Color of Blood(48)

Judy sighed. “I know. The only thing I can imagine is that they think I know more than I do. They just assume it.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. If I knew what the connection was, I would tell you. You think I like having my parents scared to death?”

“No, of course not. Still, this threat doesn’t add up. What would they expect you to do after being threatened? How could it advantage them?”

“Maybe they expected me to throw the case somehow,” she said. “Maybe I’d claim that Wu wasn’t the man I stopped at the airport or deny some other point of evidence. But that’s a stretch, if you ask me. They had to consider that I’d certainly report the threat.”

They were sitting in a small pastry shop near their office, and Judy toyed with her coffee cup, lost in thought.

“I think it will pass,” Daniel said. “Really, Jude, they’ll just forget about you and your family. Must be a new triad that’s not very sophisticated. It’s silly, really. We have a team giving round-the-clock protection for your family, and they shouldn’t be alarmed.”

“You’ve never met my stepfather, have you?” she said.

“No,” he said, laughing. “Not had the pleasure.”

“Lucky you,” she said.

Daniel’s mobile phone rang, and he reached into his back pocket and put down his tea to answer it. Judy’s phone also rang, and she pulled it out of her purse.

“Judy?”

“Yes”

“This is Erica.” Miller’s secretary often made calls for him when he was pressed for time. “Calvin wanted me to tell you that they’ve just made the biggest heroin bust in Australian history,” she said. “A small freighter in Fremantle: about a thousand kilos of heroin. He thought you should know. It’s a great day for the department, and he wanted me to tell you and the others.”

“Erica, was this an AFP effort or was it WA Police?”

“It was the AFP, Judy. Don’t you remember? I thought you and Daniel did surveillance on this one, right?”

“Ah, yes we did,” she said. She remembered a ten-day period last winter when she and Daniel followed two Pakistani merchant mariners from a Hong Kong–chartered container ship. Neither Judy nor Daniel could ascertain anything unusual from their wandering around Fremantle and Perth.

“Well, Calvin wanted to thank everyone who worked on it. He said it will be on the telly tonight for certain. Everyone will be able to see our success.”

“Of course,” Judy said.

***

After pressing the doorbell several times, Dennis wondered if it even worked. He grabbed the tarnished brass knocker and banged the metal door. Ambivalent and a little confused about his presence there, he secretly hoped she was not home.

He heard movement inside the apartment, and he could see a flicker of light at the peephole.

“Dad!” Beth threw her arms around his neck. “What are you doing here unannounced? Is something wrong?”

“I just thought I’d drop in and say hello.”

“In California?” She pulled him into the living room. “Since when do you drop in three thousand miles away from home? I mean, it’s great to see you. It’s just that I didn’t know you were coming. Why didn’t you call?”

“Oh, you know me,” he said.

Standing in the dining room, looking surprised and nearly incredulous, was Nathan, her husband.

“Mr. Cunningham!” he said. “What a surprise.” Mercifully, Nathan never referred to Dennis as Dad, and Dennis took it as a redeeming quality. Wearing a button-down, long-sleeve blue dress shirt and a pair of dark blue slacks, Dennis thought Nathan looked very much like the patent attorney that he was. A dark-brown tweed sports coat hung over the back of the dining room chair that he had just risen from.

“Oops,” Dennis said, noticing they had been eating dinner. “That’ll teach me. I should have called; you’re eating dinner.”

“Don’t be silly. We have plenty of food for another setting.” Beth dragged him to the small round table. “How about some turkey meatloaf and mixed vegetables?”

“No, really,” Dennis said.

“Nonsense, just sit right there.” She pointed to a chair.

“Beth, really—”

“Dad,” she said, giving him the same kind of cut-the-shit-look Martha used in their marriage.

“Fine. I’ll shut up and eat.” He sat down and was joined by Nathan. Beth quickly plated a slice of turkey meatloaf and a pile of steaming vegetables and put it in front him. In truth he was famished, and eating would be a good distraction from his self-consciousness.

In the four years that his daughter had lived in San Francisco, he had been in sporadic contact with her, but he had only visited her apartment once. He was on completely foreign territory and might as well have been having dinner with a strange couple in an apartment in Kazakhstan.

The three of them made pleasant small talk for a while. Beth and Nathan were drinking red wine, and they offered some to Dennis, but he took a glass of water instead. Beth asked Dennis how he was feeling. He assured her he was feeling fine and tried to change the subject.

“You’re not still depressed, are you?” she asked.

“Nope, back at work. Fit as a fiddle or something like that.”