Edge of Midnight (32 page)

Chances were, Mindmeld and the Haven were exactly what the guy said they were, in which case, well, bully for her. The Haven was all about expressing dormant brain potential, right? God knows, her brain was as dormant as they came. Who knew? She might even learn something. Stranger things had happened.

She reached out, poised her fingers over the keyboard. Hesitated.

Me again. I decided. Would luv 2 meet with u. Where?

“If you don’t like how I’m driving, tough shit,” he said. “You should have stayed with Tam, where you’d have been safe.”

“I don’t want to sit on the shelf like a china doll,” she said. “So far I’ve contributed exactly nothing to the solving of our problem. Other than servicing you sexually, of course.”

He gave her a sidelong glance, caught the teasing gleam in her eye. “Not that it’s such a chore,” she added. “It’s excellent. Even so, I don’t want to spend this whole investigation with my legs in the air.”

He started to speak, but she cut him off. “Yes, you’re the super commando whiz with a zillion languages, but I have some ideas, too.”

“I never said you didn’t.” He slowed down as they entered Garnett. “I think you’re brilliant. Which is why you should be working on Kev’s drawings. I stared at those suckers until I went batshit fifteen years ago. I have no ideas left. You might see something fresh.”

“I’ll study them all you want. I would have studied them all night, if you hadn’t kept distracting me.”

“Distracting you? There’s a brand new euphemism. Actually, it was you who distracted me. I remember lying helpless, flat on my back, with a sweaty, dominating bitch goddess riding me hard.”

“You were hardly helpless. And that was after over an hour of being distracted by you, Sean,” she pointed out. “But I suggest we don’t discuss it now. This is a dangerous road, and we’re almost there.”

“We could pull over in the woods,” he suggested hopefully. “I could distract you up against a tree. Or we could try the backseat.”

“I want to talk to Trung, and so do you,” she said. “Concentrate.”

He appreciated her attempt to lighten the mood, but it just didn’t seem right to him, wandering around under a big, open sky with Liv beside him and no squadron of Special Ops soldiers flanking her.

He didn’t know how to deal with this fear. Usually he faced danger with the what-the-fuck attitude of a guy who wasn’t particularly afraid of death. He was afraid for Liv, though. Pissing himself afraid.

He was nervous as an alley cat, constantly checking the rearview. Peering into the sky to check for helicopters, for fuck’s sake. This was the flip side of what happened when a guy allowed himself to give a shit. It clouded his brain, made him stupid and thick and useless.

“It’s not safe,” he said. “I can’t concentrate. I could get us killed.”

She reached over, touched his thigh. “I feel safest with you.”

His throat went hot and hard as a fist. “Please, don’t say that.” He forced the words out with difficulty. “Don’t set me up.”

“I’m sorry if it makes you nervous, but we got into this thing together, and we need to figure it out together.”

He forestalled the rest of her bracing inspirational lecture by tossing the e-mail from Con onto her lap. “Read me the directions.”

“Why should I, Mr. Photographic Memory?”

“You wanted to make yourself useful? Be useful,” he growled.

They pulled up in front of a seedy-looking grocery store. Sean parked and got out, turning a slow three-sixty. He grabbed Liv and hustled towards the store. He didn’t want her out in the open. Not that she was recognizable in that blond wig, but even so.

A pimply teenaged boy manned the counter. Sean gave the kid a bland smile. “I’m looking for a man named Mr. Trung.”

The boy went motionless, eyes big. He scampered out of the room.

That was unnerving. He slid his arm around Liv’s waist while he waited. She was so soft and warm and vibrant. It made his breath snag, his chest tighten. Awareness of her throbbed in his groin. In spite of how tense he was. In spite of the fact that he’d been at her all night. He couldn’t get enough. He craved that sensuous dream world they slid into when they got it on. He could live in that world with her forever.

A middle-aged Vietnamese man came out, followed by a fortyish woman. They regarded Sean and Liv as if they were poisonous snakes.

