Past Crimes

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  For Amy Leone

  First, last, and all stations in between

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Age Nine

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Age Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Age Fourteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Age Seventeen

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Age Eighteen

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Age Eighteen, same night

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Age Eleven

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHEN I STEPPED OFF American Flight 9601 at Sea-Tac, I could hold the sum total of my personal possessions in my one good hand. Passport. Travel warrant. Cash and cards and my army tabs and ID, all held together with a large paper clip. My cell phone. A red rubber ball that the physical therapist at Landstuhl had given me.

  And a single folded sheet of yellow notepaper. A letter from my grandfather.

  Tar abhaile, más féidir leat.

  —Dono

  Irish Gaelic. My grandfather’s English was just fine after forty years in the States. But he used the language of his childhood in County Antrim when he wanted to keep our conversations private. Which was most of the time.

  Translated, the words written in the old man’s bold cursive scrawl said:

  Come home, if you can.

  It was 0430. None of the rental-car agencies had customers waiting. I stepped up to the first counter, where a woman stood and stared blankly down at a computer screen.

  “I want something with horsepower. Full-sized,” I said.

  “Are you a member of our Platinum Club?” She didn’t lift her gaze from the screen.

  I was not. I gave her my ID and driver’s license and credit card. She glanced up to compare the photographs on the cards to my face and got her first look at me.

  It woke her right up. Her eyes flickered to the thick, white scars that furrowed my left cheek and jawline, then up to the slimmer line that bisected my eyebrow on the same side.

  I’d carried the facial scars for more than eight years, since my first rotation overseas. I was used to people’s reactions. The marks on my face were nothing important, not like a lost limb or a blinded eye. But they were always the first things anyone noticed.

  The rental agent was polite. Her welcoming expression slid quickly back into place.

  “If … you’ll just fill this out, please, Mr. Shaw.” She passed a legal-size form across the counter and placed a pen beside it before turning her eyes away.

  Come home, if you can.

  Home had been anywhere the army had sent me, for the last decade. Fort Lewis, Fort Benning, Baghdad, and a dozen forward operating bases in Afghanistan. A few other side trips between rotations. Home wasn’t the old house on Roy Street. Not anymore.

  If Dono’s letter had stopped at the comma, I would have tossed it in the trash and gone back to squeezing the cursed red rubber ball. My left hand felt strong enough. There had been two intricate surgeries to correct the recent damage to the muscles and tendons of my forearm, when I’d caught some random shrapnel a few weeks before. But the arm still ached half the time, and I had been going crazy after a month of desk duty, waiting for the doctors to clear me for a rotation back to my unit. When Dono’s letter arrived, it gave me an excuse to apply for immediate leave.

  Even so, I would have mentally told the old man to stick it, if it hadn’t been for the last three words. If you can. That passed for “please” in my grandfather’s way of talking. Made it an entreaty instead of a command.

  If you can scared me a little, coming from that immovable son of a bitch.

  The captain running the travel assignments at Landstuhl had told me that the next available flight left out of Frankfurt to New York in two hours. I didn’t even pack a bag.

  The rental agent took the completed form and started copying all the information into the computer. “How long will you need the car, Mr. Shaw?”

  “Ten days,” I said. “Maybe less.”

  She handed me the completed contracts and directed me to where I would take a shuttle out to the agency’s garage. I reached to put the papers into the breast pocket of my ACUs before I remembered that I was wearing civilian clothes. Jeans and a T-shirt and a gray wool zip-front coat, all purchased the day before in Frankfurt while I was killing time before my first flight. Only my tan combat boots were regulation. I had considered taking the uniform with me, but it was threadbare after too many industrial washings. Instead I tore off the Velcroed-on Ranger Scroll and Third Battalion tabs and other insignia and left the jacket and trousers in storage.

  I chose a new black Charger off the rental lot and made it roar up the ramp and onto Interstate 5. North, into Seattle.

  Ten years had done more than just change a few freeway signs. There was a train now, a light-rail running parallel to the freeway. When I reached the southern tip of the city proper, I saw the football stadium, as shiny and colorful as a giant music box against the dark background of the skyline. It had been brand-new the last time I’d passed this spot on I-5, heading in the opposite direction to Fort Lewis and a new life.

  Land and sky were turning different shades of black by the time I turned off the freeway. I drove over Capitol Hill, east toward the hesitant dawn.

  Dono might be up before sunrise, waiting for me. My grandfather’s schedule had always been unpredictable. Some nights he would be in a mood and stay at a bar until dawn, lost in his own thoughts. Usually he drank at the same bar he owned, the Morgen, but sometimes he picked a different watering hole. A few places knew enough to just leave the big man alone with the bottle and ask him to lock up when he left.

  I parked the Charger in the first available space, halfway down the block from the house. Roy Street was steep, like every other street running east-west this side of the hill. Before I got out, I turned the wheel so that the tires were wedged against the curb on the steep grade. Habit.

