The Snakeheads

  THE

  SNAKEHEADS

  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

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.

  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 mind off what had happened. It wasn’t working.

  “We moved fast on this one,” Asler rabbited on. “We separated the ill and the infirm from the healthy. The snakehead is in a separate cell. In fact INS has already begun processing the illegals for deportation. The bosses want them out of the country pronto. Before the human rights lawyers and cultural groups twig to the whole thing. We even got the snakeheads. How often have we gotten lucky like that? One’s dead and the other in lockup.” He tapped the stee
ring wheel to the beat of country and western music playing on the car radio.

  Nick didn’t respond. He hoped his body language was sending a clear message that he didn’t want to talk about Walter Martin’s death right now. Didn’t want to talk, period.

  Just by listening to Asler’s tone of voice, Nick knew the guy had been at his job a couple of years too long. In another place, another time, Asler would be pumping gas or driving a bus. He was a decent man, not particularly bright, the son of a mason. Policing the border was like enlisting in the army for guys like him. They sacrificed their lives for the good of their country, and not only in wartime. To Asler, illegal migrants were the enemy, and he always met his quotas to deport. Last year his personal stats showed that he had caught over seven thousand people who had been either trying to enter the U.S. illegally or had overstayed their visas.

  The numbers just kept going up. Illegal border traffic went both ways, but seventy percent of the traffic was from north to south. The U.S. Attorney General was not too happy that illegal aliens often used Canada as a conduit for entering the U.S. These rising statistics were fast becoming a bone of contention between the U.S. and Canada. As they said in the vernacular, the shit rolled down. On the political side, the Prime Minister passed the flak down to the Immigration Minister, who in turn passed it directly down to Nick, warning him that his team, the investigative and enforcement unit of Immigration and Citizenship Canada, had to deal with the problem. It was in his court now. But how the hell did you police thirty million visitors who entered the country? How did you ensure that they all left when they were supposed to? Worse, there was no efficient way to track the untold thousands who stayed illegally and were swallowed up by the vastness of the North American continent.

  “We tried to get the guy, Nick. The one we did get went nuts, wouldn’t stop shooting. Ignored the direct orders of the U.S. government. One of our sharpshooters took him out with the first bullet. Head shot. What do these people expect? We’d roll out the red carpet for them?”

  Nick saw little point in explaining his belief that the law must be served with detachment. “You were in the papers this week over some other shooting.”

  “We’ve had quite a few of them lately.”

  Nick let out a breath but held his silence. The U.S. Canada Immigration Operation was a joint cooperative effort. To maintain working collegiality, Nick refrained from making comments about the use of excessive force.

  Fifteen minutes later, they pulled up in front of a two-storey concrete building. Nick knew the border control checkpoint well. It was fenced at the back with heavy wire around the detention centre where those apprehended on immigration arrest warrants, or caught using false documents, were held. Ideally, detainees were housed there until their country of deportation had been identified. The next step was to contact their country of origin to obtain entry visas so they could be deported back home. In many instances, those with the worst criminal offences were refused entry visas by their country of nationality for their return home. Who could blame them? Nick knew that many of those countries did not have the resources to feed their hungry, let alone attempt to rehabilitate criminals and psychopaths. Depending on their criminal records, they were either locked up or were released, turned loose on society again. Those who were granted freedom were warned to check in with Immigration on a regular basis. But plenty of them were never seen again. They disappeared “underground.”

  Inside the station, Nick recognized Jim, a supervisor of border operations who was a couple of years away from retirement.

  “Where are the detainees?”

  “I’m doing paperwork on some of them right now. Want to help me with these body bags?” asked Jim, running one hand through his thinning grey hair.

  “Not really. But tell me the numbers.”

  “Thirty-six males, two of them minors. Five females, all young. Hard to tell their ages. They’re all Asians.”

  Nick’s eyes wandered to the sliding glass doors and the black body bags being loaded into another van.

  “What about them?”

  “Four illegals dead. They either didn’t know how to swim or they were old and terrified of water.”

  “Any of the illegals in lockup speak English?”

  “Nobody’s admitted to knowing the language.”

  “What good is interrogating them if we can’t communicate?” asked Nick, flipping through the manifest. “Book a couple of interpreters for this afternoon.”

  “Nick, I got news for you. There’s no more money in the budget for interpreters for illegals. We can’t afford it. Congress downsized our budget this year.”

  Nick was saved from venting his opinion by Asler’s timely return. Instead he asked, “What about the snakehead who was killed? Was he our guy under wiretap surveillance?”

