Jim McGill 02 The Hangman's Companion Read online

  “Good.” The ambassador took his seat behind his desk and looked at his number two.

  “Ms. Mathers works at the switchboard. Her French is impeccable, and her Texas accent is crème fraîche on strawberries.”

  MarJean’s face began to color once more, but Minister Lee moved on.

  “Unhappily, Marjorie took a rather unnerving call today. She dutifully reported it to her supervisor, and the story has been rising through the hierarchy ever since. Please tell the ambassador, Marjorie.”

  MarJean told her story, and waited for the same questions she’d been hearing for hours now. But the ambassador came up with a new one.

  “Have you ever heard a real threat of violence before today, young lady?”

  Those words snapped MarJean right back to Texas. Made her forget all about her current discomfiture in Paris.

  “Yes, sir, I have.”

  The scene appeared in her mind like a movie trailer. Wayne Hotchkiss, a linebacker on her high school football team, popping out of the dark the moment she and Lucy Winger had come out of the library after a night of studying for midterms. Wayne looked and smelled like he’d been drinking.

  He told them, “You girls’re gonna step over here with me where nobody can see us, and I’m gonna have me a cheerleader sandwich.”

  Both girls stood where they were, petrified.

  Wayne fed off their fear, smiled, and took out a knife. Beckoned them with the blade. “Come on, now, ‘fore I git mad an’ cut you. An’ I git mad real easy these days.”

  There had been several fights on the football practice field that season. Teammates going at it. ‘Roid rage, all the rumors said. Wayne waved the knife and snarled, “Git over here before I have to hurt you.”

  Lucy started to whimper—and took a step forward.

  That broke the spell for MarJean. She wasn’t going to let an asshole like Wayne hurt her or her friend. MarJean stepped in front of Lucy. Wayne mistook that for eagerness. MarJean’s right foot shot up. She tried to kick Wayne’s balls all the way to Oklahoma, but she missed. As her foot continued its upward arc, she tried for his chin, but she missed that, too. She was in a bad spot just then, her right foot up over her head, and Wayne still holding his knife.

  Wayne grinned real big, liking this new view of MarJean. He took a step forward and that was his undoing. MarJean’s heel came down, slammed into his nose, taking the skin off from bridge to tip. Mashed it flat, too. Sent the football player sprawling.

  The girls ran off and, despite fearing retribution, never told their parents or anyone else what had happened. It was to their great relief that Wayne attributed his injuries to a fall and never so much as looked at them again.

  Now, MarJean was afraid Ambassador Legard was going to ask her the nature of the threat she had experienced. He very well might have if he hadn’t seen the powerful emotions he had stirred in the young woman.

  So he asked, “How did the threat you heard today compare to the one you just recalled?”

  Looking at things through the lens of her own history, and fully realizing for the first time just how lucky she had been, MarJean said, “It was just as serious, sir. There’s a poor woman out there in real trouble.”

  Hôpital Saint-Antoine, Paris

  27

  Gabbi drove so close to the bumper of the ambulance carrying Arno Durand to the hospital she felt she was pushing the damn thing. Psychologically, if the ambulance driver checked his mirror, she probably was. At least, the ambulance never slowed down, not until the driver turned the light bar off and his hazard lights on to let her know they were approaching the hospital and he would have to slow down to make the turn into the emergency entrance.

  As there was a police car hard on Gabbi’s bumper, she put her own flashers on. The three vehicles glided off the street and onto the hospital grounds. The ambulance continued on to the emergency entrance where a medical team stood waiting. Gabbi and the cops peeled off into a parking area.

  The cop car sealed Gabbi’s vehicle into its parking space and two cops jumped out. Neither drew his weapon, but each had his hand resting on it. One of them moved to each side of her car. They hadn’t been in the alley behind Durand’s apartment, hadn’t seen she was the Good Samaritan who had called for medical help. She had knelt next to the reporter’s body and could hear the thin, ragged thread of his respiration even before she found the pulse in his neck. Not knowing whether Durand had suffered spinal injury, she hadn’t dared to move him. She just whispered to him to hang on.

