Mike could see the car, could smell the dust of the backseat.
Graham was still talking. ‘She was a gardener, Danielle, liked her hands in the earth. She loved candles and Cat Stevens and incense.’
‘Sage,’ Mike said faintly. ‘Sage incense.’
Graham looked suddenly agitated. ‘How much do you need to know?’
‘You killed them,’ Mike said.
Graham looked at him steadily, though his fingers still fussed at the bedding. The bullet glinted into view, surfing the folds of the sheet. ‘You gave me your word.’
Mike raised the.357 and sighted on Graham’s forehead.
‘Of course I didn’t goddamned kill them. I’m a cop.’
‘So you had people. Like Roger Drake and William Burrell?’
Graham’s eyebrows rose with surprise. He said, ‘Like Lenny Burrell.’
Mike set the revolver on the chair arm, keeping it aimed toward the bed. ‘William’s father?’
‘Uncle.’ That bullet rolled ever closer to Graham’s fingers. ‘He took care of your mother first-’
‘How?’
‘Shot her in the bath, I think. It was quick, painless. You were asleep in the other room, but your father chased down Lenny on his way down the hall to you. There was a tussle, and your father beat Len away. He had rage going for him, John. Somehow he’d caught wind of what was going on. That you were marked, too. He took off with you that night before Len could circle back with reinforcements. Len caught up to him a week later outside Dallas. We needed to know where your father had parked you – it wasn’t like now, with databases and alerts and interagency communication around missing persons.’ Graham rubbed his eyes wearily, his voice rueful. ‘Len took his time with him, too. Leonard Burrell was a capable man. Your father had impressive stamina. Despite what he endured, he never gave up where you were.’
Mike looked up at the beams reinforcing the dark ceiling, his thoughts a haze. He said slowly, ‘I’ve hated my father for thirty-one years.’
‘Is it a relief?’ Graham’s dark-shaded face seemed almost paternal. ‘That you don’t have to anymore?’
Mike thought, You have no idea.
Graham cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry for what I did. There are nights where… Well, that’s no concern of yours.’
Mike was aware, vaguely, of Graham’s arm tensing, his fist working the sheet, the dark spot of the bullet against the pale cloth. Mike said, ‘Why didn’t anyone ever find them? My parents?’
‘Len was expert at a lot of things. One of them was making bodies disappear. Easier that way. No murder investigation without a body. A lot less heat. No missing-persons reports in police files. People get into all sorts of trouble, pick up and go. Everyone just figured the Trainors moved on. No funeral service, no obit, much smaller splash. No one to miss them.’
‘I did,’ Mike said. ‘I missed them.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
Mike could see Graham’s guilt quickening into anger, and he felt a powerful urge to lift the.357 from the arm of the chair and shoot him through the teeth. Instead he said, ‘Tell me where they’re buried.’
Graham turned back the sheet, his hand disappearing beneath the fold. ‘I won’t tell you,’ he said, ‘but I’ll show you.’
‘Okay, then.’ Mike rose.
Graham swung his legs sluggishly off the mattress, but then at once his arms blurred, hands clamping together, that stray bullet seating in the wheel of the.38 with a clink. The revolver was up and aimed at Mike’s face before Mike could snatch the.357 from the chair’s arm.
Graham gestured for Mike to step away from the chair, and Mike complied. Graham said, ‘I’m doing you a favor. If William and Dodge caught up to you…’ He shook his head, gave a dying whistle. ‘And they will. That team of them… well, sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Those boys do something magical to each other. But I’m willing to settle this here. Leave Katherine wherever the hell she is. So what do you say? Is that a fair trade?’ His thumb rose to the hammer.
Mike said, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’
Graham cocked the revolver.
A roar.
The blast of light from the balcony illuminated Shep’s emotionless face behind the barrel of his gun, safely back out of the security camera’s range. Before Mike could blink, the space beyond the open door had vanished into darkness again, taking Shep with it.
The side of Graham’s neck went to red and white, a tailed dollop of blood rising like syrup, then falling with his body to land in a slash across his cheek and chest. The gun flash had seared into Mike’s retinas, and he stood there a moment, breathing cordite, his eardrums on tinny vibration. Staring down at the bone and exposed flesh, he felt nothing. He recalled a dinner not so long before with some parents of Kat’s friends, roast chicken and Chilean Shiraz, how they’d all chatted and chewed and wiped their lips, resting happily in their assumption that they were decent, civilized folks.
What his father had gone through to protect him. The fear coming off him in waves that morning in the station wagon. The torn-open grief of losing a wife and leaving a son.
Just John. Just John.
Mike blinked himself back to life, returned to Graham’s study, and downloaded the security footage from the bedroom onto a flash drive. He replayed the digital recording, double-checking that it had copied. Graham’s face, clear as day: With the money McAvoy had invested, he couldn’t leave a loose end like your mother out there.
Then Mike wiped the security files from the hard drive. As he was turning to go, he noticed a business card in the otherwise empty metal tray at the desk’s edge. Brian McAvoy, CEO. On the backside he’d written new cell and a phone number with a Sacramento area code.
Mike stared at that number for a good long time, then withdrew his disposable phone and dialed, his gloved hand tightening around the receiver as it rang and rang.
A sleep-muffled ‘Hnuh?’
Mike said, ‘I got you dead to rights.’
‘How’d you get this number?’
‘That’s the least of your concerns.’
‘Who… who is this?’
‘The guy who owns your casino. I have footage that will destroy you.’
‘Footage?’ A moist swallow, and then a breath blew across the receiver. ‘How much do you want?’
‘There is no sum.’
‘Then why…?’
‘You’re going to back off my family or I will bury you. Do you understand me?’
‘Your family?’ A whistle of breath. ‘You sure you know who you’re calling, son?’
Now that Mike considered it, the voice sounded a bit gruffer than he’d anticipated. ‘Brian McAvoy,’ Mike said.
‘McAvoy?’ A booming laugh, rich with age and tobacco. ‘From the sound of you, you’re probably the only person who hates that son of a bitch more than I do.’ The man chuckled a bit more, fading out into a dead-serious silence. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Is this… is this Michael Trainor?’
A long pause. A ceiling vent blew dry and steady on the back of Mike’s neck.
‘Sue Windbird’s great-grandson?’ The voice filled with relief. ‘I can’t believe you’re alive.’
Mike’s fingers were cramping around the phone. He bent over, squeezed his forehead. ‘Who is this?’
‘I’m Chief Andrew Two-Hawks of the Shasta Springs Band of Miwok. I’m the CEO of a casino, but not the one you’re gunning for. You and I sit need to sit down, son.’
‘Why would we do that?’
‘Because our interests align.’