I sit in a café in Dearborn Heights, drinking Arabic coffee and thinking about what Dania had said. Maybe I’m here because I’m trying to connect with my heritage, but, as always, it’s an exercise in futility. My heart isn’t in it. I’m distracted. There are too many windows in this place, so I have chosen a seat at the back of the room and proceeded to glare at anyone who comes through the door. I have commandeered the single electrical outlet in the seating area to charge my phone. The staff is unhappy with my presence, but there are few customers this time of evening and they’re no doubt thinking about their day’s take.
Simone sends me an email. I open it up to find a Chicago police report from nearly forty years ago for one Ryan Russo, whose girlfriend had taken out a restraining order against him.
I think about asking Simone how she got access to this, but she has never spilled her secrets before and I’m betting this case will be no different. That she’s remarkably well connected in the hacker world isn’t exactly news to me.
There’s no other information in the email. Simone has signed off with “more soon” but soon isn’t specific enough for me. I order a second piece of baklava and let my mind wander while I wait for it to arrive. Seb’s phone is going straight to voice mail now, but his voice is still in my head. Still asking me to take a minute and try to sort through the threads. Dania had asked many rhetorical questions when discussing my mother, but the one that I focus on is this one: What beautiful woman doesn’t want to be photographed?
A woman on the run, obviously. From her past, from a man who had seen her photo in a newspaper and come looking for her. A man who has kept tabs on her daughters throughout the years. He’d followed me in Vancouver and set me on this course. Now I’m looking into my father’s history, looking into my mother’s life, and what do I find but this man who’d claimed to be a marine?
And who wants me dead, apparently.
Dania Nasri talked about coincidences. No matter how I turn it over in my mind, I can’t see it as a coincidence that my mother disappeared when that article on Dania’s father-in-law was printed. A photo of my mother emerges, right before Dania spoke with a man who might have been posing as a journalist and who would, many years later, pose as a veteran. And then a man shows up at the bar to spread the news of my father’s death to Kovaks, while also trying to find out more about my mother’s whereabouts. I’ve sent Russo’s picture to Kovaks, who confirmed this looked like the concerned friend, but he can’t be a hundred percent sure.
But it’s enough for me.
All roads lead back to Ryan Russo, a man of hidden motivations. Who lived through a car bombing—which had been common in Beirut at the time.
When I look at my phone again, I see multiple messages from Brazuca, asking me to call him. I’m about to do just that, when a text comes in from Leo. Leo hasn’t attempted to reach me since he thought I betrayed him by going to work with Seb after their breakup.
I open the message. He’s gone. I have Whisper.
There’s no answer when I try to reach him. I know he’s in Vancouver, staring at his phone, because a few minutes later he sends another text.
I’ve read the book.
Which means he knows everything now. I can feel his pain palpitating over the miles separating us. There’s nothing more to be said than what’s in Seb’s memoirs. There’s only forgiveness to be granted, if Leo can find it in himself to give it.
Harvey Watts told me that my aunt wasn’t my father’s birth sister, said it like it was something that I didn’t already know. When I tried to run away from foster care the first time, this was made perfectly clear to me. She wasn’t kin to me, was too sick to raise us alone, but she loved my father. It didn’t matter to either of them that they weren’t blood relations. What those made-for-TV movies that come around at Christmastime to bludgeon you with the restorative power of family reconciliation don’t want you to know is that there are connections stronger than blood.
Sebastian Crow needed help with some research once and he took a chance on me. I helped find him a handful of interviews some years ago.
After that, we never looked back.
I may not have much to call my own in this life. I live in a city I can’t afford. Close by is a sister who is embarrassed by me and an ex-sponsor who has betrayed me. My mentor has just stepped off death’s doorstep and his lover may never forgive me for my silence on the subject. There’s a town house I have no right to stay in now that Seb is gone and a dog who will punish me for my absence.
It may not be much, but what I do have I owe to Mike Starling and Seb Crow, who are both gone now. Both lost to me, and the fragile world I’d built for myself around them.
Dope and bodies.
Dope and I haven’t had a relationship since high school, but I can’t deny that I’ve got a line on bodies. And they seem to be piling up.
There’s no point in calling Brazuca, because I already have the news. Besides, I don’t want to bring him into whatever it is that I’m facing now. The men around me have a short life expectancy and, even though I haven’t forgiven him for his past betrayal, Brazuca deserves a bullet-free life filled with a healthful smoothie on the side. Also, a life free of mysterious figures from my mother’s past who have been showing up periodically throughout the years, searching for her. I don’t know what she did to bring this upon herself, upon us, but I wouldn’t ever underestimate the hatred that someone can hold tight for years. Decades, even.
In Detroit there’s a man who bought the house next door to his ex-wife’s and erected a giant statue of a middle finger in the yard. He made sure it was positioned front and center and lit up at night. It was a visual monstrosity, designed to scandalize the entire neighborhood. An expensive representation of his outrage, mild compared with what I seem to be dealing with now.
They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Yeah? Try a man.