“Have you come up with anything while I’ve been gone?”
She looked a little embarrassed. “Not much. To be honest, since you left, we haven’t been giving the case top priority. Billy made it clear he didn’t want any more time spent on it-said it had cost plenty enough already. I think part of that was so that he could tell the reporters to take a hike-that it was out of our hands. It worked-I’ll give him that.” Then her eyes took on a devious gleam. “Still, none of that affected what I could do on my own time.”
I smiled, shaking my head at her predictable doggedness. “So what do you have?”
She retrieved a folder from her desk top and opened it, her pleasure immediately tempered. “Not that much, I’m afraid. Old news, mostly. You’d asked for IDs on the hit team that did that restaurant in San Francisco.”
She handed me a small pile of mug shots, each one stapled to an abbreviated rap sheet. “Those came in yesterday. I was going to send them up to you today, in fact.”
I went through the pile slowly, recognizing Johnny Xi, the first-as far as we knew-of Truong’s exercises in human carving. There were others-seven altogether, five of them stamped deceased across the top. The names meant nothing to me. But the face of the last one in the pile was all too familiar. I’d seen it just a couple of days earlier, on videotape.
I turned it around and showed it to Sammie. “Ring a bell?”
She squinted slightly, and then shrugged. “Maybe,” she answered cautiously. “Should it?”
“It’s an old shot. It’s our pal Edward Diep.” I looked at the rap sheet. Diep’s name was given as Lo Yu Lung, the same that Sammie had dug up on the phone just before the task force had been launched, but which had meant nothing to either one of us at the time. “We never got anything more on Diep, did we, aside from a Philadelphia address?”
Sammie shook her head. “Nope.”
“Can I use your phone?” I reached by her and dialed Frazier’s number. “Remember Edward Diep?” I asked him after he answered.
“Not much to remember. According to our Philly office, he’s long gone. Nobody seems to know anything about him.”
His choice of words caught my attention. “Like he didn’t exist?”
There was a pause at the other end. I could hear Frazier rustling papers on his desk. “That’s the implication,” he finally answered. “Inquiries were made of neighbors and nearby retailers. Nobody pegged on the mug shot. One guy’s quoted as saying he would’ve remembered, ’cause Asians run pretty thin out there.”
“Meaning it wasn’t an Asian neighborhood?” I asked, my excitement growing.
“I don’t know the city. I guess not. Why?”
“Because the one thing we’ve heard from the start of all this is that Asian crooks especially like to hang together. That’s what Dahlin discovered in Hartford, and what Lacoste was driving home in Montreal. Rich or poor, big-time or local, they seek out their own company. If that’s true, then why did Diep live so far away?”
“Okay,” Walt answered, “I’ll bite.”
“Because he doesn’t exist. And he didn’t want to set up a phony address that a quick call to some buddy or relative down the street would prove was bogus.”
Having thus stacked the deck, I asked the $64,000 question. “You said earlier that of the two San Francisco shooters still missing, one was definitely dead and the other presumed so. Was the second one named Lo Yu Lung?”
“Yes,” came the surprised reply.
“He and Diep are the same person-I’ve got the proof right in front of me. Which means Truong’s right-hand man is one of the people Truong is hell-bent on killing.”
“Damn.”
“That’s why the Philadelphia address makes sense. If you’re an Asian and you want to hide from the cops, what kind of address do you hand out? One in Chinatown. But if the people you’re trying to confuse are Asians, the reverse logic sets in. Diep-or Lo-was ducking Asians, not us.”
“Certainly one particular Asian,” Frazier murmured. “All right. Keep in touch.”
I hung the phone back up and smiled at Sammie. “Nice work. What else’ve you got?”
She looked a little startled and glanced down at her folder, seeing her erstwhile paltry efforts in a whole new light. “I finally heard back from the Lowell PD. Remember I’d been bugging them to give me what they had on Henry Lam and the guy Ron shot-Chu Nam An? I was hoping I could put them in the same place at the same time. It’s probably academic by now, but I did come up with a connection, not just between those two, but with Diep as well. All three of them surface at the same address in a door-to-door canvass report the cops did about a year ago, when they were looking for a child-killer.”
“Diep must’ve been wooing Lam to get on Truong’s good side later on-using the quote-unquote surrogate son to sneak in under the father’s defenses. Sure as hell worked. You’re on a roll, Sam.”
She read on, “J.P. heard back on that fingerprint he found on the pipe-bomb cap, but we hit a dead end. The print belongs to Greg Binder, who did a short stint for car theft a few years ago, but we can’t find a current address. The old one’s over a year out of date. It was up in the boonies in Orleans County, and the deputy we asked to check it out said nobody he talked to even remembered the guy. We’re still chasing it down, of course, but it doesn’t look good.” She handed me a sheet of paper. “And there’s nothing in his sheet to indicate any connections to Asians, or explosives, or violent behavior, or even Brattleboro.”
“I got one idea-a long shot.” I reached for the phone again and dialed Dan Flynn.
“Ask Digger something for me,” I told him when he got on the line. “See if the name Greg Binder rings a bell.”
Sammie watched me, her sallow cheeks regaining some of their color.
Flynn returned. “Says he’s known him from the time he was old enough to pry off a hubcap.”
“We need to find him. Any ideas?”
There was another long pause before Flynn got on again. “Try his uncle in South Burlington-runs a hardware store called Honest Ed’s. Digger says when things got tough for Greg as a kid, that’s usually where he headed. Ed Binder’s one of your salt-of-the-earth types.”
“Thanks, Dan. I’ll tell you later what’s up.” I disconnected, dialed Information, and got the number for Honest Ed’s.
“Is Greg Binder there?” I asked the voice on the other end.
“Sorry. You just missed him-went out on a delivery. Take a message?”
“No, thanks-I’ll call back.” I hung up and sat back in my chair.
“You’re shitting me,” Sammie stared at me.
I laughed. “When you mentioned Orleans County, I remembered that Bill Shirtsleeve-that’s Digger-used to work the outpost out there a few years back. Pure luck.”
She was shaking her head-smiling. “You going to check out Mr. Binder?”
I looked at my watch and saw, almost regretfully, that I had time to do just that. I had been looking forward to visiting Ron, and Tony as well, who I’d heard had been shipped back to a regular room at Brattleboro Memorial. But since the bombing in Newport, a new sense of urgency had arisen; if I hoped to deploy the preemptive moves against Truong that Walt Frazier was trusting me to make, I was going to have to move fast. We had to end this soon, and considering the price already paid, we had to be successful.
26
Honest Ed's Tool amp; Pipe looked as odd as it sounded. Set back from the road, hemmed in on both sides by a crush of prefabricated retail outlets, Ed’s appeared as either the cause of it all-the first and oldest roadside store along what had become an endless commercial strip-or a theatrically overdone attempt to go back in time to the “good-old days.” It was a wooden building with white peeling walls and enormous, dusty, plate-glass windows, crammed with junk either needing replacement, or at least a good cleaning. Over the front door-each letter highlighted by a trail of neon tubing as garish in color as the latest tricolor toothpaste-was a huge sign advertising Ed’s name. It was a helpful if unattractive addition, given that, without it, Ed’s might have been mistaken for anything from a closed pawn shop to a holding station for rejected tag-sale items.