“Drawers? Files?” Again he shook his head no.
“Not much of a search,” I said.
“Not particularly thorough, no.” He looked up. “I don’t get the sense that this was a pro’s handiwork.” He looked at Art for confirmation, and his partner nodded.
“How come?”
“It seemed too… haphazard.”
“Does the killing look like the work of someone who was haphazard?” I asked him.
Art looked down at the photos of Hoddington. “Oh, whoever did this had killing on his mind, that’s for sure. But I don’t think it played out the way it was planned.”
“How so?”
Micky closed his red eye and squinted at me. He gave me a tight grimace of satisfaction. “Read the coroner’s report…”
So I did, but it didn’t tell me much. My brother’s lips just got tighter and he put his finger on the paper. “Look. The victim had his hand burned. There were bruise marks on the wrist, too. Someone was torturing him.”
“There’s a familiar tune,” Art commented.
“For information?” I said. It sounded stupid the minute it was out of my mouth.
Micky rolled his eyes. “Of course, for information. Just like the victim in Queens. But the blood toxicology on Hoddington shows that it all got cut short.” He pointed to the relevant line, but I couldn’t figure it out. “Come on, Connor,” he said, and his voice betrayed a growing excitement. “Look! Hoddington had a heart attack. Probably induced by the torture. So, whatever the killer had planned got cut a little short.”
“So chances are the killer didn’t get what he came for?”
“Maybe.” He eyed me.
Art chimed in. “The bigger question is, what was it that got sent to the victim that made someone do this to him?” He gestured at the photos of Hoddington.
“I don’t know,” I had to admit. “But look.” I showed them the paper with the note written on it. “I think we’re starting to firm up the links. We know that Hoddington got something from Sakura…”
Art continued. “We know Sakura sent it the day before he was killed. Hoddington had it for four days before he ended up dead.”
Micky paused and looked at me with a glint in his good eye. “There’s one way to check on whether there’s really a link, though,” he told me.
“Hey, great,” I said.
“Sure,” he smirked. “Find the package and see if someone tries to kill you.” With my brother it’s hard to tell whether the sarcasm is a genetic thing, or something they teach you at the police academy.
It was a plan, of course, but not one I was particularly interested in. We began to go through the evidence again. There was a photo envelope filled with copies of snapshots that were found with the other documents at the cabin. They showed Hoddington smiling with the benevolence of age at some younger people. They were lifting wine glasses and toasting each other. You could see enough of the background to know it wasn’t the cabin where he died.
There were other pictures of Hoddington with the same group, standing outside. The trees were in bloom. In one shot, he stood with his arms around a man and a woman, off to one side of a structure. It had a wide, peaked roof supported by natural stone at either end. And under the roof, a dark bank with an archery target centered in it, staring at the camera like an eye.
I turned the pictures over. They were developed the day before the murder.
“Any idea who these people are?” I asked.
“Locals checked around,” Art told me. “They’re not family. Maybe people from the university? They’re old enough to be former students.”
I let it go.
Micky had been watching me during this process as if waiting to see whether I would notice something. So far he had been patient, but his eagerness finally prompted him to action.
“You want a stronger sense of a link? OK. Here’s a record of Hoddington’s phone calls.” He held the sheet out to me.
There wasn’t much activity. Hoddington came to his cabin to get away from things, and it showed. I scanned down the list. “I assume that these are calls in Georgia?”
“Sure,” Art said. “Seven-seven-oh, four-oh-four, those are Georgia area codes. I checked.”
“Yeah,” Micky said, “but look at this.” He snatched the paper back. “Here’s a call to area code seven-one-eight on the evening that the FedEx was delivered. It’s Sakura’s house.” You could hear the excitement in his voice. “And here, on the day Sakura was killed, Hoddington called a New York City number. It’s Sakura’s office.”
Art looked over his shoulder at the list. “He tried the two-one-two number a bunch of times, but there’s a day or so gap without activity. And then he was killed.”
I scrambled around the pile and picked something up. “The gap corresponds to the days before these pictures were developed,” I told them.
“So now do you see?” Micky asked.
