I shook my head.
“Can’t pretend I’m surprised. I met your grandmother a few times, at parent-teacher conferences. She was—very smart. Very direct. She wanted to make sure Moira had everything she needed in school. She dressed very well. A lovely green linen dress one day. And she wore her hair up, with chopsticks for hairpins. It’s very funny, what people remember after so long. Oh, Van.” She got up and took a Kleenex from the box on her desk and handed it to me. “Blow your nose, sweetie.”
I did, and I wiped my eyes on my wrist.
“It’s okay, dear. Of course you want to know about Moira, and your grandma. Do you want to keep talking now?”
“No.”
“That’s all right. I’ll see if I can remember more. It was—well, there have been a lot of students but I’m sure there’s more in the back of my head. You come back when you’re ready.”
I nodded, already hurrying to get out.
“And Van? I won’t mention this to your grandfather. Okay?”
I hadn’t even thought about Granddad. Man, if he learned what I was doing, I was toast.
“Thanks,” I managed. I opened the door and closed it tight behind me before I ran down the hall.
I strode down the hall to Dr. Claybeck’s second spare bedroom. Like the living area, it was of another age. Hollis made an unkempt lump under retro Mondrian sheets.
“Hollis,” I said, clicking on the bedside lamp. The bulb glowed beneath a fabric lampshade patterned with starbursts. “Wake up.”
“Whazzit? My turn?”
“No. Did Dono know anybody named Sean? Back when Moira was a teenager. A young guy, I’m guessing.”
“Who’s—wait. What are we talking about now?”
I forced myself to rewind and told Hollis about Moira’s reunion letter, and my conversation with Stasia. The room smelled of Lemon Pledge and faintly of Hollis himself. I must have needed a shower just as much.
When I finished, he was sitting upright, his eyes wide.
“Jesus God. You think this lad could be—”
“Sean,” I pressed. “Did Dono know someone named that?”
“Your man didn’t socialize much. You know as well as I do. Much less with young people. Most of the men he met were in our line of work, one way or another.”
“So what jobs was Dono pulling that spring? Was he into house scores? Smuggling anything with you?”
“Easy now, I’m thinking.” He leaned back against the robin’s-egg headboard and scratched his tousled head. “That was during one of the big tech booms. I remember Dono stole a truckload of stuff from Microsoft right off the loading dock. Housing prices going up, lots of expensive development materials. And new players in town . . . Oh.”
“Hollis.”
“Give me a moment. Fats. No. Gut.”
“Gut?”
“Gut Burke. He was a fat man, hence the nickname, though I don’t know if anyone dared call him that to his face. Fergus Burke, or Gus or Gut. A very bad sort. He had been some kind of muscle for one of the families. I think he was new in Seattle, from back east.”
“And Dono worked with him?”
My grandfather had kept himself at a long distance from organized crime, as a rule. It was the main reason he and Grandma Fi had left Boston for Seattle in the first place. The East Coast was too mobbed up for an independent operator like Dono.
“Or Gut Burke was buying something. Don’t recall exactly what that might have been. The point is, Burke had brought his son with him. A teenager. I can’t swear to it, but the boy might have been named Sean.”
“You’re not sure.”
“It was thirty years ago, Van. And your grandfather told me all of this secondhand. But Moira was around. Burke and his lad came to the house unexpectedly, which pissed your grandfather off to no end, let me tell you. He never liked conducting business with family nearby. If he hadn’t been so royally furious and ranted to high heaven about it, I might not have remembered the incident at all.”
“So they met: Moira and Sean. If it was Sean.”
“They must have. Dono and I talked about the strangeness of Gut Burke taking his son along on the errand. Learning on the job.”
Just like I had with Dono. I wondered what sort of skills Sean had perfected as Gut Burke’s apprentice.
“You’ve got a contact in the FBI field office downtown, right?”
“Yes.” Hollis’s voice was cautious.
“I want to meet him. After he’s pulled everything he can find on Gut Burke and his son. And,” I amended, “on Bilal Nath and his soldiers, too. Might as well get all of my shopping done at once.”
