“You can take a break,” Jack told the hired bodyguard. Theo had kept his promise and found serious muscle to sit with Grandpa after the threat. This guy had to be six feet eight, Jack estimated as he watched him leave the room.
“Hi, Grandpa,” said Jack.
The older man gazed in Jack’s direction, showing little reaction at first. Truthfully, Jack barely recognized him anymore. He’d shed twenty-five pounds in the nursing home, and it showed in his face. Jack had always known his grandfather as having long wisps of silver hair, but now a buzz cut was necessary to keep him from yanking it out in fits of confusion. Breathing through his nose was too much effort anymore, so his mouth was constantly agape. Finally, the recognition flashed on Grandpa’s face.
“Jack, how are you?”
Jack smiled. It was hit-and-miss with Grandpa, some good days and some bad days. Nighttime was generally tougher than daylight. Sunset was worst of all-sundowner syndrome, they called it.
The nurse kept busy packing, but she glanced over and said, “We didn’t have a good sunset at all today. Lots of confusion. But he seems to be coming back a little. You can give it a try. He may have a few good minutes left for you tonight.”
Jack held his tongue. He knew she was trying to be helpful, and he was fully aware that his grandfather’s condition was irreversible. But it still bothered him the way so many people felt free to talk about his grandfather’s condition right in front of the man, as if he were already gone.
Jack reached through the bedside restraining bars and took his grandfather’s hand. Grandpa’s gaze slowly rolled in Jack’s direction. A little smile creased his lips, and he raised a crooked finger, pointing at Jack’s head.
“You see?” said Grandpa. “I told you.”
Jack was confused, but then it hit him. He’d been in such a daze that he was still wearing the yarmulke from Neil’s funeral, completely unaware of it.
“I wore it out of respect for a friend,” said Jack as he removed it. “We buried Neil today.”
“Neil who?”
It saddened Jack that his grandfather didn’t remember. “Neil Goderich.”
“Goderich? That sounds about as Jewish as Petrak.”
“The original family name was Goldsmith. They changed it to hide from the Nazis.”
Grandpa nodded-as if he truly understood-and it had Jack’s mind working overtime. For more than a week, Jack had been thinking about his conversation with Grandpa’s lady friend-specifically, Ruth’s mention of how the stage play about Pio Nono and Edgardo Mortara had deeply affected Jack’s grandfather. Then, in Washington, Neil had explained his own family name change, which prompted Jack to do some research on Jews who had fought to survive by hiding their Jewishness from the Nazis. Sometimes a name change was just the start. Some Jewish children were sent to live with gentile families. In the saddest cases, young children whose parents were taken away to die in concentration camps grew up in non-Jewish homes without knowing that they were Jewish. As the Greatest Generation passed, deathbeds and nursing homes had a way of letting those secrets loose.
Jack presumed that his grandfather still had relatives named Petrak in the Czech Republic. He was starting to wonder if he had lost other relatives on his great-grandmother’s side-perhaps those who hadn’t changed their name to Petrak to survive the war.
“Grandpa?” asked Jack.
His eyes were closed. Jack was about to nudge him, but his cell rang. Not even the Carrie Underwood ringtone that Andie had programmed into Jack’s phone was enough to get a reaction from Grandpa. The caller ID said PRIVATE, and Jack had a feeling that it was Andie. He was right.
“I’m so sorry,” said Andie. “I just heard about Neil.”
Jack rose and went to the other side of the room, away from Grandpa, to bring Andie up to speed. He hit the highlights quickly, ending with the double murder of Neil and his new client-and how it was no coincidence that they were on a mission to unravel one of the threads that seemed to lead all the way back to a secret detention facility in Prague.
“I’m coming home,” said Andie.
“How long can you stay?”
“I’m putting in a request for at least a week. Longer, if I can swing it.”
That was good news on one level, but it gave Jack pause. “Honey, I want to see you, and I’m definitely down in the dumps. But I don’t want your career to take a hit over this.”
