“You ever heard of someone named Sonny?” I asked.
She shook her head.
I tried out the other names I’d accumulated, with the same results. She finally said, “I’m sorry. I guess I haven’t been much help.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I answered. “We’re doing this brick by brick, and you’ve just given us quite a few.”
Ideally, after my conversation with Heather Dahlin in Hartford, I would have assigned round-the-clock surveillance of Michael Vu, as well as the two buildings in Brattleboro that housed an ever-changing community of Asians, and the four Asian restaurants in town. But our operating budget being what it was-and considering that I’d already put a tail on Vince Sharkey-that was out of the question.
What I did was less dramatic, less effective, and more affordable. The following morning, I brought the entire detective squad up to date, sharing with them my suspicions that we were being market-tested for an Asian gang.
“I think you’re getting paranoid,” Willy said flatly, a toothpick in his mouth and one foot propped up on the edge of the conference table. “You said yourself that they feed off each other. What do you guess we have in this town? Maybe a hundred and fifty Asians, four hundred in the whole county? Nothing close to a Chinatown.”
“What about Sally Javits?” countered Sammie.
“I think she’s paranoid, too,” Willy answered. “What do a bunch of kids know, for Christ’s sake? They chuck a brick through a window now and then, spray paint a wall, do a little dope, scare a few merchants who’re dumber than they are. The first slope who walks in with a gun and a sales pitch has ’em all standing around bawling.”
“I know you’re not going to like this,” I interrupted, “but that’s the last time I want to hear ‘slope’ or ‘gook’ or anything like it. It’s wrong, it’ll only cause problems we don’t need, and it’ll alienate the very people who might otherwise help us.”
Kunkle rolled his eyes. “I seriously doubt you’ll get any help from them.”
“Look,” I said, “I’ll keep this short, but I want you all to hear me loud and clear. There are just over three thousand Asians living in Vermont-that’s fifty percent more than all the state’s blacks, making them our largest minority. Exactly two of them are in prison. Ninety percent of the others have a work ethic and morals that make the rest of us look degenerate. So while Asians may seem a whole lot different from us, they’re to be treated like everyone else. Do I make my point?”
“If Sonny was only making a sales pitch by killing Benny,” Sammie said quietly, getting us back on track, “he did a hell of a job, and his target sure shoots a hole in the they-only-feed-on-their-own theory.”
I nodded to Tyler. It had been two days since we’d discovered where Travers had eaten his last meal, and I was behind on Tyler’s progress. “What more do we have on Travers’s death?”
His voice slid into its professorial mode. “We’ve been able to piece together what happened to him in the house, more or less, but the people who did it went out of their way to be neat and tidy.” He pulled several sheets of paper from a folder before him. “This is my report-finished this morning. It doesn’t include the blood and fiber samples we sent up to Waterbury. Those results won’t be back for a while, but I don’t expect much anyway. From what I could determine, most of the blood came from Travers, and even if the blood we found under the broken glass on the other counter came from someone else, there’s probably not much we can do with it.”
He sat back in his chair, getting comfortable. “The blood was a help in one way. There was so much of it that his attackers couldn’t get near him without either stepping in it or touching it. Problem is, they all wore gloves-surgical latex, from what I could tell-and those slip-on things surgeons wear over their shoes. We could still tell the general shoe size-which was small, by the way-and the fact that there were three men involved, but that’s about it.
“I analyzed the cut pants. The knife used was razor sharp, and from the marks left on the tabletop, it was the size and shape of a fillet knife, with a thin, slightly curved blade. But they must’ve taken it with them, so I can’t confirm any of that.
“We also found a blue plastic bag, ten-gallon size, which was used over the victim’s head. It was under the table, wadded up behind the pants.”
“How do you know it was used over his head?” asked Dennis DeFlorio. Dennis was our robbery/burglary/B amp; E specialist, just back from vacation. Neither my best nor my brightest, he was nevertheless my most consistent subordinate-not given to moods, or prone to office politics, and utterly dependable to do exactly what he was told, if little beyond that.
“Teeth marks on the inside,” Tyler answered. “You could tell they’d used it to cut off his air supply and that he tried to chew his way out. Suffocation’s not the point, of course. It’s just a way to build up panic.”
“The voice of personal experience?” Willy cracked.
J.P. gave him a rare but telling hostile stare. For all his seeming detachment, Tyler was not unaffected by the ghostly agonies left behind at many of the scenes he investigated. He covered his sensitivity well, but he took no pride in pretending he was unaffected. To his own rare credit, Willy dropped it, feigning a sudden interest in his coffee.
“The point is,” J.P. concluded, “that this was neither spur of the moment nor the work of amateurs. It’s difficult to extract oneself from such a scene without leaving something incriminating behind. But that’s what these people did. And the use of gloves and booties implies prior experience.”
“How ’bout the duct tape?” I asked. “Could you trace that?”
He shook his head. “It’s cheaper-grade stuff-something you could get at any discount store anywhere. In fact, that’s the reason Benny got away. At some point, they must’ve either taken a break or gone off to talk privately, because they all left the kitchen and went into the living room. I found small traces of blood from their feet in there, and I could tell from disturbances in the dust where they’d cleared three seats for themselves. Travers took advantage of the opportunity to tear his right hand free and get loose. He escaped through the kitchen door, which leads into a sort of garage-barn combination, where he’d hidden the repainted car.”
A donut halfway to his mouth, DeFlorio asked, “Without his pants?”
Sammie gave him a scowl and pushed Tyler’s report toward him. “They’d been torturing him, Dennis. They cut his pants off and used the knife on his balls. He didn’t care how he looked.”
It wasn’t totally fair. This was the man’s first day back on the job, and Tyler had been delicately circumspect in his description of Travers’s ordeal. Dennis’s hand froze. He looked around self-consciously, murmured, “Right,” and replaced the donut in its colorful box.
I tried to cover the embarrassed silence. “Ron, what’s Vince Sharkey been up to since we put that tail on him?”
Klesczewski pulled a note pad from his jacket pocket and flipped it open. “Not much. Hanging around the Flat Street address that houses some of the Asians, watching from his car, partway down the block.”
“Is there any sense that he’s up to something?”
Ron shook his head. “He’s been meeting with his boys, but so far we haven’t seen anything unusual.”
I looked over at Willy. “Anything from your sources?”
“Word has it you threw Vince in the river. Right now, it sounds like he’s more pissed at you than at any goo… Asian. Things have settled down a bit over the last two days. Vu and his people have been quiet, the old patterns are starting to pick up again, and nobody’s seen hide nor tail of Sonny.”
“But what about Benny’s operations?” I pressed him. “What’s the feeling out there? Is Vince going to inherit the business, or is he going to have to fight Vu for it?”