He woke at ten to five with his breath frozen on the inside of the windscreen.
For a moment he did not know where he was. Then he did. A truck stop on the east side of Flagstaff, seven thousand feet up, in early October. Ray Okafor’s van. Ray had been his partner in homicide for eleven years, and it was Ray’s funeral that had brought him back to Los Angeles. Ray Okafor’s foam mattress, with a slit down one side where somebody in the LAPD had looked for something and not found it. A blanket that had been enough in Los Angeles and was not enough here.
He lay still and looked at the ceiling. There was frost on the steel above his face, a fine grey fur of it, from his own breath. When he moved his head it came down on him like a light snow.
The van had no heat. That was the thing he had not thought about. It had heat when the engine was running, and Ray had seen to it that the engine always ran, but a twenty-year-old Ford Econoline with the engine off was a metal box, and a metal box at seven thousand feet in October was the temperature of whatever was outside it, give or take a large man breathing.
He got up, which in the back of the van meant rolling onto his knees, and found his boots by feel, and climbed through to the front and started the engine. It caught first time. He sat in the driver’s seat with his hands in his armpits and watched two clear half-moons grow slowly upward on the windscreen while the rest of it stayed white.
Ten minutes. Ten minutes of burning Ray’s gas to warm a man who had slept in worse places and would sleep in worse again. He knew it was foolish while he did it. He did it anyway.
There was a diner attached to the truck stop. It had been there six years ago, the last time he passed through, and it would be there when the sun went out. He sat at the counter between a long-haul driver eating pancakes with the steady attention of a man refuelling, and a pair of elk hunters in orange who were arguing about a rifle.
He ordered eggs and coffee and took out his phone.
It was the one Imani Brooks had pushed into his hand in Rosa Reyes’s kitchen with the Metro cars pulling up outside. Brooks was the Northeast homicide detective who had caught Ray’s death, and hunted Thorsen for it, and ended up on his side. Rosa was the mother of Marisol Reyes, the nineteen-year-old whose killing six years ago had ended Thorsen’s career, and of Mateo, Marisol’s angry younger brother, who had carried the proof around on a cracked phone with a frog on the back. The phone Brooks gave him was small, cheap, from a 7-Eleven on Riverside Drive, with the shop sticker still on the back. Her personal number had been the only one in it. It had not stayed that way. She had given the number to the DA, because the DA needed a witness he could reach, and to Denise Okafor, Ray’s widow, and to Rosa, and somewhere between the DA’s office and the second day of the news it had got out into the world the way water gets into a boat.
Sixty-one voicemails and more text messages than he wanted to count. He had not looked at any of them since he left Los Angeles. There were no names on any of them, because there were no names in the phone, only numbers, and he did not know a single one. Los Angeles area codes, mostly, and New York. He went through them with his thumb. A woman who said she was a producer. A man who said he was a literary agent and that Thorsen’s story had real legs. A podcast. Three more producers. A television station in Phoenix. Somebody from the Times who sounded young and decent and frightened of her editor. A text that said only ARE YOU THE GUY, in capitals, from a number in Ohio. He deleted them one at a time, not listening past the first sentence.
There was one with a 626 code. Pasadena. He nearly deleted it with the rest. Then the first word came out of the little speaker, and his thumb stopped.
He would have known the voice anywhere. He had woken up next to it for eleven years. Denise must have given her the number. Joanna had sat at Denise’s table for eleven Thanksgivings, and Denise did not stop counting people as family just because they had stopped counting themselves.
The waitress put the eggs in front of him and topped up his cup and went away. He started the message again from the beginning and held the phone to his ear.
“Dan. It’s me.” A pause, with a kitchen in it. A radio playing somewhere behind her. “I saw you on the news. I just — I’m glad you’re all right. That’s all.” Another pause. “Bye.”
Eleven seconds.
He played it again. Then he put the phone face down on the counter beside his plate and ate the eggs.
Joanna taught music at a middle school in Pasadena. She had been married to him for eleven years, and then she had not, and she had been married to a pharmacist called Glenn for six. He had met Glenn once, at a gas station in Altadena, by accident. Glenn had shaken his hand and called him Daniel and been perfectly pleasant, and Thorsen had driven away thinking that Glenn was probably exactly what she should have had all along: a man who came home at the same time every evening and said what he was thinking while he was thinking it.
He did not call her back. He did not delete it either.
The phone buzzed against the counter while he was paying. Brooks.
“You’re alive,” she said.
“I’m in Flagstaff.”