  I looked at my old neighborhood for the first time in over a decade. Unlike downtown, it didn’t seem to have changed much. Two-story homes packed close together on small lots. Most of the cars were a few years old, but none of them showed signs of being permanent fixtures along the curb.

  It was cold enough that the dew had turned to frost on the thicker lawns, and condensation formed on my lips and jaw as I walked up the hill. Damp leaves made the sidewalk slick.

  I stopped at the top of the block to stare at my childhood home. The streetlamps around the house had always been weak, and their glow didn’t encroach far onto Dono’s property. No lights were on inside either. In the dimness, the old house loomed almost a full story above its nearest neighbors, on a lot half
again as wide—a massive dark block that faced the cold and seemed to radiate it right back.

  The foundation of the original house had been laid well over a century ago, when most of the eastern side of the big hill and the smaller slopes beyond had been pastureland. The years had been cruel to the house. By the time my grandfather came to own it—“bought” might not be the right word—the roof and walls sagged against the tough skeleton of the place. Dono had spent years razing and rebuilding what needed doing. The patchwork quilt of rooms he made of the once-grand home would not have pleased either a building inspector or a historical society, but since neither of those would ever be allowed inside, what was the worry? It suited Dono and his young daughter, my mother, well enough.

  At least until she left him, just before I was born.

  I walked up the long set of wide stone steps to the porch. The porch wrapped around the house, with the front door around the side, so that the street saw only windows with their lace curtains. After ten years away, I was ready to knock on the wide oak door and to see Donovan Shaw. I was his namesake.

  The porch light was out.

  The door was wide open.

  My scalp prickled. The inside of the house was completely dark—and silent. The doorway made a gaping ebony rectangle in the middle of the dark blue siding.

  There were no signs of forced entry. And your average B&E man couldn’t beat the heavy dead bolt and strike plate that I could just make out on the door, much less whatever custom alarm system my grandfather surely had these days.

  I could have beaten the lock. But then I had been Dono’s protégé.

  A sound from deep inside the house. A soft thump, like an old refrigerator kicking on. Or maybe a footstep.

  “Dono?” I said.

  No answer.

  I edged inside. There was no sign anything was wrong, other than the door.

  Still. Bad news and blasphemy, the old man would have said.

  Three more steps until I could see into the front room. The sky outside the broad picture window had turned the color of a pale rose.

  Just enough light for me to clearly see the body.

  He was lying facedown, feet toward me, tall and rangy and dressed in dark brown trousers and a thick blue chambray shirt. The hair was more gray than black, different from the last time I’d seen it.

  Dono.

  I ran to him, and as I knelt down, there was a crash from the rear of the house. The kitchen door, slamming open. Then footsteps, running off the back porch.

  But I couldn’t chase after. There was blood on Dono’s head. A lot of blood.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I HAD THE HORRIBLE FEELING of coming full circle. My last sight of Dono before I’d left Seattle, when I was eighteen, had been in the kitchen of this same house. He’d been lying on the floor then, too. His face dark with rage. I’d been aiming a gun at his heart.

  But any blood Dono and I had spilled back then could be measured in drops. Not like this.

  The running footsteps outside were gone.

  Dono was still warm. I leaned down and put my ear near his cheek. One breath. Two. Light as a spiderweb.

  “Dono!” I shouted in his face. “It’s Van.” No response. Not even a twitch behind the closed eyelid.

  More blood was pooling on the floor under his head. My knees slipped in the wet. Then I caught the smell of singed hair and burned powder. Gunshot.

  I tore off my jacket and my T-shirt, wadding up the shirt and pressing it against the oozing hole behind his left ear. His hair was sticky.

  “Dono!” I shouted again. “Hang on!” With my other hand, I felt for a pulse at his carotid. It was there. Barely.

  Come on, you tough old bastard. Stay with me.

  I kept one hand on Dono’s head and reached out with the other to my jacket. His blood was seeping through the wadded layers of T-shirt cotton. I was fumbling to unbutton the pocket and reach my cell phone when I heard a creak of wood on the porch outside.

  Had the guy who ran out circled back to finish the job? I didn’t have a gun. Dono and I would both be easy.

  I heard many quick and muffled footsteps outside, coming toward the door. Then silence.

  Cops. Had to be. Coming in quiet, until they got in position.

  “Here!” I yelled. “In the front room! He’s been shot!”

  “Police! Who’s inside?” shouted a male voice.

  “Me and my grandfather,” I said. “Somebody ran out the back door a minute ago.”

  “Come out of the house, sir. Now.”

  “He’s bleeding out, goddamn it. I’ve got pressure on it.”

  Ten long seconds passed before silhouettes appeared at the edge of the door. Stick formation. Single file.

  “Here,” I said again.