“Don’t you understand how dangerous this has become? Your client and your partner are dead: first Jamal Wakefield, now Neil. Has it occurred to you that someone out there might think that the third one’s the charm?”
It had, especially after the threat against his grandfather, but Jack didn’t want to go there.
“Harry!” Grandpa shouted, calling for Jack’s father. “Harry, where are you?”
Jack asked Andie to hold on, went to the bedside, and spoke in a soothing tone. “Harry is not here, Grandpa.”
“Harry!” he shouted.
The nurse muttered under her breath about his “combativeness,” and she grabbed him hard by the wrists. Jack reached over and grabbed hers. She didn’t seem to like it, either.
“Grandpa, it’s okay,” Jack said as he stroked his head. Grandpa settled down, but he continued to mumble about Pio Nono and his curious obsession with Pope Pius IX.
Andie’s voice was on the phone. “Jack, is everything okay?”
“Yes. Just a little confusion, that’s all.”
Jack glanced at the nurse, and she seemed to take his cue that gentle was better, even if it did take a little more time than grabbing an octogenarian like a steer and strapping him to the bed. Jack stepped aside but stayed in the room to keep an eye on things.
“Listen to me,” said Andie. “I’m coming home as soon as I can. Hopefully this weekend. But promise me that you are not going to take this into your own hands. You have to let the police do their work.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t say ‘sure.’ I want you to promise that you won’t.”
Jack struggled for a response. As the future Mrs. Swyteck, Andie was perfectly within her rights to reel him in, and her concern wasn’t at all out of line. There was just one problem. Neil was gone. And he was never coming back.
It was personal now.
“I promise you,” said Jack, “that I will never make you a promise that I can’t keep.”
Chapter Forty
Chuck Mays woke early on Sunday, skipped breakfast, and drove to the cemetery. Vince and Sam rode along, the dog in the backseat with his snout out the window. The Maserati handled the curves along the tree-lined highway with ease, and the way Sam was breathing in another perfect south Florida morning almost made Chuck jealous. It was Chuck’s intention to express his condolences to Neil Goderich’s widow at some point. But not today. In fact, he was nowhere near Miami Beach, where Neil had been buried two days earlier. Charlotte Jane Memorial Park was in Coconut Grove. It was McKenna’s final resting place.
Sunday would have been her nineteenth birthday.
Chuck parked on Franklin Avenue and followed the sidewalk around the corner to the main entrance. Older than the city of Miami itself, and situated on a few silent acres in West Coconut Grove, Charlotte Jane Memorial Park was in some ways the departed soul of a neighborhood that was rich in history and plagued by crime. Multimillion-dollar estates lay between the bay to the east and, to the west, the old Grove ghetto, where gunfights in run-down bars and package stores were all too common, and the “have-nots” tried not to get caught in the crossfire. After dark, street corners on Grand Avenue could service just about anyone’s bad habit, from gangs with their random hits to doctors and lawyers who ventured out into the night in deference to their addictions. But within Charlotte Jane’s iron gates rested the early settlers who sailed across the Florida Straits from the Bahamas. Shada’s family was from the islands, and she had chosen this historic cemetery for McKenna. Chuck was ashamed to admit it, but he had been too distraught to make
such decisions. The fact that it was within a stone’s throw of south Florida’s oldest African-American Baptist church hadn’t fazed his wife. Shada’s father was Muslim, but religion had never been important in her life.
Chuck stood beneath the arching ironwork at the entrance gate and drew a breath. Even by Coconut Grove standards, Charlotte Jane was a unique burial ground. As was the old Bahamian way, bodies rested aboveground in tombs that looked like stone caskets. Tombs were so close together that visitors barely had enough room to step between them. Some were their original stone color, but others were painted white or silver and looked brilliant in the Florida sun. Many were in disrepair, however, either deteriorating with age or the target of vandals. Spanish moss hung from sprawling oak limbs like dusty old spiderwebs from a chandelier, and the overall impression was more one of haunted than hallowed ground. Chuck was fine with it. McKenna probably would have found it cool that Michael Jackson had filmed part of his famous Thriller video here-or at least that was the Miami lore.
