White Ghost (3 page)

W
hen Gage arrived in his office reception area, he found Jack Burch sitting on a couch next to a slim Eurasian woman. Her back was straight, her eyes forward, her hands locked together as though her grief could be contained by force of will. Her gray suit and the string of pearls hanging around her neck seemed to Gage to be camouflage, like the feather pattern on an owl that imitates bark or stone.

“Graham,” Burch said, as they rose for introductions, “this is Lucy Sheridan.”

“I'm very sorry about your loss.” Gage took her hand and glanced toward the double glass doors facing the parking lot and the bay. “Wasn't your mother—”

“She needed to take care of some things.” Lucy looked away for a moment. “She sends her apologies.”

Burch caught Gage's eye with an expression that said,
Her mother isn't ready to deal with this
.

Gage passed on their drink requests to his receptionist, then led them down a hallway agitated by clicking keyboards, whirling printers, and voices echoing against the redbrick walls and into a conference room.

“I spoke to the FBI lead agent,” Gage said, after sitting down across from them. “He says the kids they caught were just—”

Gage hesitated. The meeting had just begun and he'd already caught himself moving too fast toward its inevitable end. He looked from Burch to Lucy. He was surprised she held his gaze.

“You can say it. I'm ready. I might not be in ten minutes or in an hour or in a day. But I am now and I need to know.”

Gage watched her grip the edge of the table in front of her in apprehension, preparing herself both to hear the words he would speak and to brace herself against their meaning.

Finally, Gage spoke. “The kids the police captured are called throwaways.”

Lucy blinked but kept her eyes fixed on Gage.

“A
dai lo
picked your brother for the robbery.” Gage glanced toward Burch. “
Dai lo
means big brother.” Then back at Lucy. “Peter was known as Ah Pang.”

Lucy winced, pained by the words and what they meant for what her brother had become. “That's a character Peter liked in a Hong Kong gang movie,
Dragon's End
.”

“They pick a name to give themselves a sense of identity, but it actually makes them anonymous. That's something the big brothers understand and the underlings don't.”

The receptionist knocked and then entered carrying a drink tray. She served Lucy tea and Burch and Gage coffee.

Gage slid a San Jose Police Department offense report across the table and watched Lucy's eyes work their way down the text, pausing, and then pushing forward.

18:05HRS . . .

Asian male, Suspect (1), 24 to 25 years old—

business office of PL Computers—

handguns—

Victim (1) and Victim (2) . . . tied up—

8 Asian males entered the warehouse—

loaded boxes of microprocessors into a van—

security guard shooting—

Suspect (5) fell to the floor—

males jumped into the back of the truck—

responding officers located Suspect (5)—

Gage saw Lucy's eyes widen, then her brows furrow as she grasped that Suspect (5) was her brother and that he was about to die before her eyes.

deceased in the warehouse—

Lucy's jaw tightened and she swallowed.

Suspect (6) and Suspect (7) were found hiding in a dumpster—

the loss was approximately $4,500,000—

Suspect (5), later ID'd as Peter Sheridan, 16 years old, was released to the Coroner at 01:55HRS.

Lucy wiped away the tears that had formed as she read.

Gage could tell that she'd never seen a police report and hadn't anticipated how it would read and hadn't known to brace herself for its synthesis of the brutal and mundane.

She straightened in her chair, then folded her hands on the table.

Gage wondered where her strength came from, suspecting it hadn't come from her absent mother.

“My father knows who was behind it.”

“Knows? Or just thinks he knows?”

“He met the man once, a few months ago. Peter was with him. Peter . . .”

Lucy raised a finger as if she'd arrived at an unmarked trailhead and was lost in a vertiginous moment, struggling to decide whether to backtrack or press forward. Gage understood she wasn't ready to start at the end, that she hadn't yet caught up to the present. Even more, he knew she needed Gage to understand Peter's life, not just his death, the throwing away. With a nod of his head, he gave her permission to start at the beginning.