  “Soyez fort. L’aide vient.” Be strong. Help is coming.

  She repeated the admonition in as many ways as she could conceive.

  Not believing how long the damn ambulance was taking. Had they stopped at a café for a meal? Was the crew new to the city and couldn’t find its way? What the hell was the problem?

  Giving in to her frustration at one point, she muttered, “Merde, merde, merde.”

  That was when Durand opened one eye and looked at her.

  “La bète fétide,” he murmured. The foul beast. The Undertaker.

  Then his eyelid slid shut, scaring the hell out of her once more that he’d died. But she found his pulse, though it seemed to be weaker. Just as she was about to fall into despair, the damn ambulance finally came, and when she looked at her watch, she saw that it had been under ten minutes in arriving. She quickly backed out of the emergency team’s way, and a moment later ran around to the front of the building and got into her car.

  There was a police vehicle—the one now blocking her car—at the mouth of the alley halting traffic so the ambulance might make an unhindered exit. Gabbi timed her move perfectly, letting the ambulance enter traffic and flashing around the police barricade the moment it had. The cops, startled by her maneuver and uncertain of her intent, were on her tail in a heartbeat.

  And now two more patrol units arrived, these cars discharging gendarmes with automatic weapons. All of them neatly pointed her way.

  Gabbi had her driver’s window down and extended her official ID in her left hand.

  “Je suis diplomate américaine.” I’m an American diplomat.

  Not a weapon was lowered.

  “J’ai telephone à l’ambulance.” I called the ambulance.

  That eased the tension a little.

  “Vérifez mes mots avec le magistrat Pruet.” Check with Magistrate Pruet.

  The cops sighed in unison and lowered their firearms.

  Annandale/Arlington, VA

  28

  “I do like this car, Margaret,” Putnam said.

  Sweetie was driving her Malibu, taking her landlord to see how Deke Ky was mending, but they were swinging by Annandale first to take a look at the residence of Edward and Marilyn Vinh.

  “Must be worth more than the original sticker price,” Putnam added.

  Sweetie thought of how much the car meant to her.

  “It’s more valuable than I can tell you,” she said.

  Putnam understood. The car was more valuable than she cared to tell him, at least right now. He could live with that. He intended to outwait Margaret on a lot of things. He turned the conversation to a new topic.

  “You don’t think the Vinhs might recognize me?” Putnam asked.

  Sweetie glanced at him. He was wearing sunglasses and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. She said, “Let me ask you something, and I’m in no way implying you’re a bigot.”

  “That’s good,” Putnam told her, “because after my parents abandoned me as a child, I was raised by black people.”

  Sweetie came to a stop for a red light. Gave him a long look.

  Like he’d said he’d been raised by wolves or something.

  Putnam only smiled. Letting her know, okay, she might have secrets about her car and what it meant to her, but he had stories about his past, too.

  Sweetie understood. Didn’t pry. She could be patient, too.

  The light turned green and she put the Malibu in motion.

  She
told him, “What I was getting at is this: Today, you saw the Vinhs, and you took pictures of them. Tomorrow, if one of them passed you on the street in D.C., would you recognize him?”

  Putnam thought about it. “The kids, no. They’re pretty young, fall into a generic Asian kid picture in my mind. The dad, probably not him either. Nothing about him struck me as memorable. The mom, though, she was pretty nice. I think I’d remember her.”

  If Putnam was trying to bait Sweetie, she didn’t rise to it.

  “What if Mom was wearing sunglasses and a scarf?” Sweetie asked.

  Putnam tried to compose the image in his mind. He couldn’t.

  “Okay, you got me. So what’s your point?”

  “My point is, why do you think the Vinhs would remember what you look like for more than ten minutes? Why do you think they’d recognize you when you’re wearing shades and a baseball cap. One of the most disappointing things a new cop learns is how unreliable eyewitness testimony is. People hardly ever see things in detail, and even when they do, few of them have the vocabulary to express just what it was they saw.”

