Ten

Running with Addy’s dog, Stanley, was like being tethered to an enthusiastic horse. Not only did the huge mixed breed resemble an especially pale and muscular pony, but I was also very conscious that if Stanley suddenly chose to switch directions, there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it.

Fortunately, Stanley limited himself to occasional arm-yanking tugs at the leash as we jogged. He probably wondered why our pace was so leisurely. He knew I could run faster, even if it would never be as fast as he would prefer. But I didn’t want to be early. So we had taken the long way from Addy’s house, coasting down the steep slope of 24th Ave and winding around Interlaken, descending even farther to arrive at the edge of the arboretum, our breaths making steam-engine puffs in the late afternoon air. Traffic was light but rushed. I kept a watchful eye for cars slaloming through the boulevard as fast as the curves allowed.

In another five minutes we reached the Japanese garden. I bought a ticket and let Stanley investigate the lawn before we entered. Normally he’d mark his territory, but he’d depleted himself during the first mile of our run.

Inside, the garden was nearly empty. Just me and Stanley and a few families with young children. Hollis’s friend from the FBI hadn’t arrived yet.

Within a few months the garden would be a riot of colors and scents. I wasn’t much on horticulture, but I remembered the vibrant pinks of the azalea bushes and an almost bittersweet lush smell of the cherry trees in full bloom from walks I’d taken as a kid, whenever the big house I shared with Dono became uncomfortably cramped. Now the garden looked subdued, patiently waiting for the celebration of spring to start.

A small boy, encased in a puffy coat and pompom hat, screwed up his courage to take two steps away from his parents and toward Stanley, who wagged his tail in greeting. I made him sit, and the boy reached out. Stanley landed a lick on his hand before the boy began scratching the dog’s tea-saucer-sized ear. A blue Prius, so new it shone like a sapphire, pulled into the parking lot.

I led Stanley down the long path that looped around the narrow park. On the far side was an open-air shelter, overlooking the largest of the garden’s ponds. I sat on one of its benches and waited. The owner of the Prius made his cautious way through the gate and eventually toward us.

Stanley huffed as the man drew nearer. I patted the dog’s side and fished in the pockets of his harness for a bully stick. The harness held everything from waste bags to hand wipes. Stanley could have easily carried a cooler full of beer, too, but Addy drew the line at that. I gave the stick to Stanley. He seemed assuaged as he lay down and began to gnaw at the rawhide.

I removed a small receiver from the other side of his harness, switched it on, and put it in the pocket of my running jacket.

“What kind of dog is that?” the man said, stopping ten yards away. The comforting mass of a rhododendron still between us.

“Part mastiff, part Komodo dragon,” I said.

The man nodded, not really listening, his head moving to and fro as he scanned the park. He was skinny enough to seem taller than he actually was, with old-fashioned glasses that reminded me of Scrooge counting pence.

“We’re alone,” I said. “Unless there’s a police diver hiding in the koi pond.”

He actually glanced at the surface of the water. His name was Panni. For the purposes of our meeting, I was told to call him Mark if I had to say his name out loud. Hollis had said Panni would be more comfortable if we used aliases, and I was trying to make friends here. Panni was probably only a year or two out of grad school, finding his criminology degree of limited use in a low-level position in the Records department of the FBI’s Seattle branch office.

After another moment of reconnoitering the lily pads, Panni sat down on the bench beside me. While his jaw was so hairless that it might never have seen a razor, his embroidered skullcap bulged with long locks tucked beneath it.

“How do I know you’re not wearing a wire?” he said.

“You can check if you want.”

He thought about it. Maybe it had already occurred to him that if OPR, the Bureau’s version of Internal Affairs, were on to him, they would have busted him the moment he tried to leave the field office with confidential files.

“Never mind,” he said.

“And I’ll trust you, too.” The little receiver in my pocket hadn’t emitted the buzz alerting me to any cellular or two-way signals within a dozen feet. Panni wasn’t wired.