“Van, that’s not—I’ve been a long time earning my man’s trust. He’s a jumpy fellow. He can’t just type in names and have NCIC spit information out without people noticing. They track these things. You’re asking a lot.”
“Less than a sharp poke.” I nodded toward the stairs leading down to the clinic.
Hollis flushed. “I suppose I do owe you for tonight. It’s Monday. I might be able to reach him this morning.”
“Call him now. I’ll make it worth his while if he comes through. A bonus if it’s fast.” I had come into a lot of money early in the year, through circumstances that required me to spend the cash quietly. I still had some of that slush fund left for emergencies. And this had been one rainy goddamn day.
Hollis got up to put his pants and sweater on over his sleeping attire of boxers and undershirt. I idled impatiently in the hall.
“Did you sleep?” he said.
“Some.”
“I imagine . . . since you came back, that hasn’t come easy.”
My pacing stopped. “What do you mean?”
He hitched up his trousers, a kind of embarrassed shrug. “You’ve told me your combat experiences gave you nightmares for a long while.” Hollis glanced down the hall and lowered his voice another notch. “After what happened with those maniacs in Oregon, it stands to reason you’d have some trouble putting that aside. In your dreams, I mean.”
I looked at him, understanding. That would be the normal response.
It just hadn’t been mine.
“My dreams aren’t troubling me, Hollis,” I said. “The thing that troubles me is that I haven’t been dreaming at all. Not since I came back. I killed those men and I’ve been sleeping like a baby ever since.”
I couldn’t put an exact name to Hollis’s reaction, but the closest expression might have been wariness. Like realizing the docile neighborhood mongrel was showing flecks of foam around its jaws today.
Nine
Jaak regained consciousness shortly after dawn. I roused Hollis and Dr. Claybeck. The sailor’s English was limited but serviceable, which was a grace as none of us knew any Finnish and Hollis only a few phrases of Swedish, most of them dealing with the possibility of being arrested and protesting innocence. But we all collaborated to piece together the story of what had happened to Jaak the evening before.
He had been preparing to sneak off the Stellar Jewel to meet Hollis when a ship’s petty officer named Kauko had caught him. Instead of turning Jaak in, Kauko had offered a deal. Kauko had been planning to take one of the freighter’s launches to pick up other sailors north of where the Jewel was docked on Harbor Island. He offered to hide Jaak in the launch and ferry him to meet Hollis. In return, Jaak would share the profit from the deal. Trapped, Jaak couldn’t refuse.
Things had taken a turn. During the ride on the launch, Kauko had pressed Jaak to share drinks from a flask. Jaak began to feel groggy. By the time he realized he’d been drugged, it was too late. He had a rough memory of staggering toward Kauko and the petty officer looking at him in terror. Then nothing. Dr. Claybeck theorized that Kauko had doped Jaak with Rohypnol or some similar benzo compound.
Kauko’s motives were less clear to all of us. Jaak told us that Kauko had stolen his entry visa. Perhaps that had been his intent all along, to filch the document to make his way onshore and maybe use Jaak’s
name to start a life in America. But when the roofie hadn’t knocked the large Jaak out quickly, Kauko had panicked and stabbed him in self-defense. Thinking his shipmate dead and himself a murderer, the petty officer had bolted.
Claybeck okayed Jaak to be moved, and Hollis agreed to take the sailor back to his freighter. If Kauko had returned to the Stellar Jewel, Jaak would confront him and take whatever punishment came for leaving the ship.
“What do we owe you?” Hollis asked Claybeck.
“Peace and quiet,” she said. After her short sleep the doctor looked slightly refreshed, if just as aloof. Only Jaak received any hint of warmth. “Make sure your ship’s doctor takes you to a hospital,” she reminded him.
We left. I risked Claybeck’s ire to leave my number and asked her to get in touch if she heard from Bilal again. She didn’t refuse outright, which was as much as I could hope.
