Stroke…
She didn’t believe them. The WITSEC agents. How could she? They couldn’t even prove if her father was dead or alive.
She had grown up with him. He had given her his love-whatever he’d done. He always came out to watch her row. He always rooted her on. He helped her come through her illness. He taught her to fight.
She had to believe someone, right?
The WITSEC people were protecting something. Basically they had used her-to get to him. “You don’t know what’s at stake in this case.”
The pain started to intensify in her chest. Yes I do.
Kate got as far as the cliffs across from Baker Field, a little over a mile. Then she turned around and picked up her pace against the current.
Every four beats now.
Her mother, Kate thought, she knew something, too. “There are some things I’ve been holding back for a long time now that you need to know…”
What? What was it she was trying to say?
It wasn’t fair that Kate had to be separated from them. Sharon and Justin and Em. It wasn’t fair that they had to go through this without her.
Two Columbia University eights were on the river practicing, too. The Peter Jay Sharp Boathouse, where she stored her shell, was only a short distance ahead.
Kate leaned into the last couple hundred meters.
She picked up her stroke, the one she had in college, her thighs pushing into the drive, her body sliding forward in the shell. Then the craft cut the surface on a perfectly even keel.
Faster.
She increased to every three beats. Her legs driving in perfect unison with her arms. Kate felt the muscles in her back straining, her heart rate escalating. The fire burning in her lungs.
The final fifty meters, she stepped it up to an all-out sprint. Kate glanced behind her-the boathouse pier was just ahead of her now. Stroke, stroke… Kate grimaced, her lungs exploding with the burn.
Finally she released…the sleek craft gliding through the imaginary finish line. Kate dropped her oars and brought her knees up to her chest, wincing in pain. She pushed her Oakleys high on her forehead, dropping her head on her arms.
What kind of animal do they think he is?
She let her mind drift back to the image of those horrible crime-scene photos. The sight of that poor woman beaten and murdered. What could she possibly have known that he would have done that for? What reason would he have? It made no sense-regardless of the facts.
Suddenly it scared her. Her whole life scared her.
Kate pulled in her oars and let the shell drift on its own toward the boathouse pier. The voice was back-the one inside her that had defended him so strongly just a day before.
Except this time it was saying something different. A doubt she couldn’t put away.
Who the hell are you, Daddy?
Who?
The watcher stood high on the shore. He sat on the hood of his car, his binoculars trained on the river. He focused on the girl.
He had followed her many times-had seen her take out her striped blue craft in the early-morning mist. Always the same time. Seven A.M., Wednesdays and Saturdays. The same route. Llueva o truene. Rain or shine.
Not so smart, chica. He chewed on a wad of tobacco leaf in his cheek. The river can be dangerous.
Bad things can happen out there to a pretty girl like you.
She was strong, the watcher thought, impressed. In a way he admired her. She always pushed herself very hard. He liked how she always took it home in the final meters like a champion. She put her heart into it. The watcher chuckled to himself. She could lick most guys.
He watched her pull up to the pier and stow her oars and hoist the sleek craft up onto the landing. She shook the sweat and the salt of the river from her hair.
Es bonita. In a way he hoped he would never have to do anything to her or cause her harm. He liked watching her. He tossed the binoculars on the seat of the Escalade, next to the TEC-9.
But if he had to, qué lástima.…He tucked a large gold cross and chain into his shirt.
She should know better than anybody. The river is a dangerous place.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Kate remained at home that night. Greg was doing a last late-night rotation at the ER for a while. He promised he would change his schedule so he could be with her at nights. That was when Kate felt the most alone.
She tried her best to fill the time by working on her thesis, Trypanosoma cruzi and the Molecular Strategies of Intercellular Pathogens Interacting with Their Host Cells. Trypanosoma were parasites that blocked the fusion of lysosomes in the plasma membrane, which aided cell repair. Pretty ponderous, Kate knew, and unreadable-unless you happened to be among the fourteen people in the world who actually were turned on by lysosomal exocytosis.
Which tonight Kate wasn’t. She pushed her glasses up on her forehead and turned off the computer.
The doubts about her father kept intruding. What to believe. Whom to trust. Was he dead or alive? This was the man she had lived with her whole life-whom she respected and adored, who raised her, shaped her values, who was there for her. Now she had no idea just who that man was.
Something flashed in her mind. Kate got up and went over to the old Irish armoire they had found at a flea market and where they now kept the TV. She knelt, opening the bottom drawer. Tucked way in the back, under an old Brown sweatshirt and a stack of manuals and magazines, she found what she’d buried there.
The envelope of photos and mementos she’d found in her parents’ dresser more than a year before.
Kate never quite had the heart to look through it.
She shut the drawer and took the envelope over to the couch, curling up against the cushions. She slid the contents out onto the antique trunk that acted as their coffee table.
It was a lot of old stuff she’d never seen before. Her father’s things. A few snapshots of him and Sharon when they were back in college. The late sixties, straggly long hair and all. A couple of gemological certificates. The program from his NYU graduation in 1969.
Some other things that went back much further than that.
Kate had never seen any of this before.
Letters to his mother, Rosa, in an early, barely discernible scrawl. From summer camp. From some early travels. Kate realized she didn’t know very much about her father’s past. His early years had always been a blur.
His mother had come from Spain. Kate knew virtually nothing about her grandfather. He had died in Spain when Ben was young. A car accident or something. In Seville. There was a large Jewish community there.
Out of the pile, Kate pulled a dog-eared black-and-white snapshot of a handsome woman in a stylish hat, standing, holding the arm of a slight man in a homburg in front of a café. Maybe back in Spain.
She was sure she was staring at her grandfather.
Kate smiled. Rosa was beautiful. Dark, European-looking, and proud. All Kate knew about her was that she had a love of music and art.
And she found others. One was of Rosa on horseback in the country, wearing an old-fashioned leather riding jacket and boots, her hair in braids. And another, on a streetcar, in a city Kate didn’t recognize, holding an infant whom Kate recognized as her father. She traced the familiar lines in his infant face. Her lines…It almost brought tears to her eyes, tears of joy. Why had these been hidden? They were fascinating. She was finding a family history here, a family she never knew.
Kate stared closely at the undeveloped face of the man who had raised her. Which was easier to accept, she asked herself, that he was dead somewhere, murdered for a betrayal? Or that he was alive? Hiding out somewhere, having abandoned his family. And having committed this terrible crime.