  “Let me see your hands,” the cop in front ordered. He had a shotgun leveled at me.

  I raised one red-stained hand up high. “I’ll step away. But somebody has to take over, fast. His skull might be fractured.”

  “Do it,” the cop said. I put the other hand in the air and stood up. Blood dribbled down from my palms onto my forearms and bare shoulders. “Turn around,” he said. I did a one-eighty so he could see there was no weapon tucked in my jeans.

  “Now back slowly toward the door,” he said.

  I backed up. One of the cops ran around me to kneel by Dono. His partner covered me as I edged out toward the one holding the shotgun.

  They let me come all the way out onto the porch, backing up to keep some distance between us. The second cop in the line was big, maybe six-three with an extra layer of padding in the face and belly. He spun me around so that my nose was three inches from the dark blue paint. Shotgun was on the other side of the doorway, watching the entry and the hall beyond.

  The big cop reached for his shoulder radio. “We’re inside. Detaining one male at gunpoint. Victim down. Need rescue.”

  “I’ve got combat medical training,” I said to the cop. “Let me help.” I willed Dono to keep breathing.

  “The officer there is an EMT. We’ll take care of him. Is anybody else in the house?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I got here two minutes before you did. The door was open. My grandfather was on the floor. Somebody ran out the back when I came in.”

  And someone must have called 911, before I’d even arrived. A neighbor? Or the same guy who’d shot Dono?

  “What’s your name?” Shotgun said to me.

  “Van Shaw. My ID is in the jacket on the floor by my grandfather.”

  “You live here, sir?”

  “No. I flew in to Sea-Tac about an hour ago. All right if I turn around?” I wanted to see if the cop working on Dono had the wound stanched.

  “Go ahead.”

  I edged sidewise to look through the entryway. The EMT cop had pressure on Dono’s head, and with his free hand he was checking for pupil dilation.

  More cops were moving around upstairs, sweeping the place. I’d cleared my share of houses and other structures. Their team knew how to do it. They moved fast and quiet, checking every room and closet and anywhere else a human might hide.

  “Gun,” said the partner of the guy kneeling by Dono. He was pointing at the floor of the front room. In the low light and with the rush to help my grandfather, I hadn’t seen what had been there. A tumbler glass had fallen and broken near Dono’s ancient leather wing-back chair. Lying behind it was a snubnose .38 revolver.

  “Yours?” the big cop said to me. His name tag read OLSSEN.

  “No.” And whatever gun had made that hole in Dono, it wasn’t as big as a .38. Maybe the revolver belonged to Dono himself. Had he been carrying it? And had he been too slow on the draw to save himself?

  Two paramedics came running down the porch and past us into the house. They had a pressure bandage on Dono’s skull in under a minute and a ventilator down his throat one minute after that. I was trembling slightly. A little from the cold air, mostly from adrenaline. Tiny droplets of half-d
ried blood quivered off the ends of my fingers.

  Fight harder, Dono. You have to wake up.

  Every time the EMT squeezed the bulb and forced air into Dono’s lungs, I exhaled as if to push a little more life into him. The medics counted three and lifted him onto the stretcher and carried him to the door.

  “Harborview?” I said. Too loud. One of them flinched.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Sir, I’m gonna need you to stay here,” said Shotgun. R. VOH. “You said your identification is in the room there?”

  We stepped inside, Voh and Olssen keeping me between them. I pointed at my jacket on the floor. Voh stepped carefully into the front room, around the spatters of blood and bloody footprints. He fished out the contents of the jacket’s pockets without moving it from where it lay.

  He glanced through my papers. “You’re deployed overseas, Mr. Shaw? Or Sergeant Shaw?”

  “Yes.” On the wall of the foyer was a shallow metal panel, the size of a paperback book. Dono’s house alarm. Homemade. I reached out and flipped the panel door open.

  “Hey,” said Olssen. “Sir, don’t touch anything, all right?”

  Dono had upgraded the system since I’d lived here. It was plain-looking, just flat stainless steel and a ten-digit keypad with a single light to show when it was armed. The light was off.

  So maybe somebody knocks and Dono wakes up and turns off the alarm to open the door. Or maybe the shooter was here already and the alarm never got turned on because the old man never went to bed last night.

  Either way, odds were damn good that Dono knew the person. Hard to imagine a stranger getting close enough to put a gun to his head at five-thirty in the morning.

  Two men came in through the front door. Detective badges clipped to their belts.

  The first was forty-something, with prematurely white hair. His blue suit was pressed and clean. The second detective was closer to my age, a thin guy in a brown sport coat and a shiny shirt with matching tie. He took in the scene in the front room and let out a low whistle. His partner frowned.

  The white-haired cop took my identification and papers from Voh and looked at me for a moment. “I’m Detective Guerin,” he said. “This is Detective Kanellis.”