“You okay?” asked Vince.
“I guess so.”
A large sign at the entrance warned him to lock his car and take his valuables with him. He hadn’t bothered. Visiting his daughter’s grave made it impossible to give a hoot about petty theft.
“Damn it,” said Vince.
Chuck turned and saw his friend sitting on a tomb and rubbing his shin. Vince’s guide dog had a sorry look on his face.
“What happened?” asked Chuck.
“Either I tripped over a tomb or a dead guy jumped out and kicked me in the shin. What do you think happened?”
Chuck gave him a minute, but he didn’t dare help him up. He knew how much Vince hated that.
“Sorry,” Vince said, rising. “I didn’t mean to snap at you like a royal smart-ass. Especially here. Today of all days.”
“Forget it,” said Chuck. He turned and continued toward the north end of the cemetery. Sam followed, and Vince was right behind his guide dog.
McKenna was buried beneath two large oak trees in one of the oldest sections of the cemetery. Hers was among relatively few tombs from the twenty-first century. The cemetery had been essentially full for years. Space came available only as the oldest tombs, holding bodies unknown, disintegrated. But it wasn’t just the new tombs that were decorated with flowers. Even Mrs. Blackshear, “Asleep in Jesus” since 1927, had a vase filled with plastic carnations. It was a touching gesture, even if by a stranger, but it saddened Chuck to wonder who might visit McKenna in eighty, ninety, or a hundred years.
And then he froze: A hundred yards ahead, between two oak trees, someone was at McKenna’s grave.
“What’s wrong?” asked Vince, sensing his vibe.
“Wait here,” said Chuck.
He started toward the grave, moving quickly between the tombs-much faster than he could have with Vince following behind him. The going was getting tougher, however, as he moved into the oldest part of the cemetery. Tombs were so crowded together that he had to put one foot directly in front of the other to walk between them. He was about fifty yards away when he noticed that it was a woman at McKenna’s grave. She was on her knees, clearing away weeds around the marker. But she wasn’t dressed like a maintenance worker. Her head was covered by a large scarf, hijab style.
Chuck picked up the pace until he was almost at a jog, but with his eyes riveted on the woman who was wearing the hijab scarf, he tripped and knocked over a porcelain vase. It crashed into pieces against the concrete base of a tomb.
The woman at McKenna’s grave looked up. Just thirty yards separated them, and Chuck’s gaze cut like a laser over the ragged rows of tombs. The scarf covered her hair, but she wore no veil or sunglasses. She stared back at him for a moment-and then she sprang to her feet and ran.
“Stop!” Chuck shouted. He started after her, but the tight spaces between tombs made it impossible to gather speed. The north end of the cemetery had no fence, and the woman was getting away.
“Wait!” Chuck shouted, but the gap between them was widening. Meaning no disrespect to the dead, Chuck hopped up on a tomb and ran at full speed, leaping from one to the next the way superheroes leaped from building to building. The woman was doing the same, but she was much lighter on her feet. Chuck was losing ground.
Come on, Mays, faster!
He picked up the pace, but the older crypts were spaced so irregularly that it was hard to hit his stride. He hopped from a white tomb to a silver one, and then to a crumbling marker for a pioneer unknown. He was keeping one eye on the woman, who was pulling away, when he caught sight of trouble. Vandals had destroyed the next tomb in his path. The lid was a pile of rocks, and the empty tomb lay open. Chuck reached for another gear and soared right over the battered tomb. He landed hard-all 240 pounds of him-on the next tomb over. It was a century old, however, and it couldn’t support his weight. Chuck crashed through the lid like a human cannonball. He was almost up to his knees in a smashed tomb, but the pain made the horror of it almost irrelevant.
“My leg!”
