“No, I want to go.” I could act like a grown-up murderer, I decided, even though the decision bothered me. Was I growing so callous that I could accept what I’d done? “I want to hear what he’s got to say.”
“Okay, if you’re sure.”
“If Joel loved his dad, it’d be different. I couldn’t face him then.”
“Huh! You don’t need to worry about that.”
Before we left the house, Tor received a text from Liv. She and her husband had nearly reached the island’s one international airport, a long way from the farm. Her husband, she said, would get some sleep in a hotel before he drove back. “Storm on the way,” she texted, “hope it waits till I’m gone, and Helgi’s safely home.” I hoped so, too, fervently, on both counts.
When we arrived at the crowded restaurant, Joel was already seated at a table in the back of the big room. He stood up as we joined him and shook hands with Tor—gingerly, as if he worried that Tor might be electrified.
“Good to see you, Maya,” he said, but he sounded troubled.
My guilt sprang to life and stabbed me. Did he suspect something, after all? We all sat down and studied menus. I noticed Joel giving Tor the occasional sideways glance. Tor noticed, too.
“Have you seen the police since you’ve been out?” Tor said.
“Yeah. A long and lousy chat with Lieutenant Hu.”
“Did they tell you they suspect me of killing your father?”
Joel winced and shut the menu with a snap. “Yeah,” he said. “Did you?”
“No. I’ll swear that on anything you want.”
Joel smiled, the first normal smile I’d seen him give that evening. “I believe you. Never thought otherwise, but once the police get talking, you wonder.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Why would you kill him? It didn’t make any sense. He’s the one who hated you, not the other way around.”
“Exactly. It’s my guess that they don’t know who in hell killed him, or even if he really was murdered. They’ve got to blame someone.”
The waiter appeared. We all ordered, somewhat randomly. Tor and Joel pitched into their beers the moment they arrived. I contented myself with ice water and worked on the plate of samosas while they continued talking.
“The police have some ideas,” Joel said, “about motive. Drugs, mostly. I know he did snort coke now and then. He ran with a pretty fast crowd back home. They had too much money that took a hell of a lot of stress to make.”
“Yeah, the cops mentioned drugs to me, too. It’s because of Maya’s brother, though, the guy Nils shot when he missed me. Roman has a drug problem. A big one.”
Joel winced again and looked at me. “I didn’t realize he was your brother. Shit! I mean, sorry.”
“The language doesn’t bother me,” I said. “I live with Tor’s mouth.”
Joel managed another smile. “Okay, but hey. Look, I’m really sorry about the shooting. Crap, that sounds lame! Allow me to apologize for my father’s crime? Nah, that’s worse.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” I managed to force out the words through a wall of guilt. “Roman’s going to be okay.”
“That’s what counts, yeah. Still.” Joel looked away, and he’d gone a little pale around the mouth. “I always knew Dad had problems. I never dreamed how deep they ran. I mean, like, he was just my weird dad, and he’d always been that way. Y’know?”
“Yeah,” Tor said. “When you’re a kid, you accept things.”
“But when you grow up, you learn more. His second wife—I keep in touch because of her kids. They’re my half-brother and sister. She never told me until Dad was killed that he used to hit her. That’s why she left him. He never did that to my mother. I dunno about the third one—she was the kind of dingbat who might have put up with it.”
“No kids there?” I forced myself to join the conversation.
“No, luckily,” Joel said. “Say, Maya? If your brother needs some kind of fancy rehab, let me chip in, will you? I make good money, and I’d like to pick up part of the tab.”
I was sincerely touched. “Well, thank you,” I said. “He’s in therapy now for the drugs, but Tor—” I glanced Tor’s way.
“I’m taking care of it,” Tor said. “The reason Roman got hit was he was protecting Maya. Covered her from enemy fire, just like in the Marines.” He gave Joel a brief smile. “But if you want to help, we can discuss it when the final bills come in.”
“Okay. Good idea.” Joel raised his beer glass and clinked it against Tor’s.
