He glanced at me. “One of the ranchers, Mr. Dunnigan...”
“You’re still lying.”
“I am to assume from this that the bent bottle caps didn’t succeed in misdirecting you?”
“No.”
“It was a habit Phillip Maynard informed me of.” He actually smiled and finally took a breath. “Phillip was actually blackmailing me. He was supposed to retrieve the girls, and more importantly, the computer. He made a mess of it and killed Ho Thi. I suppose he thought that if he planted the girl near the culvert and threw the purse in with the Indian, there wouldn’t be any questions. I assume he was counting on a preconceived prejudice.”
“So you drugged him, just like Rene Paquet, and hung him? ”
He didn’t say anything. The unspoken truth lay there between us like a bad smell, and I started formulating a new plan in hopes that he’d become so agitated with me that he might change his aim. “Paquet wanted to save Ho Thi and get her out of whatever human-trafficking scheme you’ve got going, which is why she got picked up by the undercover detachment in L.A.”
He studied me. “You know, I really am unfortunate to have arrived in your county, Sheriff.”
“So you killed him and, consequently, the forty-two people in Compton.” He took another breath but didn’t move or say anything. “So, under the auspices of Children of the Dust, you retrieved Ho Thi and returned her to the brothel, but once there, she met the sole survivor of the Compton truck massacre. ” I nodded my head very slightly toward the young woman at the wall. “Ngo Loi Kim. She and Ho Thi were desperate, and I’m assuming Paquet was the one who had given them this laptop as an insurance policy in case something happened to him.” His resolve didn’t appear to be weakening, so I kept talking. “The wild card was the photograph of Ngo’s great grandmother, sitting in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge with an unidentified Marine investigator who played Fats Waller, and once told her about a favorite fishing hole in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, USA.”
“You have an overactive imagination, Sheriff.”
“It doesn’t take any imagination at all, and you’re still under arrest.”
There was a long silence, where we both reviewed our options. “My offer still holds—the girl for the laptop.” I was thinking about how I could prolong the conversation, but I was running fresh out of options and he confused my silence with my considering his offer. “You don’t know what is in the computer, nor should you care. It is nothing in comparison with the life of this girl—the great granddaughter of a wartime friend—and you can save her.” He took another step. “You didn’t know I existed last week, and I can assure you that you’ll never know I existed tomorrow.”
“You can’t possibly think you’re going to escape.”
“It is something at which I’m very good.” He smiled again.
He wasn’t going for any of it, and now was the time I would have to choose—fire or give him the computer for Ngo Loi. I took a deep breath, and the darkness shifted. It was as if the entire stairwell was growing behind Tuyen, and a face appeared almost a foot and a half above his.
Something was there.
Somebody.
Virgil.
Apparently, Tuyen was not the only one who had used my piano playing as a cover to ascend the steps, our conversation notwithstanding. My expression must have changed, because the lithe man’s face suddenly stiffened and he spun.
I held my fire in fear of hitting the big Indian but jumped off the stage in an attempt to get to the two of them as I heard the muffled report of the 9 mm. They slammed into me, and I slid backwards on the dusty wooden floor.
The Glock fired again, but the bullet ricocheted into the wall, and I watched as Virgil lifted Tuyen, swung him through the air like an oil-pump jack, and dashed him against the floor. He had to be incredibly tough, because he held on to Virgil’s arm and made the big Indian stagger. I scrambled to get at them just as the smaller man planted two powerful kicks in the giant’s midriff.
Virgil grunted and then closed a hand on Tuyen. The 9 mm fired for the third time, and I heard the round go through the ceiling before the semiautomatic clattered on the hardwood surface. I threw myself forward just as Virgil swung Tuyen again, his legs striking me across the face.
It was silent for less than a second, and I was trying to push off the uneven surface of the broken plaster when Virgil let Tuyen go. It was like some modern dance crack-the-whip, and I saw Tuyen’s body crash through the glass door at the far end of the room and through the railing on the second floor balcony. He froze like that and was a tableau of desperation. His hands grabbed at the broken and rotten wood, and it looked for a moment as if he might just make it, his fingers snapping and curling at the collapsed pieces of railing.
But he didn’t and fell from view without a sound.
I scrambled forward and glanced back at the girl. She hadn’t moved, and I gestured to her with my open hand. “Stay there! ”
It was quiet except for Virgil, who was breathing raggedly in the center of the room like some towering Windigo. I ran past him across the wide planks of the dance floor and stopped just short of the gaping doorway and collapsed balcony. I stared down at the moonlit hillside.
He had hit the rocks twice, first the ledge above and then the bigger one below. Somehow, he was still alive. At first, I thought he was trying to get up or roll over and escape, but that wasn’t it.
I’d been right about where the rattlesnakes had been sleeping. Tuyen slapped at the flat level of the shelf around him to try to keep the snakes off, but there was nowhere for him or the snakes to go. He stopped screaming, he stopped moving, and the night was silent.
EPILOGUE
Lucian studied his part of the file and then looked up from the faxed sheets. “You think this Dick Van Dyke character was the ringleader? ”
Jesus.
Vic, Lucian, and I sat by Saizarbitoria’s bed at Durant Memorial. The Basquo was missing a kidney but looked pretty good, considering, as he flipped through the entirety of what we now called the Tuyen File, passing it on sheet-by-sheet to all of us. Ned Tanen had forwarded most of the information from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and, from the look on Santiago’s face, he was having the same sickening response as I had had.
The report from the Immigration and Naturalization Service indicated that in the last few years as many as fifty thousand female illegal immigrants had been brought to the United States exclusively for use in the sex industry. Ho Thi Paquet and Ngo Loi Kim’s story was horrific, but it wasn’t exclusive.
“Children of the Dust was the front for the importation of the young women, and Trung Sisters Distributing distributed them into the brothels worldwide, as far as London. It’s all in the report.” I took a deep breath. “Ngo had a facility with computers and a tenuous connection to Wyoming, and Ho Thi had learned to drive, so...”
Vic looked up from her part of the report. “Ngo doesn’t speak English? ”
“No, so the e-mails she was sending were phonetic Vietnamese, which looked to us like a garbled mess.”
Saizarbitoria raised his head and looked at me as he passed the last of the file to Lucian. “So, Phillip Maynard was drugged before he was hung after all?”
“Drugged like Paquet, according to the Yellowstone County coroner.” I plucked at a loose straw in my hat. “Maynard was the advance man Tuyen sent from their Chicago branch. Henry translated, and Ngo filled in the rest of the story. The girls had gotten separated—Ho Thi ended up in Powder Junction and Ngo ran to Bailey. Tuyen came to finish the job, found Ho Thi, but couldn’t find either the computer or Ngo. He killed Ho Thi when she wouldn’t tell him where Ngo had gone. He needed a fall guy, and he needed some time. He had seen Virgil and knew that he lived in the culvert near Murphy Creek, so he planted her body there and threw her purse in the tunnel, but when it didn’t look like I was going to bite, he sacrificed Maynard with the fake suicide.” The Basquo folded his hands on the bed covers, and I played with my hat in an attempt to soften the unease between us. “Tuyen’s wounds looked self-inflicted, and the bottle-cap thing just seemed too obvious—so I started thinking about who would gain from implicating the Dunnigans.”