“Sure. Hoddington got sent something from Sakura. There may have been something unusual about it. Hence the initial phone call. Then we see a flurry of subsequent attempts to contact Sakura…”
“But he was already dead,” my brother added.
“And then Hoddington takes a road trip somewhere for a few days. He comes back…” I trailed off.
“And he takes the big trip,” Art concluded. He looked at me with arched eyebrows. “That’s what I think. We’ll check some of this out. See if we can get a fix on where he went before the murder.”
“Not too bad,” I said. “Now all we have to do is connect the dots to Han, right?” I looked at my brother, who was moodily pushing reports around the tabletop. He didn’t reply. “Right?” I prompted.
“So you didn’t talk with him on the way over, Mick?” Art said.
I looked from one to the other. “What?”
Micky sighed. “There’s a complication here.”
My brother and I went to school with a guy named Charlie Wilcox. He was wiry, with a shock of spiky blonde hair and an explosive temper. Charlie was a permanent fixture on the detention rosters of principals, the bane of the nuns in our Catholic grade school, and an even more dangerous menace in high school. His family had attained local notoriety by the simple fact that his parents had produced fourteen kids. The Wilcox family had thirteen beds, which meant that bed-time during Charlie’s childhood was an interesting lesson in Darwinism.
He had achieved fleeting fame and actually generated some sympathy in the summer after high school, when a car accident had propelled him through the windshield of a Ford Maverick and out into the greasy August night, shearing off his ears. Several operations and many months later, Charlie emerged looking like a slightly altered version of himself and acting very differently.
I had lost track of him, but my brother hadn’t. Charlie had actually graduated from college and pursued, of all things, a career in law enforcement with the FBI.
I snickered. “You gotta be kiddin’ me.”
My brother shook his head as he took the three of us back to Brooklyn. “I shit you not. He’s actually working in the counterintelligence section here in the city.”
The thought of Charlie, armed and somehow associated with intelligence, was deeply alarming. But I said nothing about that. “What’s he got to do with our little problem?”
“We ran the plate number you gave us from when Han jumped you,” Art said, “and we got an interesting result.”
“That’s the understatement of the year,” Micky said, and there was resentment in his voice.
“It’s a diplomatic plate,” Art continued quickly. He could sense that his partner’s temper was on the rise and wanted to head off an explosion.
“Diplomatic immunity,” I said, and I realized why Micky was so annoyed. But I was wrong.
Art waved it away. “It’s a little more hinky than that, Connor. We also got a little ‘cease and desist’ advisory from the Feds.”
Micky made a right turn a little fast. Art and I were used to it by now and we leaned into the turn, but the tires squealed a bit. “Fuckin’ Feds,” Micky murmured darkly.
“So what’s that mean?” I pressed them.
My brother sighed. It sounded like something bleeding off from a high pressure valve. “Somewhere, someone’s got something going and it involves whoever was driving that car.”
“Did you find out who it was?”
“No,” Art said, “but we got the next best thing.”
“What?”
“Someone who can,” Micky said, and for the first time that day, my brother seemed content.
We eventually parked on Fifth Avenue in Fort Hamilton. It’s pretty upscale down there, with condos facing the water and any number of small restaurants to choose from. The day had developed into a bright and sunny one, and the trees that lined the avenue were filled with new leaves. The weekend streets were busy with yuppie couples wheeling toddlers around in expensive strollers. One white-haired fellow with a much younger wife pushed his kid along, wearing a fixed smile on his face that couldn’t quite hide a look of stunned disbelief.
Micky steered us to a small Chinese place. I glanced at the menu taped to the window and felt a surge of relief, since I knew the lunch bill wouldn’t destroy my budget. Micky reminded me that Art has a thing for egg rolls. We squeezed into a booth. Art sat next to me out of habit, like he was taking me into custody.
“Why here?” I asked.
“Waiting for someone,” Art explained.
I looked at Micky. He was watching the street for something. He turned his head and looked significantly at me and waited.
“No!” I said.
“Sure,” Art told me.
“Charlie Wilcox,” my brother added with deep satisfaction. “He lives on Staten Island. It took a bit of arm twisting, but I got him to come over and see us.”
