“How’d it go?” Bree said. She’d already armored up in the sweltering heat.
“Heartbreaking in some ways, the proudest moment of my life in others.”
“Good for you. You should be proud of him. He’s an amazing kid.”
“He is that,” I said, and I put on my own armor as Detective Rand placed a map on the hood of one of the cruisers. It showed the Eden Center, a mall laid out in a lazy U shape with a large parking lot in the middle.
Pho Phred’s was near the Viet-Royale restaurant in the northeast corner of the U, part of a section called the Sidewalk Stores that was set up to resemble an outdoor market in old Saigon. Rand showed us the access to the area from the south off the main parking lot and from the north off a smaller parking lot that abutted Oakwood Cemetery.
Rand said we’d want to cover both entrances as well as send in Fairfax officers familiar with the center through both ends of the bottom of the U.
“You’ll have him cut off in four directions,” Rand said. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
“Let’s do it,” I said, and I got in a car with Sampson.
“It’d be nice if Le’s good for McGrath, Kravic, and Peters,” he said.
“It would be,” I said. “I could take some time off, go watch Jannie run.”
“No reason that can’t happen,” Sampson said, starting the car and heading for Eden Center.
From there, everything went downhill fast.
14
WE WERE ALL in contact over the same radio frequency. Two Fairfax County officers entered Eden Center through Planet Fitness, on the far west side of the Sidewalk Stores. Two more came in from the east.
Bree and Muller came in the north entrance. Sampson, Detective Rand, and I went in through the south door. This section of Eden Center was painted light blue, which Rand said was believed to promote prosperity.
The area was certainly doing a thriving business. At one o’clock on a Friday afternoon, there were hundreds of Vietnamese Americans roaming around, shopping for fresh fish in one store, embroidered silk dresses in another, taffy candy in a third. And the air smelled savory and sweet.
Sampson and I stood out like sore thumbs, but being tall among short people had its advantages. We later figured that one or all of us must have been seen entering the center, because we were inside for no more than ninety seconds before, not fifty yards away, Thao Le blew out of Pho Phred’s, looked around, and saw us.
Le was wiry, fast, and agile. He turned and ran north.
“He’s coming right at you, Bree,” I said, breaking into a run.
“I see him.”
Detective Rand said, “Take him clean if you-”
Le must have spotted Bree and Muller, because he suddenly darted into a packed restaurant. Bree left Muller in the dust and dashed in after Le, her badge up. We heard screaming.
“There’s got to be a back way out of there!” I yelled, dodging into a fish store forty yards shy of the restaurant.
With my badge up, I yelled at the startled merchant and his customers, “Back door!”
His eyes got big and round, but he gestured to rubber curtains behind the counter.
I heard Rand calling for patrol cars as I went through the rubber curtains into a cold storage area off a small loading dock. The overhead door was raised. A wholesale-seafood truck was backing up.
I jumped off the dock before the truck could block it, landed in a putrid-smelling puddle, and stumbled. Sampson was right behind me; he grabbed me under the arm and got me upright just as we heard a crotch-rocket motorcycle start up and then saw it squeal out from behind a dumpster fifty yards away.
Helmetless, Le handled the bike like an expert, rear wheel drifting and smoking before he shot north and away from Bree, who had her gun up but wisely held her fire. Le accelerated toward the corner of the mall, then downshifted, braked, and disappeared to our right.
“I’ve got cars coming right at him!” Rand gasped as he caught up to us.
We were all running now. Bree got around the corner and held her ground. We reached her just in time to see the Fairfax patrol car turn Le.
The gangster came right back at us with the patrol car in pursuit. Another patrol car was entering the hunt from behind us. I was thinking Le was as good as in cuffs.
Le stopped about halfway down the parking lot, near another dumpster and a haphazard pile of wooden pallets stacked by the rear chain-link fence. The first cruiser was almost to Le when he looked our way and smiled.
He flicked the accelerator on the motorcycle, covered fifteen yards in a second, shot up that pile of wooden pallets, and was in the air for maybe ten feet before he landed almost sideways on the dumpster.
Le buried the throttle the instant he touched down, then he shot across the dumpster lids diagonally, jumped up on the pegs as the bike went airborne again, and sailed over the chain-link fence that separated the parking lot from Oakwood Cemetery.
The motorcycle landed on a service road and almost tipped, but Le got his foot down, righted it, and sped off, leaving us angry at losing him and slack-jawed at his mad skills.
Then a Fairfax patrolman still inside Eden Center came over the radio and said, “I’ve got Le’s girlfriend here at Pho Phred’s. You want to talk to her?”
15
WE FOUND THE officer and a zip-cuffed Michele Bui outside Pho Phred’s. Ms. Bui was, to put it mildly, unhappy.
“I got my rights,” she said. “I’m U.S. born and raised, never put a toe in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. So I don’t have to say a thing because I have not done a thing other than order lunch. This is harassment, pure and simple.”
Bui was tall for a Vietnamese female, almost five six, and slender. Her hair was shaved on one side and long on the other. She sported tattoos of yellow butterflies on her left arm, and red ones swarmed on the right. Two hoops in each nostril completed the look.
Bui began to shout in Vietnamese, and many people in the halls and other stores came to the doorways and looked at us.
“We just want to have a chat,” Bree said calmly.
“You usually bring guns and zip cuffs to a chat?” Bui asked.
“When Thao Le is who we want to chat with, yes,” I said.
“When are you guys going to leave Thao alone?” she said. “You arrest him, he gets off. You arrest him, he gets off. When you going to figure out that he can’t be had?”
She watched our faces and smiled knowingly. “You don’t have him, do you? You didn’t catch him!”
Bui started laughing and then called out something in Vietnamese that got the other people there laughing.
She looked at me. “You in charge?”
I jerked my head toward Detective Rand.
Bui rolled her eyes, said, “Can you take the cuffs off? They’re starting to hurt, and I smell a lawsuit coming on.”
Bree said, “If we take them off, you’ll talk to us?”
“Why would I do that?” Bui asked. “I am under zero obligation to talk to you because I have done nothing wrong.”
“How about aiding and abetting a cop killer?” Sampson said.
That seemed to come out of nowhere to Bui, and her chin retreated fast.
“Thao’s no cop killer,” she said.
“We think he is,” Bree said. “The cop was Tommy McGrath, a guy who had a jones to put Thao away for the rest of his life.”
Bui said nothing, her eyes darting back and forth.
“You’ve heard the name before? McGrath?” I asked.
The way she shook her head said she had heard of the late COD.
Bree picked up on it too. She said, “When someone kills a cop, the net gets big and wide. That net is forming around your boyfriend. Question is, which of his fish will get caught in the net with him?”