The Fourth Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (A Tenzing Norbu Mystery series Book 4) (31 page)

“What do you mean? Like, undergoing repairs?”

“I mean gone. Vamoosed. Like the dark web went even darker. Not only that, the NDRSNT directory’s coming up as an error page for the time being.”

“How could this happen?”

“Could be a raid. That’ll make sites go underground faster than a fuckin’ prairie dog, to prevent the feds from planting malware that could expose buyers and sellers. Or maybe these guys just got spooked for some reason.”

“But you think the FBI’s involved?”

“Actually, I don’t. I think somebody wants this business to disappear, jump off the radar screen for the moment.”

“Agvan Supply?”

“Probably, or whoever owns them.”

I put Clancy and Mike’s messages side by side. There was only one conclusion—Zarko Stasic had also put two and two together, and was either shutting things down, or, more likely, regrouping so he could take his business elsewhere.

Why had I set off the car alarm, almost certainly landing myself on Agvan Supply’s security camera feed? Why hadn’t I told Deputy Sergeant Gaines exactly where to find the old man’s killer? Why had I sent Zarko Stasic that macho message, via Ponytail, a taunt he’d answered with a much deadlier message of his own?

What had I expected him to do, invite me over for a duel?

Yes. I had expected Stasic to fight instead of flee. And my expectations had probably doomed those two little boys, not to mention countless others, to lives of degradation and terror.

“I’m sorry, boss,” Mike now said. “I hope my hacking didn’t somehow poke the sleeping bear.”

So Mike, too, felt responsible.

“This is all on me, Mike. All on me. Listen, you’ve been a huge help, and I appreciate the heads-up,” I said. “Let me know if anything changes.”

I took the Gower exit off of the 101, headed south, and soon pulled up outside the Bohannon house. The curtains were drawn. Another cheap white rental car blocked the driveway. I unbuckled my seat belt. Closing my eyes, I rotated my shoulders backward and forward, loosening up my rotator cuffs. Next, I flexed and stretched my neck muscles, shifting my head side-to-side and front-to-back.

I rested one hand on my belly, inhaled until my lungs were beyond full, and let out two loud
HAH
s while feeling the deep contraction in my diaphragm. As a gust of fresh air clears away the smoke, the expulsion of carbon dioxide freed up space in my belly and purified my head of expectations.

I was ready to face whatever lay inside the house.

The white hood of the rental was still warm, and the engine was making a small, tick-ticking sound of disapproval. Mila and Sasha hadn’t beaten me here by much.

Dread wrestled with acute curiosity. More than a small part of me wanted to find out—no, make that was
insanely curious
to find out—how this situation would finally play out.

Yeshe’s voice chided from afar: “Tenzing, do not expect, or control. Offer yourself as a channel of ease. Bring loving-kindness, and the balm of compassion.”

I’ll try.

Everyone had assembled in the living room. Martha sat in the rocking chair. Her arms were crossed, but her eyes were more troubled than angry, and her chin had lost yesterday’s rigid, stubborn set. Bill stood next to Martha, his hand resting on her shoulder, I was happy to see. Sasha and Mila also stood, their backs to the French doors that overlooked the yard, staring at the carpet. And Julie, my Julie, sat cross-legged on the floor, both hands buried in Homer’s wrinkled neck.

Bill shot me a look. “Good. You made it,” he said.

“Where are the girls?”

“Stashed upstairs for the time being,” Martha said. “Thank God for Dora.”

For once, I was in the loop.

“I’m sorry we come here without asking,” Mila said. “But there is no time.”

Sasha put his hand on Mila’s arm. “No, let me.” His eyes found Martha’s. “Mrs. Bohannon, I apologize for intruding into your life this way.”

Martha’s eyes softened at his forthright words. It was hard not to like the kid. I checked on Bill and almost laughed. He’d gone from not knowing he had a son to being ashamed that he had a son to being proud of his son, all within a few weeks. Now he was staring at Sasha with something that bordered on awe.

Martha said, “Thank you. I’m sorry it happened this way as well.” She stepped forward and shook Sasha’s hand. He held onto it.

“There’s something else.” Sasha’s smile was rueful. “All my life I wanted a sister. I used to beg my mother to get me one.”

“Is true,” Mila said.

“And now I learn that I have two, two actual sisters.”

