The window groaned when I opened it, letting in the night fog to ease the stuffiness of the place.

“You live here?”

“Seven years.”

“Why? Did you take a vow of poverty?”

“I never had to take a vow; I was born to poverty.”

“Your dossier said you have a rich aunt?”

“Adelle Wilson. She owns Grayling Motor Freight. This isn’t it. Its a big complex in Oakland. This is just a little outfit she bought out about the same time I came to San Francisco, which she runs as a local annex to the main business. I needed a job and a cheap place to live; she gave me this room and a job as a night watchman. It was ideal. No rent to pay, a small salary, and all I had to do was be here from ten at night to six in the morning. I made rounds a couple of times a night and responded if an alarm went off. Otherwise I could study or sleep.”

I pulled the blanket off the mattress and whipped the room with it. For a minute, the dust filled the air, but cross ventilation carried most of it out the window and made the place more habitable. Ed Wilkes sank down on the sofa while I went through the cupboards and found an unopened can of coffee. I set water to boiling. “If you want to stay here tonight you can sack out on the sofa. I have a sleeping bag you can use.”

“OK. We need to make some plans.”

I plugged in the ancient refrigerator and put water in some ice cube trays. “Excuse me while I’m being domestic,” I said. “The place isn’t very complicated. I’ll have everything that matters running again in a minute.”

Ed looked around and shook his head. “Seven years?” he said.

I filled the filter cone with coffee and poured in boiling water. “Yes. You read my state department documents, so you know that I dropped out of high school to enter the Army.”

“At age sixteen.”

“I was only a month shy of seventeen and those days the Army was pretty unpopular. It was only a short time after Viet Nam. You could still get in if you were upright and breathing.”

“Fake ID?”

“Homemade. It wouldn’t have worked if the recruiter hadn’t had a quota he couldn’t fill.”

“You were in the Army three years out of a four year enlistment. You went out on a medical discharge. How is your knee these days?”

I looked at Wilkes. He was amused. No doubt he had some idea of the truth. I said, “As good as can be expected.” 

There was nothing wrong with my knee; never had been. And I was sure Ed knew that.

“How is Sgt. Davenport?”

He knew.

“Still in prison, as far as I know. I haven’t had any contact with him since I last saw him in Germany.”

“We should talk about him some time.”

I handed Ed a cup of coffee and said coldly, “No, we shouldn’t.” more tomorrow

The adrenaline rush had washed all the doubts out of my system, and that took me back.

When I was eight years old, there had been a fire in a house on my block. As soon as I smelled the smoke, I ran there, cutting across back yards and jumping fences. It was an old abandoned house; I can still remember the raw disappointment when I realized there was no one for me to heroically rescue. I crawled under the shelter of a lilac bush to where I could feel the heat of the blaze and watched the flames and smoke. I stayed there until the backwash from a fire hose caught me and washed me out, wet and embarrassed as a kitten in a rainstorm.

There are men who live for quiet and security, and men who live from crisis to crisis. I have always been one of the latter.

So why had I applied to the State Department to be a junior officer in an embassy, a job about as exciting as being a clerk at Macy’s? Because the other half of me was the abandoned child who wanted to be accepted and respectable. There is not much respectable about a private eye. But it was probably a mistake to think I could give up the rush.

*       *       *

A layover in Dallas meant a morning arrival in San Francisco. I watched the Nevada desert give way to the crumpled mass of the Sierras, which then graded out too oak dotted foothills and the vast, hot, flat, green expanse of the San Joaquin Valley. When we crossed the Coast Range, we were too low to make out its true shape and then the bay area was spread out beneath us like a map.

It was home. I had lived here for years, but until now, coming back after seven months absence, I hadn’t realized that it was home.

Chapter Twenty-nine

The street ended at an iron and hurricane fencing gate. Beyond was a parking lot, mostly empty, and a warehouse with the Grayling Motor Freight logo on its concrete block side. At the side of the gate was a call box holding a simple push button which I rang. A few minutes later the guard came out. I didn’t recognize him.

“What do your want?”

“I’m Ian Gunn. Even though I don’t know you, someone should have told you about me.”

He shone a flashlight in my face, and grunted. “Yeah,” he said, “they showed me a photograph. Got any ID?”

I showed him my passport. “I also have a key, but I didn’t want to get shot.”

