2 Sisters Detective Agency(6)

There was a silence. My stomach sank.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Let me guess. He’s riddled with debt, and I’ll have to be there because it has all fallen to me. I’m his only living relative so I’ll have to assume the liability. How much is it?”

Still no answer.

“Are we talking tens of thousands?” My mouth was bone dry. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars?”

“Ms. Bird, I’ve been instructed to explain everything only once you arrive here in person,” Abelman said.

I covered my eyes, felt suddenly crushingly exhausted, the last time I had seen my father turning over in my mind. I’d been thirteen, sitting in a big car like the one I now owned, squashed against the door by his bulk. I’d been excited. My parents’ divorce had been rough. My father had packed his bags and walked out one cold, snowy night and left my mother to explain to me that Earl had picked up a girlfriend in California on his latest business trip and he was leaving us for her. When my father called and asked me to go out for coffee with him two weeks later, I’d been buzzed. It seemed wonderfully adult to be going out for coffee alone with my father. In my mind, we were going to bond, to drill down and discuss it all, to look each other in the eye across the table in a diner and negotiate our new, exciting future together as Daughter and Divorced Dad. He was going to give me the real story about this supposed girlfriend. He was going to tell me he was renting a cool new apartment in downtown Denver and I could come hang out with him there whenever I wanted. I would wave good-bye to my mother, climb into the car, and smile broadly at my unusually tanned father as we headed for town.

We hadn’t gone for coffee. He’d driven me to the town courthouse, where he’d had a notary witness me signing over some stocks he had held in my name. After he’d reclaimed the stocks, he’d dropped me back home, and I never saw or heard from him again.

Something was pressing at me now, an instinct I couldn’t deny.

“Something’s wrong here,” I said. “This feels like a trap.”

There was a small sigh on the line, like the lawyer had been caught out. When he spoke again, his tone was sympathetic. It was the voice of a man who had dealt with my father for a long time and was as worn down by the experience as I was.

“You’ll understand everything when you get here,” Abelman said.

“I’m coming,” I told him.





Chapter 6



It didn’t take long for Jacob to figure out who his attackers were once he had locked back into hunter mode.

As a young man, he’d wandered from job to job, his senses ticking all the time as he moved, feeling his way forward. Every interaction was a puzzle to be picked over, every face a mask of clues. Did the woman at the hotel counter recognize him from an Interpol alert? Was the man across the café an FBI agent surveilling him while fellow agents assembled? Every time he got off a plane, he’d wondered if officers were about to pounce. Every time he accepted a job, he’d considered the possibility that it had come from an undercover operative trying to set him up. It had been a long time since Jacob had employed such heightened awareness of himself and his movements, but it was easy to resume the behavior. Being a killer and fugitive was like riding a bike. The muscles remembered.

He walked now through the bustling shopping mall toward the security office, past brightly lit stores pumping out techno music. He was sure he was on the right track as he followed the signs overhead to a narrow hall between a juice bar and a sushi place. A group of elderly mall walkers passed him, with heavy tans and wearing bright athletic suits, little dumbbells gripped in withered fists. The mezzanine café was crowded with daytime shoppers taking a break between stores, piles of shopping bags at their feet. Jacob clocked every face, noted when his glance was returned. He felt like a fox creeping through night fields, into the henhouses where dozy chickens slumbered.

In his retirement, Jacob lived a quiet life. Too quiet, to the trained eye. He had the volunteer job at the local community college, teaching trade skills and joinery to young people. He’d learned carpentry while stalking a target for six months in Alaska on a rare long-term job. He didn’t stop to chat with the other fathers when he dropped Beaty at school, making like he was shy. People probably figured he was self-conscious about being one of the older dads. He passed politely on dinner-party invitations, didn’t return friendly calls or texts. He didn’t borrow tools from his neighbors, didn’t stop to chat at the grocery store, didn’t have golfing buddies, fishing buddies, or buddies of any kind. He let Neina attend functions alone, making excuses for him, and while she had complained in the early years, his persistence had paid off. After a while she had stopped trying to push him. He went through life offending no one and befriending no one, someone purposefully difficult to remember, a smudge at the edge of a picture.

Which made it easy to remember the last time he’d offended someone. The girl who had attacked them in his house had accused him of needing to learn manners. There was only one thing remotely rude he’d done recently. A mistake caused by the pressures of time.

At the security office, a lone man in a black-and-white uniform lounged behind the counter, one hand hidden in a bag of Cheetos, the other tapping away on the PC on the desk.

“Excuse me,” Jacob said, his eyes on his shoes, affecting uncertainty. “I don’t mean to bother you. I know you’re probably busy.”