A pause. "It's bad enough that I need another two weeks before I know the full scope."
“That’s not good.”
He reaches across and puts his hand on my knee without looking away from the road. His grip is tight, the warmth deliberate, and I cover his hand with mine and look back out the window.
I think about James at the table and the slight catch in his voice. I think about the moment near the end of lunch when he glanced at Nicholas across the table, just for a second. I'd filed it as old friends checking on each other without saying so.
That's what I'd filed it as.
I look at Phoenix's hand on my knee. At the road ahead.
Later, I would think about that glance differently.
14
PHOENIX
I'm reviewing the Schedule C filing when my father's number comes through. It's seven in the morning and I've been at my desk since five-thirty, which has become the rhythm of the last three weeks. The cascade analysis sits open on my left monitor and the board member files on my right. There’s a legal pad with twelve questions in the middle. I've been working through them since Monday, half of them are answered and half of them are resulting in new questions. Nathan is somewhere in the building. I heard him come in at six but the floor outside my office is empty and gray in the early light.
"Come by the house," my father says. "There's going to be someone here at ten."
I wait for more. He doesn't give it.
"Who?" I ask.
"I'll tell you when you get here."
I look at all of the work on my desk and say, "I'll be there at nine.”
The drive takesforty minutes in early morning traffic and I spend it not thinking about what I already suspect. I runthrough the board member situation instead—the retired CFO from Chicago, the real estate developer from Dallas, the narrow angle that Nathan identified in Schedule C of the Harwick operating agreement. We have a meeting with the Chicago board member on Thursday. If it goes well, we move on the Schedule C provision before Richard understands what we're doing. If it doesn't go well, we're back to the supermajority problem and sixty-two million sitting frozen while Richard waits for us to call.
We haven't called.
Three weeks of silence. Richard's note in my desk drawer, face-down, the handwriting steady and unhurried. Every day we don't respond is a day he wonders what we know. That's what my father said and I believed it for the first two weeks and I'm starting to believe it less now, because Richard Hale spent thirty years being patient and two weeks of silence is nothing to a man like that.
I pull through my parents’ gates at eight fifty-three and park in the circular drive.
My father is at the south wall when I come through the gate, his back to the drive, coffee in hand, looking at the roses. He doesn't turn when he hears my car. I cross the garden toward him.
"Hawaii State Police," he says. "Cold case division."
I look at the side of his face. He's still watching the roses.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
"I'll explain tonight." He turns the coffee cup in his hands. "This morning I need you in the room and I need you to say nothing unless our lawyer tells you to."
I want to know more. What is Dad even talking about? I’m tired of getting the clean version of every disaster. But when I ask him to elaborate, he shuts me down.
I look at the wall behind him. At the house. At the study window where in forty minutes a detective will sit across from my father and ask about something I don't have a name for yet.
My father has a past. I know the broad strokes. He grew up in Charlestown, in the bad part of town. He had some sort of jewelry operation. He changed his name in high school to put distance between himself and what happened. I know Richard Hale came from the same place. These are all the things that Dad has managed to move on from but where do Hawaii and this detective fit in?
Cold case division means something that didn't get resolved. A file that sat in a cabinet somewhere for years while other cases moved to the front and this one collected dust, and then someone pulled it back out. Someone decided it was worth a plane ticket from Honolulu to Los Angeles.
People don't fly from Hawaii for nothing.
"How bad is it?" I ask.