“Yeah.” He opened the gate. “Who’s the other guy?”

“A friend of mine.”

“Look, I was told to let you in, but . . .”

“Don’t push it.”

He decided not to. Ed followed me across the parking lot while the guard relocked the gate. I still had a key to the building, too, so I let us in after I had turned off the alarm.

“Are you going to tell me what is going on?” Ed asked.

“Sure. This is where I live. Come on up.”

The hallway inside skirted the main office and led by a narrow stairway to an upper room. No one had touched it since I left. There was a layer of dust on everything, from the Salvation Army couch, to the battered desk, to the mattress in the corner, to the dust cover on my Macintosh computer. My old bike was hanging upside down from its hooks and acres of bookcases still spilled their excess onto the floor. more tomorrow

“I’m here to pick up some unclaimed luggage.”

“Let me call someone to help you.”

A natural delay, or a calculated one?  I couldn’t decide.

Minutes dragged by, scurrying nervously, looking over their shoulders at the door. Finally a balding, fiftyish man in a blazer with the company logo on the breast came up and asked for identification. Instead, I handed him a letter on Raven’s personal stationary authorizing me to pick up her luggage. The signature was quite authentic looking. Ed had a talent for forgery. He read the letter briefly, then said, “May I see your ID.”

“I don’t have any on me. I didn’t know it would be such a federal case!”

The word play was lost on him. He said, “If you don’t have any personal identification, I really don’t see how I can give you Ms. Cabral’s luggage, even if you do have a letter from her.”

I shrugged. “OK, no sweat. I’ll get my ID and come back.” I held out my hand.

“That’s all right. I’ll keep the letter.”

That removed all doubt. 

I snapped my fingers, but he just said, “No, I insist.” 

I made a long arm over the counter and snagged his wrist. I pulled him sharply and painfully against the counter and retrieved the letter. His eyes were wide with shock. I was half way to the door when he staggered back and shouted, “He’s getting away.”

I didn’t look back to see who he was calling to. The sound of the front door slamming open brought Ed upright behind the wheel. He had the motor roaring when I went across the hood in a sliding dive, and the car spat gravel before I could get the door closed.

*       *       *

We ditched the car, took a subway, then a bus, then another subway, and ended up at our hotel. Twenty minutes and several phone calls later we picked up a second rental and headed south to Pittsburgh. There we caught the first of several flights that eventually brought us into San Francisco the next morning.

The flight on the Concorde had been a novelty and the views had been arresting. I had found myself moving in a kind of vacuum, acting too quickly on my decision to wonder if it was all a good idea. The flight from Pittsburgh to San Francisco gave me time to sort things out.

As Senator Cabral had said, there was nothing I could do for Raven in Europe until she surfaced again. She needed for her troubles to be traced to their source and ended. The question was, “Why me?”

From the Senator’s viewpoint, I was an ideal candidate. He could not call on official help without endangering his career. I was a known quantity and I had experience.

From my viewpoint? 

Well, why not me? I could tell myself that I was putting to rest a piece of unfinished business so that I could get on with my life, but it would be a lie. I was having too much fun for that to be the real reason.

I hadn’t enjoyed the search for Raven, because the pain of her leaving was still too fresh. But since I ran from the cruise line office, everything had been different. I felt alive for the first time in weeks. The adrenaline rush had washed all the doubts out of my system. more tomorrow

Chapter Twenty-eight

Ed Wilkes and I boarded the Concorde in Paris just after seven PM, and got off at Kennedy two hours earlier, local time. We had outrun the sun. My luggage consisted of a toothbrush stuffed in my shirt pocket and a paperback novel. My other jeans and shirt had been so stained with Davis’ blood that I had dumped them, and I would hardly need a pack full of camping gear in New York City.

We checked into a medium priced hotel. I left Ed making phone calls and went out to buy some fresh clothing and a suitcase. Then I stayed out, sightseeing. I had been to Washington, to Europe twice, through much of Canada, and from San Francisco to Marseille via the Panama Canal and the Caribbean. For a small town Wisconsin boy, I had gotten around. But I had never been to New York City.

*       *       *

Ed Wilkes’ phone calls had given us some new information. He had claimed that his wife had left a suitcase aboard one of the cruise ships. When they had not been able to locate the nonexistent bag, he suggested that they check with customs to see if they were keeping it. Customs officers, he was informed, were present whenever a ship landed, and any abandoned luggage was seen by them before being stored by the cruise line.