“Half-sisters,” Mila said. Sasha shot her an affectionate look, and I realized that her tendency to nitpick might not be personal so much as her personality.

“I want more than anything to meet them. And I’m very afraid you won’t allow this.” Had Sasha, too, been taking communication lessons from Kim?

Martha went very still.

“I know my existence causes you pain.” Sasha’s voice was devoid of self-pity. “But I didn’t choose the parents I was born to.”

His point was well taken, if debatable, at least in my tradition. Some Buddhist teachings claim that after many lifetimes of retiring karma, certain sentient beings can consciously choose their parents for their next span of life lessons. Given my tussles with my father, I quite liked the idea, although like a lot of metaphysical theories, its accuracy was difficult to prove.

Either way, Sasha’s observation did the trick.

Martha shook her head. “You know what’s so weird about this? Maude and Lola have been bugging me since they could talk about getting them a big brother. Lola even asked Santa Claus for one last Christmas. Remember, Bill?”

“I’d totally forgotten that,” Bill said.

“I told Lola life doesn’t exactly work that way, but now?” Martha covered Bill’s hand with her own, “Who knows? Maybe it does.”

For just a moment, we all smiled at this unexpected answer to a four-year-old’s request.

Then Sasha cleared his throat, crossing his arms as if for protection, his anxiety suddenly palpable.

Our lighthearted reprieve was over. Martha sensed the change immediately, and her reaction was instant.

“What is it, Sasha? What’s wrong?”

Sasha seemed frozen in place. Mila touched his back, as if to let him know she was right there.

Something compelled me to speak. “I think we’d better sit down for this,” I said. Mila shot me a grateful look. Soon we had rearranged ourselves, forming a circle, as if by silent agreement. Homer’s thick body draped across Julie’s legs, like a piebald lap rug. We were an odd assembly of characters, to be sure. A blended family, although some were more reluctant than others to be in the mix. But the desire to alleviate Sasha’s obvious agony, and to understand his mother’s grim, unmistakable resolve, bound us as surely as blood.

Bill spoke first. “Mila? You want to start? Because I’m completely clueless.”

“Better Sasha talk first,” she said.

Sasha nodded. Seemed to gather himself. “I know my mother told you guys that I’d started an investigation into human trafficking a few months ago. But what she didn’t tell you was why.”

I remembered that side-flick of Mila’s eyes, when I’d asked her just this question.

“I suspect,” Mila now said. “But I did not know why for sure.”

“The
why
has to do with my grandfather,” Sasha said. “And my step-grandfather, I guess.”

Irena’s two husbands.

“I loved my grandfather.
Deda,
I called him. Deda was a good man, gentle and very kind. He was the fairest person I ever met, fair to a fault, I sometimes thought. I only knew him after he was released from Omarska, after his time in the prison camp. But even as a child, I could sense how that trauma clung to him, draining him of energy and light. He never talked about it. But the darkness was always there. Deda would listen to his classical records for hours, staring out the window in his study. But he never saw the trees, or the sun, not really.”

“My father has no room for joy,” Mila added. “Only for grief.”

“Anyway, when I got back from my first semester in college, I persuaded my mother to buy Deda a laptop computer. My grandmother was never home, she’d gotten all wrapped up with this new religion. I thought if I showed Deda how to do research online, browse the Internet, he might reengage with the world again. He used to be a professor, you know, a brilliant scholar. Anyway, it seemed to work, at first. But then, he became obsessed with it. Secretive, too.”

“He spends hours on the computer,” Mila said. “Days.”

“And then, one night, someone, a burglar we thought, broke into the house. I was away at school.”

“I hear a shot,” Mila confirmed. “I run to my father’s office. He is dead, shot through back of head.”

“Any sign of a struggle?” Bill spoke for the first time, all business.

“No,” Sasha said. “But my grandfather wasn’t the type to fight. Anyway, whoever it was, they stole his computer.”

“Anything else?”

“His wedding ring. They never figured out who did it.”

Mila’s voice was steel. “I know. I know who killed my father. Is Zarko.”

“We don’t know that yet, Mama, not for sure,” Sasha said.

Random images pixilated and formed into new ones. I felt lightheaded, as the pieces of this story spun and danced in my brain like fireflies.

“When I came home last summer, I decided to listen to one of Deda’s records. I chose his favorite, Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy.’” Sasha shook his head. “Not that it brought him any.”