“Peter was just six when we arrived here. I was fourteen. We only saw our father when he came to the United States for the holidays and when we visited him in Hong Kong during summer vacation. And Mother . . .” Lucy looked back and forth between Burch and Gage. “I know at times like these people blame the mother.”

“No one here is placing blame,” Gage said, wondering whether by people Lucy meant herself.

“Mother was always something of a mystery. My father once said this was what infatuated him when they met. But it really wasn't mystery. It was distance. She was as psychologically distant as my father was geographically.” She glanced at Burch. “I know some people refer to her as reclusive.”

Burch's face reddened.

Lucy pushed on. “She is, but I don't think it's only because of her disability. It's a lot deeper, way beyond just the awkwardness of her limp.”

“She refused to come to my office when we were doing the corporate reorganizations,” Burch said, attempting to recover his position of confidence, “even though she's a shareholder and board member in all their companies.”

Lucy stiffened as though someone had leaned against her in a crowded elevator, then pushed on.

“As a child, Peter was as naïve and trusting as a puppy. But by middle school he began to close himself off, just like our mother. He'd disappear for days, sometimes weeks. My parents made
him move to Hong Kong to live with our father, trying to break his ties to his friends here and regain some control over him.”

Gage shook his head. “I don't see how that could've worked. I doubt that his problems were geographical.”

She nodded. “My father couldn't control him either. Things escalated. He became what they call a
fei jai
.” She looked again at Burch. “A junior gangster. My father hired a private detective in Kowloon who tracked him to Temple Street where gamblers were using him as a lookout. My father had no choice but to send him back to the States. And Peter took up where he left off, and then ran away for the last time when he was fifteen. My mother—” Lucy's voice caught. Her hand rose to cover her heart. “My mother is just devastated, so bewildered, so . . . I mean, no one expected . . . she . . . we . . . couldn't grasp what was happening.”

Lucy looked down at the police report as if it represented the completion of her thought, then gripped her teacup in both hands and held it close to her chest.

“Do you know where he was living before the robbery?” Gage asked.

“With other first-generation kids, moving from place to place. East Bay. South Bay. San Francisco.”

Lucy set her cup down and focused on Gage.

“Peter came home on my birthday two months ago. He was surprised to find my father visiting from Hong Kong. They got into an argument and Peter yelled, ‘You're nothing to me' and then mumbled the name Ah Ming as he ran out of the house.” She paused and then sighed. “And that was the last time I saw him.”

“Lucy's father was too embarrassed to tell me about it,” Burch said, “so he hired a private investigator out of the phone book. A contact in the San Francisco Police Department told the investigator that Ah Ming's real name is Cheung Kwok-ming and
that he came to the States in the mid-'90s and built a chain of Asian supermarkets. I'm sure you've seen them. They're called East Wind. In no time he became a big man in the Chinese community. One of my associates did some research and found he's on the boards of a couple of benevolent associations and gives a huge amount to Chinatown charities.”

Lucy took the story back. “My father decided his only chance to get Peter back was to confront Ah Ming, so he asked the investigator to take him to Ah Ming's mansion in Hillsborough.”

Gage looked at Burch, who shook his head with a disheartened expression, foreshadowing how it would end.

“Peter was standing in the front courtyard with some other boys when they drove up.” Lucy's eyes went vacant, as though the imagined scene was developing in her mind. “Peter ran inside and Ah Ming's men grabbed my father as he stepped across the threshold and threw him back down the front steps. It took twenty stitches to close the gash in his scalp.”

“Did your father call the police?”

Lucy blinked herself back into the present and shook her head. “He thought it would be counterproductive. Peter would've gone into hiding where we'd never find him . . . and that was the last we heard about him until the police came by the day before yesterday.”

Burch let a few moments pass, then said to Gage, “That should give you an idea of what the Sheridans have in mind.”

Gage did, but he didn't believe in grasping at phantoms, especially when he had a real enemy of his own. He leaned forward, crossing his forearms on the conference table.

