Born to Kill (28 page)

“We're gonna be nearby in a car,” reassured Kumor. “You got our beeper numbers. We're never gonna be more than a block or two away. Okay?”

“Yes,” answered Tinh, sounding none too convinced.

Later that evening and throughout the next day, Tinh attempted a few trial runs with the recorder. As Kumor had suggested, he stuck it in his pants, ran the microphone wire up his abdomen, and concealed the mike in his breast pocket. While on the street, he moved the recorder to his jacket pocket. At another point he slipped it into the breast pocket of his shirt, trying to find a location that seemed comfortable, a place where the recorder could be turned off and on without anyone noticing what he was up to.

Two days later, Tinh was sitting in the front room of the safe-house apartment in Sunset Park. It was a Friday night, and a number of gang members had gathered, including Shadow Boy, Minh Do, and Tam Thanh Do, a gang member better known as “Son.”

Among the crimes Tinh had been instructed to try to elicit information about was the accidental shooting of gang member Cuong Pham during the produce warehouse robbery the previous summer. Tinh had already been told a version of this killing by another gang member at Maria's Bakery, just a few days after the shooting occurred. It was one of the stories he had passed on to the investigators, but they told him they needed “corroboration”—a strange word with many syllables that Tinh would be hearing often in the months ahead.

Tinh knew that Son had participated in the robbery at W. C. Produce. Son had watched as Jimmy Nguyen, a gang member sometimes known as “Hong,” attempted to shoot the elderly Chinese store owner, instead hitting Cuong Pham in the back of the head and killing him instantly.

As Son began to explain what happened, Tinh felt inside his waistband to make sure the recorder was on.

“That motherfucker,” Son said of Hong. “He was sweating, his hands were shaking. [The gun] fired and made a ‘bang' noise in the basement.”

“Motherfuck,” interjected Tinh, using the standard BTK modifier.

“At that time,” continued Son, “Hong thought Cuong shot the Chinese guy. But Cuong held his gun at the Chinese guy's head and the Chinese guy, he push the hand away and the gun went off. Hong started shaking then.”

Tinh was confused. “Oh. Cuong pointed the gun at the owner's head?”

“Yeah, at the owner. So the owner pushed it away and it went off.”

“Then who died? Hong died?”

“No, Cuong died. Hong pointed the gun at the head.”

“Whose head was he pointing at?”

Son was starting to get exasperated with all the explaining. “He was pointing it at the Chinese's guy's head. At that time, Cuong was tying up the Chinese guy.”

“Oh, oh, okay. And what were you doing?”

“Motherfucker,” answered Son, with a wicked chuckle. “We were robbing the place. There was a lot of gold and money. Then the gun made a big noise in the basement. We ran away.”

“At that time,” Tinh added encouragingly, trying to get Son to verbally identify the participants, “who was there? Hong, Be, you …”

“One hour later,” Son went on, ignoring Tinh's question, “[I] go to the bus station and drive to California. Stay for three days and three nights.”

“Motherfuck,” exclaimed Tinh. “Who told you to do that?”

“
Anh hai
.”

By now, a few more gang members had entered the room and were seated on the floor and couch in front of the TV. Chopsticks in hand, some were eating Chinese take-out from white cartons while watching a Hong Kong gangster movie on the VCR.

“Hey,” Minh Do cautioned Tinh and Son, “tomorrow we going to rob. Talking about these things is bad.”

“Yes,” remembered Son. “Tomorrow we are going to cock the gun.”

“Cock the gun” had become a favored BTK saying. It meant undertaking a major crime with loaded guns, with a good possibility that somebody—gang member or merchant—might wind up getting shot.

Son and Minh Do turned their attention to the TV. Shadow Boy,
seated on the floor in front of the couch, looked at Tinh. “Hey, Timmy, what's that by your shirt? Your shirt is burning.”

Tinh immediately flinched. He didn't have to look down to see that Shadow Boy was pointing to where the tape recorder was concealed.

“What?” Tinh asked innocently.

Shadow Boy pointed again. “There. Right there. Your shirt on fire or something.”

