2

Kane was sitting at his computer, reading up on the White Rose Murder, when his cell phone rang.

“You have to come and get your things out of the house,” his ex-wife, Laurie, said.

“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” Kane said. “How are you?”

He could hear her take a deep breath and exhale with a sigh.

Great, he thought. Just ten seconds on the telephone, I’m pissed off and she’s long-suffering.

“Nik,” she said with obvious patience, “we’ve talked about this. We’re not married anymore and it’s time to make the separation complete. We’ll both be better off.”

“I haven’t got anyplace to put that stuff,” he said.

Oh, that’s good, he thought. Be childish. That’s appealing.

“Don’t be like that, Nik,” she said. “You’re making good money now. Get out of that crappy apartment and get a house big enough for your things. Build that cabin in the woods you always used to talk about. Rent a storage locker. Move on with your life, and let me move on with mine.”

Kane bit back a smart-ass remark and waited. He still didn’t understand what had happened between them. For twenty-five years Laurie had been, in addition to everything else, his best friend. She’d stood behind him during his trial and his years in prison, raising their kids, visiting him every week, toughing it out. Then, less than a month after he’d gotten out, she’d announced that she wanted a divorce.

She’d gone out and gotten one, too. Kane couldn’t bring himself to fight it, couldn’t see rewarding her for all she’d done by being a jerk about it. But he’d dragged his feet, not signing the final papers until she’d gone off on him like a nuclear explosion. And, for some reason, he was unable to clear out of the house and finish the job.

The house, their house, where they’d fought and sat companionably and made love and raised children, was just hers now, and she wanted him to remove his camping gear and guns and tools and everything else that reminded her of him, of them. She’d already removed everything inside the house, the gifts he’d given her and the photographs he was in, even the dishes they’d eaten off of. She’d covered the floors with new carpet and the walls with new paint. Laurie had erased him from her life, except for those few belongings still in the garage.

He didn’t think she was being unreasonable, really, to want him out, to remove the last of his clutter from her life, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. And he didn’t understand why.

“My analyst says you’re trying to hold on to me,” Laurie said. After all their years together, she had a spooky ability to tell what he was thinking. “She says leaving things here is an attempt to exercise control over me and our relationship.”

Kane laughed.

“Well, that’s really working, isn’t it?” he said. He could hear the self-pity in his voice and it made him disgusted with himself.

“Nik, please,” Laurie said. “You’re just making this harder for me. And for yourself.”

Kane sighed. She was right, of course. And she was entitled to the life she wanted, even if it was without him. He knew that he couldn’t keep them together on his own. He knew that the right thing, the honorable thing, was to wish her luck and let her go. He thought of himself as a pragmatist, was proud of his ability to face facts without wincing, and yet…and yet he just wasn’t able to do the pragmatic thing here.

Maybe I am a control freak, he thought, just like Laurie and her goddamn analyst say.

“Okay,” he said. “I may be going out of town on a case, but if I do I’ll come and get that stuff first thing when I get back.”

“Do you think it will be long?” Laurie asked.

“I don’t know,” Kane said. “I’m going to Juneau. It’s that case of murder in the legislature, the young woman who was killed there a few days ago. It could be a while.”

“Oh,” Laurie said. “I read about that in the newspaper. The White Rose Murder, they’re calling it.” She paused. “Are you sure you want to get mixed up in all that?”

Kane heard trouble in her voice.

“What is it, Laurie?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Nik,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Kane waited. She’d tell him. She was too honest not to.

“Dylan’s down there,” she said.

It took Kane a moment to make sense of what she’d said.

“Dylan?” he said. “Our son, Dylan? He’s in Juneau?”

Dylan was the youngest of their three children, the only boy. He’d been twelve when Kane went off to prison, and he’d taken his father’s departure hard. He was at college when Kane got out, and when the boy returned for the summer he’d refused to even speak to Kane. As a child Dylan had been mercurial, happy one minute and weeping the next, full of enthusiasms that died out as quickly as they were born. In his father’s case, though, he seemed to have settled on hatred.

Kane hadn’t been surprised. He knew all about hating your father. He’d planned to try to get through to his son during the summer, but Dylan had taken a job at an arts camp at the university in Fairbanks and Kane hadn’t seen him again.

“What’s he doing there?” Kane said. “Shouldn’t he be in school?”

Laurie’s voice was sharp with exasperation.

“I told you all about this, remember?” she said. “His school has a junior-year sabbatical, where the students go out for a semester and work. Dylan’s working for a member of the House of Representatives. Tom Jeffords helped him get the job.”

I suppose she did tell me, Kane thought, but I was probably thinking about something more important. That’s the kind of father I always was and, apparently, still am.

“Well,” Kane said, “I’ll look him up when I get there, maybe buy him dinner.”

Laurie was silent, then said, “Hmm.”

“Hmm?” Kane said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Laurie sighed again.

“What that means is that you should be careful with Dylan,” she said. “He’s still got a lot of anger at you for leaving us.”

Kane could feel his self-control slipping away.

“Leaving you?” he said. “I didn’t leave anybody. They put me in fucking prison. It wasn’t my choice.”

“You made choices,” Laurie said, her voice rising, “and your choices led to prison.”

Kane gripped the cell phone so hard his hand hurt.

“I don’t need any secondhand analysis from you and that quack you’re seeing, Laurie,” he said. “Or any advice on how to get along with my kids.”

He could hear her taking deep breaths.

“Fine,” she said in a calmer voice. “Just come and get your things. I’ll give you two weeks. If you haven’t picked them up by then, I’m giving them to the Salvation Army.”

“Don’t you dare,” Kane began, but the click of her hanging up stopped him. He closed his cell phone with great gentleness and put it into his shirt pocket. He sat thinking about the conversation, about how poorly he’d handled it.

When he’d first gotten out of prison, Kane was in many ways still institutionalized. He wasn’t used to having choices, so he wore the same clothes every day. Large spaces made him nervous. The world was dangerously unpredictable, full of people doing whatever they wanted.

Intellectually, he knew that these were responses conditioned by his years in prison. He knew that, with work, he could overcome them. But emotionally, he didn’t want to have to work at it. He wanted them to go away on their own. He wanted to just step back into his old life, back into his job on the police force, back into his marriage, and pretend that he’d never been in prison.

That didn’t happen. Jeffords had refused to take him back on the force. Laurie had divorced him, saying he was not the man she had married. His children were strangers to him. He was fifty-six years old and living in a furnished apartment, without any significant ties to another human being. Whenever he was in the grip of self-pity, he even felt that life was better in prison, where he’d known everyone and they’d known him. He supposed that blighted sense of community was what kept some cons coming back behind the walls.

He fought the self-pity and all the other feelings—shame and anger and uncertainty—that tried to take control of him. He wore different clothes and went into crowds and tried to relate to the people at work. But his job and his family had been his identity. His job and his family and, if he were to tell the truth, drinking. And now he had none of them, and that left a big hole where his life should be. He was having a hard time figuring out how to fill it. All he’d decided so far was that he needed to take control of himself and his life, and stop trying to crawl back into the dark hole of passivity that, even today, beckoned to him.

If I can just get my feet firmly planted, he thought, I can try to make up for my mistakes, to both Laurie and the kids. Maybe he could start with Dylan.

It wasn’t any surprise that his son was mad at him, and he had every right to be. What was it the Bible said? “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

Kane shook his head and looked at his watch. If he left now, he could make it to his gym, have dinner, and still get to his surveillance on time.

He might be an aging, isolated, dry alcoholic, and a sorry excuse for a husband and father, he thought with a wry grin, but he could still beat the crap out of a heavy bag.