“Actually,” Gage said, first looking at Burch. “I'm not yet sure they have a clue what they'd be getting into.” Then at Lucy. “And I'm also not sure that Peter's presence in the company of Ah Ming two months ago necessarily means Ah Ming was behind the robbery.”

Uncertainty washed over Lucy's face. Gage knew that what she'd missed, what the grief-stricken always miss, is that suffering reduces their perception of the complexity of the world. They're taken captive by a picture and the force of its irresistible logic, and the chaos of possibility gets distilled into a syllogism limited by a narrowed sense of relevance:

Sheridan last saw Peter with Ah Ming.

Peter died in a robbery.

Therefore, Ah Ming was behind the robbery.

Gage knew he needed to drive the point home even though the focus of her anger, the anger that made her grief bearable, might transfer to him.

“What about the dozens of other people Peter might've been seen with if your father had been there to look? Who knows how many big brothers he came in contact with at safe houses or on Chinatown street corners or in Vietnamese coffee shops.”

Lucy's face flushed like she was suffocating. Gage recognized it as the expression of a rape victim after she's been told the DNA didn't match the man she had picked out of the lineup; it was born of the fear that somewhere out there the man who really attacked her was on the street. And it was also born of the realization that she was wrong about something about which she'd been positive.

“And even if Ah Ming really was behind the robbery, I'm not sure we'll be able to connect him to it. All the human links between him and the kids who were arrested are probably gone.”

“How's that possible?” Lucy's face flushed and her voice rose. “There has to be some kind of trail. Doesn't there?”

Gage knew her unfinished thought was:
And isn't it your job to find it?

“The short answer is no.”

Gage picked up a pen, then grabbed a yellow legal pad from a stack at the end of the table.

“Look at the numbers. Let's assume they net two million dollars from the stolen chips. A hundred thousand goes to whoever set it up. Fifty thousand goes to the
dai lo
who managed the robbery—recruited the kids, rented the car and the van, bought the guns. A few hundred dollars each to the underlings, say five thousand dollars total. They can spend another fifty thousand scattering everyone between the top and the bottom around the country and still net one point eight million dollars. And even the fifty thousand in traveling money isn't wasted because they now have people available to work wherever they land.”

Lucy nodded. “I understand.”

Gage shook his head. “Not yet. The death of your brother is even more than felony murder; it's murder with special circumstances. The law doesn't distinguish among those who die in a robbery. Robber or victim. So fifty thousand dollars or even five hundred thousand isn't too much to spend to blow up a bridge to death row. And while I may not know the road map of this particular crime, my experience tells me the bridge was blown just minutes after your brother died.”

“Are you saying there's no—”

“Wait,” Gage said, holding up his hand. “There's more. Do you think whoever is behind this is going to have the computer chips delivered to him, unloaded at his house, stacked in the corner?”

Gage shook his head, answering his own question.

“These guys are insulated with front companies and intermediaries, suit-wearing pillars of the community who connect the aboveground to the underground, but never get their hands dirty.”

He leaned back and spread his arms.

“Why does Ah Ming give to charity? Out of the goodness of his heart?” Gage thumped the table with his forefinger. “His heart beats only to keep his blood moving. Charity buys cover.”

“Are you saying it's hopeless? That Ah Ming is untouchable?”

“That's not the question we're faced with.”

“Then what is?”

“We need to know whether your father is targeting Ah Ming because he really thinks Ah Ming caused the death of your brother, or simply because Ah Ming humiliated him.”

Lucy looked down at her tea, now cold in the half-empty cup.

“The thought of Ah Ming is eating away at him.” She took in a long breath and shrugged. “But if it isn't Ah Ming, we have to know that, too.”

“Where do we go from here?” Burch asked, his tone suggesting to Gage that he was so caught up in a desire to find out the truth, he'd forgotten the point of the meeting, which was to find a means to sidetrack the Sheridans from self-destruction.