The Dark Root (8 page)

“You know where he was living?”

“I heard he had a place on Elliot once, but I also heard he moved. He did that a lot.”

That much we’d already found out. “And you never saw or heard from him again?”

He straightened up slowly, sensing the worst had passed. “Next I knew, a couple-a days later, I was readin’ he’d been the one that got fried in that crash. Was that the murder you talked about?”

Willy gave him a withering look. “Don’t think out loud, Moe. It doesn’t make you look good. We said
a
murder—not his.”

Ellis gave a small shrug.

“And don’t think,” Kunkle added, “that you’re still working part-time painting hot cars. That’s over. You’re on our shit list now, get it?”

He nodded silently.

“And don’t forget that we just did you a big favor. Right?”

He began looking thoroughly depressed, realizing what this favor might cost him someday. “Okay.”

We left him to contemplate life’s odd twists of fate.

· · ·

Sammie Martens was waiting in her car when we stepped outside the body shop. “I heard you guys were here. Didn’t want to barge in and catch Willy torturing another witness.”

To my regret, Willy smiled with pride.

“You got something?” I asked, slightly irritated.

Sammie was looking pleased herself. “I found out where Travers ordered his last pizza, and where it was delivered.”

My mood thus brightened, I bowed theatrically and gestured to the street. “Lead on. We’re right behind you.”

We didn’t have far to go. We returned down Canal to Birge, along which the old Estey Organ warehouses stood side by side, clad entirely in dark slate—the latest in fire prevention well over a hundred years ago—and descended Baker Street to the bottom of a steep dead end.

Where Sammie eventually pulled to a stop was typical of Brattleboro’s eccentric layout. From being in the middle of Vermont’s fourth-largest town at the top of the hill, we were now in the dooryard of a rambling, sagging, decrepit old farmhouse, perched on the edge of a large, weed-choked field. Blocked from our view by trees and brush, our urban surroundings might as well have been a figment of imagination. Even its sounds were muffled by the distant rushing of nearby Whetstone Brook.

But the place held little charm. What some other town might have exploited as the sylvan setting for a condo project, or a pocket municipal park tucked away by the water’s edge, the powers here had left to rot. The building was deserving of an arsonist’s care, and the field had been scarred by a wide dirt road leading to a scattering of retired appliances, rusting car bodies, and assorted trash.

We assembled in front of the silent, abandoned-looking building.

“This is it?” Kunkle asked quizzically.

Sammie merely crossed the hardscrabble front yard and hammered on the door with her fist. The sound echoed dully throughout the house.

“When did the delivery take place?” I asked, joining her on the rickety porch.

She was peering through one of the side windows. “A little over an hour before we found him in flames. I talked to the delivery boy and showed him Benny’s mug shot. No doubt about it.”

I stood beside her, shading my eyes with my hands to see through one of the dusty panes. “You know who owns this?”

“Gregory Rivière. He’s behind on his town taxes, and he comes up on our computer as a ‘known associate,’ but we’ve never actually nailed him for anything. From what I could find out, he’s originally from Wisconsin and did some drug time in New York. He’s supposed to be out of town right now.”

“Well,” I said, straightening up and wiping the dust from my hands, “I guess we better round up a search warrant.”

For the second time in a quarter hour, Sammie smiled with self-satisfaction, retrieving the very document from her back pocket and handing it to me. “Blessed by the Honorable Judge Harrowsmith himself.”

Kunkle laughed behind me and turned the doorknob. The door swung open without protest.

We crossed the threshold and paused. There is always a sense of trespass that accompanies an uninvited search, unabated by the knowledge that we are there by legal sanction. I can always feel the absent owner’s spirit cringing as we poke about, examining details unknown by even his or her most intimate friends. On the other hand, the uneasiness is counterbalanced by an intense curiosity, suddenly unleashed to run rampant to its heart’s content. All the taboos of closed doors and forbidden rooms, drummed into us from childhood, are removed. Armed with a search warrant, especially one worded as generally as what Sammie had secured, we were freer than thieves in the night.