“I don’t know why we couldn’t go through our mutual friend,” he said, sitting next to me on the bench.

“Because our friend isn’t always available,” I said, “and if I need information quickly in the future, it’s better that you and I know each other.” I patted Panni on the back.

“I can’t do this a lot,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant logistically or emotionally.

“Let’s just take care of today.”

“So how do we . . .”

“You leave what you brought on the bench. Then you go to your car and find yourself a party.”

He frowned. “What about the rest?”

“It’s already in your pocket, Mark.”

He pressed his elbow against his North Face ski jacket and was rewarded with the crackle of paper from the folded envelope I’d placed there. His eyes widened.

“Happy New Year,” I said.

Panni fumbled in his jeans pocket and set a black thumb drive on the bench. He managed to take long strides on his way back out of the garden, despite being clenched enough to hold a broomstick lodged where I couldn’t see it.

I scratched Stanley’s flank as I reached into his harness again for an adapter cable. I plugged the thumb drive into my phone and began to read the files Panni had brought.

The first document was Bilal Nath’s travel visa to the United States, including an image of his passport. He was a citizen of Pakistan, with a listed residence in London. He’d entered the country on a flight from Heathrow to Miami in mid-November. The next two pages of search results confirmed Bilal had no arrest record in the United States and a check with Interpol had drawn a similar blank.

But the next file was a surprise. A State of Florida marriage license. Bilal Nath and Aura Kincaid had been married in Miami only a week after Bilal had arrived in America. The gangster and his girl were newlyweds.

Aura’s record wasn’t quite as clean as her husband’s. Arrests for identity theft in her home state of Washington, and again in Florida, which also included a count of wire fraud. Cybercrimes. Unsurprising, given that code she’d created to strip-mine my phone for all its data. She hadn’t been indicted on the first rap and had gotten off with probation for the second.

The sentencing statement noted that the judge had been lenient given Ms. Kincaid’s ongoing health concerns. It didn’t elaborate on what those problems had been, but if they’d been serious enough to make a Dade County judge pause, I guessed Aura had been afflicted with more than a hangnail.

She’d been married once before Bilal, too, I noticed. To a Timothy Gorlick, while she was still living in Washington. Their divorce had been finalized right before her move to Miami.

That was the sum total of information on my new and unwanted acquaintance. I had gleaned a few biographical facts, but nothing that might give me any leverage to shake Bilal loose. Stanley caught my angry curse and raised his head.

Bilal had hired Dr. Claybeck through Ondine Long. It was a sure bet Ondine was also the person who had first dropped my name to Bilal, although I had no idea why. Nothing good, that was equally certain. Whatever motive that witch might have had for mentioning me, my best interest wouldn’t be a factor.

I closed the files on Bilal to open the second folder. The information Panni had been able to find on Fergus Burke.

Gut Burke’s federal rap sheet was the largest file. It had been linked to records in various counties and states. I didn’t know if that efficiency was Panni’s good work or courtesy of Homeland Security tying information across sources.

Fergus William Burke, aka Big Gus, aka Gut Burke, aka George Bergin. White male, six-foot-one, 260 pounds. Born New York City, died twelve years ago in Longview, Washington, only days shy of age sixty.

So he was dead. If Gut Burke had been my paternal grandfather, he was just another relation lost to time, never to be known.

But that was making the very big assumption that Burke had any connection to me at all. I scrolled ahead, looking for his family and known associates.

There. Three relatives. Wife Iva Burke, divorced with no year listed. Daughter Kathleen, deceased. She had her own criminal sheet as a separate file on Panni’s drive. Katie Burke had been arrested in Berkeley twice for possession of heroin and died of an overdose at age twenty.

And son Sean. Sean Burke.

Hollis’s memory had been spot-on. My mother, Moira, had known him.

The news was big enough that I let the file labeled sean_william_burke _09790467a sit unopened and full of its own portent, while I read more about his father, Gus.