“I timed him,” Ed explained. “From the time he put me on hold until he told me that the bag was not there it took six and a half minutes. He could possibly have called somewhere or just checked a list, but more likely he looked in a nearby room.”

We parked our rented car between two dumpsters across the street from the pier.  Most of the pier was taken up by a warehouse.  On the right was a driveway, wide enough for a pickup or front end loader.  There were wide yellow strips painted on the macadam to guide passengers to the embarkation lounge.  Half way down the building was a sign with a stylized gull and the words Gull Lines, in English and Norwegian.

Wilkes turned to me and asked again, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Not particularly, but I will.”

“If the luggage is clean, it will cause no problems, but if it isn’t, it would be better if no one saw my face. I might run into some DEA officer who knows me.”

I nodded. 

“If they stall you, they are probably calling for help. If that happens, get out fast. If we get separated, you have the number to call.”

I nodded again. I didn’t like this. Facing an armed assailant on a darkened Venetian bridge was one thing. Getting the entire bureaucratic might of Washington on my back – now, that was scary.

Wilkes slumped down behind the wheel where he could watch the entrance from behind a newspaper. I went down the yellow macadam road to the Gull Line offices. Beyond the glass doors, all was modern and cool, with a hundred steel and plastic chairs linked together and bolted to the floor, a TV, now blank, placed high in a corner and a glass partitioned ticket counter. Not unlike an airport or modern bus terminal.

A uniformed girl sent me a pert smile from behind the counter, and asked if she could help.

“I’m here to pick up some unclaimed luggage. It belongs to Ramona Cabral. She came back from Bermuda on the fourteenth of April.”

“Wow, that’s a long time for luggage to go unclaimed. What happened?”

“A honeymoon.”

“Lucky girl. Still, three months?”

“Actually a honeymoon and a divorce.” more tomorrow

Here is the crux of the problem. When drugs – and it doesn’t matter if you are talking about cocaine, pot, or alcohol – become scarce and expensive, they are profitable to sell. Every junkie who feels the pinch when he buys, knows that he could make money if he were selling. It is a grass roots movement. Every junkie wants to sell, but that only works in an expanding market. Any student from Economics 101 knows that. Like a pyramid scheme or a chain letter, the result is middle management types recruiting new customers in the xerox room, mechanics selling baggies behind the garage, and sixth grade junkies selling to third grade wannabes.

More enforcement means higher prices. Higher prices mean more pressure on users. That pressure sends the users-turned-sellers looking for new customers.

More enforcement means more drug users. QED.

When his leave was over, Cabral resigned from the FBI and ran for the state senate. And lost. But he learned from the experience and four years later he won the seat he still occupies. His platform was moderate, but his hidden agenda was legalization. He introduced no drug legislation during his first term, but soon after his first reelection, he authored a bill to legalize marijuana in California. It failed, and he spent the rest of that term mending fences and explaining his position to anyone who would listen. He almost lost the next election. A month after, he introduced a second legalization bill.

Two decades later, his yearly legalization bills were a constant in California, like the swallows returning to Capistrano. They always failed, but every year a few more of his fellow Senators voted with him.

*       *       *

“Senator,” I said, “I follow your arguments. It doesn’t matter if I agree with them. What I don’t see is how you jumped from that to suspecting drugs in Raven’s luggage.”

“Look at it as a problem in economics, Ian. If enforcement increases drug use, it also increases drug profits. Up to a point. No enforcement means low prices. Perfect enforcement, if that were possible, would mean no sales. Somewhere in between is the optimum level of enforcement to maximize drug profits.”

“OK.”

“I set out to calculate that optimum level, and I found that we are right at that level now in California.  It is too close a match to be a coincidence.”

I shook my head at the implications. Ed said, “Gunn, the big dealers are calling the shots. And nothing scares them so much as the fear of legalization.”

I thought he was paranoid.

I was only half right. more tomorrow

“A double barreled attack. Destroy any chance that Raven might have information, and discredit me at the same time, through her.”

“That’s why the luggage came on through. It’s probably loaded with drugs.”

“And it would look like Raven was smuggling.”

“And like I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite.”

*       *       *

When I asked the luggage question, I didn’t have a theory. I was just fishing for useful knowledge. The Senator’s reaction took me by surprise, and made no sense until I heard the story behind it.

