“You’re saying … he’s alive?” Kate asked haltingly. “That he was part of this fraternidad, this family.”
“He is very much alive. In fact, it’s possible he’s watching us now.”
Her eyes shot around her. The sudden thought of him out there, not dead, but observing them, was terrifying. Why wouldn’t he try to contact her if he was alive? Sharon was dead. Kate herself had been wounded. Emily and Justin needed him. It was too much to accept. She was his daughter. Whatever this debt, this oath that he was bound to, no twisted concept of blood would make him forget that or be so cruel.
“You’re lying.” She stood up again. “You’re using me to lure him to you. My mother’s dead. You people killed her. You shot up our house. I saw it. I was there. Now you’re telling me about this ridiculous brotherhood and that everything in my life was just some kind of cover. A goddamn lie!”
“You know it,” Oscar Mercado said softly. “You saw the photograph, Kate.”
She wanted not to believe him, but his solemn eyes were clear and unflinching, and she could see in them the man who was in the photograph under that gate with his arm around her father. His brother.
“It’s still not enough,” she said. “I know my father. I know what I felt. You said you can prove it, so show me. How?”
“I hope, with this.” The old man reached inside the pocket of his wrinkled jacket and came out with something in his palm, bound in tissue. He handed it to Kate.
As she unwrapped it, the world shifted for her again. She knew he was telling the truth. She knew he knew everything about her. As she stood staring at him, a sudden rush of tears welled in her eyes.
It was the other half of the broken sun given to her by her mother.
It all came apart for Kate there.
An inner quake shook her so emphatically she felt as if it were cleaving her in two. She pulled the chain out from around her neck with the same broken half sun. She placed Mercado’s and hers in her palm, side by side.
They formed a perfect match.
“You knew my mother?” She looked at him closely, staring into his clear blue eyes.
“I more than knew her, Kate. We were familia.”
“Family …?”
He nodded. He took her by the hand. This time she didn’t flinch. His hands were hard, but there was a tenderness to them. Then he explained a part of her history Kate had never known.
“It was true what your father told you. He did come here as a boy. But not from Spain. From Colombia. From our own country. His mother was my father’s mistress. After my own mother died of an infection in her lungs, Ben’s mother became the love of his life.”
“Rose.” Kate nodded. Her mind darted back to the pictures she had found of the woman, recalling the face of the man with her, with her father as an infant. Her grandfather.
“Rosa.” He shook his head and pronounced it in Spanish. “She was a beautiful woman, Kate. From Buenos Aires. She studied painting. She was full of life. Of course, they could never marry. Even at this time, in Colombia, this kind of union could never be permitted.”
Kate understood what he was telling her. “Because she was a Jew,” she said.
“Sí, ella staba judía.” The old man nodded. “When she bore him a child, it was necessary that she move away.”
“My father …” Kate sat back against the bench.
“Benjamín. After her father. So she came here.”
All of a sudden, questions about her father’s past started to become clear. That was why she knew nothing of her grandmother’s life. They hadn’t come from Spain. He’d hidden the truth all along. The rest of it seemed to fall in place like the last pieces of a puzzle: Her father had set up his own arrest. He’d gone to meet Margaret Seymour, just as Cavetti and the FBI had claimed. And that photo of the two men underneath the gate. The chilling name, overhead—MERCADO. That other man in the snapshot was before her now. His brother. Now it all made sense. Her eyes stole to the broken pendant—the gold half suns.
“It holds secrets, Kate,” Sharon had said when she placed the pendant around Kate’s neck. “One day I’ll tell them to you.”
Her mother knew!
“Your mother gave me this,” Mercado said. “She knew one day it would be me to tell you, not him. You must realize now”—the man smiled—“what happened to her, it was not me.”
“No!” A wall rose up inside Kate. Her hands trembled, but her voice was firm. “You’re saying he killed his own wife. That can’t be. He loved her. I saw them. For over twenty years. That was no lie.”
“I am telling you, Kate, this bond, it is stronger than what you know as love. All these years inside the program, I’ve never once divulged what I’ve just said to you. I never betrayed him.”
“Why are you telling me this? Why did you show yourself? What is it you want me to do?”
“I want you to help me find him, Kate.”
“Why? So you can kill him. So that he doesn’t kill you. Whatever’s happened, he’s still my father. Until he looks me in the eye and tells me he did these things. From him, not you.… You’re saying that everything I’ve trusted in my whole life has been a lie.”
“Not a lie. A protection. For your own—”
“A lie!”
Oscar Mercado took her by the wrist and gently opened her palm. He picked up the two pendants of the broken Aztec sun and reached over and placed them around her neck. The two halves dangled momentarily, then came to rest against her chest in a way that made them appear as one. A single golden sun.
“You want the truth, Kate, here it is. Here is your chance. The gate is open, Kate. Do you want to walk through?”
Phil Cavetti parked his car across from the blocked-off blue-shingled ranch in Orchard Park, New York, which was ablaze in flashing lights. He dropped his shield in front of a local cop guarding the taped-off walkway leading up to the front door. The cop waved Cavetti through. There was a doggie bed on the landing, and a little plaque nearby that read HOME OF CHOWDER. WORLD’S FAVORITE CANINE.
The door was open.
Stepping into the house, the first thing Cavetti saw was the outline on the floor of the first victim, Pamela Birnmeyer. She’d been an agent with the U.S. Marshals Service, out of the Warrants and Bonds Division, for six years. He’d met her once. She had a husband who taught computer science at a local college and a two-year-old at home. Probably why she’d put in for hazardous duty. Extra cash.
Cavetti swallowed a rush of bile. He hadn’t been to a fresh crime scene in years.
He followed the commotion into the kitchen. He had to avoid a couple of FBI crime-scene specialists who were kneeling, trying to lift shoe prints off the floor. The body of the second victim had been removed, but a bright scarlet smear was still visible on the white fridge where her body had crumpled to the floor.
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