Authors: Jaden Terrell
I filled Malone in on the way, focusing on Tuyet’s disappearance and skimming the parts about my father and his other family. The hall was quiet, except for the sounds of our footsteps—the click of my boot heels, the muffled tap of Malone’s flats, the soft shuffle of Khanh’s embroidered slippers.
Malone pushed open a door that had a brass plate with her name on it. “I have to warn you. These photos, they won’t be easy to look at.”
Khanh gave her a long, flat look. “Easy, not easy, I look.”
Malone gestured toward two chairs across from her desk, then went around and dropped into the ergonomically designed computer chair on the other side. Her desk was polished, neat. Pens and pencils in a ceramic pen holder, spiral-bound calendar open to the current month. I thought of my scarred desk with the bullet holes. I liked it better.
She opened a drawer and pulled out a thin file. Pushed it across the table toward Khanh.
Khanh closed her eyes. After a moment, she took a deep breath and opened the file. Picked up the photo on top. I looked over her shoulder. The dead girl, curled like a sleeping infant in the mound of garbage bags. Khanh took a quivering breath and moved the picture to the back of the pile.
She took her time, studying each one carefully and lingering over the close-ups of identifying marks. A mole on the side of the neck. A dragonfly tattoo on one shoulder. The scar that looked like a Chinese ideogram.
In the photos, the scars and bruises were more noticeable. A small sound, almost a chirp, escaped Khanh. Then she let out a whoosh of breath and said, “Not her. Not Tuyet.”
“You’re sure?” Malone said. “There’s a lot of damage. The face is kind of . . . misshapen.”
Khanh closed the file and handed it across the desk. Her voice was calm, but her jaw pulsed. “Tuyet not so small. Bigger breast. Longer leg. No . . .” She fumbled for the word. “On shoulder. No tattoo.” After a moment, she frowned and said, “She must know Tuyet. Maybe steal picture.”
Malone said, “Or maybe Tuyet gave it to her. Or maybe she got it from someone else who knew your daughter.”
I looked at Khanh. “Who was the man who bought Tuyet’s ticket?”
“She call him Mat Troi,” Khanh said. “He Amerasian, like us.”
“Probably why she trusted him,” Malone said. “Assuming he’s involved in this. But you don’t know that he is—or that she isn’t. If this girl was a rival—”
Khanh’s hand curled into a fist. “Tuyet never do this!” Her stump waved toward the file.
“Relax,” Malone said. “I didn’t say she would. I said she might. We don’t know what happened. We don’t even know she’s missing.”
“She missing. Too long, no call.”
“Maybe,” Malone said. “They don’t, always.”
She asked Khanh all the right questions—the flight number, time and date of the flight, everything she knew about the man who had bought the ticket. Khanh knew the time and date of the flight, not much else.
“You have a picture?” Malone asked.
Khanh reached into her purse and pulled out a candid photo of a laughing young woman on a motorbike. Tight jeans. No helmet. One hand brushed a windblown strand of long black hair from her face. She had Khanh’s eyes and mouth, my father’s nose and cheekbones. She was beautiful.
I thought of the girl in the dumpster, her battered face, her shredded feet. Her killer had kept her a month, maybe two, Frank had said. Tuyet had already been missing a month. If she was still alive, she might not have much time.
Malone scanned the photo into her computer and handed the original back to Khanh. I picked up the file before Malone could protest and flipped to the picture I wanted. “Khanh. You see this mark?” I pointed to the scar, the one that looked like a Chinese symbol.
“Yes. Mean eye of dragon.”
“Frank—Frank Campanella, he’s working the case—says it might be a brand.”
“I not know brand.”
“It’s a mark, like a scar. It shows possession. Like, cattlemen used to brand their livestock so other ranchers would know those particular animals were theirs. So if a rustler stole somebody else’s cow or horse, other people could recognize it and know who the real owner was.”
She looked aghast. “You do this people?”
“No, psychopaths do this to people.” At her blank look, I added, “Bad men who like to hurt things.”
She took in a hitching breath. “You think Tuyet with . . . sigh-ko-pat?”
Malone shot me a glare. “It’s too soon to speculate. She could be shacking up with the guy she came here with, she could be—”
“She could be anywhere,” I said. “She obviously got as far as looking up my office number, just like you did, but you showed up on my doorstep, and she never did. Whatever that means, it can’t be good.”