Senator Daniel Cabral has a scar, low on his left side, just above his belt, the size of a dime, and a matching scar, slightly higher, that covers three square inches of his back just above his belt where partially successful plastic surgery left a white and lumpy mass. Entry wound and exit wound for a 38 caliber bullet. The other five bullets went through his partner.

He didn’t show me the scar, of course, but it was part of the story he and Ed Wilkes told me that night in Paris.

Dan Cabral was born in California of Mexican-American parents. His ancestors had been citizens for ten generations. He didn’t speak Spanish until he was ten years old and spent a summer with an uncle in Sinaloa. His parents were wealthy. His grandfather had bought farmland which had been in the path of growth. His father had sold it for development, reinvested, and repeated the process several more times. By the time Cabral was born, there were millions in the bank and in real estate.

Daniel had gone to college and, over his parents objections, had joined the FBI. He did well. The FBI needed Chicano agents to deal with Cuban refugee problems around Miami. Later, when Cabral became too well known there, they sent him to deal with drug smuggling across the Texas border. He spent two years, then transferred to Calexico to continue the same work.

Cabral had been with the FBI seven years when an arrest went bad on an empty road in the middle of the Mohave Desert. As he was falling, hit in the side, he shot the two smugglers who had killed his partner. One died there in the dirt beside his stalled truck. The other ran a hundred yards into the sage brush and bled to death. So did Cabral, nearly, before help came.

They gave him a commendation and four months leave to recuperate. He spent it thinking about all the things he had seen, and came to the conclusion that drug enforcement was causing the drug problem. 

I didn’t entirely buy his argument, but it went this way.

A drug user needs his drugs. If they are available at a reasonable price, he uses them. Sometimes he destroys himself, and sometimes he doesn’t. Lots of prominent citizens have gone through a successful lifetime on drugs without being found out. But if the drugs become too expensive, problems arise. To support his habit, the user might spend money that should have gone to his family, or rip off car stereos, or hold up a convenience store.

Or he might become a supplier. more tomorrow

“Don’t mind me,” I said. “I find all this fascinating; even the seventy-five percent I don’t understand. But I do have one question. Where does Raven’s safety figure in all this double dealing?”

Daniel Cabral had a temper, no matter how much he had trained his face not to reveal it, and that made him mad. I didn’t care. I didn’t give a damn about the Senator’s political agenda. I just wanted Raven to be safe.

“My daughter’s safety comes before anything else,” Cabral said evenly. “However, at the moment there is nothing I can do for her. She will call home and find out everything that has happened, or one of your street musicians will find her and notify Hayden. Until that happens, there is nothing I can do for my daughter. All I can do is try to keep my career from going down the toilet because of her stupidity.”

“And if it came to choosing between your daughter’s safety and your career?”

“The safety of my family comes before anything else!”

No qualifications. No equivocation. I liked that. I also realized that Raven’s lifestyle had made him consider the possibility long ago.

I spread my hands in friendly surrender.

“Let’s get back to your story.” Wilkes said.

“Not yet,” I said. “There are some loose ends dangling. Senator, were you ever notified that Raven was missing? And what became of Raven’s luggage on the cruise ship?”

“I was not notified. When she didn’t show up at the airport as scheduled, I checked back and there was nothing the cruise line could tell me. I assumed that she had gone off somewhere without telling me. She does that. It is her way of declaring her independence.”

There was a great deal of impatience in Cabral’s voice, the legacy of years of dealing with his wayward daughter.

“And the luggage?”

“It was being held for her. She had not claimed it. I assumed she would, and gave it no more thought.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why? How could it make any difference?”

“Why depends on a basic assumption – was Davis smart or stupid?”

“I vote for stupid,” Wilkes interjected.

“Maybe. But I was impressed by the way he handled the situation in Venice.”

“He died.”

“Luck. There was some skill on my part, but mostly it was luck. Let the same situation develop twenty times, and nineteen out of twenty I would be the one to die.” It was something I had been thinking about a lot.

“Look at what happened on the ship. If I hadn’t been there, how would it all have ended?”

Wilkes admitted, “He would have succeeded completely.”

“And would have escaped without a trace.”

“Yes.”

