“These are in the three-hundred-thousand to a half-million-dollar range. Some of them are bought sight unseen by people in Hong Kong, just so they have somewhere to move in 1997.” Lacoste suddenly stopped the car and backed up. “See that license plate?”
We both looked at a late-model, Japanese luxury sports sedan. There were four 8s on the plate.
“Eight is a lucky number to the Chinese. The owner worked very hard to get a license like that.”
“Christ,” Spinney mused. “Looks like a trailer park, but with million-dollar trailers.”
Lacoste agreed. “They like being close together. That’s what makes them strong.”
“Is Da Wang’s house around here?” I asked.
Lacoste emphatically shook his head. “No, no. A few of these might be owned by triad people, but most belong to rich businessmen still in the old country. People like Da Wang do not live in houses like this. We find that the gangs like cars, sometimes clothes and pretty girls, but they don’t care where they live, and they like to live with lots of other people. La Cosa Nostra, they get a big mansion, much land, a fence, guard dogs. Asian criminals mostly do not like that. It would keep them apart from the people they need to survive. Da Wang lives in East Brossard, where there are lots of apartment buildings that look like motels.”
We’d left the ritzy neighborhood from Oz and returned to one of the main commercial strips. “There is your place-up there.” He pointed to a large gas-station/food-store combination, with flying-buttress roofs over the pumps and a steady stream of traffic filing through. He parked off to the side and we got out and crossed over to the store.
I handed Lacoste the receipt. He discreetly flashed his badge at one of the clerks, who abandoned his customer with a murmured apology and came over to us.
After a quick conversation, the clerk went back behind his counter and picked up a phone. Lacoste explained. “He has to call his boss. We may be lucky today.” He pointed to a camera that was mounted over the cash register. “There have been robberies here, so last year they put in those. They keep the tapes for a long time, he says.”
“How long?” I asked, even now doubtful we could get that lucky.
Lacoste spread his arms out expansively. “That, we will find out.”
Fifteen minutes later, a short, fat, blotchy-faced man arrived, irritable and out of breath. He led us into a small, windowless back room, one wall of which had several closed-circuit television screens mounted near the ceiling. On a counter beneath them was a large console with a touch-pad keyboard mounted on its surface. The man took the receipt from Lacoste, read the time and date, and punched some numbers onto the playback machine. The TV image directly above us suddenly went haywire, streaked by the effects of a tape in fast rewind. About four minutes later, the tape stopped, paused, and then suddenly came to life.
Before us was the same scene as before-the counter, the cash register, the back of a clerk in his smock-but we could tell from the reflections off the distant windows that it was night. We watched as a line of people took their turn in front of the camera.
“There,” I suddenly said, both stunned that such a long shot had paid off and unsure of what it meant.
The store owner hit a button and froze the image.
“Who is it?” Spinney asked about the middle-aged man standing alone with his wallet in his hand, a small pile of candy and soda spread out before him.
The image was made doubly odd in that it so closely matched what we had back in Brattleboro-on the tape I’d made of the traffic stop on the interstate. “His name’s Edward Diep.”
22
Unfortunately, Edward Diep didn't appear in any of Jean-Paul Lacoste’s reference files. He cross-checked with RCMP and the Québec Provincial Police, and even with the American NCIC, as we had done that night so long ago. But now, as then, all we got for our efforts was the record of a Pennsylvania driver’s license and an address in Philadelphia.
Using my hard-won new connections as a federal agent, I called Walter Frazier on Lacoste’s phone and asked him to have the address checked by someone in the Philadelphia office. I also requested a thorough background search of Wang Chien-kuo, alias Da Wang. In exchange, Walter asked me to stop by his office on our way back through Burlington. He had some new information on Truong Van Loc.
After that, Spinney and I took advantage of our freshly minted alliance with the MUC to introduce Lacoste to our entire rogues’ gallery, from the largely unlabeled photo album my squad had assembled of Brattleboro’s transient Asian population, to the mug shots, fingerprints, and arrest file of Nguyen Van Hai, the only man we had under arrest, who was awaiting trial for the torture-murder of Benny Travers.
Running them all through his own data bank, Lacoste came up with several cross-references. Nguyen, Henry Lam, Chu Nam An. At this early stage, all we could easily locate was some basic information on each man, but it was enough to transform Lacoste from an amiable and generous host into a committed participant. The possibility that we might have handed him something his department could use to its own benefit was enough to guarantee their continuing cooperation, long after Spinney and I had headed back over the border.
We parted company much later that day, with promises to keep in close touch. There, I was not just being polite. I had high hopes that the more he dug, the more connections Lacoste would uncover-connections that might prove crucial to the whole case.
An hour later, we were back among the flat fields of southern Québec, heading home.
“What do you make of Diep on that video?”
I paused before answering. “When we stopped them on I-91 last winter, none of those three seemed to know each other. I played the what’s-your-buddy’s-name routine on Truong, and he flunked-called Diep ‘Jimmy.’ Normally, that would actually make sense. From what I’ve researched, when a hit is ordered, the contract goes out to a jobber-like a middleman. He calls on his usual people, or others who’ve been recommended to him, and he names the rate-five thousand, fifteen thousand… I read a cop can go for fifty. Once he selects the team he wants-each member of which comes from a different part of the country-the deal’s done. The team comes together once, the target’s whacked, and the team disperses. They do not trade names or addresses, they keep the small talk to a minimum, and they’re only in contact for a few hours.”
“Except that this time Truong was contractor, jobber, and hit man rolled into one, so he should’ve known who everyone was,” Spinney concluded.
“Not only that, but Lam and Diep both have links to Montreal, and Truong and Lam originally lived in California…”
“And Diep and Lam also lived on the East Coast, and Truong and Lam showed up in Brattleboro to aggravate the hell out of you. In every case, Lam is the common denominator.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “But if Diep was the newest member, introduced to Truong by Lam, what was he doing in Montreal with Truong, for what we assume was a hit on Da Wang’s snakehead? And why was that receipt Diep collected found in a Canadian car that was used to kill Benny Travers?”
Spinney turned both his hands up in resignation. “All right, so the hit team couldn’t have been made up of people who didn’t know each other.”
“Then why didn’t Truong know who Diep was when I asked him?”
Spinney didn’t answer.
Walt Frazier dimmed the lights and hit a button on his remote. The VCR across the room stirred awake, and the television set above it lit up with a ragged nighttime camera shot of a decrepit one-story bungalow, glistening in the reflected glare of several bright lights. Police in bulletproof vests scurried back and forth, getting into position. After a moment’s telling pause, they rushed the building’s front door, the cameraman in hot pursuit. There was no sound track.