One to the Wolves, On the Trail of a Killer by Lois Duncan Page A

until he read about them in your book. And he swears he didn’t take her to
     the Desert Castle.
    “Two days before the shooting, Kait asked him, ‘What would you do if I died?’ He thought
     she was joking. 2 Then, she did die, and he’s been going through hell ever since. It sounds like she
     was priming herself to confide in him, and he didn’t take her seriously. We definitely
     need to find out if the print on that Budweiser can belongs to one of the Vietnamese
     suspects.”
    I phoned the Immigration and Naturalization Service office in Albuquerque and requested
     that they provide APD with the immigration files for Dung and his alibi friends. I
     spoke with an agent named Doug 3 who was extremely sympathetic because his daughter had gone to school with Kait and
     because his friend, Police Chief Sam Baca, had told him Kait was killed by the Vietnamese.
     Spurred by that disclosure, Doug had ordered the immigration files for Dung and his
     friends sent up from the regional office in El Paso. When he attempted to give them
     to the APD, the police had not wanted them, so he had sent them back to Texas.
    I asked him, please, to get them back and check to see if they contained any information
     that might help us.
    He did so and phoned me, sounding very excited.
    “There’s something crazy going on!” he said. “An Quoc Le has a double!”
    “A double?” I repeated blankly.
    “In 1987, an An Quoc Le who lived in Westminster was naturalized in California. A
     person with a different face, but with the same name and same date of birth, was naturalized
     in Albuquerque in 1991. I’m not sure yet which is the legally naturalized An Quoc
     Le. I’ll have to compare the fingerprints.”
    “An Quoc Le is a common Vietnamese name,” I said. “Couldn’t this be a coincidence?”
    “No,” Doug said with certainty. “One of these guys is an impostor. The An Quoc Le
     who came to Albuquerque was admitted to the United States in 1982. An Quoc Le Number
     Two, the one in California, was naturalized in 1987, using the same Alien Registration
     Number.”
    I gave him the Social Security number for “our” An Quoc Le.
    “That matches the one who was naturalized in Albuquerque,” Doug said. “We’ve definitely
     got two individuals. Hopefully when we get through investigating we’ll denaturalize
     one of them. When I find out more, I’ll let you know.”
    Day after day we waited for him to call back, but, like other good men before him,
     he seemed to have been road-blocked. An Quoc Le continued to enjoy the lifestyle to
     which he had become accustomed, and we were never to hear from that nice INS agent
     again.
    However, something did soon come out of Albuquerque to give new direction to our thinking.
    “Does the name Matt Griffin mean anything to you?” Michael asked me.
    “Wasn’t he the cop who was the ‘Ninja Bandit’?”
    “That’s the one,” Michael said. “The press started calling him the Ninja because he
     dressed all in black and leapt over counters during bank robberies. His get-away cars
     were stolen sports cars. He’s currently serving a life sentence for shooting a witness.”
    “I remember that,” I said. “He was arrested the same week Kait was shot.”
    “That story is back in the news again,” Michael said. “In January 1989, Griffin killed
     a man named Peter Klunck. The official story was that it was self-defense. Well, it’s
     now come to light that the APD Internal Affairs files contain information that Peter
     was once Griffin’s snitch. There’s also a rumor that Griffin’s fellow officers covered
     up for him.”
    “What does this have to do with Kait?” I asked him.
    “The federal prosecutors have demanded to examine the I.A. reports. APD refuses to
     release them.”
    “But what’s the connection—”
    “I’m getting to that,” Michael said. “A P.I. in Albuquerque, Roy Nolan *, has been
     investigating an auto repair shop that’s an alleged chop shop