Gut Burke had racked up enough arrests to force me to scroll down twice to see the whole list. He’d been in handcuffs before he’d had his first zit. Assault, burglary, armed robbery, possession with intent, suspicion of extortion, suspicion of kidnapping, suspicion of murder more than once. Leaving aside a host of short jail terms, two of those arrests had earned Burke prison time. Four years in Sing Sing for manslaughter, six in San Quentin for selling cocaine. East Coast, West Coast.

Mug shots of Burke at various ages showed a man who was almost fully grown and next door to good-looking at sixteen, with a strong nose and chin and dark wavy hair, who had slid downhill fast. Like a time-lapse of Dorian Gray’s portrait. It wasn’t just the weight gain that ballooned his already thick neck. The skin on his cheeks blossomed into rosacea and his countenance became darker in a different way.

Burke looked exactly like what he was: a thug, a crook, a killer.

The attached Bureau dossier gave me some color commentary to back up all the stats. Gut Burke had been an enforcer for the Westies, the Irish-American mob in Hell’s Kitchen, who started as competitors of the Italians and ended as little more than attack dogs working for the Gambino family. Seeing the writing on the wall, Burke had pulled up stakes and fled to California in the early 1980s. The Feds had tried to make him turn state’s evidence when they nabbed him for trafficking drugs, but Gut hadn’t taken the deal.

Burke had moved again, to Washington State, just after his parole from SQ ended. The dossier showed registered addresses in Olympia, Longview, Tacoma. Never anywhere longer than five or six years. And no arrests after his relocation to the Northwest. Had he suddenly quit? Or changed his methods?

Which renewed my curiosity about what business Burke might have had with Dono thirty years ago. Despite a few similar notes in the melody of their criminal records, the two men didn’t have much in common. Burke was a few years older than my grandfather had been, and from NYC, while Dono had come to the States through Boston. Dono was a thief, with no interest in dealing narcotics and especially not in murder for hire, which looked to be Gut Burke’s specialties. And Dono had assiduously avoided working with gangs. If crime could have hermits, that would have been my grandfather.

My fingers hesitated over Sean’s file. The more I learned about the Burkes, even reading between the emotionless lines of the official record, the less I liked.

My grandfather had raised me to be just like him. A thief. Dono Shaw wasn’t without his own scruples, and he’d loved me. I’d bought into the idea—the delusion—that he and I were justified in what we did. That I was a good person despite my crimes.

I’d grown out of that way of thinking.

Gut Burke couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be considered good, not ever. Was his son the same?

I opened his file.

Sean Burke’s driver’s license and two passport copies were on the first pages. He was forty-seven. He traveled internationally with enough frequency that he’d filled the first of the passports within a few years. Trips to Canada and Russia, mostly, and a handful of former Eastern Bloc nations as well.

I studied Burke’s face. The photos were straight-on and impassive, as with most DMV and passport pictures. It was a squarer face than his father’s but with the same strong features and the same pugnacious set to the jaw.

He didn’t look a ton like me, except for the shape of his skull and perhaps the ears. Dark hair and eyes, sure, but not so dark as the Shaw bloodline with their black hair, and eyes close enough to that shade that a drunk girl in a bar near Fort Benning had once poked me in the chest and proclaimed them obsidian. I’d known my whole life that my looks resembled Dono’s. Everyone who’d seen us together had remarked on it.

Burke and I were similarly sized, though. Over six feet, and big in the shoulders and chest from what I could gauge from his headshots and his license. That hadn’t been the case for Dono. My grandfather had been even taller, but rangy. More a wiry strength than the muscle mass that came naturally to me. I noted Sean had kept his weight down as he’d aged. No one was likely to call him Gut after his dad.

He was also married. To Natalia Burke née Morozova, no children. Real estate records showed they owned a house right here in Seattle, a two-bedroom suburban in Bitter Lake bought ten years ago for four hundred and ten thousand and probably worth twice that now, thanks to Seattle’s insane real estate boom.

