Read The Dark Root for Free Online Page B

of that time. We were also close friends, so I empathized with his unhappiness. The ticking clock I’d worried about when Alice Sims approached me at the crash site had recently gotten louder. She had finally connected the hot-rodder ploy with Benny’s death, and she’d even ferreted out his name by talking to some of the same kids we’d interviewed—although not Sally Javits—so the pressure on Tony to explain a few things had suddenly become greater.
    I therefore tried to give him something hopeful. “There may actually be more to this. Remember that home invasion about a month ago—Thomas Lee? I went back to the neighbor who saw a car squealing away from there just before we showed up that night. At the time, she said she knew the car wasn’t from Vermont because the plates had dark numbers on a light background. Last night, I parked opposite the Lee house and held up a variety of license plates against my own car—from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Québec—and had her stand in her window to see if any of them rang a bell. She pegged the one from Québec.”
    He looked at me quizzically. “So?”
    “So it was an Asian-style crime against an Asian family. That vehicle stop Marshall Smith did on the interstate in late January was a carful of Asians, all of them with contradictory stories, no luggage, an empty secret compartment on board, and heading for Montreal. And now this thing with Sonny… All Asian-related. All with ties to Montreal.”
    “The vehicle stop had nothing to do with us. It was dumb luck Smith was out there.”
    I conceded the point with a wave of my hand.
    “I’ll go along with the other two, though,” he added. “You call Montreal?”
    “They never heard of Michael Vu or any of the boys we’ve identified, and they said ‘Sonny’ is a common pseudonym. Of the hundred-and-some-thousand Asians they’ve got in their town, maybe two dozen rap sheets have that name, and they didn’t sound too interested in mailing me pictures of them.”
    “I wouldn’t have either,” Tony murmured. “How ’bout Thomas Lee. You speak with him after that night?”
    “Yup. Still won’t talk.”
    Tony removed the pipe and tapped its contents out into a large ashtray, shaking his head and looking doubly glum. “Well, until you prove otherwise, that’s all beside the point anyhow. Concentrate on nailing whoever killed Ben Travers. I’ve been stalling the press on whether this car crash was youthful high jinks gone wrong or murder, but if they get a whiff of Montreal hit teams and the ‘Heathen Chinee,’ we’ll be knee-deep in shit in no time. Who do you have working the case now?”
    “Besides me, Ron Klesczewski and Sammie Martens. J.P.’s wrapping up the forensics, but that’s mostly logging whatever comes back to him from the crime lab.”
    He looked slightly puzzled. “That enough people?”
    “For what we’ve got to work with, yeah. Benny’s inner circle was small, and they’re all playing dumb. We haven’t even been able to track what he did between getting out of bed that morning and getting himself burned to death seven hours later.”
    I got to my feet and moved toward the door.
    Tony aired a possible alternative. “If I were one of Ben’s more ambitious lieutenants, hungry to grab his turf and not get caught, Sonny and his Chinese tough talk would have seemed like the perfect combination of an opportunity and an alibi.”
    I paused at the door and looked back at him. “Good point.”
    “Put on more people and get clear on where you’re headed. The answer to your problem may be less complicated than you think.” He patted the pile on his desk. “And this is thick enough without any race-discrimination suits added to it.”
    · · ·
    · · ·
    I didn’t have long to wait for the Benny Travers case to open up slightly.
    J.P. Tyler was waiting in my office, much happier than when I’d seen him last and holding a long, thin, shiny piece of twisted metal in his