Nils really could have killed me that day in San Francisco. I could have been shot instead of Roman. I’d shoved that terrifying fact out of my mind. Self-defense. And he knocked one of his wives around. The guilt began to ease, but it lingered. It’s not your place to judge and execute him. Yeah, he was scum. That doesn’t mean you get to punish him. Abruptly I realized that both guys were looking at me.
“Fazing out?” Tor smiled at me.
“Just thinking. It’s all so sad.”
“Yeah,” Joel said. “It is that.”
Waiters arrived with our meals and baskets of naan. The evening turned as normal as it could ever be. Between bites, the cousins talked about football, the Jets and the Raiders, mostly. As I watched them laughing, pretending to argue over their two loser teams, I realized that they would have been friends had they been raised together. I wondered if they could patch up a relationship now, with Nils’ death lying between them.
We’d almost finished eating when Tor abruptly snarled, but at himself.
“Shit!” he said. “I forgot to bring those pictures. Hey, Joel, do you have time to come back to the house? I found one of Grandfather Halvar’s journals with a whole lot of family pictures in it. He wrote it in English, mostly, and I thought you’d like to have it.”
“Say, thanks! I would, sure.” He glanced at his watch. “But I can’t stay long.”
By the time we all got back to the house, the evening was growing late. Joel had just time to admire our flat, in particular the Ming vases and the jade sculpture. When Tor brought out the leather-bound journal, he opened it to a picture of Joel as a blond toddler on a grassy lawn. Under it the old man had written “handsome lad and very smart.” Halvar’s writing was small, cramped, and backward-slanting. I bet a graphologist would have had a field day with it.
“I barely remember Grandad from when I was a kid,” Joel said. “When he moved to New York we had lunch a couple of times, but he was even weirder than Dad. So I never got to know him well as an adult.”
“You’re lucky,” Tor said. “Take it from me. Real lucky.”
“Okay.” Joel checked his watch. “You’ll have to tell me more in email.”
Tor wrapped the journal up in archival quality tissue paper and slipped it into a heavy manila envelope. Joel took it, and we walked him out to his car. In the clear night sky above us, the first quarter moon shone among scraps of fog. To the far west the sky hung silver and close.
“I hope your plane takes off okay,” I said.
“Should be clear at the airport for a while yet,” Tor said.
“Let’s hope, huh? Hey, thanks for these photos!” Joel switched the packet to his left hand. “Our grandfather was one weird dude, but y’know, it’s cool to know he did care about us.”
When Tor shook hands with him, I saw an odd expression pass over Tor’s face. For a moment, a flicker of a moment, his mouth hung slack and his eyes seemed glazed.
“What time does your plane take off?” Tor said.
“Midnight,” Joel said. “Why?”
“That’ll be pretty much the last flight of the day, and the airport, it’ll be nearly deserted.”
“Yeah. What—“
“Be careful, that’s all. Be real careful when you get to the airport.”
Joel stared at him. He was probably thinking that Tor was as crazy as his father.
“Just a feeling.” Tor took a step back. “I can’t even explain it, but I get this kind of feeling now and then.”
“Well, uh, thanks.” Joel forced out a smile. “Thanks for dinner.” He turned and hurried off. Neither of us said anything until he’d driven away.
“You felt something when you touched him, didn’t you? When you shook hands,” I said.
“Yeah, I don’t know why, but he’s in danger. I know I sounded like an idiot. I had to warn him. It would’ve broken every vow I’ve ever made to let an innocent man walk off without even a fucking warning. Okay?”
“Well, sure, I didn’t—“
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you.” He ran both hands through his hair and shivered. “I shouldn’t have let him drive off like that.”
“Would he have listened if you’d tried to explain?”
“No. It would have just made him leave faster.”
As we walked around the house to the side door, I saw a pale shape, barely visible, moving on the hillside. Tor had seen it, too. One of the outside alarms muttered, then fell silent.
