'How'd he pick you up?'

'They had someone on Rachel Hewitt's grave.'

Scully whistled. 'Jesus Christ, three years and they're still on that place.' He shook his head. 'When that Russian swears an oath, he means it.'

I said, 'Who's Markov?'

Jasper said, 'Markov is a big man in the Ukrainian mob. He came over here a few years ago with his brother, Vasily. Vasily was the boss. They set up shop and began expanding the business, and one of these new ventures was printing counterfeit dollars to ship back home and sell on the Ukrainian black market.'

I nodded. Clark the printer. Clark the artist. ' Clark was a counterfeiter.'

Scully said, 'Yeah.'

'So what happened between Clark and Markov?'

'Vasily thought Clark was skimming his print and laying it off on a couple of locals. Clark got word that Vasily was planning to bump him off, and came to us for help.'

'He turned state's evidence to buy into the program.'

'Didn't have a lot of choice. The Markovs never made a threat they didn't carry out.'

'Was Clark skimming?'

Jasper shrugged. 'Who knows? Because of Clark, Vasily's doing twelve to twenty on Mercer Island, and Andrei swore he'd spend the rest of his life hunting down Clark and his family, and that's what he's doing. It's been three years, and he's still got people on it. Now you show up, and he sees you as a lead back to Clark.' Great.

I said, 'If Clark went into the program, how come you guys lost track of him?'

Jasper stared at me for a time, then wet his lips and looked away.

Scully made a little mouth move as if his lips had gone dry, too. 'The night we brought Clark in things went bad. Middle of the night, raining, we were going to put him and his kids into a safe house, then begin the relocation. We told him not to worry. We told him it was safe.'

I was watching him. 'Only it wasn't safe.'

Jasper's eyes narrowed and he looked back at me. 'Somehow Markov's people found out. We had everything in the truck, we were five minutes from driving away, and they surprised us.' He stopped and stared past me some more and I wondered if he wasn't reliving that night. 'My partner was a guy named Dan Peterson. He was killed.'

Scully said, 'Go get some water, Reed.'

Jasper shook his head.

I said, 'You couldn't get Markov for the shooting.'

Jasper sucked a breath, then focused on me. 'Peterson ordered me to get Clark and those kids out of the kill zone, and that's what I did. He stayed. I didn't see it, and I still don't know for sure what happened. SPD moved on our call. They found Danny inside. He'd been shot in the backyard, then dragged himself in.' He shook his head again. 'We never had a name or a face, but we know it was Markov.' He shook his head some more. 'Everything went wrong that night. It shouldn't have happened.'

Scully said, 'We finished the relocation, but Clark never trusted us after that. He changed his name as soon as they got to the relocation city and the whole family disappeared.' He shrugged yet again. 'That's his choice, of course. You don't have to stay in the program.'

Jasper made a little wave, then suddenly sat straighter, folding his feelings and putting them away. Every cop I've ever known could do that when he or she had to. 'And now you show up, asking about Clark Hewitt.'

Scully nodded. 'A guy from Los Angeles.'

I stared at Reed Jasper, and then at William P. Scully, and then I thought about Teri and Charles and Winona, waiting for Clark to come home. I wondered how much of this they knew, and I thought they must know some of it. Probably why they weren't thrilled about my coming to Seattle. I thought how terribly afraid they must be of losing him to risk bringing me into their affairs. I thought about what it must've been like for them three years ago, and what it must be like to live a life defined by secrets and lies. Secrets never stay secret, do they? Not even when you want them to. Not even when lives are at stake.

I looked Scully squarely in the eyes and spread my hands. 'I don't know where Clark is, or his kids, or anything about him.'

Jasper stared at me, and you could see he didn't believe me. Neither did Scully. 'Look, Cole, it's not our job to protect him anymore, but we feel what you might call a sense of obligation, you see?'

I smiled my best relaxed grin, and said, 'Man, this has to be one of the world's biggest screw-ups.' I told him the exact same story I'd told Andrei Markov. 'I came here looking for a drug connection named Clark Hewitt. I was just following a name, and the name's the same, but my guy doesn't have anything to do with Russians or counterfeiting or any of this other stuff.' I let the grin widen, like I was enjoying the enormous coincidence of it all. 'All of this is news to me.'

Scully nodded, but you could tell he didn't believe me. 'Who are you working for?'

'You know I'm not going to tell you. The card says confidential.'

'This is important, Cole. Clark is in grave danger. So are those kids.'

I shrugged. They had been in grave danger three years ago, too.

Scully said, 'I think you know something. I'm thinking maybe Clark left some footsteps in LA, and if I'm thinking it, Markov will be thinking it, too.'

I shrugged again. 'I'd help you if I could.'

Special Agent Reed Jasper nodded and stood. You could tell he didn't believe me, but there wasn't anything he could do about it. 'Sure.'

'Can I go?'

Scully opened the door. 'Get the hell out of here.'

It was twenty-two minutes after eleven that night when I walked out of the federal courthouse into a hard steady rain. The rain, like the air, was warm, but now felt oppressive rather than cleansing. Maybe that was me.

The world had changed. It often does, I've found, yet the changes are still surprising and, more often than not, frightening. You have to adjust.

I had come to Seattle to find a man named Clark Haines, and in a way I had, though that no longer seemed to matter. What mattered was those kids, alone in a house with a Russian mobster wanting them dead.

CHAPTER 11

My left cheek was tight and discolored the next morning where Alexei Dobcek hit me. I had been up most of the night, trying to keep ice on my cheek, but the ice had been too little, too late, and I felt grumpy and discouraged, though not very much of it had to do with the ice. I packed my things, brought the rental car back to Sea-Tac, and boarded the plane. Grumpy.

A sandy-haired flight attendant in her early thirties clucked sympathetically and said, 'Rough week?'

I grumped.

She put her fists on her hips. 'Pouting won't help.'

These flight attendants are something.

I settled in beside an overweight man with very short hair and glasses so thick that his eyes looked the size of BBs. He smiled, but I didn't smile back. Tough.

I crossed my arms, frowned real hard, and thought about Teri and Winona and Charles as we lifted up through the northwest cloud layer into a brilliant clear sunshine that stretched from southern Washington to the tip of the Baha Peninsula and the Sea of Cortez. Maybe it would help if I stuck out my lower lip. I had flown to Seattle to find an ordinary missing father, and instead had found that Clark Haines was really Clark Hewitt, and that Clark Hewitt, along with being a drug addict, was a criminal, a former participant in the federal witness protection program, and was actively being sought by both the Russian mob and various federal law enforcement agencies. These are not good things to discover, and were even less good when one considered that, if the mobsters were after Clark, they would also be after his children. For all I knew, Clark Hewitt was dead and would never return, or, if he wasn't dead, perhaps had no interest in returning. I thought that maybe I could get his kids into foster care without revealing their true identities, but this somehow seemed to leave them more vulnerable and exposed. The obvious solution was to take them to the police, identify them by their original names, and allow Jasper and Scully to see to their well-being. Charles and Winona and Teri would still end up in foster care, only an awful lot of people would know who and where they were, and the more people who knew, the greater the possibility that word would get back to the Markovs. This was yet another problem, and all these problems were making me grumpier still. Maybe I should try to get into a problem-free occupation of some kind. Hunting lions, maybe. Or raising the Titanic.