We’d been blindsided, and Malique knew it.
“Well, well,” he said. “It seems that the do-gooders from Silver Bullet failed to mention that they left their boyhood friend rotting away in a hellhole in Thailand.”
I nodded. “Do you think Segura could be connected to the bombings?”
“What do you mean connected?”
“Could he be orchestrating the hits?” I said.
“Strange question, Detective. I don’t know what would make you think that a man chained to a prison wall in Thailand could be responsible for setting off bombs in New York. Unless…” Malique ran a hand under his chin and stroked his wiry beard. “Unless there’s something you failed to mention.”
Danny Corcoran had warned me about Malique. “You can fuck with him,” he had said, “but don’t try to con him.”
“There is something,” I said. “But I didn’t fail to mention it. I just wasn’t going to walk in here with my kimono wide-open. But now that I know there’s good faith, I’ll tell you.”
I looked around the room, and then turned back to Malique. “Do we need this big a crowd?”
He barked a command in Haitian Creole, and five of the six bodyguards left the room. The sixth man didn’t budge. “That’s my son,” Malique said. No further explanation was necessary.
“The bombs that killed Fairfax and Zimmer had an identical signature. They’re both the handiwork of an Australian named Flynn Samuels. The problem is that Samuels has been in prison for the past fifteen years.”
Malique La Grande had perfect teeth. And I could see almost every one of them as a wide smile crossed his face. “Let me guess. The prison is in Bangkok.”
“Small world,” I said.
“So they’re cellies?”
“We don’t know that yet. The Thai government isn’t exactly forthcoming with details on their prison pop.”
“Does Segura have a network here in the city?” Kylie asked. “People who might be willing to exact revenge for him?”
“He’s got his Guatemalan grandmother and a couple of aunts. That’s his network. But I doubt if these ladies know much about blowing shit up, because if they did, they wouldn’t have waited twenty years to get even.”
Malique looked at his watch. “You got one more minute. It’s not good for my reputation to have a cop car camped out in front of my market.”
“It’s unmarked,” Kylie said.
“People in this neighborhood don’t need the big blue letters. They can smell a cop car.”
We got in a few more questions before our time ran out. We thanked him and left. As soon as we were on the road I called Cates at home and told her we had a new development in the Silver Bullet case.
“Another bomb?” she asked.
“Metaphorically speaking, I guess it is.”
Kylie and I stopped in a coffee shop in Queens, where the breakfast waitress didn’t know anything about our lives and didn’t care. I put in a quick call to Howard Malley at the FBI, and by 6:20 we were in Cates’s office telling her about our middle-of-the-night ride to a Haitian supermarket in Canarsie.
“Was Segura in on it?” she asked.
“Malique thinks he was clueless. The heroin was found in Segura’s bag, but all five boys were hauled off and locked up by the Thai cops. About ten hours later, an emissary from a Bangkok bank paid a visit to a senior police official, and the four rich kids hopped on their private jet and flew home. Segura is still there. Malique swears up and down that they only brought him along to take the fall.”
“So the guy who took the rap for the drug deal is locked up in the same country as your bomb maker,” Cates said. “Do you have any idea if their paths ever crossed?”
“According to Howard Malley, there are 144 prisons in Thailand, with a combined male population of over two hundred thousand,” I said. “It seems unlikely that the two of them met and even more unlikely that Flynn Samuels would ever give up his trade secrets, but we’re looking to see if we can make a connection.”
“Where are you on the Davenport murder?” Cates asked.
“Closing in,” Kylie said.
“That’s not an answer I can pass up the food chain, MacDonald. I need details.”
“Sure. As soon as we’re done here, Zach and I are going to pick up a hundred thousand dollars in cash from the DA’s office, hand it over to a seventy-five-year-old man of dubious ethics, and have him deliver it to a blackmailer who may also be a murderer. Then we’ll hold our breath, keep our fingers crossed, and hope for the best.”
Cates has no patience for lame cop jokes. But this time she didn’t say a word. She knew Kylie wasn’t joking.