Chapter 2

Whatever his problem is, he’s not about to talk about it to a stranger. Or a friend, I suspect, or he wouldn’t have been here thinking about drowning his sorrows. Wonder why he changed his mind? Not that I’ll ever find out.

* * * *

Mika flopped face down on the bed in the motel room he was renting for the time being. There was no way he could have stayed at the house after the murders of his mother, Anna, and brother, Reko.

“I don’t care what they say, that was no home invasion. At least not the way the cops are thinking. Someone breaking in to steal whatever they can find might, maybe, shoot the homeowners to keep them from telling the cops what they looked like. But for damned sure they wouldn’t have cut them up the way Mom and Reko were. That was done out of hate or rage.”

He rolled over, staring up at the ceiling. “Who were they, and why our house? It’s not like there was anything worth stealing. We never did have anything of real value. It wasn’t the way we lived. If Dad hadn’t died, and Uncle Elias hadn’t insisted we move back to civilization, as he put it, we’d still be where we grew up. Civilization my ass.”

Realizing it was late, and knowing he had to be at the garage first thing in the morning, Mika went to shower, pushing his problems to the back of his mind for the time being. There wasn’t anything he could do about what happened until he figured out who wanted his mom and brother—and probably him if he’d been there—dead.

The reason he hadn’t been there haunted him. He’d met a guy who had brought his fancy car to the garage to have some work done on it. He was tall, dark, and sexy, or at least Mika thought he was. So when he’d come to pick up the car Saturday afternoon, and asked Mika if he wanted to go out for a drink, Mika had jumped at the chance to get to know him better. In this case, ‘better’ meant spending the night with the man.

He had arrived home soon after ten Sunday morning, and walked in on a scene so bloody and horrifying he knew he would remember it until the day he died. His brother was curled in a fetal position in the middle of the living room floor, as if he’d been trying to protect himself from the knife, or knives, that had sliced his chest, arms, and back. His mother was on her stomach in the doorway to the dining room, blood pooling under her body, a bullet wound visible in the back of her head.

“My guess, right now,” Detective Windom said an hour later, after what Mika considered a cursory examination of the crime scene, “is that the thieves tortured them, trying to find out where they kept the valuables. You mother tried to escape while they worked on your brother and they shot her, and then him.”

“There wasn’t anything worth stealing,” Mika had protested. “Nothing!”

“But the thieves didn’t know that,” Windom pointed out, as if he thought Mika was too stupid to figure it out for himself.

That had been a week ago.

His Uncle Elias, his mother’s brother, had flown into the city as soon as he’d heard about the murders, making decisions that weren’t his to make, in Mika’s opinion. His reasoning was that, at age twenty-five, and not used to the way the world worked, Mika was too young and innocent to understand what had to be done.

“I wasn’t, I’m not,” Mika had said more than once, but not to his uncle’s face.

After the coroner released the bodies, Elias had arranged for the funerals and burials, both on the same day because, as he’d put it, “Why prolong the agony.” When Mika had protested about them being buried in the local Lutheran cemetery, his uncle had told him that Anna had been a Protestant before she “took up with your father, who forced her to follow his insane heathen beliefs.” Mika had been too distraught to argue, even though he knew that wasn’t the truth.

Now, he was—hiding out? Is that what I’m doing? Afraid whoever killed them will come after me? Are the police right about its being a home invasion? Am I trying to make something more of it because I can’t accept it was only a random killing?

He had wondered that before. Now, as he got ready to go to work Monday morning, the same thoughts ran through his mind. If he’d had someone to talk to about them, maybe it would have helped, but he didn’t. He didn’t have any real friends, not even among the guys he worked with at the garage. His uncle had left two days ago, after turning the execution of his sister’s will over to a lawyer he’d hired. “Your parents were fools,” he’d said scathingly. “But at least they had sense enough to make wills, not that Anna got much when your father died. If it hadn’t been for me…” He left the rest unsaid; as well he should have, in Mika’s considered opinion.