CHAPTER THIRTY

Kate was silent on the short drive to AJ’s house. She couldn’t help running everything through her mind over and over again. AJ would want every little detail.

Kate had been shaken by the realization that some guy, most likely John’s killer, had been standing in her bedroom, pawing through her underwear. He had wanted to make her afraid. He wanted her to know that he could reach out and touch her. He wanted her to know that he was coming for her. He wanted her to feel violated and vulnerable.

But her initial reaction of fear had curdled into anger. He had intended her to know he had been in her bedroom to terrify her at a gut level.

Kate was long past terrified and well into seething rage.

She remembered vividly a sifu from California coming to her martial-arts school when she was young, perhaps twelve or thirteen. It had been a great honor for their school. Kate didn’t remember the man’s name. She only remembered him as a quiet, bald, firm Asian man of few words. He had smiled, but it wasn’t friendly. It was judgmental.

To her, martial-arts school was an escape from a world she couldn’t change. It was a time for herself away from watching over John. It was a time when she could be her own person, with her own life, and not John’s sister, minder, protector.

Each student at the school had been pitted against an opponent so they could put on a demonstration of their skills; the visiting sifu evaluated them each in turn. Some of the older students received an approving nod. Some received a word or two of advice, and some a stronger criticism of the way in which they performed a particular move.

Kate went through her routine with an older boy who was more advanced. She was supposed to defend herself against his attack. She had been proud of her quick blocks and the variety of defensive moves she had used. When they were finished, she bowed before the sifu, sure she had acquitted herself well against the bigger boy.

When she straightened from her bow, the sifu looked long and hard at her. She remembered his intimidating eyes. They seemed fierce and knowing, as if they could see right through her. He tapped a finger against the base of her throat, at the top of her rib cage.

“That was disrespectful crap,” he told her in broken English as he lifted his nose. Kate stood motionless in shock.

“If you are attacked,” he went on, “it is because they have the advantage. For you, they will always be bigger, stronger. No one is going to help you, so don’t expect any. You must do everything you can with the bad intention of hurting your enemy.”

He tapped his bony finger at the base of her throat again. “You do not respect your own life. You are afraid of hurting your attacker. You should instead be afraid of him hurting you, and stop him.” He leaned toward her, his mouth in a sour expression. “You are better than you have shown me. I am disappointed in you.”

Kate had been humiliated. The class was dead silent at his words, and when it was over she cried on the long walk home. She made excuses in her own mind that she was only a girl and the boy had been much bigger and more experienced.

But even in that moment, she knew better. It didn’t matter. Failing to do what was necessary to stop her attacker had been what mattered, regardless of age or strength or gender. The sifu had been right.

Jack’s demonstration had brought back the burning shame of that lesson.

While her brother’s death was horrifying, in a way it also seemed surreal. She knew it was true, of course, but she couldn’t really wrap her head around it.

Knowing that it was likely the same man who had been in her bedroom, his hands on her underwear, made it suddenly real. It made those lessons relevant in a way they never had been before.

Rather than wanting to defend herself from the threat, as she had when she had been a girl, the way she had tried to defend herself from Jack—and having him easily get the upper hand over her—had caused some profoundly important internal switch to flip. She now grasped in a very real way that if she wanted to survive, there was only one way. She had to eliminate the threat.

She knew how to do it. She had been practicing those moves for years. Before, they were only theory practiced against a vague threat, and that threat didn’t try to kill her as she went through routines. She had never really thought about those moves being delivered with the deliberate intent to maim and cripple.

Now she did.

“Are you still mad at me?” Jack asked.

She frowned at him. “I’m not mad at you.”

“You were. I could see it in your eyes. It wasn’t a look I enjoyed seeing directed at me.”

“Well,” she said, “I guess maybe I was a little angry. But I know you were only trying to help me.”

“I’m glad you realize that.”

“I shouldn’t have been angry at you, I should be angry at myself for letting you get the better of me that way.”

“Kate, you can’t expect to know how to handle all of this. No one would. Ordinary people don’t go around getting attacked. They don’t expect it to happen. That’s where fear and instinct step in to help us.

“Give yourself some credit for how well you’ve been handling everything so far. Most people would be so broken up by their brother’s murder and the idea that the same person was now after them that they wouldn’t be able to function. You’ve been keeping your head.”

Kate swallowed back her emotion. “Will you teach me how to have bad intentions of hurting an attacker?”

As Jack studied her face, she deliberately looked at him only out of the corner of her eye, afraid that he would say no.

“I always hope that the people I find will be smart enough to ask me that. You’re the first one who ever has. I will help you for as long as you want me to teach you.”

Kate sniffled and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist as she nodded.

She finally turned off the main four-lane street into AJ’s neighborhood. AJ had been right about the party. The house across from AJ’s place was all lit up. As she drove past she could hear loud music.

At least, from what she’d heard from AJ and by the looks of people she saw, it was an adult party and not a bunch of drunken teenagers vomiting all over the front lawn. The street in front of AJ’s house was lined with parked cars. There were no empty spots to park in.

Kate drove around the block, and then widened her circle until, as AJ had guessed, she found a parking place a couple of streets over.

Kate put the car in park and then stared at nothing for a moment. “How did he get in my house?”

Jack leaned an elbow on the armrest. “That’s the wrong way to look at it.”

Kate frowned over at him. “What do you mean?”

“He wanted to get in. If you’d been at home, he could simply have kicked in the door or broken a window. The point is, he would have gotten in one way or another. You shouldn’t worry as much about how he is going to get to you, as what you will do when he does.”

Kate grimaced. “I guess you’re right.”

“I think that for now the best thing would be for you to stay at Detective Janek’s house. We need to have a long talk with her about a number of things, not the least of which is how to keep you safe. For now I’ll feel a lot better if you aren’t sleeping alone at your place.”

Kate nodded as she watched the figures of people, intermittently lit by streetlights, turning to shadows as they made their way to and from the anniversary party. A few people were leaving but most were still arriving.

It was a chilly night, so both she and Jack put on their jackets. When Kate pressed the remote to lock the car doors, the chirp blended in with the distant music and voices carrying through the night air.

“I can stay at AJ’s place tonight, and maybe for a few nights,” Kate said, looking over at Jack as they passed under a streetlight. “But I can’t stay forever. What good is running away or hiding going to do as long as these people are hunting me? Once I go back home, they will be waiting in the shadows for me. It seems clear they were even trying to get to me at work.”

He considered for a moment, and then looked over at her with a sudden thought. “Why don’t you come to New York with me? I need to go anyway. We could even go to Israel for a while. They would be glad to have you and maybe you could even help them in return. It would get you out of danger for now.”

“I have a job.”

“Can’t you take some time off?”

Kate smiled briefly at an older couple going in the other direction before answering Jack. “I guess I could. But once I get back, nothing will change. They will still be coming for me.”

“It would throw them off your trail for the time being. In the meantime, we can work on some measures to make you harder to find.”

“I’d rather end the threat,” she said as she turned up the walk toward AJ’s front door.

He gave her a more serious look. “That means killing whoever is hunting you.”

“I didn’t start this,” she said.

On the front porch, Kate glanced briefly over her shoulder at a burst of raucous laughter coming from the house across the street.

Kate knocked on the front door. But when she did, it swung inward a few inches.

The door wasn’t latched.