“So why leave the luggage aboard? Raven and I talked about this on the way to Europe, and we concluded that he would drop it overboard. That way, no one would suspect that Raven never made it back to New York. No one ever checks to see who gets off of a ship or plane. They just take names when you get on. They would look for clues to her disappearance everywhere else but on the cruise ship.”

“An oversight?”

“Possibly. Or perhaps he had a reason for the luggage to make it back to the states. But I have no idea what reason that could be.”

Cabral turned pale. He and Wilkes exchanged glances. Wilkes said, “Of course!” more tomorrow

Chapter Twenty-seven

When I got back to the suite, Cabral had gone out. Wilkes had been waiting for my return, in case Joe Dias called early. After he left, I paced the room for a while, dispirited and irritable, then tried to catch up on some sleep. Uselessly. I alternated tracing cracks in the ceiling and staring at the phone.

I did have a life. Or at least, I used to have one. I had places to go and things to do. But I knew that I would make no move to leave. It wasn’t just Raven, either; there were too many unexplored possibilities in this new situation.

Wilkes and the Senator came in just as the phone rang. It was Joe. After I hung up, the Senator asked, “Well?”

“A week ago, someone torched Harvey Jacks’ office. Joe’s investigator talked to his wife. She didn’t know much, but she said Jacks had bragged about working for a big-wig in Sacramento. And Jacks had said she, not he, when referring to the big-wig. But he never named her. Seems he was very closed mouthed.”

“What was left of the office?”

“Not much. Joe’s willing to investigate further, but he did this much as a favor to me. I won’t ask him to do more without paying him. He has a living to make.”

“Call back and hire him in my name.”

I did, then covered the receiver and asked, “Anything else?”

Cabral looked at Wilkes, who shook his head. After I had hung up, Wilkes observed, “If Jacks was into blackmail, he would have had more than one copy of his evidence, and it wouldn’t have been in a file cabinet in his office.”

“Likely.”

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” the Senator said. “We’ll hear your story again, Ian, and look for anything we might have missed so far. I am not clear on timing and motivation, and I don’t understand how Davis and Alan found you so quickly in Marseille.”

I told the story again, sexually censored. I was talking to Raven’s father, after all. Wilkes sat at the table with a pad, taking notes. Cabral said nothing until I reached the fight on the Wahini in Marseille. Then he interrupted, “How much time was there between when Ramona called California and when the thugs jumped you?”

“Mid-morning of one day until the following evening. Maybe thirty hours.”

“Ed, make a note to check every airline with departing flights for Europe, particularly Paris, starting at the time of Ramona’s call and carrying forward twenty hours. Look for James Davis and anyone with a last name of Allen or a first name of Alan, under any variation of spelling. I’m particularly interested in how they paid for their trips.”

“Senator, you are asking a lot. The Bureau isn’t going to do that just as a favor. If you want to keep using them, you are going to have to make an official report on what happened to your daughter.”

Cabral said, “Shit.” It was the first coarse thing that had cracked his urbanity. Either he was beginning to accept my presence, or this was cutting close. Maybe both.

It helped bring some things into focus. Raven’s loose living would be an embarrassment to the Senator. What had happened to her since Bermuda would be a tabloid reporter’s dream come true. I could see the headlines in the Enquirer.

“Dammit, Ed, we need that information.”

Wilkes did not answer.

“You’re right, of course. It is asking too much. But we need to know. How else can we find out?”

“I could go ask,” Wilkes said.

“And flash your badge. That would be the end of you with the Bureau.”

Wilkes shrugged.

“No, Ed, I won’t let you. Besides, I need for you to stay inside.”

“I can find out without showing a badge or admitting my name. There are ways to finesse these things, but I would need to be on the spot.” Then he glanced sideways at me and raised a questioning eyebrow.

“Don’t mind me,” I said. “I find all this fascinating.” more tomorrow

I knew Cabral by contrast. He was as powerful as my own father had been weak. In his presence, I felt ten years old again. I wanted to please him. I wanted to be like him. All my orphan needs were exposed, when I was with him.

There were two dangers. I might let such a man become the lodestone of my life and live in his shadow as Ed Wilkes appeared to do. Or I might find myself opposing him even when I agreed with him, to keep my separateness alive. Like Raven did.

Already, I understood her better.

