“I think I told you it was a coincidence. I was in the area on some pretrial work for Nanette Grover. I assume you know her.”
“Professionally only.”
“Not surprising; she’s not a social butterfly.”
“How did you come to be involved in this case?”
“One of the witnesses I was looking for mentioned a car accident in the area a few years earlier. It just sounded odd, so I looked it up, but there wasn’t any record of the accident and . . . you know how I like to poke my nose into anything weird,” I said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “The more I looked at the information on Leung, the more it seemed like he’d simply disappeared, and with that and the accident information, I thought I should find out if they were connected, since no one else seemed to give a damn. The more information I got, the more it looked like I was right. So I poked around the lake a bit on the weekend and found the car. That’s all. I’m more than glad to turn over my research on Leung’s financial and property situation to the investigator if he wants it.”
“I’m sure he will.”
“Then I’ll be sure to send it over, if you give me the investigator’s name and office address.”
“I would also like to speak with you myself.”
“Why? What business is Leung’s death or his family’s misery to you?”
“They aren’t. But I am still concerned with the matter of William Novak.”
There it was. I wanted to swear, but I held back. “Solis, I’ll talk to you all you like in a few hours, but I have to get some work done here first. We can meet after lunch if you like. Wherever you want.”
“That will do. One o’clock here at the police department. I’ll meet you in the west lobby.”
I would have objected—if I had any intention of turning up—but I’d already given him the choice of place and time; throwing a fit wouldn’t change anything. “All right,” I replied. I think I sounded snappish and I didn’t care. Nor did I put the phone down politely. I just dumped it into the cradle and got ready to go out.
Before I could go on with anything else, I needed to talk to Michael Novak. I’d let it slide, and now with Solis breathing down my neck, apparently thinking I was somehow responsible for Will’s disappearance, I had to face up to it. I also had to find out what Michael had already told Solis and if there was any hope that I didn’t have to duck and run.
The pressure from Nan and my own sense of paranoia about both the situation at the lake and Solis’s sudden interest in Will’s disappearance swamped my brain, and I dove into the nearest of the impending disasters without noticing I’d forgotten all about meeting with Ben Danziger.
It didn’t take very long to hunt Michael Novak down. He and Will had been in London for almost two years and he’d been back in Seattle for less than one, so he’d gravitated back to the parts he knew best and the jobs he understood. I found him at a motorcycle repair shop in the industrial part of Ballard. I recognized his shaggy head of blond hair even streaked with grease and at a distance. The shop was noisy, full of metallic bangs and loud engines, but in spite of the cacophony, the energy around the place flowed in calm blue lines and concentrated swirls. I didn’t think I stood much of a chance of being heard over the din and I didn’t want to pick my way through the work area nor yell my business at full volume, so I walked to the customer counter and waited for one of the men in coveralls to come talk to me.
The guy who walked up to the counter was in his mid-thirties, tanned so leathery, the creases at the corners of his eyes looked as if they’d been stitched into his skin. Even with the nearest engine barely idling, he had to raise his voice. “Do for ya?”
“Michael Novak?” I asked, pointing.
“Why?”
“Personal business about his brother.”
The mechanic winced slightly, the creases beside his eyes deepening to canyons for a moment. “Ahhh . . . yeah.” He turned his back on me and let out a piercing whistle, waving his arms over his head.
The volume in the place dropped in a wave moving from him to the rear wall, and all eyes, including Michael’s, turned toward the front. His gaze flickered over me and the corona of pleasant blue around him sank down to a narrow band I could barely see at this distance.
“Novak! ” the mechanic at the counter yelled. “You good for fifteen minutes?”
“Yeah,” Michael called. He put his tools down with care before he started walking my way. The noises started up again as Michael passed each workstation.
The man at the counter looked at me. “S’all right?”
“Yes, thanks.”
He nodded, but he also didn’t return to work until Michael had stopped beside me and turned to give him a reassuring nod. “Back in ten, OK?” Michael asked.
“No problem, man,” the other guy replied, heading for the bike he’d been working on.
I glanced toward the narrow strip of graveled parking outside and Michael shrugged, leading me out. He kept going around the corner of the building and stopped to lean back against it. Cold wind channeled between the buildings and pushed the sound of the shop into the canal ahead of us. Michael started to cross his arms over his chest, but then he dropped them to his sides and pressed his palms against the cold wall, letting his gaze fall to the ground.
It was a strange posture, as if he was afraid of me but couldn’t or wouldn’t bother to hide it. The thin line of his aura flickered blue, then orange, and back to blue. “I wasn’t sure you’d ever come around,” he started.
“I’m sorry, Michael. I should have come sooner.”
He shrugged, still not looking at me. “I think I understand. Will . . . really screwed things up. After all you did, he couldn’t let it go. He got so crazy at the end. . . .”
“That isn’t why,” I said. “I was just being selfish, pretending everything was all right everywhere, just because it was all right where I was.”
“How all right was that?” he scoffed. “I heard you got shot and it was pretty bad.” He snuck a glance at me, as if looking for evidence of the wound or some change he could spot with his ordinary vision.
I worried my bottom lip a second. “Yeah . . . it was bad. But I’m still here. And Will’s not.”
Michael finally looked up at me. “What happened to him? I mean . . . I know he’s not coming back, but . . . He really isn’t, is he?”
I shook my head. “No, he’s not coming back.”
“Not even . . . like a ghost?”
I knew there was something even worse than ghosts in his mind, but almost a year after London, he seemed to be trying to soften what he knew about the Grey and its horrible denizens. I didn’t know if I was going to make that easier or harder for him.
“Not like any of those things,” I said. “Not at all.”
He looked relieved, yet he still asked, “But what happened? Why can’t they find any trace of him?”
The words hurt as I said them, as if each syllable had barbs. “I’m not sure you want to know. Because if you do, you may want to tell the truth when . . . someone asks you for it, and they’ll think you’re crazy if you say something like that at my trial.”
“Your trial?”
I nodded. “Detective Solis thinks I killed your brother. Or am responsible, at least, since I was the last person to see him alive.”
Michael pushed himself off the wall, standing straight and wide-eyed. “No, he doesn’t! He doesn’t think it’s you; he thinks it’s me!”
I blinked at him. “What?”
“Solis thinks I killed Will. He thinks it was an accident, that I was angry at Will or scared of him or something like that. He thinks that because Will hit me, I—I hit him back. But I didn’t! I didn’t, I swear to God. I swear. . . .” His voice broke and he covered his face with his grease-stained hands, his words coming out in hard, gulping sobs. “I don’t want to be here. I want to go back to England. I tried to hold out here, but I can’t make it—I can’t stand the pitying stares and the horrible memories. I was going to leave, but that detective started asking around and then he told me he would find out.” He lifted his face. “I can’t go while he thinks I did it, but I want to. I want to so bad. I just want out of this place. I just want to go back to where I had a life I understood. I want to make my own life.”