Khanh was quiet for a moment. Then, “You help me find her.”
“That’s what we do,” Malone said. “But it will take time. It’s a big world out there, and we don’t have much to go on.”
“Big world,” Khanh repeated. She hugged herself with her good arm and whispered, “Too big, sometime.”
6
“W
hat now?” Khanh asked. She hauled the duffel bag across the passenger seat and into her lap. It was too big, but she propped it on her thighs and wrapped her arms around it as if it were a child. Her left hand cupped her other elbow, just above the stump.
I said, “You heard her. They’re looking for your daughter. They have more resources than we have.”
She glared at me through narrowed eyes. “You give up.”
“Nobody’s giving up. I’m just saying, this is a homicide investigation. Leave it to the professionals.”
“These professional,” she said, “how hard you think they look?”
As hard as they can
, I wanted to say, but she was right. Nashville detectives were good, but what did they have? A dead girl they couldn’t identify and a missing foreigner they couldn’t prove was missing. My father’s photograph linked them, but how many links might be in that chain was impossible to tell.
“This sigh-ko-pat,” Khanh said. “Maybe hurting her right now.” She gave me a pleading look. Big brown eyes like Maria’s, with epicanthal folds like Paul’s. This was not my problem, but I felt my resolve faltering. Something skittered at the edges of my mind. I pushed it down, thought of my father and the Vietnamese family in front of that shack in the rice fields.
No. I don’t owe her anything. I don’t owe either of them anything.
I wasn’t sure if I meant Khanh and her daughter, or if I meant Khanh and my father. The thought made me feel petty, but there it was.
“Please,” she said, maybe seeing something in my face, some sudden coldness. “I know we nothing you, but for you father . . . for you ancestor . . .”
“I’m not feeling very chummy with my ancestors right now. You were doing better when you said she might be being tortured somewhere.”
“That still true. Please. I read you sign. You find lost people. My daughter lost.”
Another lost teenager. The weight of it was a pressure in my gut, a clamp around my chest. Frank had it right. All those months when I’d been dodging cases more complex than faithless spouses and skip tracing for bill collectors, I’d been running from a deeper question:
What if I wasn’t good enough?
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I gripped the steering wheel, found my voice, and said, “I find people who have credit cards, driver’s licenses. People who leave trails, even if they don’t mean to.”
“You hear police lady,” she said. “Tuyet grown woman. Maybe go away. Maybe meet man, fall in love.”
“Maybe she did.” At her baleful expression, I held up a hand and said, “I’m not saying that’s what happened. I’m saying, isn’t it possible?”
“No. Not possible.”
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. With the Murder Squad defunct and the department understaffed, the Cold Case division was Khanh’s best hope of solving the unidentified Asian woman’s murder and finding Tuyet. They were among the best in the country. But it would be a year before the case would be officially cold, and by then it would be too late for Tuyet.
If it wasn’t already.
I weighed the options, came up empty. Khanh and her daughter needed help. Good enough or not, I was what they had.
“I’ll look for her,” I said, finally. “But just until we figure something else out.”
“We look for her.”
“I work alone.”
She stared straight ahead, not frowning, not smiling. “Okay. You work alone. I come with you.”
I started to tell her it was too dangerous. Whoever had killed the girl in the dumpster wouldn’t hesitate to kill again. And Occam’s Razor said that whoever had killed the girl either had Tuyet or knew the men who did. Then I thought about the wind tree and the long trek into the jungle. I thought about vipers. Bandits. Tigers.
“Fine,” I said. “But if you get in my way . . .”
“Not get in way,” she said. A smile flitted across her lips. “Where we start?”
“We canvass the neighborhood. My building first.”
This was ground Frank and Harry had already covered, but I wanted to ask my own questions, hear the timbre of voices, watch for physical reactions. Witnesses were sometimes more relaxed and therefore more forthcoming with civilians than with police. And sometimes less, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. The hunger to gossip might make up for my lack of a badge.
Since it was too early for the Strip-o-Gram ladies, I knocked on the door across the hall.
Shawna Reese,
said the placard on the door.
