Free The Dark Root by Archer Mayor Page B

eyes as cool and calculating as a pool shark’s.
    He held up a finger. “So you think Ben Travers, already hot to leave town, escaped in a stolen car after being tied to a chair and tortured by Sonny and his boys. But for all intents and purposes, there is no Sonny, the man you think is his lieutenant has an alibi, as do his goons, and you have no reliable witnesses to Travers’s intentions, the torture, the car chase, or the final flight off the cliff.”
    He held up two fingers. “Then you’ve got these three supposedly connected episodes—a suspicious traffic stop, a suspected home invasion and rape, which may or may not have involved one of the men from the traffic stop, and Travers’s death, which may or may not have involved Asians. Speaking strictly legally here, that’s about it, right? The bottom line is that, aside from the Travers homicide, you really don’t have anything, and even that’s looking iffy.”
    Neither Brandt nor I responded. Derby had, in fact, accurately summarized what we had. On top of that, Alice Sims had made her boss proud. She’d picked up that Benny might’ve been done in by a “Chinese named Sonny,” and had made it pointedly clear in that morning’s paper that the police were being less than straightforward with the facts, despite Tony’s reluctant admission that we were indeed dealing with a homicide.
    Derby made a gesture to alleviate our discomfort. “Okay. You asked me to listen to what you’ve got, and you heard my opinion. Now tell me what you’re
going
to get. Maybe that’ll sound better.”
    I looked out the window at the ebbing light. Most of the day had been spent picking over every square inch of the Rivière house off Baker Street—and locating Mr. Rivière himself, who was visiting a brother at the federal pen in Rahway, New Jersey. We’d found lots of junk to pick through, but none of it, I felt certain, would end up having anything to do with Benny Travers.
    So what did I have to tell Derby, or anyone else, for that matter? That I felt a vague sense of foreboding—that this was somehow a precursor for all hell breaking loose? I had no tangible evidence—a pool of blood on a seat, a terrified look in a young woman’s eyes, an expression of malice on the face of a Vietnamese crook.
    “What I hope to find out,” I finally said in answer to his question, “is why Ben Travers was in that house.”
    “You think he was there to meet with Sonny?” Derby asked.
    I shook my head. “I doubt it. He was nervous as hell the night before, hassling Moe Ellis to speed it up, hoping to hit the road in an unknown car before the paint even dried. And yet, eight hours later, he was still in town, eating pizza. But not at one of his usual haunts, and not hanging out with his usual friends, at least according to them. He was alone, his back to the door as he chowed down for lunch, waiting for someone he trusted. For some reason, he felt the heat had lessened a bit between the time he last saw Moe and when he was trussed up in that chair.”
    Brandt’s weary face looked slightly brighter as he heard echoes of his own advice from twenty-four hours earlier. “Waiting for one of his own people?”
    “That’s what I’d like to find out. I already have Stennis scouting around. And we do have one piece of hard evidence. Tyler came up with some shell casings from the Upper Dummerston Road. They’re nine millimeter, and they have a rectangular firing-pin impression that’s supposedly unique to a Glock. No fingerprints, though.”
    Derby was already shaking his head, looking doubtful. “Where exactly were these casings found?”
    “Along the stretch of road where one of the witnesses said he heard shots.”
    The SA’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Hold it. I thought you had a whole bagful of conflicting testimony on that. This sounds like a prime witness.”
    I pursed my lips. Brandt answered for me. “Not for your purposes. He’s a notorious flake—confesses to