“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.
6
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.”