“Get inside,” Tor snapped. “Fast!”
I rushed through the door, and he followed. He slammed and locked the door, then hurried upstairs right behind me. I ran to the kitchen window and looked out, but the movement on the hill had stopped. The alarms stayed quiet. Tor called the security system people anyway. He hung on the phone for a few minutes while they checked their recording equipment.
“Nothing?” Tor said. “Okay. It must have been a stray dog, then. Some kind of animal, anyway.”
In a moment he said goodbye and hung up the landline.
“Do you really think it was a dog?” I said.
“I hope so.” Tor frowned, thinking. “The alarm turned off so fast that it’s likely.”
“But what about Joel? Do you think you should go to the airport? You can just jump there, can’t you?”
“And leave you here alone?”
I caught my breath with a gulp. “There’s the security system—”
“If someone’s already prowling around, will the cops get here fast enough? What if the prowler’s a vitki just waiting for me to be somewhere else? Look, I like Joel. It’s a shitty choice I’ve got to make, but I’m not risking you.” He paused, then nodded as he made a decision. “I’m going to go outside and cast a few wards. But I won’t be more than three feet away from the door.”
“Okay. I’ve got to admit I’m scared.”
After he warded the house, Tor did a long complicated rune stave reading centering on Joel. When he came back upstairs, he said one word to me, “bad”, before he went into the kitchen and got himself a bottle of beer. Neither of us felt like going to bed. Tor sent Liv email to bring her up to date. We tried to read. At 11 o’clock I insisted on catching the late local news on my laptop. The story had broken: “Mugging in Oakland Airport! Was it a kidnapping? Details after these messages.”
The details started off with a description of someone who had to be Joel. Apparently he’d returned his rental car and taken the shuttle van from the lot. He’d just gotten off in front of the terminal when two men appeared. One grabbed his suitcase; the other grabbed Joel. At this point the eyewitnesses became totally confused. Several agreed that the assailants were “as tall as basketball players, huge guys.”
“They must have shoved him into a car,” one woman said. “There were a lot of cars pulling up, letting off passengers, you know, picking people up. That must have been it, because then they were gone.”
“Yeah,” her husband said. “It all happened so fast”
The final witness, racist though he maybe was, delivered the clincher. “They were real tall,” he said, “but they weren’t black. I’ve never seen white guys that tall.”
The phone in Tor’s pocket howled like a wolf. “That’ll be Lieutenant Hu,” Tor said and answered the call.
It was, and he was at our front door. Tor went down to let him in, and I turned off the laptop. Hu, dressed in jeans, a business shirt, and a sports coat, came alone this time. He’d been home—I heard him tell Tor as they came upstairs—but checked with “the office” when he heard the news on TV. Hu and Tor stood in the middle of the living room. I felt like screaming at them to sit down. I don’t know why. Instead I huddled in an armchair and said nothing. Since the lieutenant never glanced my way, I could assume that the aversion spells had taken hold.
“Saw that your lights were on,” Hu said to Tor. “Thought I’d stop by. Do you know about your cousin’s disappearance?”
“I just saw it on the late news. Do you have any leads?”
“Not yet. That’s what I’m hoping to get from you. Look, Thorlaksson. I don’t know how close you and your cousin are, but if he was one of my relatives, I’d want to cooperate with the police.”
Tor had masked his face with the nerd illusion. He played into it by nodding as if he was considering what Hu had told him.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Tor said eventually, “but I could be wrong.”
“Try me,” Hu said.
“Okay. When Joel was leaving, we were standing outside by his car. I handed him a package about so big—” Tor gestured with his hands, “—that contained family pictures and a journal that belonged to our grandfather. I’m willing to bet that someone was up on the hill behind our house and saw it. Thought it was something entirely different. After Joel left, I noticed something moving up on the hill. My security system blipped just as I was going back into the house. I called in, but at the time, I thought it was maybe a stray dog. You can check that with the security company.”
