“Take a taxi to commit a murder? The police would have no problem finding me.”
“They already have.”
C.F. Chang explained what he knew. Chow Ying had nothing to say in his defense. He thought about mentioning his ankle but knew it would get him nowhere.
“If you don’t finish what I have asked you to do, a paper trail will be the least of your worries.”
“Laoban. I will complete the job. But it will take time.”
“What about Peter Winthrop’s son?”
“He is an easier target. I almost had him the other night, but the job was interrupted. I haven’t seen him since. It takes time to stake out two people.”
“Very disappointing, Chow Ying. Perhaps I do need to get someone else on the job.”
“No, Laoban. I will handle it. But this is not Beijing. Things are different.”
“You are running out of time and I am running out of patience,” C.F. Chang said sternly. C.F. Chang looked down at the paper on his desk and read the itinerary he had paid good money to get his hands on. “I am going to help you, Chow Ying. I want you to write down every word of what I am about to tell you.”
“Yes,” Chow Ying answered, grabbing a pen and an empty paper bag to write on.
“I’m going to give you precise directions and I expect them to be followed precisely,” C.F. Chang commanded. C.F. Chang explained what needed to be done and finished with a final bit of non-negotiable advice. “If you fail, there will be no second chance. The next time I am forced to call you, it will be too late.”
Chow Ying answered to a dead phone line that he understood.
Chapter 36
Wallace walked into the station, greeted the staff sergeant on duty, and bee-lined it for the coffee pot. He filled up, and turned around to a grinning Nguyen.
“You gotta stop sneaking up on me. You’re going to give me a heart attack for Christ’s sake.”
“He has a son,” Nguyen reported, smiling ear-to-ear. “And I wasn’t sneaking up on you.”
“Who has a son?”
“Peter Winthrop,” Nguyen answered, looking at the paper in his hand. “His son is named Jake Patrick, raised by his mother after his parents’s divorce. The mother legally changed her name back to her maiden name after the split, and she switched the son’s name as well.”
“Where is the son and why is he important?”
“Well, I was thinking about the phone in the church. How you said it was in the back, down a hall. It would be tough for someone to see it if they didn’t know it was there.”
“Right.”
“Well, I went back to the list of parishioners that the priest gave us.”
“Let me guess, you found a ‘Jake Patrick’ on the list…”
“No, but there was a Susan Patrick on the list. Forty-six-years-old. Recently deceased. Mother of one Jake Patrick and ex-wife of one Peter Winthrop. I ran a background check on Peter Winthrop, found out he had previously been married, and went back to the list of parishioner’s from there.”
“So the son was the one that called.”
“It’s as good a guess as any.”
“Well, after we visit the senator, let’s find our good friend Jake. He has some explaining to do.”
Chapter 37
The countdown clock to the vote on the Senate Special Committee for Overseas Labor ticked past the eleventh-hour mark. The demands of a week of ass kissing and trading votes for his future had taken their toll. The embroiled Senator Day sat in his office, reading the letter from C.F. Chang for the twentieth time. He stood from his chair with a stooped posture, like a boxer slowly rising from the stool in the corner, barely supported by wobbling legs. All he had to do was make it to the middle of the ring to hear the decision.
The senator had been battered in round one by the AWARE group and their vigor for protesting and newly found love affair with media attention. Their Alamo would always be the moment Senator Day detained fifty-plus Asian Americans in the hall of the Senate Building for no other reason than they were Asian. The group continued to stake out prime real estate near the Capitol and showed no signs of going quietly. Kazu Ito had given them a reason to come to D.C. Senator Day had given them a reason to stay.
Round two was a flurry of combinations to the head and body. The senator had been mugged by his colleagues, his political pockets picked clean. He had no idea Senator Wooten and Senator Grumman had such criminal tendencies. They were like prison guards who took advantage of their position with the inmates. And Senator Day had been the one wearing orange pajamas.
The middle rounds were waves of sharp jabs—personal injury with heavy bruising. His pregnant wife was vacillating between an emotional breakdown and demonic possession. His liver hurt, a dull ache between the eight and ninth ribs on the right side. To make matters worse, it was Dana’s time of the month and for the last week he hadn’t been able to shine the top of his desk with the back of her blouse.
The final round was the newscast and the questions surrounding the sweatshop. It was a punch the senator didn’t see coming. Sure the senator knew the tape was out there, but it wasn’t his intention to have it playing on the evening news, not with a pregnant sweatshop girl holding his future in her womb.
For the committee, the senator had done everything he could. He bought the votes he needed to buy. He knew his unseen master would be watching. Every committee recommendation was posted in the morning edition of a dozen Capitol Hill news rags and on twice as many congress-monitoring websites. His performance would be measured with perfect accuracy. Selling constituents down the river for a chance to win them back wasn’t a new sport. It was congress at work.
Despite it all, the senator was still there. Everyone had taken their shots and he was still standing. All he needed was one call from DiMarco, and his life was back on track. He somehow managed an arrogant smirk.
But there was one more punch coming at the senator’s head, a good old-fashioned haymaker, and no one was there to tell him to duck. ***
The cars snaked in single file, each one stopping at the temporary stop signs erected amidst the sea of jersey walls. Detectives Wallace and Nguyen flashed their badges to the Capitol Police officers who manned the roadblock with a level of seriousness rarely displayed by government employees. The one-way streets near the Capitol and its surrounding buildings were already a tourist’s nightmare, and when the national terrorist warning level hit orange, roads started shutting down, sealing off the end of the maze where the cheese was stored.
“Streets around here open and close like a stripper’s blouse,” Detective Wallace said, easing on the accelerator.
“That’s the world we live in. Someone finds a few computer disks in a terrorist safe house in Pakistan, and the next thing you know you can’t drive your car around the block.”
The detectives pulled into the back lot of the Hart Senate Building, showed their badges again, and approached the entrance to the building and the main security booth. A courtesy nod from the man behind the glass let the officers bypass the line of constituents waiting to be frisked on their way to see their duly elected public officials.
“I’ve never been in here before,” Nguyen said, embarrassed.
“It’s just another building. I was here for a day about seven years ago. Some woman took a dive off the balcony in the atrium. Made a nasty mess on the marble floor.”
“Suicide?”
“It appeared that way. The woman was from Arkansas somewhere. Came to see her senator complaining about carcinogens in the water near her house. Twelve people in her neighborhood had come down with a rare form of leukemia, including her son.”
