Edge of Midnight (McClouds & Friends #4)(108)

“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.