Counselor for Abused Women
. She answered the door, scowled when she saw me, and talked to us in the hall, arms crossed tightly across her chest, one knee jiggling as she talked. She kept regular office hours and hadn’t been there at the time of the murder, she said, then went on at length about the Asian woman’s tragic death and the perfidy of men. She punctuated her speech with hard looks in my direction.
Pretending not to notice, I thanked her for her time and turned toward the stairs.
“Wait,” she said, touching Khanh’s elbow with her fingertips. “I hope you find your daughter. If you find her, she’ll need to talk to someone. You know where to find me.” She shot me a final glare, stepped inside, and closed the door.
“No help,” Khanh said.
“Onward and upward.” I led her up one level and tapped on the psychedelic poster on the door of the Society for the Legalization of Controlled Substances. No answer. The door was locked, and a faint odor of marijuana hovered in the hall. I knocked again, and finally the chain rattled and a barefoot, bleary-eyed guy in faded jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt opened the door. A haze of cannabis smoke boiled from the room. I coughed and waved the smoke away.
“Dude,” he said.
“I’m following up on that murder from last week.”
His eyes cleared a little. “I thought you weren’t a cop no more.”
“Private.”
“Can’t help you, man. We was crashed out in the back when it went down.”
“How do you know when it went down?”
“Cops asked where we was between midnight and five a.m., wasn’t too hard to figure. We worked late stuffin’ flyers into envelopes, had some pizza around nine, crashed around eleven. Didn’t hear nothin’ until we woke up around noon the next day. Well, except for the big crash.”
“Big crash?”
“Sometime between two and three. Sounded like it came from next door.”
“Warfield’s office?”
“Naw, more like outside. But then it got real quiet again and we went back to sleep.”
“You tell the police about this big crash?”
“Hell, no, and I ain’t gonna, neither. Too bad about that chick, though.”
I glanced at Khanh as the door closed. “Yeah, too bad.”
The last occupied office belonged to Casey Warfield, a nondescript man who shuffled nondescript packages to and from Tokyo, Bangkok and Shanghai. I’d never noticed any postmarks from Vietnam, but then, I hadn’t had reason to look for any. Suddenly he seemed a lot more interesting.
His door opened as I lifted my hand to knock. His eyes widened, and he stumbled backward a few steps, shielding his body with his briefcase and an oversized presentation folder. Recognition seeped into his eyes, and he lowered the briefcase a few inches.
“Dear God, you scared the life out of me.” His gaze moved past me to Khanh, lingering on her scars a little longer than was polite. He was a few inches shorter than me, with prematurely thinning hair and a pasty complexion. He tucked the folder under one arm and used his free hand to straighten his tie. “I don’t have time to talk. I’ve already missed one meeting because of you.”
“Me?”
“Don’t tell me that dead girl in the dumpster didn’t have anything to do with you.”
“A little respect.” I nodded toward Khanh. “Next of kin?”
“No, but her daughter’s missing. There’s a good chance it’s connected.”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?” The folder slipped, and he propped the briefcase against his calf while he adjusted the folder. “But I can’t help you. I already told the police everything.”
“You do a lot of work in Asia, right?”
“With, not in. I’ve actually never been out of the country.” He stopped suddenly, eyebrows lifting. “You’re not thinking I had anything to do with—”
“I’m not thinking anything. Yet.”
“Look. Finding that . . . seeing her . . . that was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I hurled my lunch all over the alley. It’s burned on my retinas, man.”
“You’re the one who found the body?”
“I was just about to leave. To another meeting. And somebody knocked on the door. It was that hot-looking blonde stripper, and she had a trash bag in her hand, you know? And she said she was going out back to put it in the dumpster and would I mind going with her, since she didn’t like going in the alley all by herself. I was running late, but I said okay, because . . . well . . .” He gave an embarrassed laugh.
“Because she was hot.”
“Hot
and
a stripper, you know?”
“She ever ask you do to anything like that before?”
“Hell, no. Thought it was my lucky day.”
“And in the alley, you didn’t see anything else out of place?”
“You mean, besides the body? Man, I couldn’t see anything but that. I couldn’t get that picture out of my head. While I was puking, the stripper called 911, and then we went inside to wait for the cops and I canceled my meeting. It was an important one too, but what can you do, right?”