For
Robert Kupferschmid
THE SNAKEHEADS
Mary Moylum
A Castle Street Mystery
Copyright © Mary Moylum, 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Editor: Doris Cowan
Copy-Editor: Julian Walker
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Transcontinental
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Moylum, Mary
The snakeheads
“A Castle Street Mystery.”
ISBN 0-88882-225-1
I. Title.
PS8576.0994S53 2001 C813.’6 C2001-901943-2 PR9199.4.M69S53 2001
1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01
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Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on recycled paper.
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prologue
Darkness. BJ loved darkness. That was when the city came alive. In the daytime, people were too busy drudging for a living. But at night, everything was exposed. The night stripped them of their phoniness, their veneer. The night revealed them for what they were. He had read somewhere about crucial events in history occurring at night. He wasn’t surprised. He already knew it: stabbings, muggings, rapes, and murders all happened under the cover of darkness.
BJ and Harry were sitting in a rusty white van in front of a tony townhouse, just watching. The street was quiet. BJ held a pair of binoculars to his eyes as Harry panned the neighbourhood with a long telephoto lens. In the house next door, a woman was exercising on her Stairmaster. In another house across the street, several kids were eating a pizza in front of a television set. BJ fiddled with the radio, he was getting antsy. Two hours and counting and still no sign of their target. They needed to know whether the judge lived here alone or with a woman. If he lived with a woman, they needed to know her itinerary before they planned their next move. So far, so good. They had tracked down the judge’s address from newspaper clippings and city hall records. They knew the month and year he had bought the townhouse, how much he paid for it and the remaining mortgage on his property. Harry’s interest in his enemy extended to the smallest detail. He even knew about the judge’s relationship with his ex-wife and his children and all about his work on the Immigration and Refugee Commission. In the age of information technology all of that could be downloaded from the net. In prison, with plenty of time on their hands, they learned to cruise the internet; they had discovered a wealth of information about people, which they downloaded and saved for further use.
BJ took a last drag on his cigarette and flicked the ashes on the floor. He had to admire his good friend Harry. All those years in the Pen, Harry never lost sight of his goal. Instead Harry’s rage had fed on itself until it had reached Old Testament proportions. The righteous wrath of an executioner. BJ smiled. He had no problem with that. Hell, he could recount all the crimes he himself had committed without a flicker of emotion. He had been in and out of jail for most of his forty-five years and had the tough-guy look to go with it: shaven head, scarred arms, bulging muscles, and tattoos of girls and guns everywhere on his body.
BJ turned toward his friend, whose eyes were fixed on the house, as if by will alone he could conjure up the judge who had done him wrong years ago.
For another half hour they waited for something to happen. Finally it came in the presence of a welldressed man walking toward them, with a woman on his arm.
Harry smacked the back of his hand against BJ’s shoulder and said, “It’s him!”
BJ took a good long look at the guy. He felt a vibration in his chest, a catch of breath. He wished they could do the job now, tonight. But what if the bitch spent the night with the judge? Shit! It meant they’d have to keep up the surveillance, find a night when the she wasn’t sleeping over.
BJ grinned at his friend. He was wired now. He always felt like that before a job. In this case it was justified. Didn’t the Bible say an eye for an eye? No one had paid the price for the man’s crimes, yet. But soon, soon, someone would.
chapter one
Months of surveillance on an agent smuggler called Shaupan Chau had finally panned out. But, in the end, the sting operation had gone wrong.
Nicholas Slovak stared dully out the car window. It was not quite four in the morning. Good thing he didn’t have to drive. He knew he should be used to the routine by now, should expect the unexpected. But this was worse, much worse, than usual.
He was aware of Dick Asler glancing over at him repeatedly. Was he looking for signs of emotion? Maybe the silence was making Asler uncomfortable, because apropos of nothing he suddenly started to talk:
“Last thing we need is a repeat of the Moon Star disaster. What did that end up costing the American taxpayers? — over five mil, to house a hundred illegal migrants. The mayor of Seattle was ticked to no end. That wasn’t the kind of tourism he wanted.”
Nick kept his eyes on the bleak highway landscapes they were passing. The sky was getting light. He could tell he was making Asler nervous. The guy normally didn’t bother to make chit-chat.
“This week alone,” he continued, “I netted a truck-load of fucking Africans hiding under crates of lettuce and tomatoes. There were so many of them that we ran out of cells in Detention, had to let a few of them post bond and turn them loose. Won’t ever see them again. They’ll disappear underground. You can bet good money on that.”
Asler was a U.S. detention and deportation officer stationed in Buffalo. In his thirties, he was a few years younger than Nick. He’d been sent to meet Nick at Niagara Falls, New York, and take him to the crime scene on the U.S. side of the St. Lawrence River, seventy kilometres from Montreal. They were in the same line of work, but on different sides of the border. For both of them, the priority was to stem the flow of illegal aliens into North America. Nick was the Canadian counterpart of Asler’s boss, so he apparently thought he should try to take Nick’s