Shakedown

Chapter Nineteen

Kate wanted to try the wok-roasted shrimp and scallops. I wanted to chase after Wendy, apologize, explain, and warn her again about Colby.

“What’s your purpose?” she asked me.

I crimped a scallop between my chopsticks. “She’s my daughter. I’ve got to protect her. Or haven’t you been listening?”

“How do you think that would work out?” Kate asked.

“She’s upset, but I can calm her down and get through to her.”

“Doubtful. When someone is that angry, they can’t hear much of anything, especially an apology. Try combining a premature apology with a warning that she should run away from the man she loves and you violate one of life’s basic rules.”

“What’s that?”

“When you’re in a hole, quit digging,” Kate answered.

“How certain are you that Colby is worried about this house?”

“Pretty certain. Like I’ve told you, context is everything. He only displayed the micro expressions when he talked about the house.”

“What did the expressions look like?” I asked.

“His upper eyelids were raised and his lower eyelids were tense. His eyebrows were slightly raised and bunched together. We call it a fear eyebrow.”

“He told me that the house was a stretch for him even at the price he was paying, but he figured he could?ip it to another buyer and make money on the deal if it turned out that he couldn’t afford it. Maybe that’s why he was so nervous.”

“Now you’re the one defending him,” Kate said. “Nervous, worried, and afraid are variations on a theme, a matter of intensity. If he was truly afraid, his jaw would have dropped open and he would have stretched his lips horizontally back toward his ears. He was past nervous, definitely worried, and not far from being really afraid.”

“How could he keep that much emotion under wraps?”

Kate shrugged. “He’s used to hiding his true self. That’s what an undercover agent does. It’s hard to know from a single micro expression how intense the emotion is. He might be more afraid than I thought.”

“I’ll check it out in the morning.”

“How?”

I sat back in my chair. “I’ll check the county’s records on the ownership and appraisal of the house, then I’ll talk to the wife. The husband is doing his time at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth. I’ll drive up and see him. Shake the bushes, see what comes crawling out.”

“At your peril.”

“I know. Colby will find out what I’m doing, tell Wendy, and my hole will keep getting deeper.”

“You could walk away.”

“You know I can’t.”

“I do.”

“Am I wrong?”

“To love your daughter? To want to protect her from a man that may have crossed to the dark side? No one would argue with that,” Kate said.

“But…”

“But, sometimes you have to get out of the way. The hard part is knowing when.”

“I’ll get out of the way when I know that she’s safe.”

“That’s not wrong but it’s likely to be tricky, maybe dangerous. Because of his undercover work, Colby is used to living with violence and betrayal. Someone like that gets into a tough spot, they’re capable of doing almost anything. I saw a piece of him that he keeps hidden and it frightens me.”

“Then I’m not wrong.”

“No, you aren’t.”

The wok-roasted shrimp and scallops were delicious. I did a better job of saying good night in the parking lot than I did at IHOP.

“Don’t forget that your class on micro expressions starts Friday night. You have the potential to be a very good student,” Kate said, slipping out of my arms. “I’ve got to go home and finish preparing for a client presentation in the morning.”

“This is Wednesday. What am I supposed to do until then?”

“Get a dog,” she said.

I knew where to find one. That is, if Marcellus Pearson’s dog hadn’t run away in the nearly forty-eight hours since her owner had been murdered. The last trace of sunlight was being chased out of the western sky when I headed back to Quindaro to look for Ruby. I hoped she was as good at surviving on the streets as she was at retrieving twenty-dollar bills.

I doubted that any FBI agents would still be going doorto-door, but if they were, I’d explain that I was looking for the dog, not wanting to leave her on her own or at the mercy of animal control. It was a thin story but I practiced saying it with a straight face and a mild case of the shakes.

Half a dozen young black men were clustered in the driveway of a house on the corner of Marcellus’s block, two of them playing basketball, battling for position beneath a hoop without a net, the others smoking and joking. The game of one-on-one stopped when I drove by and parked in front of Marcellus’s house.

One of the players held the ball on his hip, staring at me as I got out of my car. He was wearing shorts and was stripped to the waist, his ripped torso and shaved head glistening beneath the streetlight at the edge of the driveway. Someone snatched a towel from the ground, trading it to him for the ball. The player wiped the sweat off his body and handed the towel to another member of the group without taking his eyes off me. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the one left by Marcellus’s death was no exception.

We sized each other up from a distance, wordlessly agreeing that we were neither afraid nor impressed, content to stay out of the other’s business for now. If I came closer, he’d feel compelled to test me, something I didn’t need.

I gave him a slight nod, letting him know that I got it, that I was on his turf and that he was graciously allowing me to be there. He shot the ball at the other player, hitting him in the gut, picking up their game again.

The crime scene tape that had been stretched across the front porch of Marcellus’s house was gone, only a few remnants clinging to the corner posts, the inside and outside of the house wrapped in shadows. I wondered whether Marcellus had owned the house. If someone else owned it, they might wash the blood off the?oor and walls and rent it to someone who didn’t know or care what had gone down inside.

If that didn’t happen, Quindaro would eventually claim it. Young kids would break in to see where the bodies had fallen. Drug dealers and gangbangers would turn it into a free-trade zone to be shared with rats. The weeds would grow tall, the roof would leak, the concrete would crack, and the foundation would sag. The city would place liens on it for unpaid taxes, fine the unknown and absent owner for code violations, and let the property deteriorate, telling whoever complained that the city didn’t have the money to fix it up or tear it down. The people who’d lived there had died in an instant. The house would take longer.

I found the light switch in the front room. The warped hardwood?oor had purpled where blood had been left to soak into the planks. Except for the bodies that had been removed, it was otherwise just as I had seen it two nights ago.

I walked through the house again, stopping in the kitchen, at the top of the stairs, and in the bedrooms, imagining Keyshon eating his breakfast, taking a bath, and sleeping as his mother checked on him one last time before she went to bed. The clothes still hung in the closet where I’d found him clutched in his mother’s arms, more dried blood the only testimony to what had happened in that small, dim space. His mother was dead. His father was dead. It was as if he’d never lived. There was no one to remember him.

That’s why I was there. To make certain someone did.