Charlie arrived a few minutes later, looking older but still thin. And a lot more worried-looking. He smiled when we shook hands—old school chums—but the expression came and went on his face like a muscle spasm. The waiter darted over and we made our selections. Art ordered egg rolls.
Charlie Wilcox waited for the waiter to leave, then slid a large manila envelope onto the table. “I don’t like this much, Burke,” he began.
Micky wagged a finger at him. “You owe me, Charlie…” Wilcox nodded, but he looked like someone who had eaten something that tasted bad.
The FBI man slid out some pictures, surveillance shots of a vehicle and various people getting in and out of it. The license plate matched the one on the car that Han had escaped in. Micky went through them one by one. He slid one over to me. “Recognize him?”
The shot looked like it was taken in Battery Park, but I was more interested in the fact that the hulking figure of Han was clearly visible talking to a smaller Asian man. There were other shots of the car, of the smaller man talking to various people, entering and leaving buildings.
“So what do we have here, Charlie?” Micky asked. Out of the corner of his eye, Wilcox saw the waiter returning and he quietly slipped the pictures back out of sight. The food came and the duck sauce flowed. But Charlie didn’t seem to have much of an appetite.
“The smaller man is on the consular staff at the Embassy for the People’s Republic of China,” he said in an extremely low voice. “Cultural attaché.” We all nodded at the significance. It was the usual posting for intelligence agents. “Wu Tian. Career officer in the Chinese intelligence service.”
“The
Guoanbu
,” I said sagely. But no one seemed impressed by my vast store of knowledge.
Wilcox nodded. “He’s had postings in the Western Chinese Provinces. Spent five years in Tibet, and now he’s here.”
Micky and Art looked at each other at the mention of Tibet. Art’s eyebrows rose.
“That could have something to do with things,” I said.
“Buddy boy,” Micky began, “it may be connected to the murders or it may not…”
“That’s the beauty of what we do,” Art offered. “Lots of interesting things; some are connected, some aren’t.”
“Drives some people crazy,” Micky added.
His partner gazed about the restaurant with a look of serene satisfaction. “Not us. It fits our eclectic nature.”
Charlie didn’t know what we were talking about, but he plowed on. Life with the FBI had made him very serious. “Wu’s a pretty slick character. We suspect he’s got a sideline going and has been smuggling out Asian art and antiques for years. Lots of good looting opportunities in Tibet. Nothing real concrete, but he’s dirty in any number of ways. It’s not an unusual thing with the military and intel people in the PRC. The big man we haven’t been able to identify yet, but they’ve met on a number of occasions.”
“What are they up to?” I said
Charlie Wilcox shook his head. “I just work the tags on this. Collect the surveillance footage. It gets passed on to higher levels, and I don’t know what they’re doing with it.”
Micky made a skeptical sound deep down in his throat.
“I’m telling you, Burke. The bag around this thing is big and black.” He looked apologetically at Micky. “Sorry, but that’s all I’ve got.”
Micky squinted at him for a moment, then nodded slowly. “OK, Charlie. We can keep the prints?” Wilcox nodded reluctantly. Micky slipped a piece of paper over to the FBI man. “Here’s the info on the big guy. We’re lookin’ for him if he turns up again, OK?”
Wilcox nodded and slipped out of the booth. He glanced nervously toward the door. “I’m out of here,” he said, nodding to the detectives. “And you didn’t get those photos from me.”
“Came in a fortune cookie,” Art said. Charlie did not look reassured.
“Nice to see you again, Connor,” he said. But he didn’t seem to mean it.
We got down to more serious eating. “I’m having a hard time putting this all together,” I admitted. “It seems like Han is involved in three murders but we still don’t know why. I thought it had something to do with the inka. But is he also working for the Chinese?”
“Han’s muscle for hire,” Art said. “He could be working for lots of different people. The Chinese could have nothing to do with the killings. You also have to think of the possibility that each murder could have a distinct motive.”
“Links between the killings seem pretty good, though, Art,” Micky said. “Sakura gets something from Kim. Han wants it back. But Sakura’s sent it off somewhere…”
“Why kill Sakura?” I asked.
“Whatever Kim sent to him is something no one’s supposed to see,” Art told me.