A rippling chop greeted us on the Sound, but compared to the previous night, the Francesca barely felt the waves. Hollis dropped me off at a marina in West Seattle. After dozing through a Lyft ride, I was back in my own car and headed for home. I needed rest and food before I met with Hollis’s FBI contact later in the day.
And, I decided, I needed to talk to someone who could tell me if I was insane for even considering digging up family secrets. For wanting to know who my father was, if the son of a bitch had abandoned Moira and me thirty years ago.
“Your father?” Addy said. The pan she was removing from under the oven clanged against its drawer. “That’s tremendous!”
“Keep it down,” I said. A glance into the living room confirmed that Cyndra was still engrossed in a Fortnite mission with other gamers around the world, her over-ear headphones in place. Addy’s excitement was enough; I didn’t need Cyn getting overstimulated, too. She’d think the whole situation was romantic. The long-lost family, reunited. “I don’t know if Sean Burke is my father. Just that he might have known my mother.”
“How could you not have mentioned this before? That you were tracing your roots?”
“I’ve barely started. And if Burke isn’t the guy, I might be finished just as fast.” I wasn’t even positive yet that Gut Burke’s son and Moira’s Sean were one and the same.
“Don’t downplay this. You might actually find a blood relative. Someone other than your grandfather, for the first time since you were small. It’s huge.”
I went back to dicing potatoes. When I’d first met Addy, her antique set of Henckels kitchen knives had been so dull they were more useful as bookmarks than cutting tools. Addy was a good cook but terrible at maintaining things around the house. I had borrowed a manual sharpener from Luce’s bar to hone the blunted edges of the knives and bought Addy a sharpening steel to use regularly. She never touched it, but the steel was there when I visited.
“What are you going to say to him?” Addy said as she plopped a roast into the pan. The three of us were having a pre–New Year’s Eve dinner together, since she and Cyn would be joining one of Addy’s coterie for the holiday itself.
“That’s the big question,” I said. “‘Hey, did you knock up Moira Shaw when she was statutory?’”
“They were children. Teens make mistakes.”
“A mistake Sean Burke had years to make up for.”
“How do you know he didn’t try? The only way to find out is to talk to the man. I’m sure you’ve already searched online.”
I had. There was no shortage of Sean Burkes in the world, and a handful on the West Coast who might be the right age. But the field would narrow once I learned more about Fergus Burke. Gut’s only online presence was a two-line notice of a conviction in Everett for DUI and solicitation, almost twenty years ago. A great anecdote to tell about my possible paternal grandfather.
“It’s only a big deal if I let it be,” I said.
A deal I would be smart to postpone. My shadowy bloodline wasn’t important right now. Not with Bilal Nath holding me at his beck and call. That had to be my priority.
“Addy,” I said, “how long are you and Cyndra staying with Dorothy?”
She paused in her grinding of peppercorns and rosemary. “Just sleeping over at her home after the ball drops, and then breakfast on New Year’s Day.”
“Could you extend it?”
“What’s going on?”
“It would be better if you and Cyn were out of this house for a while.” I took a breath. “Somebody with hostile intentions hacked my phone. There’s no direct threat. But I’d feel better if you were harder to locate for a few days.”
Addy set the mortar and pestle down. A small action, but Addy pausing her bustling flow sent as much signal as a shout. “Any threat feels direct enough, Van. If you don’t see that, I don’t know what I can do for you.”
“I just want to take precautions.”
“This is a caution. A pre-caution would be avoiding situations like this in the first place. And you seem incapable of doing that. No, don’t say anything.” She held up a hand. “I accept the part of you that’s prone to trouble. You know that. You also know it’s not me or you I’m concerned for.”
“I do.”
She looked toward the living room, and Cyndra. “I will ask Dorothy if we might stay a couple of days. It’ll give us a chance to go through some donation ideas she’s been on me about.”
“Thanks.”
“You’ll recall I once did some volunteer work with addiction therapy. Friends and family support groups.”
Surprised by what seemed like a swerve in topic, I blinked. “Yeah.”
