He’d been arrested twice on racketeering charges, and twice he’d walked because of insufficient evidence or, depending on your source, because of the money Le paid in bribes. Soon enough, though, Le came on the radar of Detective Tommy McGrath and his partner at the time, Terry Howard.
A year into the investigation of Le, Internal Affairs caught Howard with cocaine and money taken during a drug bust. Howard had always maintained his innocence, even tried to blame it on McGrath, but in the end, he’d been fired, and it had been ugly for him ever since.
McGrath believed Le had framed his partner. But six years after the fact, Tommy had not turned up enough evidence to exonerate Terry Howard because, as he’d noted in the file O’Donnell found, the Vietnamese gangster was slippery and careful. The most time Le had ever served was three and a half years for assaulting two police officers attempting to take him into custody. Both cops had ended up in the hospital.
Which is why I decided that if we were going to talk with Le, we would bring a small army with us. I started making calls.
At ten minutes to one, I pulled into a lumberyard just down the street from Eden Center, a Vietnamese and Korean entertainment and shopping hub in Falls Church. I found Bree, Sampson, and Muller waiting for me as well as four SWAT operators, two patrol units, and a sergeant detective named Earl Rand whom I’d worked with successfully before. All were with the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Department.
“How’d it go?” Bree said. She’d already armored up in the sweltering heat.
“Heartbreaking in some ways, the proudest moment of my life in others.”
“Good for you. You should be proud of him. He’s an amazing kid.”
“He is that,” I said, and I put on my own armor as Detective Rand placed a map on the hood of one of the cruisers. It showed the Eden Center, a mall laid out in a lazy U shape with a large parking lot in the middle.
Pho Phred’s was near the Viet-Royale restaurant in the northeast corner of the U, part of a section called the Sidewalk Stores that was set up to resemble an outdoor market in old Saigon. Rand showed us the access to the area from the south off the main parking lot and from the north off a smaller parking lot that abutted Oakwood Cemetery.
Rand said we’d want to cover both entrances as well as send in Fairfax officers familiar with the center through both ends of the bottom of the U.
“You’ll have him cut off in four directions,” Rand said. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
“Let’s do it,” I said, and I got in a car with Sampson.
“It’d be nice if Le’s good for McGrath, Kravic, and Peters,” he said.
“It would be,” I said. “I could take some time off, go watch Jannie run.”
“No reason that can’t happen,” Sampson said, starting the car and heading for Eden Center.
From there, everything went downhill fast.
CHAPTER
14
WE WERE ALL in contact over the same radio frequency. Two Fairfax County officers entered Eden Center through Planet Fitness, on the far west side of the Sidewalk Stores. Two more came in from the east.
Bree and Muller came in the north entrance. Sampson, Detective Rand, and I went in through the south door. This section of Eden Center was painted light blue, which Rand said was believed to promote prosperity.
The area was certainly doing a thriving business. At one o’clock on a Friday afternoon, there were hundreds of Vietnamese Americans roaming around, shopping for fresh fish in one store, embroidered silk dresses in another, taffy candy in a third. And the air smelled savory and sweet.
Sampson and I stood out like sore thumbs, but being tall among short people had its advantages. We later figured that one or all of us must have been seen entering the center, because we were inside for no more than ninety seconds before, not fifty yards away, Thao Le blew out of Pho Phred’s, looked around, and saw us.
Le was wiry, fast, and agile. He turned and ran north.
“He’s coming right at you, Bree,” I said, breaking into a run.
“I see him.”
Detective Rand said, “Take him clean if you—”
Le must have spotted Bree and Muller, because he suddenly darted into a packed restaurant. Bree left Muller in the dust and dashed in after Le, her badge up. We heard screaming.
“There’s got to be a back way out of there!” I yelled, dodging into a fish store forty yards shy of the restaurant.
With my badge up, I yelled at the startled merchant and his customers, “Back door!”
His eyes got big and round, but he gestured to rubber curtains behind the counter.
I heard Rand calling for patrol cars as I went through the rubber curtains into a cold storage area off a small loading dock. The overhead door was raised. A wholesale-seafood truck was backing up.