“Same thing, I hear.” There was traffic behind her and the tick of an indicator. She was in a car. She was always in a car. “I’ve got four things. Do you want them in order of importance or the order I wrote them down?”
“Your order.”
“One. The violets. I lost one.” She said it the way she would have reported a casualty. “The small one, on the end. I think I drowned it. The other five are fine. One of them has a flower on it.”
“Five out of six.”
“I’m told that’s a good clearance rate.” The indicator stopped. “Two. Dwyer was arraigned yesterday. He pleaded not guilty with a straight face. Lusk too. Vane’s lawyer and the DA are in a room every day and nobody will tell me what’s on the table. The preliminary hearing isn’t set. It won’t be before December, the way they’re going. When it is, I need you here.”
“I said I’d come.”
“I know what you said. I’m writing it down so I can show it to you later.” She took a breath. “Three. Mateo’s been in my office twice asking how old you have to be to apply to the academy. I told him twenty and a half and a high school diploma and no felonies. He said what about guns he used to have, hypothetically. I told him to stop talking.”
“Good advice.”
“Four.” A different note in her voice. More careful. “An old man called the front desk at Northeast. Twice. Yesterday morning, and again last night. The first time he asked for you by name and wouldn’t leave his own. The desk officer told him you weren’t a police officer and hadn’t been for six years and hung up on him. The second time he got the night sergeant, who’s a human being. He said he was your uncle.”
Thorsen did not say anything.
“Thorsen?”
“I’m here.”
“He left a number. Two one eight. I looked it up. It’s northern Minnesota.” She read it out. He wrote it on the back of the diner receipt with the waitress’s pen. “The sergeant said he sounded like a man who doesn’t use the phone much. Like he had to work up to it. He said to tell you it was about Nils.” A pause. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Yes,” Thorsen said.
She waited. When nothing else came she said, “Okay,” in the tone of a detective writing down that a witness had declined to elaborate. “Keep your phone on. I mean it. If the DA needs you I’m not chasing you round the Grand Canyon.”
“Brooks.”
“What?”
“Water them less.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said, and hung up.
He sat in the van in the truck stop car park with the engine off and the receipt on his knee.
Nils.
He had not said the name aloud in forty years. He had not thought it in nearly as long. It came back to him now whole and unbidden, the way smells come back: a round-faced, white-haired boy two years younger than him, with a gap in his teeth and a sunburnt nose, who followed him everywhere for three months of every year and cried when it was time to go.
And the man who had called Northeast twice, and had to work up to it.
Uncle Arne.
Arne had a red beard in those days, and a laugh you could hear across the water. He smelled of diesel and woodsmoke and fish and the snuff he kept in a round tin in his shirt pocket, and he had hands so big that when he took hold of your head to turn it towards something you should look at, a heron or a boat or a storm coming, you felt like a cup. He had taught Thorsen to tie a clove hitch and a bowline, and to gut a herring in three strokes, and to steer the skiff in a following sea by watching the wave behind you and not the one in front. He had let a ten-year-old boy take the tiller of a boat on Lake Superior, which Thorsen understood now to be a thing you should not do, and had sat in the bow with his arms folded and his eyes closed as if he were asleep, and had not been asleep.
Every summer, from the year Thorsen was five. His parents were doctors, both of them, his father a family physician and his mother a paediatrician, in a clinic on Gaffey Street in San Pedro that half the harbour owed money to. Every June they closed it for eight weeks, which their patients forgave them for because it was Dr. Thorsen and Dr. Ana, and his father drove them up from California in whatever car he owned that year, three days across the desert and the plains, Thorsen and his mother and a cooler of sandwiches. Two months at the Point. Then three days home again in August, sunburnt and quiet.
Until the summer he was eleven.
He remembered the end of it badly, the way you remember fevers. Being woken in the dark. His mother’s hands on his shoulders, steering him. The car already running in the lane with its lights off, and his father loading bags into the boot with his jaw set and his face a colour Thorsen had not seen on it before or since. Nils’s voice somewhere, calling. Nobody answering. The trees going past black on black. Sleeping, and waking up in Duluth with the sun coming up over the lake and his father filling the tank at a gas station and not looking at anybody.
He had asked. Once, in the car, somewhere in Nebraska.
Why did we go, Dad?
His father had driven for a long time without saying anything. Then he had reached across and put his hand on the back of Thorsen’s neck, the way he did when Thorsen had a fever, and left it there, and said, without taking his eyes off the road: We’re not going back, Danny. Please don’t ask me.
