“You don’t agree?”
“I don’t have enough to agree or disagree. I’ve just got a feeling it’s bigger than that. Hillstrom gave me an idea of what Travers went through before he died. You were right about that part-it wasn’t just a joyride gone bad, like we implied to the paper. He was tortured, beaten, shot, and finally rear-ended off the Upper Dummerston Road at a hundred miles an hour. He must have been terrified-running for his life. Ben Travers was known to stand up to anyone, including us, so the question that keeps running around my brain is: Who was it that got him so scared? And the only answer I come up with dates back several months and shouldn’t have anything to do with Ben Travers… Although it may involve Sonny…”
I could visualize Gail shaking her head as my voice drifted off and my mind began outdistancing my words. “You want my input,” she broke in, “you better think out loud.”
I shifted my position on the bed. “The last time I saw someone that frightened was after the home invasion I told you about. Do you know if Amy Lee ever contacted Women for Women? I phoned her about a week later to check up on her, and she told me she had, but I never called the center to confirm it. It never occurred to me she might be lying.”
“I don’t know,” Gail answered. “I can find out for you. You think Sonny did that, too?”
My mind was off running again, filled with images not of Ben Travers or a traumatized Amy Lee, but of the malevolent Truong Van Loc-and the recently met, cocky Michael Vu. “Maybe it was someone Sonny hired.”
We hung up so she could check with her contacts at Women for Women. I sat staring at the opposite wall, my loneliness supplanted by the hope that I’d finally shaken the right tree branch. Tony Brandt had cautioned me against pursuing the “Heathen Chinee,” as he’d put it, but I was becoming convinced that therein was hidden what I was after.
Asian crime was a growth industry-rising with a bullet on every metropolitan police chart in this country and Canada, especially since one of its global strongholds-Hong Kong-was going back to the Communist Chinese in 1997. Asian criminals were well-organized, well-financed, ruthless, and highly mobile, and they favored urban centers with large Asian communities. Marshall Smith’s discovery of a carful of young Asian men who didn’t know each other, and were driving through the middle of the night for a vague and ominous-sounding rendezvous in Montreal, fit the traditional profile for an Asian hit squad. The fact that rural, thinly populated Vermont had so far been left on the sidelines of this latest criminal trend didn’t mean that things couldn’t change.
Policemen by their nature tend to be professional paranoids-that’s what helps keep them alive, or at least relatively healthy. So it was no stretch for me to connect a suspected hit team we’d met by accident, to another we believed had visited the Lee family, to yet a third we were only hypothesizing had murdered Ben Travers. Coincidences were not something I trusted at face value, so three in a row struck me as too much to ignore. Despite Tony’s advice that I concentrate on who killed Travers, I was starting to think I might have better luck broadening my horizon.
Gail called back ten minutes later. “If Amy Lee ever contacted Women for Women, they don’t have a record of it. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Now I can do something I should’ve done a while ago.”
Amy Lee did not look good. She walked with her head down, her feet shuffling along the sidewalk. She was much thinner than the last time we’d met, and her clothes hung on her awkwardly. Her hair was dirty and unkempt, and she had a habit-a virtual twitch-of looking furtively about her, as if something invisible and malevolent were stalking her, which I didn’t doubt it was.
I swung out of my car and approached her gingerly, my expression open and friendly. She hesitated at the bottom of the path leading to the high school’s front door, obviously considering flight as an option.
“Amy?” I called out softly. “Remember me?”
She looked at the ground as I stopped before her, and nodded silently.
“I was wondering if we could talk a bit.”
“I don’t want to be late for class.” Her voice was a monotone.
“You won’t be. This’ll only take a couple of minutes.” I gestured to a grassy area off the path, where the building’s corner provided a little privacy. “How ’bout we go over there?”
Students were parking their cars in the lot across the street, shouting and laughing at one another as they headed for the building. No one gave us a glance as I gently steered her to the spot I’d indicated. Still, I made sure to position her with her back to the passing crowd.
“How have you been?” I asked.
“Okay.” I could barely hear her.
“You didn’t call that place I told you about, Women for Women.” She shook her head silently, her eyes still glued to the ground.
I crouched down, pretending to pluck absent-mindedly at the spring-fresh grass, but actually so I could look up into her face without challenging her. “Amy, what happened to you was a crime, and you were its victim. In that way, it was no different than if you’d been hit by a drunk driver. Both things come out of nowhere and leave you shattered. The difference is you haven’t done anything to help yourself get back on your feet. You might as well be still out there, in the middle of the road.”
Her lower lip was trembling. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, like a child, and murmured, “It’s hard.”
I reached out and touched her other hand with the tips of my fingers. “You not getting much support at home?”
“They’re angry that I can’t let it go.”
“But you need help to do that, don’t you?”
She gave a small shrug. “I guess.”
“Amy, if I drove you there, would you be willing to meet with the people at Women for Women?”
She looked at me for the first time. “My parents would kill me.”
“They don’t need to know-not at first. This would be just for you.”
She rubbed her forehead and glanced at the entrance to the high school.
Interpreting the gesture, I said, “I can take care of them. I know the principal.”
“Will you tell him?” she asked, suddenly alarmed.
I shook my head. “No. I’ll make something up and make sure he doesn’t contact your folks.”
There was a long silence.
“What do you say?” I finally asked, almost in a whisper.
“Okay” was her equally quiet response.
I stood up and grasped her hand in mine. “I’ll take you to my car first. You wait there while I set things up.”
Like an abandoned wanderer, she took me on faith.
Ten minutes later, after a chat with the principal and a quick call to Women for Women, I rejoined Amy Lee in my car, where she was sitting wedged into the far corner of the front seat, her body pressed against the door, her eyes fixed to the ground outside her window.
Now, I thought, comes the hard part, where I hoped I wouldn’t be seen as a manipulative and heartless hypocrite. I settled next to her and closed my door, adding to the sense of privacy, even though the human flood tide outside had dwindled to a few latecomers who were jogging across the school’s broad lawn.
“Amy, before I take you to Women for Women, can I ask you a couple of questions about that night?”
As small as she was, her body made a spontaneous effort to shrink even further, hunching over. She finally brought her knees up to her chest until she was sitting in a tight ball.
“I don’t want any details,” I added quickly, “nothing you’re not willing to tell me-just some general things. Would that be okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fair enough. Let me ask something to start, and you see if you want to answer. If you don’t, that’s fine.”