here was confirmation of what he’d assumed: no one bought the narrative that this dogged, justice-driven deputy DA had acted alone. How much of the truth of Father Chavez’s involvement was out there he had no clue, the priest having gone undercover at great personal risk to expose the family’s criminal machinations. But it was obviously enough, or Detective Whitehead wouldn’t have bothered making the call.
“Let me think about it,” Michael muttered, miserable.
