Tim didn’t.
“Bruce said he and the missus are home most days and they haven’t caught sight of him. Cass. That’s the brother, right? He’s probably hiding out from the reporters, but they haven’t seen him go in or out, except the day he came home from prison.”
“Did he leave town?” Tim asked.
The man who’d been speaking just shook his head. “Might be. But if I spent twenty-five years in the can, I’d want to hang out with my family. Paul’s his identical twin, isn’t he? Close, right? For years, I been reading how Paul and him wrote each other every day.”
“Me?” said another man. “Twenty-five years inside? I’d get four girls and a bottle of whiskey and tell them to see how much I could take.”
The men around the table all laughed.
For the most part, Tim didn’t spend much time with ex-cops. There were three former Homicide dicks he’d played golf with every summer Saturday for at least thirty years, but that had stopped for him when Maria took sick. That proved to be the end of the game, too. Dannaher’s back was too bad for him to swing much, and Rosario couldn’t see where the ball went. Carter could see fine, but forgot where the ball had landed by the time he left the tee. Leaving aside the golf buddies, Tim’s closest pals were all former musicians. Some still played and Tim loved to hear them, but his hands were too stiff for him to do much with a trombone, and his embouchure was gone. Mostly he and his friends listened to music, grunting at the best passages, telling stories of old gigs and good players. His best friend, Tyronius Houston, had moved out to Tucson and begged Tim to visit. There were a couple of others who’d be showing up around here again in April, once the weather improved.
Tim used the john again before he departed, then drove back to the Gianises’ house and sat across the street. Near six, a car finally pulled into the garage. When the door went up, he caught sight of another vehicle parked inside, a gray Acura. These days, Paul was probably being driven around by his campaign staff. Given the darkness at 5:30, when the lights came on in the first floor of the house, Sofia was displayed as clearly as if she were on a stage set. With his binoculars, Tim watched her whisk through the kitchen in her green surgical scrubs. He put his car in gear and pulled into their round driveway.
Sofia Michalis had been one of those kids who stood out from the time she could talk. Maria was friendly at church with Sofia’s mom, who, with four older kids already, tended to act like her baby was possessed. Sofie could read, literally, not long after she was upright, and started school a year early. But unlike some other kids Tim had seen who were isolated by phenomenal intelligence, Sofia always seemed outwardly normal, with huge intense black eyes, almost like a cartoon character’s. She’d been a classmate of Tim’s middle daughter, Demetra, and Sofia was one of those little girls you couldn’t have in the house too often. She’d play jacks with De and then, if Tim was at home, would stop off in the kitchen to ask him about his latest case. By the age of seven, Sofia was reading the newspaper cover to cover every day. She was preoccupied frequently with questions about the methodology of detection-how did fingerprint powder stick to the ridges? How could you tell for sure what a person reduced to a skeleton had looked like? It was all he could do at times to keep from answering, ‘How in the hell do I know?’ But then, after mulling over his answers, she would turn back into a kid.
‘There aren’t any bad people like that around here, right?’ she asked him about one of Tim’s goriest cases, a serial murderer named Delbert Rooker who’d killed several young women.
‘Not a one,’ Tim had told her. Even at seven, Sofia, he realized, was too smart to fully believe him.
One of the games Sofia and Demetra played was doctor and nurse, Sofia the doctor, De the nurse and a bevy of dolls as the patients, and darn it, if that wasn’t exactly how it had turned out. De had done a PhD in nursing eventually and was chief nursing supervisor at Hutchinson out in Seattle. And Sofia had rocketed through med school and residencies and was now chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at U Hospital.
Sofia also was one of two or three neighborhood girls who helped them with Kate when she turned sick. Sofia would come over and read to Kate, or babysit for an hour while Maria ran to the grocery at times when Tim’s daughters couldn’t be there. Sofie wouldn’t take any money, not that they didn’t need it in her house. You could just never forget a kid like that.
Tim always felt a tinge of parental pride in Sofia’s achievements. If you were anywhere in the US but Kindle County, Sofia was probably better known than her husband, after leading teams of reconstructive surgeons to Iraq. Tim had seen her several times on CNN, talking about the horrible toll IEDs were taking both on our soldiers and on many Iraqis. It was a horrible thing about humans that as much as we had achieved in helping people thrive-in medicine, and agriculture and technology-we’d so magnified the malevolent force of a single bad actor. Sofia and her colleagues helped turn that around miraculously, grafting burns, getting shredded limbs ready for prosthetics and crafting the missing pieces of faces out of silicone.
Tim rang the bell of the Gianis residence and could hear footfalls down the stairs. The door swung open and Sofia stood stock-still. He had no intention of reminding her who he was, but with a brain like that, she likely forgot no one, and given her profession she probably could reimagine any face she saw without the wear of time.
“Mr. Brodie?” she asked.
He couldn’t keep from smiling. She surged forward to hug him and held him for several seconds.
“It’s so wonderful to see you. Come in, please. Come in.”
He shook his head. “Wish I could, sweetie, but I’m here on business.”
“Well, come in anyway. How are Demetra and Marina?” Tim’s oldest daughter was a musician who played French horn in the Seattle symphony and taught the horn players at the U. She’d started out in rock ’n’ roll and collected her share of bummy fellas along the way before finding Richard, a bassoonist. They’d never married-Richard was against it in principal-but they had two terrific girls, including Stefanie, who’d ended up moving back here.
One thing you knew for sure about Sofia, even when she was little, was that she wasn’t going to have the looks to be Miss America. But she kept herself nicely, wearing makeup even for the surgical theater. Her black hair was still shoulder-length, and showed the smoothing hand of a professional. Her fingernails were bright red. And you could still swim in those eyes. Her nose remained too much for her face, but even that was an impressive statement of self-acceptance, given her line of work.
Tim refused to take off his coat, but he stood under the brass chandelier in the entry and they talked a solid ten minutes about his family and hers. Behind Sofia a baronial central staircase with a beautiful walnut balustrade rose to a window of stained glass on the landing. A dog penned up in the kitchen was barking forlornly and scratching the finish off a door. Sofia knew about Maria-in fact, she tried to remind Tim that she’d been to the wake, but that whole time to Tim had been like getting dragged under a tide, hoping you lasted long enough to get back to the air.
“And you say you’re working?” she asked. “I thought you retired ages ago.”
“I did. But I work some as a private investigator. Do some things for ZP, I’m afraid.”
“Oh dear,” Sofia answered. She laughed. “Now I understand why you didn’t want to come in.”
“Sorry to say it. I’ve got a subpoena for Cass. Just to get his fingerprints for the present. DNA later, if the judge ever allows it.”
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Brodie,” she answered, “but that’s for the lawyers.”
“Well, if you tell me he lives here,” he said, “I can just drop this and we can be done with it.” He’d drawn the papers out of the pocket of his overcoat.