The woman spoke mechanically, as if she’d rehearsed the words. “I am Helen Trung. This is John, my husband. My father is not here. He is gone back to Vietnam six months ago. He is not come back.”

Sean looked at the blank wall of the couple’s faces, tightening his arm around Liv, and followed his first impulse. “Fifteen years ago, I believe there were people who threatened Mr. Trung,” he said. “These same people killed my brother, and are threatening me, and her.” He nodded at Liv. “I want to find them.”

The man and woman looked at each other. The woman turned back. “My father is gone. He is not come back,” she repeated.

Sean waited, letting the silence speak for him.

The woman began to mutter angrily in Vietnamese. He dredged up his memories of the language that Crazy Eamon had drilled into him and his brothers, the language his father had learned in the four tours he’d served, in the war that had broken his mind.

“Please help us, if you know about these men,” he said, in halting Vietnamese. “My wife is in danger from these men. We will not endanger your family. You have my word.”

The couple’s eyes widened. He was startled at the impulse that had moved him to identify Liv as his wife. “Girlfriend” sounded frivolous. And he didn’t have a word for that concept in Vietnamese anyway. He hadn’t used the language since he was twelve, when Dad died, and the word girlfriend had not entered his active vocabulary, in any language.

The word wife had such a different weight to it. “Wife” made it sound like her welfare and safety was his, by God, business. He liked it.

He was just about to give up and leave when a wheezing voice came through the curtain that divided the store from the back room.

“Bring them in to me,” someone said, in Vietnamese.

They followed the woman through the curtained door, through a cramped hall and into a small kitchen. A swift glance around revealed a oneway mirror to monitor the shop outside, and a wizened guy in his late sixties, sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette. He flicked an appraising glance over Liv, and then fixed his gaze on Sean.

Sean waited patiently for the older man to speak first.

“I thought they had killed you,” he said slowly.

Sean suppressed a surge of wild excitement. “Perhaps you mistake me for my twin brother,” he said. “He was killed, fifteen years ago. I wish to find this killer, and avenge my brother.”

Trung’s face twitched. “You sound like my old great-aunt from Khanh Hung,” he wheezed. His laughter turned to a coughing fit. He rapped a command to his daughter, who hurried in with a fresh pack of cigarettes. She looked like she was trying not to smile, too.

Liv nudged at him. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Me, I guess,” he said ruefully. “My backwoods yokel accent.”

“Those who are curious about death often find more than they wanted to know,” Trung intoned, his head wreathed with smoke.

“So be it,” Sean replied quietly.

The daughter whispered furiously into her father’s ear. He shook his head. “Sit down,” he said to Sean, gesturing at the table.

There was only one chair, and Sean gestured for Liv to sit. The man’s daughter made some explosive comment under her breath, and disappeared into the other room, coming back with folding chairs.

She crowded them into the narrow space around the table.

“Coffee,” Trung said to his daughter.

The old man hunched over the table, staring at the smoke curling up between his gnarled fingers. “I never saw you,” he said slowly.

“I understand.” Sean shot a reassuring glance at Liv, wishing he could translate for her, but he needed all his concentration for this.

“I thought you were your brother,” Trung said. “He always spoke to me courteously, in my own language, when he saw me. He was a good boy, kind and polite. I will tell you what I saw, for his sake.”

“I thank you,” Sean said, inclining his head.

“I worked for three weeks at that building,” Trung said. “One day, I go into one of the rooms, and I find the table broken, chairs on the floor. Glass, everywhere. No one told me what had happened. I did not ask. I seldom saw the people who used the building. I did not know what they did.” He finished his smoke. “One morning, I went in early.” The old man stopped, his eyes far away. He groped for the cigarettes.

Sean pushed them across the table into his hand.

He shook another out, lit up. His fingers had a constant tremor. “I was going down the hall,” he resumed. “The light was on in one of the rooms. I thought I had forgotten to turn it out. I opened the door.”

He paused. “There was a man,” he went on. “A big man. His hands were red. There was a body on the floor. He had been putting it into a plastic bag. There was blood leading to the door, where another body had been dragged before.” Smoke trickled between his fingers. “Then he said, ‘Since you are here, come help me. This one is heavy.’”