I closed my eyes and leaned back to absorb the dappled sunlight coming through the tree overhead. On April thirteenth, Raven had fallen into my life. Now it was two days until July.  For two and one half months, present or absent, she had been the focus of my life. The overpowering, erotic focus of my life. But she was not the entirety of my life. I had lived without her for two weeks now, and I was nearly my complete and normal self again.

My life was in need of review. At some deep level, I had been worrying at that, not for weeks, but for months.

The closest thing to a career I had had was when I worked for Joe Dias. There were things I had liked about the job – the excitement, the touch of danger, the intellectual challenge of finding clues to unravel a puzzle. I had not like the people I had to deal with. And finally, the day to day routine had been deadly dull.

I had liked college. The people you met were interesting; most were young and alive to possibilities. And they were, for the most part, not likely to shove a knife in your ribs when your back was turned. I had liked the work, the intellectual stimulation of chasing down clues in old record to see what had really happened, say, in the administration of Andrew Jackson. But the day to day routine meant long hours lethargically reading through dusty records. It, too, was deadly dull.

I had chosen the foreign service. To make a difference in the world. That’s what I told myself, but I was not so good at self deception. A semi-orphan from small town Wisconsin, deserted by an alcoholic father, a high school dropout who had clawed his way through college and graduate school – I knew what I was looking for. I was looking for respectability, and I was out to show the world that I was important.

I wanted to help Raven. I would help Raven. That was a given. 

But after that? Would the foreign service give me the chance I needed to prove myself, or would I become another petty bureaucrat. Or quit, because it was so deadly dull that I could not endure it. more tomorrow

“He was trying to shoot me, so I stomped his head into the pavement.”

“Very effectively, I’d say,” Wilkes added dryly.

It was an ugly picture. They had composed his features, and pushed his nose back more-or-less straight, but there was a curious flattening to his forehead that came through clearly in the grainy black and white.

“I don’t know him,” Cabral said calmly. After his early years with the FBI, the sight of death did not disturb him. “Do you?” Wilkes shook his head.

“Davis,” Cabral went on. “Why would he use his real name?”

“Assuming he did.”

“The coincidence with Alice Johnson’s maiden name is too great. I think we can assume as a near certainty that Davis is his name, that his first name probably is James, that he is related to Johnson-Fletcher, and that they are working together because they are related. So why would he use his real name?”

“Why not, Senator?” Wilkes said. “If he succeeded in killing your daughter on the cruise ship, it wouldn’t matter.”

Cabral drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair while he thought. I had a feeling that he was not so calm about all this as he tried to appear. Talking about an attempt on his daughter’s life had to make him angry. I thought I could see small indications of that anger, but his face was well schooled. Finally, he said, “No doubt that’s it. The simplest answer is often the best.”

I added, “Perhaps having used his real name, he was committed to finishing Raven in Marseille.”

“Or maybe it merely reinforced Johnson-Fletcher’s need. I am also assuming that she is the one Ramona had investigated, but we need to be sure.”

“I may be able to help there,” I said. “I need to make an overseas call.”

“Go ahead.”

I called Joe Dias. He was out, but Carmen said he had made an investigation. I gave her my number.

Wilkes said, “Joe Dias. The detective you worked for when you were going to college?”

“Damn, you are irritating. How much do you know about me?”

“When you applied for the foreign service, the CIA did a full background check. The Senator and I read it before we left California.”

That security check was the one thing that had made me hesitate about applying for the foreign service. It made me nervous. Especially about my time in Germany.

“Joe isn’t due back in his office for two hours. Meanwhile, I need some air. We can continue this later.”

“We will continue it now,” the Senator said.

“You daughter – Raven – has been on her own for two weeks. We have no reason to think she is in immediate danger. It will wait an hour while I collect myself.”

*       *       *

June was almost gone. In the two weeks since Raven and I had walked these same streets, the greens had deepened and a dusty pallor had come upon the sycamore leaves as the summer’s heat worked into them.

I found a bench overlooking a handful of grass trapped in a sea of sidewalks and streets. Things were moving too fast for me, and there were forces working at levels I could feel but could not touch. One thing I knew clearly, though. Daniel Cabral was a danger.

Ed Wilkes exuded a quiet competence and deadliness, but he was a pale candle in the sun of Daniel Cabral. Raven had spoken of competing with a powerful father, but that had been her wishful thinking. No child could have competed with him. Anything she might seem to have won over him, would have been a gift he had given without her knowing. more tomorrow