The initial pickings, however, didn’t generate much excitement. Befitting a house with no lock on the front door, the place at first didn’t offer any more than the junk-clotted field below it. Sparsely furnished, evil-smelling, choked with dust and mildew, it appeared totally deserted.

Until Sammie appeared from around the kitchen door, pale and serious. “I think I got something.”

I’d been combing the contents of a box-strewn dining room, finding nothing but old clothes and unpacked household items. Willy appeared from the neighboring living room, attracted by the tone of Sammie’s voice.

We both joined her at the kitchen entrance. “I don’t think we should go much beyond here without calling Tyler,” she advised.

Over her shoulder, we could see the remnants of a bag of chips and the famous pizza, part of it still in its box, along with one half-eaten piece, draped like a Salvador Dalì imitation over the edge of the counter, its red drippings hard and dry on the floor beneath it.

As in some perverse parody, however, the floor and counter weren’t soiled only by old tomato sauce. There were large quantities of dry blood intermixed with it, extending far beyond the capabilities of a single pizza. A ragged trail of it led across the floor to a chair, which was daubed in enough dry blood to look sloppily painted with the stuff.

“Far out,” Kunkle murmured admiringly.

“What do you think?” Sammie asked. “Grabbed from behind as he stood at the counter, his back to this door, cut or hit hard enough to make him bleed, and then dragged to the chair?”

“By at least two men,” Kunkle agreed. “Benny was a big boy.”

Along the wall next to us there was a row of glass-doored cabinets over a second counter. Sammie pointed to shards of glass and more blood splayed across its surface, indicators of another wound. “He must’ve put up a fight.”

But I was looking at the chair, less interested in how he’d been brought there than in what had happened to him once he’d been seated. Against Sammie’s good advice, I carefully picked my way across the room, studying the floor as I went, making sure my feet disturbed nothing. The others stayed put.

The chair had been turned away from a small table shoved up against the far wall, to face the length of the room like a witness stand does a courtroom. From closer up, I could clearly see the chair’s two front legs were strapped with broken bands of blood-smeared duct tape, another length of which I found stuck horizontally across the chair’s back. There was a final, balled-up wad of tape lying under the table, presumably used to tie Travers’s hands behind his back, and a pair of blue jeans, blackened by old blood, slashed to ribbons. Across the top of the table were the oblong smears of a knife that had been repeatedly placed there—and obviously repeatedly used.

I began to understand why Ben Travers had been in such a hurry when he’d flown off the Upper Dummerston Road.

JACK DERBY, THE NEWLY ELECTED
State’s Attorney for Windham County, was a startling contrast from his predecessor, James Dunn. Tall, slim, with bookish good looks set off by a pair of tortoiseshell bifocals, Derby was the kind of man Rotarians like to invite over for lunch. He favored sport jackets over suits, appeared easygoing and conversational, never hesitating to stop in a hallway or on the street to answer a question or respond to a comment, and generally came across as an approachable, regular kind of a guy—a man you could trust with your vote.

But however engaging, Derby could also be as tough, demanding, and ruthless as Dunn.

Sitting in Tony Brandt’s office, Derby was slouched down, relaxed, a ready and interested smile on his face, but with eyes as cool and calculating as a pool shark’s.

He held up a finger. “So you think Ben Travers, already hot to leave town, escaped in a stolen car after being tied to a chair and tortured by Sonny and his boys. But for all intents and purposes, there is no Sonny, the man you think is his lieutenant has an alibi, as do his goons, and you have no reliable witnesses to Travers’s intentions, the torture, the car chase, or the final flight off the cliff.”

He held up two fingers. “Then you’ve got these three supposedly connected episodes—a suspicious traffic stop, a suspected home invasion and rape, which may or may not have involved one of the men from the traffic stop, and Travers’s death, which may or may not have involved Asians. Speaking strictly legally here, that’s about it, right? The bottom line is that, aside from the Travers homicide, you really don’t have anything, and even that’s looking iffy.”

Neither Brandt nor I responded. Derby had, in fact, accurately summarized what we had. On top of that, Alice Sims had made her boss proud. She’d picked up that Benny might’ve been done in by a “Chinese named Sonny,” and had made it pointedly clear in that morning’s paper that the police were being less than straightforward with the facts, despite Tony’s reluctant admission that we were indeed dealing with a homicide.