Chuck pulled himself out, rolled onto the adjacent tomb, and lay on his back. Surely the woman in the hijab scarf was long gone, and even if she weren’t, giving chase was out of the question. His only hope was that he hadn’t destroyed his ankle. He was staring up at the sky, trying to bring the pain under control, when he heard Vince approaching with his guide dog.
“I heard you yelling at someone,” said Vince, “and then a crash. What happened?”
Chuck groaned, then fed Vince his own line: “Either I tripped over a tomb or a dead guy jumped out and kicked me in the shin.”
“I’m serious,” said Vince. “Were you chasing after someone?”
Chuck was winded from the chase and needed to catch his breath. He listened for a car engine or other sound of the woman’s getaway, but the streets around the cemetery were quiet, and he was still trying to understand what had just happened.
“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” said Chuck.
“I already think you’re crazy.”
Chuck would have laughed under any other circumstances. Instead, he sat up, scratched his head in disbelief, and said, “I think I just saw Shada.”
Chapter Forty-one
Andie spent Sunday morning coloring her hair. Luckily, raven black looked best all one shade, no highlights, so it was easy enough to do it herself, given the time constraints. Losing the blond was for Jack, but she also hoped her boss would like it. Or more precisely, Lisa Horne’s boss. Danilo Bahena was the principal reason that the FBI had arranged for Andie’s crash course in male fetishes at Capital Pleasures. Andie caught up with Bahena at a private heliport in northern Virginia. Bahena took her inside the executive waiting room, away from the noise of the company’s Agusta AW-139, where they could talk in private.
“Black is more… authoritative,” Andie said. “A good thing, don’t you agree?”
Bahena stepped closer for a better look. As usual, his expression was about as easy to read as tea leaves in a windstorm.
Bahena’s official title was vice president of training and recruitment for Vortex Inc., and Andie-Lisa-was a trainee on the cusp of what Vortex referred to as “activation.” Vortex was a privately held company, a subsidiary of a foreign corporation of obscure ownership, which made it impossible to know what the real business of Vortex was and who was actually running it. Bahena was equally enigmatic. He claimed to be from Los Angeles, California, but Andie and the FBI knew better. His closer ties were to Angeles, Pampanga, in the Philippines-a hotspot for human trafficking and sex trade. The skinny on Bahena was that, before he’d moved to Pentagon City and become such a friend to the U.S. government, the Japanese Yakuza and Chinese Triad had paid him a small fortune to feed their insatiable appetite for young prostitutes. He was built more like a wrestler than a businessman, and Andie could easily have envisioned him standing up to any element of organized crime. He was also a man of few words, which made him a tough study.
�
�I like it,” he said finally.
“I thought you would,” said Andie.
Bahena went to the coffee machine and poured himself a cup. He didn’t offer Andie anything.
“Now for the bad news,” said Andie. “I need a week off. Family emergency.”
“No,” he said.
“Sorry, maybe you didn’t hear. It’s an emergency.”
“I heard you fine. I said no.”
Andie disliked Bahena more than anyone she’d ever worked for-which was saying something, since in actuality she didn’t even work for him. “Look, I wouldn’t ask, but it’s my mother. She needs-”
“I don’t give a shit about your mother. We’ve got too much invested in you, and we’re on a strict timetable.”
“I’m only asking for a week.”
“I said strict. If your mother’s sick, hire a home health-care nurse.”
“It’s not a medical emergency.”
“Then call your sister.”
“My sister-”
Andie stopped herself. She’d never spoken of a sister to Bahena, and in her FBI undercover profile, she was an only child.
Did Bahena just bait me?
“My stepsister, I mean,” said Andie, her heart pounding and her mind racing as she backpedaled her way out of blowing her own cover. “I have a stepsister who is useless. So unless you’re planning to put me in handcuffs and drag me to the airport, I’ll see you in a week.”
Bahena unleashed his patented stare of intimidation, but Andie gave it right back to him. She had him pegged for the kind of man who didn’t respect any woman who wasn’t prepared to spit in his eye, and it was time to turn on the attitude.
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