Tinh looked down. The red indicator light from the recorder was showing through his cotton T-shirt. “Motherfuck,” Tinh murmured, “what the fuck is this?” He stood up quickly, walked to the bathroom and closed the door.

Tinh could feel a bead of sweat running down the side of his face. “Motherfuck,” he mumbled, grabbing the recorder from inside his waistband. He pulled out the microphone wire, wrapped it around the recorder, then stuck it in his pants pocket.

Tinh's head was swimming; he sat down on the edge of the bathtub to steady himself.
Damn!
The first night he tries to use the recorder to gather information, and already he's been discovered!? Or has he?

A worst-case scenario flickered inside Tinh's head like a bad horror movie: Shadow Boy sees the red light. “What's that?” he asks Tinh. Shadow Boy walks over and lifts up Tinh's shirt, exposing the recorder and the wire microphone. Somebody pulls out a gun and the gang members swarm around him like zombies from
Night of the Living Dead
.

Through the bathroom door, Tinh could hear the TV droning away. Maybe he should crawl out the bathroom window. Then what? He started free-associating, remembering every damn trap he'd ever gotten himself into: the refugee camps, prison, the gang.

“Motherfuck,” he mumbled one more time, wiping the perspiration from his brow. Afraid that the gang members would get even more suspicious if he stayed in the bathroom too long, he splashed some cold water on his face and returned to the front room.

Everyone seemed to be engrossed in the movie. Shadow Boy glanced at Tinh. “It was just my beeper,” Tinh offered, trying to sound casual. “The light come on when the battery get low.”

Shadow Boy nodded and turned his attention back to the TV. Tinh sat down on the couch and stared straight ahead.

The room's overhead lights had been turned off; the only illumination
in the room was from the television. On screen, elegantly dressed Chinese gangsters were shooting it out. Gunfire raged and bodies writhed in slow motion, with blood spurting from bullet wounds like lava exploding from a volcano.

It seemed to Tinh like ten minutes passed before he took his first breath.
Man
, he asked himself, as he had been more and more often since signing on with Kumor, Oldham, and the other government investigators.
How on earth did I get myself into this?

Chapter 11

K
umor, Oldham, and the others were not indifferent to the risks Tinh faced by carrying the hidden tape recorder. They had vowed to have at least one member of the investigative team within the city limits, available to Tinh at all times should he need to beep someone immediately. They tried to talk Tinh through potentially dangerous encounters, and they told him they would be there when he needed to come down from the emotional anxiety of secretly taping conversations.

The thing was, the investigators were distracted most of the time. They had their own problems to worry about.

The beating of Nigel Jagmohan had raised a question that Dan Kumor had been asking himself ever since the day it occurred. What if Tinh had actually been able to inform them about the beating before it took place? Would he and the other investigators have been able to stop it?

The question had become even more pertinent in the last few days, since Tinh first informed them
about an upcoming BTK robbery that was supposed to take place in Philadelphia. The very next day, Tinh informed them that the robbery was off. But for a while there, they'd had the gang under constant surveillance, waiting for the robbery plans to develop. It had been tense and even exciting, but Kumor had told himself afterward, I hope next time we have more information. I hope next time we aren't driving around blind, wondering exactly where and when the gang is going to strike.

Kumor was pondering these and other issues when he arrived at his apartment in suburban New Jersey around four o'clock on Saturday afternoon, the day after Tinh had almost been discovered with the tape recorder by his fellow gang members. Kumor was still carrying his gym bag after a badly needed workout. Ever since the BTK investigation began, he'd barely had time to sleep, much less stay in shape—a fact his girlfriend had reminded him of on more than one occasion. This was the first Saturday in a month he hadn't gone into the office; he was thinking about a movie or maybe a nice dinner at home. Maybe pizza.

Then the phone rang.

“It's going down,” said Oldham, on the other end of the line.

Kumor was standing in the kitchen. “What do you mean it's going down?”

“The robbery. It's on. Lan Tran, Timmy, the rest of 'em—they're getting ready to go do the job right now.”

“The robbery in Philly?”

“Well, yeah, but it's not in Philly. It's in Rochester.”