  “Yeah, it looks like him.” A team of immigration officers on both sides of the border had been tailing the suspect for several months.

  “How about the others? Are they in lockup?”

  “One gunshot wound was flown out on a MedEvac. Surgery at Canadian taxpayers expense. Engle, the big cheese, made that decision.”

  Another way to stiff the poor Canadian taxpayer. Nick changed the subject, “You’re telling me one of the snakeheads got away? How did that happen?”

  Jim replied, “I wasn’t part of the sting operation. Better talk to Asler or Engle about that.”

  Back on the road, Nick took in the passing scenery. Growing up in Rochester, New York, he knew this area like the back of his hand. Finally, turning his gaze on Asler, he said, “Okay, tell me how it happened.”

  “The craft had already docked. According to one of my officers, Martin gave the order for them to come ashore single file. That was when somebody started firing.”

  “So, five people are dead counting one snakehead?”

  “You should see how many illegals they’d crammed into that boat. They panicked and when they started throwing themselves into the water, it got crazy. People piled on top of each other because they couldn’t swim. Four of them drowned in less than five feet of water. It’s amazing to me that more didn’t drown.”

  Nick said, “I’m telling you right now that I’m going to order an inquiry into how one of my officers got killed. I’m going to order the works. I want ballistics testing from all the guns.”

  Asler kept his eyes on the road. “I’m the first to admit that we made mistakes.”

  Nick, facing the younger man, asked, “What the hell went wrong? I’ve lost a top-notch officer. How the hell did that happen?”

  “We’re talking two in the morning when the whole damn thing went down. Seems like a long time ago even though it has only been six hours. We made the damn mistake of thinking there were only two agent smugglers. After the shootout we started rounding up the illegals into vans. Your partner, Walter, announced that he was going to take two officers aboard. They were assembling a team to comb the craft when a shot was fired. Walter was at the head of the line. He was killed instantly.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you guys know there was another smuggler aboard?”

  “Ah, shit, Nick!”

  Nick waited.

  After a moment of silence, Asler continued, “We exchanged fire with the third snakehead and we know he took a hit because there’s blood on the side of the boat. But he got away.”

  “Got away? I don’t understand how he could’ve gotten away. One injured snakehead against an army of officers armed with night vision goggles and guns?”

  “We’ve been scouring the water ever since. Given that our smugglers are gooks, I wouldn’t put it past them to swim half the St. Lawrence Seaway underwater.”

  It hit Nick again that Walter was dead. A good friend and colleague was dead. He turned away from Asler to hide the emotions pooling at the back of his eyes.

  They turned onto Highway 37 and drove in silence for a while. The Mohawk signs along New York State Highway 37 gave warning to the Federal Bureau of Investi
gation, U.S. INS, and Immigration Canada against travelling any further. Mohawk guerrillas had been known to shoot at vehicles passing through aboriginal land. Nick was happy to deal with the Crees, Blackfoot or Micmacs any time, but in his opinion the Mohawks were a trigger-happy bunch. Still, he’d done his best to establish a working relationship with the Grand Chief and the reserve police chief. If their own police could control the smuggling of illegal migrants through Mohawk land, so much the better. Unfortunately, the traffic was too lucrative a business to be anything but a source of temptation to certain members of the community.

  Large wooden “No Trespassing” signs marked the entrance to the Akwesasne Indian reserve, warning FBI and New York state police to stay off Indian land — a smuggler’s paradise of twenty hectares of islands and hidden inlets spanning across Ontario, Quebec and the U.S. borders. Like the U.S. Border Patrol, they ignored the trespassing warning.

  Asler swung the SUV onto St. Regis Road and they headed due north to the St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Reservation. Knowing what they knew, neither man spoke to the other. Periodically Nick would finger his bullet-proof vest, reminding himself that most of his vital organs were safe. Unless, this very minute, someone was lining up the crosshairs of a telescopic sight on the back of his head. He sat tensely, observing the houses and farms they passed, keeping an eye out for armed Mohawk warriors.

  As they pulled up beside another four-by-four in the dirt parking lot by the boat landing, Jimmy Longbull, Grand Chief of the Mohawks, turned to see who else was appearing uninvited on Mohawk land. A stocky man with long black hair in a braid that fell down his back, he was leaning against the side of his pick-up truck and watching the cops and officials down by the water. He raised a hand in greeting — to Nick only. Longbull didn’t care for Asler, who had never acknowledged his authority as Grand Chief by sharing information with him.

  “Longbull, how goes it?”

  The two men slapped each other on the back in a gesture of genuine warmth.