And he hadn’t. That was the strange thing, looking at it now from forty years off, the way he would look at a witness statement. He was a boy who asked about everything, who took apart radios and asked the mailman where the letters went. He had grown up in a house where you could ask anything, where his mother answered questions about where babies came from with diagrams, and his father would sit on the end of his bed and explain how the heart worked until one of them fell asleep. And about this one thing he had not asked again. Not at eleven, not at twenty, not at thirty. Some part of him had understood, in that car, that there was a door in his family that was not to be opened, and that it hurt his father to stand in front of it, and he had walked round it ever since the way you walk round a hole in the floor.
He had not been back. He had not written. Nobody had written to him.
He looked at the number on the back of the receipt.
It rang seven times. He was about to give up when it was picked up, and there was a long moment of nothing but breathing and a radio, and then a voice said, cautiously, as though it was not certain what instrument it was speaking into:
“Thorsen.”
Older. Thinner. Gravel in it now where there had been none. But the same voice. A voice that stretched its vowels out and laid them down flat, like a man coiling rope.
“Arne,” Thorsen said. “It’s Daniel.”
Silence. A long one. He could hear the radio clearly. A man reading lake forecasts. Northeast winds ten to twenty knots. Waves three to five feet.
“Danny,” Arne said.
Nobody had called him Danny in that voice since he was eleven years old. Ray had called him Danny. Denise. Art Delgado, God rest him, who had not deserved to. But not in that voice. Something moved in Thorsen’s chest that he had not expected, and he sat very still in the driver’s seat of a dead man’s van and waited for it to stop.
“I saw you on the television,” Arne said. “On the news. Your face. I said to Marit — ” He stopped. “Well. I said to myself. That’s Karl’s boy. I’d know him anywhere. Those are the Thorsen shoulders. Then they said your name.”
“How are you, Arne?”
“I’m seventy-six.” As if that answered it. Then, with an effort that Thorsen could hear, “I’m not good, Danny. I’m sorry to call you like this. Out of nowhere. Forty years. I know what it looks like.”
“Tell me about Nils.”
Arne told him. He told it badly, in the wrong order, the way people do who have been told it themselves by policemen and have not slept. Thorsen let him. Then he took him back through it with the questions, gently, one at a time, writing on the back of the receipt in small capitals.
A man called Paul Strand. Forty-one. From Duluth. Some kind of title man, papers and land records, working on the sale of the Point. He had come up twice in September asking about old family papers. Nils did not like him. Nils thought he was trying to wreck it, Arne said, without explaining what it was. On the last night of September, Nils and Strand had had words in the Legion in Nordby, in front of half the town, and Nils had said a thing he should not have said. The next morning, at twenty to seven, Nils went down to check the nets and found Strand on the rocks under the Point. Half in the water. Dead. Head broken.
“He called it in himself,” Arne said. “Nils did. Called the sheriff, then came up the house and sat in the kitchen in his boots and shook. Three days later they came back and put the cuffs on him in the yard. In front of me. In the yard.”
“What did he say to Strand? At the Legion?”
A pause. “He said, come near the Point again and you’ll go off it.”
Thorsen wrote it down.
“He didn’t do it, Danny.” Arne’s voice cracked on it, quietly, like ice. “He’s a big soft fool and he drinks more than he should, like his granddad, and he’s got a mouth on him. But he never hurt anything in his life. He used to cry when we killed the fish. You remember. You’d laugh at him.”
Thorsen remembered. He had laughed. He had been ten and a half and a boy from the city, and he had laughed at a smaller boy for crying over a herring. He had not thought of it in forty years either.
“The sheriff says it’s done,” Arne said. “He says it’s open and shut. The public defender’s got sixty cases. I’ve put the boat up against a lawyer from Duluth and the lawyer says plead. I don’t know who else to ask. I don’t know anybody who does what you do.” He breathed. “I’m not asking you to do anything wrong. I’m asking you to come and look. That’s all. Just come and look at it.”
“Have you told my father you were calling me?”
The silence that came down the line then was of a different kind. Thorsen had sat across interview tables from a great many silences, and he knew the different makes of them. This was not the silence of a man thinking. It was the silence of a man standing very still in front of something.
“Your father and I haven’t spoken in forty years,” Arne said at last. “You know that.”
“I know it. I don’t know why.”
“No,” Arne said. “No, I don’t suppose he’d have told you.” And then, quickly, before Thorsen could follow it: “Will you come, Danny? I’ve got a bed. I’ll pay the gas. Whatever it costs.”