“Something we always taught: the first and primary reason that a family member should cut ties with a loved one is when safety is jeopardized,” Addy said.
From the backyard, a crow cawed its harsh laughter.
“It’s foolish of me to expect you to change,” Addy continued. “But if your choices mean Cyndra is forced to live with any kind of fear, or risk to herself? That’s an easy decision to travel a hard path, as my Magnus used to say. That girl has experienced enough trauma.”
I nodded. What else was there to say? I would take that path, too, if I were in Addy’s place.
Ten
Running with Addy’s dog, Stanley, was like being tethered to an enthusiastic horse. Not only did the huge mixed breed resemble an especially pale and muscular pony, but I was also very conscious that if Stanley suddenly chose to switch directions, there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it.
Fortunately, Stanley limited himself to occasional arm-yanking tugs at the leash as we jogged. He probably wondered why our pace was so leisurely. He knew I could run faster, even if it would never be as fast as he would prefer. But I didn’t want to be early. So we had taken the long way from Addy’s house, coasting down the steep slope of 24th Ave and winding around Interlaken, descending even farther to arrive at the edge of the arboretum, our breaths making steam-engine puffs in the late afternoon air. Traffic was light but rushed. I kept a watchful eye for cars slaloming through the boulevard as fast as the curves allowed.
In another five minutes we reached the Japanese garden. I bought a ticket and let Stanley investigate the lawn before we entered. Normally he’d mark his territory, but he’d depleted himself during the first mile of our run.
Inside, the garden was nearly empty. Just me and Stanley and a few families with young children. Hollis’s friend from the FBI hadn’t arrived yet.
Within a few months the garden would be a riot of colors and scents. I wasn’t much on horticulture, but I remembered the vibrant pinks of the azalea bushes and an almost bittersweet lush smell of the cherry trees in full bloom from walks I’d taken as a kid, whenever the big house I shared with Dono became uncomfortably cramped. Now the garden looked subdued, patiently waiting for the celebration of spring to start.
A small boy, encased in a puffy coat and pompom hat, screwed up his courage to take two steps away from his parents and toward Stanley, who wagged his tail in greeting. I made him sit, and the boy reached out. S
tanley landed a lick on his hand before the boy began scratching the dog’s tea-saucer-sized ear. A blue Prius, so new it shone like a sapphire, pulled into the parking lot.
I led Stanley down the long path that looped around the narrow park. On the far side was an open-air shelter, overlooking the largest of the garden’s ponds. I sat on one of its benches and waited. The owner of the Prius made his cautious way through the gate and eventually toward us.
Stanley huffed as the man drew nearer. I patted the dog’s side and fished in the pockets of his harness for a bully stick. The harness held everything from waste bags to hand wipes. Stanley could have easily carried a cooler full of beer, too, but Addy drew the line at that. I gave the stick to Stanley. He seemed assuaged as he lay down and began to gnaw at the rawhide.
I removed a small receiver from the other side of his harness, switched it on, and put it in the pocket of my running jacket.
“What kind of dog is that?” the man said, stopping ten yards away. The comforting mass of a rhododendron still between us.
“Part mastiff, part Komodo dragon,” I said.
The man nodded, not really listening, his head moving to and fro as he scanned the park. He was skinny enough to seem taller than he actually was, with old-fashioned glasses that reminded me of Scrooge counting pence.
“We’re alone,” I said. “Unless there’s a police diver hiding in the koi pond.”
He actually glanced at the surface of the water. His name was Panni. For the purposes of our meeting, I was told to call him Mark if I had to say his name out loud. Hollis had said Panni would be more comfortable if we used aliases, and I was trying to make friends here. Panni was probably only a year or two out of grad school, finding his criminology degree of limited use in a low-level position in the Records department of the FBI’s Seattle branch office.
After another moment of reconnoitering the lily pads, Panni sat down on the bench beside me. While his jaw was so hairless that it might never have seen a razor, his embroidered skullcap bulged with long locks tucked beneath it.
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