Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments can be tricky. There is always the risk of forgetting someone. I tried to keep this in mind when I was writing the acknowledgement section for my first novel, Love Thy Neighbor. Then I promptly forgot someone I had no excuse for omitting. So with that oversight in mind, I would like to thank my good friend, Tim Davis. Tim helped with both this manuscript and the last, and went as far as to try to teach me some proofreading symbols in his editing efforts. He is a better teacher than I am a student. So thank you Tim, and this time around you get top billing.
For this book, I would once again like to thank my A-team of readers: Jim Singleton, Fabio Assmann, Tim Davis, Michele Gates, Don Gilleo, Claire Everett and Sue Fine. I would also like to thank a couple of other people for their opinions, help, support, and in at least one case, a potential idea for a future book. So for their various input, contribution and support, I would like to thank Sharon Mitchell, Marlo Ivey, Cornelia Newbold, Amy Ganz and Jim Mockus. I would also like to thank Lou Aronica and The Story Plant.
And last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my family and friends, in particular my wife, Ivette.
Prologue
Morphine made the Sunday paper more palatable. For as long as Jake could remember, coffee had been the chosen accompaniment for the Lord’s Day morning ritual. Mass, a thick paper, the Sunday ads, and a pot of good drip coffee. But when a yellow hue in the eyes indicates liver failure, and when the kidneys are relying on a dialysis machine to do their work, routines have a way of changing. Sure, caffeine was the still the champ of the legal morning kick, but it did little to ease bone-deep pain.
The story began in the lower left corner on the front page of The Washington Post and snaked through several columns between pages eight and ten. Jake, dressed in jeans and a dark blue Georgetown University t-shirt, his Sunday’s best gathering dust in the closet, took a sip of water. He cleared his throat and read aloud with smooth clarity and muted animation, taking cues from the professional voices on the audio books that were strewn about the corner table in the bedroom. The article was a human-interest story, a journalist’s rendition of the facts, pieces of a case pulled together from observations, known habits, and evidence:
Sometime before ten in the evening on May 3rd, Kazu Ito, advanced placement high-school student, broke from his statuesque pose overlooking his college-level calculus text and stood from his chair. He interlocked his fingers and stretched toward the ceiling, exhaling in a squeal that finished with a small roar. He grabbed his iPod off the corner of his desk, pulled his Seattle Seahawks hooded sweatshirt over his black head of hair, and left the lights on in his room as he shut the door. Kazu stepped off the front porch and stared at the light shining through the trees and fog in the strip of woods between his house and the gas station mini-mart on Route 18. It was time for his evening study-break. Straight A’s didn’t come easy, and Kazu powered his cerebral engine with Mountain Dew and Skittles. The son of Japanese parents working for a local Sharp Electronics research facility, studying was a way of life. He didn’t have the verve of an immigrant’s son trying to pull himself from a third-world background. His father was an engineer, his mother the daughter of one. They had moved from Tokyo, hardly a city teeming with flies and raw sewage. No, Kazu didn’t have to study to climb the social ladder. He had to study because his parents were Japanese and they demanded that he did. It was that simple. The mini-mart with two pumps in the front parking lot was off the beaten track, two miles from the center of town and the strip malls and supermarkets that sprung up during the years following the high-tech boom in the great Northwest. Luke “Pops” Wilson greeted everyone who came into his establishment with the same smile, a modest flash of dentures and reborn Christianity. At sixty-five, his face weathered by the passage of life and years of wild youth, Pops was now a man of peace. When the young man entered the store from the fog and darkness and asked to use the john, Pops smiled and pointed to the single door on the far side of the establishment he had owned for over three decades. As his only patron in the last hour weaved his way past the coffee machine, the hot-dog roller, and the long aisle of candy and chips, Pops looked out the front window at an empty lot. He turned on the small radio he kept on the counter and checked the clock on the wall. In twenty minutes he would hit the lights, count the day’s cash, and put it in the safe in the small office in the back of the single story building. Tomorrow he would start over at the crack of dawn and thank the good Lord for his job and the ability to serve the public with petrol and snacks for the road. Pops heard the door to the bathroom shut and looked up. By the time the flash of darkness moving behind the far aisle registered, it was too late. The blast from the sawed-off double-barreled shotgun sent him into the cigarette and chewing tobacco display, nicotine vices raining down on his body as it crashed to the floor. Sprawled on the tiles, Pops fought for consciousness as the backside of a dark sweatshirt dug through the register and shoved wads of cash into its pockets. When Pops opened his eyes again, he was alone. With waning strength, he squirmed across the floor and pushed the silent alarm button under the counter with the toe of his boot. Gasping, he pulled the phone off the counter by its cord. The call to 911 was the last one Pops would ever make. Kazu Ito walked into the mini-mart with his hood on and his iPod blaring. He bee-lined it for the cold sodas in the refrigerator in the back of the store and stopped at the magazine rack on his way to the register to check out AutoWeek’s Import Car of the Year. Mountain Dew and Skittles in hand, music playing beneath his hood, Kazu never saw the police officer high on adrenaline and hell-bent on blind justice. He never heard the word “freeze.” The mini-mart, thirty years without incident, claimed its second victim in ten minutes. By the time the ambulance and police back-up arrived on the scene, the sawed-off shotgun left by the original robber was resting firmly in Kazu’s rapidly cooling hands and the store’s surveillance tape had magically disappeared.
Jake stopped reading as the boney hand of his lone audience landed on his arm. He looked over at the gaunt face next to him and watched her chest rise and fall in shallow breaths. He read the last paragraph of the article to himself and folded the paper in his lap.
Kazu Ito was dead. That was the only fact that really mattered, the only fact that had a family in the Seattle suburb of South Renton screaming for justice and weeping for consolation. The rest of the story was a distraction. The Kazu Ito incident was the third killing of an innocent Asian in the Seattle region by law enforcement in just under a year. But before he rested in peace, Kazu would reach out from the great beyond to jumpstart the biggest news story of the year.
And Jake’s life would hang in the balance.
Chapter 1
The half-paved road made a wide turn around a stand of palm trees and abruptly ended at a closed metal gate fifty yards ahead. The black four-door sedan with tinted windows rounded the curve and hit its brakes, a cloud of dirt washing over the freshly waxed vehicle. The trailing white ten-seater van steered its way through the wave of dust, bounced through a rut in the road, and lurched to a final halt, brakes screeching.
Senator John Day primped himself in the backseat of the car. He straightened the collar of his shirt, checked his fly, and decided for the second time that he looked dapper enough for the camera and the occasion.