Thorsen looked out through the windscreen at the car park, at the long-haul trucks idling in their rows with their running lights on in the grey dawn, at the pine forest going up black behind them to a sky that had gone the colour of tin.
“I’ll call you back,” he said.
His father picked up on the second ring. He always did. Karl Thorsen had been retired for eight years and still woke at a quarter to five, a fisherman’s son’s hours, and sat in the kitchen of the house on the hill above the harbour with the radio on and the coffee going, and read the Lancet and the Daily Breeze with equal attention, waiting for a telephone that no longer needed him. Every so often it still rang. A dockworker’s widow with chest pains who would not go to the emergency room because it was full of strangers. A grandson of a patient with a rash. He went, with his bag, at eighty. Thorsen’s mother said he would go to his own funeral if somebody there was short of breath.
“Danny.” His father’s voice warmed, the way it always did, as if somebody had opened a stove door. “Where are you? Your mother’s asleep. Do you want me to wake her?”
“Let her sleep. I’m in Flagstaff.”
“Flagstaff.” Thorsen could hear him smiling. “Are you eating?”
“I’m eating.”
While he was on every television in Los Angeles they had had no way to reach him, and that, his mother told him later, had been the worst of it. They had called the LAPD, and been told nothing, and called Denise, whom they had never met, and sat on the telephone with her for an hour, two doctors and a scrub nurse, comparing what they knew. The morning it was over Denise had given them this number, and they had left messages that he could not listen to then and had listened to since, in the van, more than once. His mother crying and furious and saying call me, Daniel Karl Thorsen, you call your mother. His father saying only, very quietly, We never thought you did it. We know you. Come home when you can. He had called them back from a gas station in Barstow and his mother had cried again and his father had said, at the end, in a voice Thorsen had not heard from him since he graduated from the academy, We’re very proud of you, son.
“Dad,” Thorsen said. “Arne called me.”
Nothing at all. Not breathing. Not the radio. The line might have been dead.
“Nils has been arrested. For a killing. Up at the Point. Arne wants me to come and look at it.”
“No,” his father said. Very softly.
“No?”
“Don’t go up there, Danny.”
“Why?”
A long breath. “Because I’m asking you to.”
“You’ve never asked me for anything in my life.”
“I know.” His father’s voice did not rise. It never rose. In forty years of medicine it had told people they were dying, and that their children were, and it had never once risen. It went lower instead, and gentler, and Thorsen could hear what it cost. “I know I haven’t. I’m asking you now. Please. Whatever Arne needs, he can find a lawyer. He can find somebody. Let it be somebody else.”
“He’s your brother, Dad.”
“Yes.” A silence that went on and on. Thorsen could hear the kitchen clock his mother had brought from her parents’ house, the one with the painted saint on the face. “Yes, he is. That’s why.” And then, as though it had been pulled out of him: “Some things are better left in the lake, Danny. Please. For me.”
“Will you tell me why?”
He waited. He could hear his father breathing. He could picture him exactly: the kitchen, the radio, the reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, the big hand flat on the table, the way he sat when a patient’s family asked him a question he could not answer.
“I love you, son,” his father said. “Drive carefully.” And the line went quiet, not slammed down, but set down, gently, like a man putting a cup back on a saucer so as not to wake somebody.
Thorsen sat with the phone against his ear for a while. Then he put it in his shirt pocket, in front of the paper napkin that was already there, and sat with his hands on the wheel.
Leave it in the lake.
Nineteen years, he thought. Eleven of them in homicide. And the first thing he had learned, the very first, before the academy, before the badge, before Ray, was that when somebody tells you very firmly that a thing is none of your business, you have just been told where to look.
He had learned it from the kindest man he knew, in a car, in Nebraska.
There was a sporting goods store on the old Route 66 on the way out of town, in a low building with a fibreglass elk on the roof. He bought a sleeping bag rated to minus twenty, a wool watch cap, two pairs of wool socks, and a pair of insulated gloves that were the largest they had and still too small. The boy at the till was perhaps nineteen and had a wispy moustache he was proud of.
“Minus twenty,” the boy said, ringing up the bag. “That’s Fahrenheit, you know. Not Celsius. Where you headed, you need that?”
Thorsen thought about it.
“Home,” he said.
He said it to see how it sounded. It did not sound like anything. It sounded like a word in somebody else’s language.
He called Arne back from the car park and told him he would be there in three days. Then he got on the interstate and drove east, towards Albuquerque, and at Albuquerque he turned north.