Derby made a gesture to alleviate our discomfort. “Okay. You asked me to listen to what you’ve got, and you heard my opinion. Now tell me what you’re
going
to get. Maybe that’ll sound better.”

I looked out the window at the ebbing light. Most of the day had been spent picking over every square inch of the Rivière house off Baker Street—and locating Mr. Rivière himself, who was visiting a brother at the federal pen in Rahway, New Jersey. We’d found lots of junk to pick through, but none of it, I felt certain, would end up having anything to do with Benny Travers.

So what did I have to tell Derby, or anyone else, for that matter? That I felt a vague sense of foreboding—that this was somehow a precursor for all hell breaking loose? I had no tangible evidence—a pool of blood on a seat, a terrified look in a young woman’s eyes, an expression of malice on the face of a Vietnamese crook.

“What I hope to find out,” I finally said in answer to his question, “is why Ben Travers was in that house.”

“You think he was there to meet with Sonny?” Derby asked.

I shook my head. “I doubt it. He was nervous as hell the night before, hassling Moe Ellis to speed it up, hoping to hit the road in an unknown car before the paint even dried. And yet, eight hours later, he was still in town, eating pizza. But not at one of his usual haunts, and not hanging out with his usual friends, at least according to them. He was alone, his back to the door as he chowed down for lunch, waiting for someone he trusted. For some reason, he felt the heat had lessened a bit between the time he last saw Moe and when he was trussed up in that chair.”

Brandt’s weary face looked slightly brighter as he heard echoes of his own advice from twenty-four hours earlier. “Waiting for one of his own people?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out. I already have Stennis scouting around. And we do have one piece of hard evidence. Tyler came up with some shell casings from the Upper Dummerston Road. They’re nine millimeter, and they have a rectangular firing-pin impression that’s supposedly unique to a Glock. No fingerprints, though.”

Derby was already shaking his head, looking doubtful. “Where exactly were these casings found?”

“Along the stretch of road where one of the witnesses said he heard shots.”

The SA’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Hold it. I thought you had a whole bagful of conflicting testimony on that. This sounds like a prime witness.”

I pursed my lips. Brandt answered for me. “Not for your purposes. He’s a notorious flake—confesses to crimes he didn’t do, claims to know when the world is ending. It was dumb luck we got him on one of his lucid days.”

“We do have a way to link the casing to the bullet they dug out of Travers, though, at least circumstantially,” I added. “Tyler also got a call from the state crime lab. The bullet was ingrained with the white-powder residue of the car’s rear window, and it was basically smooth, with no lands or grooves from standard rifling.”

“Glocks have polygonal barrels,” Brandt filled in.

Derby gave a half shrug. “I guess if you found the pistol, I could use it, but even then, I’d need more—like the person who pulled the trigger.”

He suddenly launched himself out of his chair and leaned against the window sill to stare out at the parking lot. “To be honest, I think you boys may be up a creek, unless somebody spills the beans, and from what I hear about Asian gangs, that’s not what they do. They’re worse than the Mob about informers.” He turned to face us. “Hell, if that girl’s family won’t tell you about the rape, which one of Sonny’s cohorts do you expect to suddenly open up? You’ve got a problem.”

In the following silence, Derby checked his watch, gave us a dazzling smile, and concluded, “Well, gotta go. Thanks for filling me in. Good luck with the
Reformer
.”

He closed the door behind him. Through Brandt’s interior window, we watched him crossing the outer office, waving at a few people and tossing a wisecrack at the dispatcher on the way out.

“Pretty cruel,” I commented.

“He’s got a point,” Brandt muttered fatalistically.

I rose to my feet, my determination fueled. “About our having a problem? It’s early yet.”

He gave me a half smile. “Oh, yeah? What’ve you got that you didn’t want to tell him?”

I crossed over to the door. “I’m hoping to educate myself a bit. But if what we’ve got is the start of some new Asian trend, then we’ll see more of it soon, and if they keep doing things like high-speed chases in the middle of the day, then we’ll nail ’em before long.”