Now Kumor was thoroughly confused. Two days ago, late on Thursday, May 9, Tinh definitely told them the robbery in Philadelphia was canceled. ATF had reassigned most of the agents who'd been helping out with the surveillance, and everyone had gone home thinking it was going to be a relatively peaceful weekend. Now the robbery was back on—not in Philadelphia, as originally planned, but three hundred and twenty miles to the north, in Rochester, New York.

“Timmy just called,” Oldham explained. “He says he and two other gang members are on their way to pick up Lan Tran at Fifty-first Street and Eighth Avenue. Two cars, a light green Buick Regal and a maroon Cadillac with Jersey plates. Seems David Thai and his girlfriend
are already in Rochester. Timmy and the others are supposed to arrive up there tonight.”

“Where exactly?”

“Timmy doesn't know. Apparently, Lan Tran is calling the shots. I think we better try to stop them before they leave the city. Why don't you meet me at Fifty-first and Eighth as soon as you can. We'll use some pretense to pull them over. I'm not sure what.”

“That's Brooklyn or Manhattan?” asked Kumor.

“Brooklyn, Brooklyn.”

Kumor hung up and tried to get his thoughts together. Dinner was out of the question. So was the movie. He tossed aside his gym bag, went back out the front door, and climbed into his ATF-issue Mustang.

It took less than twenty minutes to zip through Staten Island to Sunset Park, Brooklyn—a drive that, if Kumor had been paying any attention to the speed limit, would have taken twice that long. When he arrived at the intersection of Fifty-first Street and Eighth Avenue, Kumor found Oldham waiting in an unmarked police sedan.

“The kid's not here,” Oldham said, looking worried. “He said he was gonna be here.”

The two agents waited fifteen minutes, then drove their cars by the BTK apartment at 810 Forty-fifth Street. There was no sign of either the Buick or the maroon Cadillac.

“Shit,” scowled Oldham. “We better beep him.”

Oldham spent the next forty-five minutes calling Tinh's pager number from his cellular phone while the two investigators combed the neighborhood, looking for some sign of the BTK contingent. Finally, Oldham's phone rang.

“Where the hell are you?” barked Oldham when he heard Tinh's voice.

Kumor sat in the driver's seat of his car, parked alongside Oldham's sedan in the parking lot of a fast-food joint on Eighth Avenue, and waited patiently while Oldham got an explanation from Tinh.

“Well,” said Oldham, putting the phone down after a steady ten minutes of conversation, “I guess we missed 'em.”

“So where the hell are they?”

“Timmy was calling from a service station in Jersey, somewhere
on Interstate 80. Says he doesn't really know what route they're taking to Rochester. Lan Tran's doing the driving, with the other car following. I told him to beep me once they arrive at their final destination in Rochester. In the meantime, we better put in a call to the state police. Tell them we got two carloads of Vietnamese, armed and dangerous, heading upstate to do a job.”

“Yeah,” agreed Kumor. “But what about Fifty-first and Eighth Avenue? How come they never met out here like they were supposed to?”

Oldham squirmed in his seat. “Uh, I guess that was Fifty-first Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, not Brooklyn.”

Despite the gravity of the situation, Kumor had to chuckle. Billy Oldham, he knew, was the kind of guy who did not like to admit his mistakes. Oldham had assumed Tinh meant Brooklyn when he meant Manhattan—and cops were supposed to know that you never
assumed
anything.

In the five or six weeks Kumor had been working around the clock with Oldham, he'd actually grown to like him. Most of his initial impressions still held true. Oldham was arrogant, condescending, and had a knack for rubbing people the wrong way. He had especially angered Detective Alex Sabo, who was supposed to be his partner, and ATF Agent Don Tisdale. They felt Oldham was deliberately keeping them in the dark about important details of the investigation and denying them access to the C.I.

Kumor knew all this, but he still had to admire Oldham's chutzpah. Though only in his late thirties, which was still relatively young for a detective, Oldham had the self-confidence of a twenty-year veteran. Within the police department he was a renegade and a loner who did things his way. Kumor was the exact opposite, a conscientious federal employee trained to do everything by the book. He took a certain vicarious pleasure in the way Oldham circumvented red tape by taking matters into his own hands, though he could see now that Oldham was just as prone as the next guy to make a rookie mistake.