Married, and settled. That surprised me, and the fact that I was surprised made me wonder whether I was trying too hard to fit Sean Burke into a preconceived notion. I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Maybe Sean had escaped the pull of his father’s gravity, as I’d more or less escaped Dono’s.

I continued to page through his records and stopped abruptly, thinking at first that the copies of Burke’s U.S. travel documents had been duplicated.

But no. I was looking at a copy of a second passport for Burke. With the red-and-gold cover of the Russian Federation.

That must have taken some doing, even with a Russian wife. Did Burke somehow arrange for dual citizenship? Was that even recognized by both countries? It hadn’t seemed to set off any red flags during travel. He’d logged at least two trips to Asia per year, with entry points at Pushkin International in Moscow and also to Kiev in the Ukraine. Family visits? Or working?

Sean held a Washington State business license under the name SWB Consultants. I clicked away from the file to make a fast search. If the business was still operating, it was unusual. I couldn’t find any online presence for SWB or Sean Burke. No social media, no company website, not even a Yelp review.

He did have a criminal record. A single arrest by the SPD, for suspicion of assault when he was barely eighteen. I checked the date against Gut Burke’s file. Sure enough, father and son had been busted together. Neither man had been indicted.

The last part of his rap sheet was especially curious, an appended section of only two sentences. Sean Burke had been questioned by the ATF two years ago. Any inquiries were directed to the federal agency’s Seattle field office. No further details on the investigation were provided. I suspected that the official record had been classified, which would make sense if the case was still considered open.

Burke might be a suspect. Or a witness, or even just a technical expert the Feds had consulted for information. No way of knowing. But those two lines had become a cloud obscuring any clear picture of Sean Burke.

The final three pages were almost identical, each one a federal firearm transaction form. Burke had purchased two SIG Sauer M17 pistols, and one bolt-action SSG 3000 rifle by the same maker, all within the past four years. I knew the M17, had even tried it out on the range in the Army when the model was in contention to replace our standard issue Beretta. SIG Sauer had eventually won that bid. The M17 was rolling out by the tens of thousands to Army and Air Force personnel.

Burke wasn’t a veteran. Why pay top retail to own pistols that would become as common as weeds within a couple of years?

The SIG rifle struck me as even stranger. A sniper rifle used by law enforcement, and an odd choice for the casual gun enthusiast.

I recalled something else about the rifle. Something that turned the nagging tap at my mind to frantic scratching. The SSG 3000 had a rare feature, a barrel that could be replaced in just a few minutes. Useful, if you wanted to try out different calibers.

Or maybe swap out the rifle’s original barrel to muddy the results of a ballistics test.

I could think of at least one private sector occupation that would find that feature useful. A job that might reward tactical proficiency with a model of handgun you could acquire with comparative ease almost anywhere in the world.

Combine those facts with frequent travel. A vague registered business. And a family history shadowy enough to make mine look like a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers.

A shooter. Not a grunt like Gut Burke, weighted down with a rap sheet that would attract attention in any town he settled in. But a professional killer, careful and prepared.

Had Sean Burke gone straight? Or, like Dono after his young wild years, had he refined his approach over time to become much better at the work he’d done all his life?

Hell. I was probably building an elaborate house of cards. Maybe Sean Burke had buddies in the Army whom he liked to go shooting with, or he had found some price break on weapons from his favorite manufacturer.

And he lived in Seattle. My possible next of kin, my father, might have been living less than ten miles away from me all these years.

Ten miles, a drive of no more than twenty minutes. I could be at Sean Burke’s house just that fast.

I unplugged the drive and filled Stanley’s harness with the various pieces of electronics once more. The bully stick long since devoured, he hopped up, keen to be on the move.

So was I, I realized. I had enough raw energy suddenly firing my blood to sprint like a wolf chasing prey.

I just wasn’t sure which direction I should go.