The room was quiet for several seconds.

“I helped him.” Trung’s voice was flat. “We dragged the body to a van. There were other bodies in the van. Then he pointed a gun at me, told me to clean up. I could hardly work, my hands shook so.” He held up his hands. “They have not stopped shaking since that day.”

“I am sorry,” Sean said. “And after?”

The man sighed, papery eyelids fluttering. “He put a knife to my eye. He said, ‘Leave this place. If you tell anyone, I will eat the liver of the youngest member of your family while you watch. Then I will cut out your eyes, your tongue.’ He cut me, under my eye.” He indicated a scar that distorted his lower eyelid. “My grandson was two years old. We left that day.”

“This man spoke Vietnamese?” Sean asked.

Trung’s mouth twitched. “No, he did not,” he said, in English.

Sean nodded, grateful to switch from Vietnamese. “Did you see others? Did you know their names?”

Trung’s smile vanished. “I had no reason to be curious before. I had many, many reasons not to be curious after.”

“Could you identify the man you saw?” Sean asked.

The old man had another coughing fit. Helen Trung poured him a glass of water. He gulped it, wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. “No, you fool,” he said. “Have you not heard anything that I said?”

“If you were asked to testify, you would have protection.”

The man leaned across the table, touched a thickened yellow fingertip to the scab on Sean’s forehead. He gestured toward the bruises on Liv’s jaw. “If these people can beat a man like you and his wife, what would they do to her?” He gestured towards his daughter. “Or him?” He waved towards the teenager lurking in the door. The kid ducked out. “You are only one man. Look to your wife. Now go, please. You are not welcome to return. I want no more visits from anyone.”

His wording made Sean pause. “Wait. I’m not the first person to ask you about this?”

Trung’s shoulders jerked, in a short, angry shrug. “There was a reporter, soon after we came here. He wanted to write a story about boys who had disappeared at that place. I told him nothing.”

“I am grateful for what you have told us, for my brother’s sake,” Sean said. “But who was the reporter?”

The elderly man frowned at his persistance. “I don’t remember. He wrote for a big paper. Maybe the Washingtonian. He wanted to become famous.” He snorted. “Writing in the blood of my grandchildren. Fool.”

“When exactly did he come to see you?” Liv asked.

Trung gave her a startled glance. “I don’t remember.”

“He bought a pumpkin,” Helen Trung spoke up. “To carve, for Halloween.” She came forward, and began clearing the coffee cups.

Sean thanked the man, nodded to his daughter and son-in-law.

He and Liv took their leave, gulping oxygen. He bundled Liv into the car, seeing that van door yawning wide in his mind’s eye, plastic-wrapped bodies piled inside. Liv was speaking, so he shook himself out of his grisly reverie. “Huh?”

She made an impatient sound. “I said, the next step is obvious.”

That stumped him, being how nothing in his entire life since birth had ever been particularly obvious. “Oh, yeah? And what’s that?”

Her smile was brimming with satisfaction. “We go to a library.”

They stopped at the first decent-sized library they found. Liv engaged in shop talk with the librarian, and they were soon ensconced in the microfiche room and alone. He was grateful Liv was taking over, because his brain had gone into hiding.

The older editions of the newspapers were not digitally stored, and that meant doing research the hard way. But Liv scrolled through microfiche with a speed that made his eyes water, keeping up a soft patter to chill him out, make him feel included.

“…October fifteenth through November fifteenth, and if I have no luck, I’ll keep going forward. I don’t think anybody ever carves a pumpkin before the middle of October.”

“Yeah. Sure,” he muttered distracted.

There was only one functioning microfiche reader. Just as well. All he could do was contemplate the ache in his stomach. So like, and yet so horribly unlike the ache he usually had when staring at a woman he’d been boffing for a few days. Usually by now he was casting around for a gentle, non-hurtful way to extricate himself. Though he knew, in practical terms, that no such thing existed. It always hurt.