“Tonight?” asked Baker.
“We’ll swing by your place and pick you up,” said Elkins. “How does an hour sound?”
“I’ll be ready.” Baker smiled compliantly, but beneath the smile lay a hard-earned mantle of distrust. “One thing, Eliza.”
“What is it?”
“Remember ... he’s still Mac Dekker.”
“Is that a threat, Don?” said Elkins.
“It’s whatever you want it to be,” said Baker.
Chapter 11
Goutte d’Or
Paris
Mac Dekker had one phone call yet to make. A call he couldn’t miss.
“Is this my little sweetheart?”
“Hello, Papa,” said Katya Dekker, his four-year-old granddaughter. “It snowed today.”
“Did it?”
“The backyard looks like a giant duvet.”
“A duvet? My, that must be something.”
“Fritz loves it. He didn’t want to come inside, even for his dinner.”
Fritz was their Bernese mountain dog. They’d brought him into the family soon after Katya arrived, hoping that he would help her cope with her parents’ deaths.
“How is Martin?” asked Mac.
“He made mefir-firfor breakfast.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the porridge he ate when he was little. It has goat’s milk.”
Martin was a young man with whom he’d worked the past two summers on the alp. He was an Eritrean refugee who’d come to Switzerland as a boy. He’d earned a university degree in agriculture and taken a job managing a dairy high on the hills above Zinal. Good people. Mac had asked if Katya might stay with his family while he and Ava visited Paris.
“Did you like it?” he asked.
“I prefer an omelet.”
“That’s very grown up of you,” said Mac.
“Why aren’t you FaceTiming?” asked Katya.
“My phone isn’t working right now.”
“Where’s Ava?”
“She’s in the other room,” said Mac.