  “And me being a white boy and the Vinhs being Asian, political correctness be damned, we all look alike to each other?” Putnam asked.

  “Not so much alike, just a lot harder to process.”

  “Is that cop lore or a scientific fact?”

  “Both. Cops have known it for a long time and science has caught up. There was a recent study done in a Boston children’s hospital. It showed that as infants learn to specialize in recognizing the faces they see most often the ability to recognize other kinds of faces diminishes.”

  Sweetie turned onto a block of neat frame houses with large front lawns and mature trees. She pulled the Malibu to the curb a half-block distant and on the opposite side of the street from the Vinh house. MapQuest had led them every inch of the way. Sweetie had made the choice of parking in the shade of an oak on her own.

  “So I shouldn’t sweat being recognized,” Putnam said.

  “No, not specifically you. But if Mr. Vinh, say, was paying enough attention to see you snapping pictures, he might be on the look out for any strangers. That’s a much easier visual task.”

  “That’s why you parked in the shade,” said Putnam.

  “You always take whatever cover you can get.”

  Sweetie took a pair of Bushnell Compact Zoom binoculars out of the glove box and focused them on the Vinh house. No one was working or playing in front of the house. No bicycles or toys had been left on the neatly cut lawn. No pruning shears had been left in a flowerbed. The garage door was down. The curtains were closed tight on every window facing the street. Sweetie had the feeling that if the Vinh house had come with a drawbridge, it would be raised.

  The Vinhs’ defenses certainly had been.

  She looked at Putnam. “Let’s go over those photos you took.”

  Putnam pulled his camera from his briefcase and they looked at the display screen. He narrated, “Dad was washing the car; Mom was weeding the flower bed; the kids were playing marbles in that little patch of dirt in the corner of the lawn. I hadn’t seen anyone doing that in years.”

  Sweetie nodded. The composite feeling of the photos was of a family at ease, enjoying the fine weather outside their peaceful home. Now, they were either hiding inside or had locked up tight before jumping in the car for parts unknown. Raising the question of what had happened.

  “You took the pictures out the driver side window from this side of the street, right?”

  “Just up there, by that pale yellow house,” Putnam said.

  Sweetie looked and estimated the distance between the yellow house and the Vinh house. Maybe sixty feet. Pretty close if one of the subjects of Putnam’s portraiture, Dad or Mom, had reason to be watchful. Neither would have had to get a good look at Putnam himself to realize a stranger was taking pictures of them from his car. Putnam had even photographed the kids, which would be enough to alarm any parent. But maybe the Vinhs, with their connection to Horatio Bao, had other reasons to feel anxious.

  If the Vinhs had gotten in touch with Bao, maybe he was feeling threatened, too.

  Sweetie handed the binoculars to Putnam. He returned them to the glove box as she put the Malibu in reverse, backed into a nearby driveway and drove off the way they came, never passing in front of the Vinh house.

  “Did I screw up?” Putnam asked.

  “Probably.”

  “Shit.”

  Sweetie normally had little tolerance of vulgarity, but she didn’t reprimand Putnam.

  “Could work out,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “If I’m right, you called attention to yourself.”

  “That’s good?”

  “Like you said, you’re a white boy. That’s what the other side will be looking for. And they’ll be puzzled what a white boy would be doing looking at the Vinhs. Meanwhile…”

  “Meanwhile, what?”

  “We bring in somebody who doesn’t look like you at all.”

  29

  Special Agent Donald “Deke” Ky opened the door to his mother’s home, but only after the security camera mounted under the eaves identified the visitors. Sweetie was taken by how much better Deke looked than only a couple of days ago.

  “You been drinking protein shakes?” she asked.

  “Nice to see you, too, Margaret.” Deke was looking at Putnam, evaluating his threat potential. He admitted both visitors to his mother’s home.

  “Mom here?” Sweetie asked.

  Deke shook his head. He could get closed-mouth like that, Sweetie knew.

  She introduced Putnam. The two men shook hands.