The truth of his words sank in.

“So, anyway,” Sasha continued, “when I pulled the record from the sleeve, a computer disc fell out with it. Deda must have hidden it there. He’d handwritten something on the disc with a marker, a bunch of initials, you know, that stood for something else.”

My sense of dread grew. “An acronym,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“
N-D-R-S-N-T,
” I said.

Sasha stared. “But, how could you possibly know that?”

“Zarko killed my father,” Mila insisted, as if caught in her own loop. “Now I will kill Zarko.”

The rest of us met this declaration of war with a kind of stunned silence.

Bill’s voice broke the spell. “Ten.”

I hadn’t heard that degree of steel in his voice since the time I ran into gunfire without waiting for backup.

“You feel like telling me what in the name of God is going on here?”

At that, Julie set Homer down. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I need a cup of hot tea.” She left for the kitchen, with Sasha and Mila trailing behind her.

I stayed where I was, glued to the sofa, as Martha and Bill conferred, their voices low. Bill looked over at me, pulling at his upper lip. The kettle whistled, and Martha hurried out.

“How would you feel about moving these operations over to your house?” Bill said, sitting across from me. “Martha and Julie can stay here with the girls. I’m not sure they need to know any more about this.”

I’d been thinking the same thing. We hadn’t heard the worst of this tale, and I couldn’t yet guess where it might lead.

“Let’s meet up at my house in an hour,” I said. “And Bill? Bring your gun.”

C
HAPTER
28

Tank seemed no worse for wear after his close encounter with a wrinkled canine. He’d licked his cat bowl clean, and promptly fallen asleep on the deck in an oval of late afternoon sun. A platter of artichoke hummus, lemon pita chips, satsuma tangerine segments, raw almonds, and cherry tomatoes would have to do for the humans. I’d set a cast-iron, round-bellied pot of green tea to steep on the kitchen counter, and four chipped but clean mugs, almost matching, awaited their payload of hot brew.

I’d had to smile as I busied myself around the kitchen. That look on Martha’s face, when I marched into the kitchen and exchanged a good long kiss with Julie before I left! It might be my best gift to Martha yet—something new to obsess about, rather than the Bill and Mila show.

My last words to Julie, hurried but sincere? “I’ll keep you posted. I promise.”

Her last word to me, delivered in a whisper? “Dessert.”

Before the other three arrived, I’d managed to gather up and even execute a hasty review of all my notes, downloads, and other items of research regarding Agvan Supply. I was fairly confident I could add to the coherent side of the ledger, as opposed to muddling things up even more.

I ushered everyone into the living room, and set the platter of food and the tray of tea on the low glass coffee table. I poured. Soon, we each held a steaming mug. The sharp tang of green leafy brew saturated the room.

This time, we’d formed a square: one perplexed Detective III (chair), one overeager ex-monk (chair), one angry Sarajevan (sofa), one naive journalist (chair).

“Where were we?” Bill pulled out his notebook, a small black Moleskine with its own narrow elastic belt. He snapped it open and waited for someone to answer, pen poised.

“‘Ode to Joy,’” I said. “Sasha, you’d just discovered the disc of your grandfather’s downloaded computer file.”

“Right.” For the first time, Sasha spoke directly to Bill. “How much has Ten told you about my uncles?”

“Half-uncles,” Mila snapped.

Bill tipped his chair on its two back legs and stared upward, as if searching the slat-and-beam ceiling for the facts. “Let’s see. Back when I was stationed in Sarajevo, I knew your mother had two older brothers, sorry, half-brothers. As I recall, they may have fought with the Army of the Serbian Republic, right?”

Mila merely grunted.

“So I knew there was no love lost at the time. That’s about it,” Bill said. I cleared my throat. “Oh, right. Until Ten called me in Sarajevo to tell me about Agvan Supply, and its possible connection to the Stasic brothers.”

Mila erupted, instantly furious. “You keep this from me!? Why!”

Bill put up a hand. “Mila, don’t get in a twist, okay? I was about to board an airplane home. You’d just kicked me to the curb! ‘Never call me again’ were your exact last words.” He shook his head. “Jesus, you’ve got a short fuse.”

Not only had the “Mila fever” broken, I suspected Martha was looking better and better to Bill by the minute.