“I will, yeah. Something different, huh? Drugs?”
“You know what Joel’s father was like. Didn’t the urinalysis find traces of cocaine?”
“Good point, yeah.”
“I’ll swear to you that Joel’s as honest as you could want. Do his father’s old associates know that?”
“It’s a thought.” Hu considered him for a long cold moment. “I don’t suppose you know who these associates are.”
“If I did, I’d tell you. But I’m willing to bet you’ve already got a damn good idea.”
Hu allowed himself a very thin, very brief smile. “You might not be wrong about that. We’ve been doing some digging.”
“I heard about my mother’s testimony.”
“She would have told you, sure.” Hu seemed to be considering something, himself, but I had no idea if he was really thinking or just pretending to hesitate. “Look, that bite mark on your uncle’s arm. It was made either by a small woman or an older child. Our DNA man talked publicly about the peculiar results of his analysis. Did you hear that on the news?”
“Yeah, I sure did. There was something strange about the DNA he got from the saliva.”
“Right. Well, there are a lot of population groups in Asia who haven’t been scientifically typed. Some of them sell their surplus daughters to scumbag traders.” Hu looked furious at the thought. He collected himself and continued. “Your mother’s suspicions about sex trafficking—we’re always on the lookout for that in the Bay Area. Do you think Halvarsson was the kind of man who’d involve himself in the trade? Or maybe just buy one of the products now and then?”
“The latter, sure. Maybe one of the girls fought back and bit him?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Well, considering he tried to shoot me, I don’t have a real high opinion of him. I do know that three women divorced him.”
“Your cousin told us that his father physically abused the second wife. I’m taking that into consideration.” Once again Hu hesitated, then fired his surprise. “Is there a chance that the assailants might have mistaken Joel Halvarsson for you?”
“We sure look alike, don’t we? I’m worth a hell of a lot of money. Do crooks kidnap people for ransom these days? Or is that only in old movies?”
“Generally, only in the movies.” Hu allowed himself a twist of his mouth that most likely he meant as a smile. “But there could be exceptions.”
“Okay. As far as I know, Uncle Nils is the onl
y person who hated me enough to have me disposed of. He tried to do it himself, after all.”
“Yeah, he sure did.”
“Can I ask you something?” Tor arranged his best dumb nerd look, slightly open-mouthed, all wide eyes. “Have they ever discovered what killed Nils? I can’t find anything about that in the online news.”
“That’s because we don’t know. Yet. Wait a minute! Didn’t you tell me that your father died of leukemia?”
“He did, yes.”
“And he and your uncle were brothers.” Hu considered Tor for a long minute, then came to some decision. “The medical examiner told me that your uncle’s blood supply was abnormally low. What there was had too few red corpuscles. Pernicious anemia at the least, he said.”
My stomach clenched. I forced myself to sit stock-still.
“That sounds real bad,” Tor said. “Do you think it would have affected his heart? Made it weak or something.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Well, thanks, Thorlaksson. I might be calling on you again.”
“Any time. Look, I want my cousin found.”
Hu raised an eyebrow in his direction. “I believe you,” he said at last. “We’ll do our best.”
Tor showed him out, then came running up the stairs two at a time. He was grinning as he strode into the living room.
“What’s so funny?” I said.
“The idea that Hu will maybe pin Nils’ death on the same disease the bastard gave my father.” Tor wiped the smile away. “Not that it’s really funny at all. Wyrd. Karma. I told you, these things come back around to the person who does them.”
“Like to me someday? I was afraid I was going to hurl when Hu started talking about blood supply and like that.”
“You had the right to defend yourself.”
“I’ve come to see that. But do I have the right to hide what happened?”
“Will they believe you if you tell them the truth?”
He had me there. “No. Not in a million years.”
“Okay then.” Tor flopped into the other armchair and stretched his legs out in front of him. “I made sure to ward the guys, but I never thought they’d go after Joel. He probably would have freaked if I wanted to draw runes on him, anyway.”
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