  “You mind if we sit down?” Sweetie asked. “I’d like to talk with you about something?”

  “What?” Deke asked.

  “I think I might have found the person who rang your doorbell the night you got shot.”

  Deke’s eyes narrowed to slits, a razor’s edge of blue pupil gleaming from each one. He gestured to a sofa in the living room. Sweetie and Putnam sat next to each other. Deke took an armchair opposite them.

  Sweetie told Deke straight out what they’d found out about Horatio Bao and Ricky Lanh Huu.

  “That guy,” Deke said. “Little jerk came to Francis’s church. Tried to coerce Francis into going to see Bao, threatened him with a knife.”

  “Some guys just set themselves up for a fall,” Sweetie said, shaking her head. “But I’m kind of surprised Father Francis shared with you.”

  “He wanted me to know in case anything happened to him.”

  Had the priest, in effect, sicced Deke on Ricky? If the creep had confessed shooting Deke to Father Francis, he couldn’t do anything about that. But if Father Francis, himself, should fall victim to Ricky’s predation, Deke would know just who to … well, whatever Deke decided was fitting.

  If that should fall outside the bounds of morality, Deke could always confess his sin.

  It would be poetic. But Sweetie had her own ideas.

  She said, “Let me tell you what we found out. Actually, Putnam found out, so I’ll let him tell you.”

  Putnam told Deke about Horatio Bao’s collection of jailbird homebuyers, and how when he went to look at one of the homes, he found a nice Viet-American family living there.

  Deke took that in and asked Putnam, “How’d you find out who the family is?”

  Putnam turned red, looked at Sweetie. She nodded.

  “I photographed his car, got the license plate. I used that to determine identity.”

  Access to the Virginia DMV database was supposed to be restricted to law enforcement personnel working with a valid need to know. Use of the database outside of those parameters was a crime — but Deke was on disability leave and didn’t push the matter. He wanted to hear what else Margaret’s friend had to say.

  Putnam saw the federal agent’s tacit acceptance of his transgression and continued. “Once I had Edward Vinh’s name and address, it was easy to
do a credit check. He’s an auto mechanic at a service station in Alexandria, makes about 35K a year. His wife Marilyn adds another 15K working part time as a cook in a Chinese restaurant. They have two children, Thomas, age seven and Sarah, age six. The kids go to a parochial school in Annandale.”

  Deke had been processing the information as Putnam provided it.

  “Working class family in a white-collar neighborhood.”

  “Median income 110K, more than twice what the Vinhs bring home.” Putnam, being a lawyer, had thought to look into that.

  “The guy who bought the house where this family lives, what’s his rap sheet say?”

  “Extortion, shaking down Viet immigrant businesses, and strong-arm robbery.”

  “What’s the going rent for a house like the one where the Vinh’s live?”

  Putnam had looked that up, too. “Two grand to twenty-five hundred per month.”

  “Takes most if not all of Dad’s after-tax income. These people look like they’re scraping by?” Deke asked.

  Putnam shook his head. “Looked like they fit into their neighborhood. Mr. Vinh was washing a late model Hyundai sedan out front. Mrs. Vinh was tending some nice landscaping. Kids were nicely dressed.”

  “Maybe they just know how to stretch a dollar,” Sweetie said, deadpan.

  Deke grunted. He asked Putnam, “You check how long the Vinhs have held their jobs?”

  “No.”

  “Might be interesting to know. See if maybe there’s unreported income.”

  “Cash,” Sweetie said. “And Putnam came up with five more felons who used Bao to buy homes. You think you might be up to checking them out. See if they’re renting to nice families, too. Maybe at a discount.”

  Deke nodded. “I’ve been needing to get out of the house.”

  “Maybe you can check out Bao’s office lady, too. I’m pretty sure she’s your bell-ringer.”

  “I could do that.”

  Sweetie told him, “I’d feel awful if I misjudged your health and you got hurt again.”

  “You want me clear this with SAC Crogher?”

  Sweetie shook her head. “I’m just saying. You’re not feeling up to snuff, I’ll work out something else.”