Chapter 3
THREE
AMELIA
At the funeral, someone asked Amelia what she liked best about working for Burt. Polite small talk often yielded dumb questions and doubly so at funerals. Then again, everyone strangled grief in their own way.
Her answer was just as polite, just as dumb.
She liked that he kept a bowl of Jolly Ranchers on his desk.
He’d suck on the green ones and confess his regrets, that he’d squandered his best years in the rat race.
Criminal defense wasn’t for the faint of heart, and his ticker had been due for another coronary. “The widow maker,” he’d called it.
In the end, it wasn’t a coronary that killed Burton Shaw. The newspaper reported that he hung himself with a blue tie, and it seemed a ghastly oversight that his family buried him in one too. If he cared, his corpse hadn’t let on, and Amelia thought he looked rather peaceful in his casket.
On her way out of the church, she said goodbye to the other interns for perhaps the last time.
They hadn’t acknowledged her in the best of times and didn’t acknowledge her then.
Law students had no time for farewell fanfare.
She was the baby, fresh out of undergrad and twenty-three.
If they’d gotten her a cake on her last day in the office, it would’ve read “Good Riddance” in thick, sugary icing.
There’d been no cake and no goodbyes, and Amelia drove home hardly sated on sweet escape. She carried Burt’s mantle now, but secrets were like blood stains. Water might wash them away, but shine the right light and you’d find them there. They never truly scrubbed clean.
In the week since Burt’s death, Amelia had been trying to come clean with hot showers and guided meditations of blooming daisies.
Behind closed eyes, the daisies never bloomed.
Instead, she saw the fear on his face when he issued his plea.
Get the fuck out of town. His death had delayed her departure.
If he were alive, he would’ve busted a gut at the irony.
In her childhood bedroom, Amelia slipped out of her funeral attire and into a white cocktail dress. Only Richard Dauer was tacky enough to throw a party on the night of the funeral. He should’ve canceled out of respect for Burt, his business partner and friend.
Then again, Rich didn’t just throw parties. He hosted galas. God forbid anyone confused the two. Nothing offended Rich like downplaying his importance, and the annual gala was important enough that every Portland lawyer, politician, and socialite attended the lavish event held at the Dauer estate.
Amelia plugged in her phone and checked the time.
Late as hell. Ever ephemeral, poetry couldn’t wait.
She uncapped a pen with her teeth and, in her notebook, captured the turn of phrase niggling in her mind.
Someday soon she’d bind her poems together in a proper book and have something to show for herself.
Her muse was a flake, though, and fled as her father’s voice swelled with rising heat from down the hall.
“Tell me you weren’t involved in this, that you didn’t know.”
Amelia had never witnessed her father work his magic in a courtroom and didn’t need to.
She knew intimately well how he verbally eviscerated and pitied whoever was getting an earful.
She snapped her notebook shut and navigated the moving boxes crowding her room.
Her father hated how she’d packed. That was about all he said of her leaving—pointing out the nonsense of spatulas boxed with purses, curios with cold medicine.
“Don’t lie to me! A man is already dead.”
Amelia leaned into the hall and held her breath to listen. Who the hell is he talking to? Someone from the office, no doubt. Callum Havick only name-dropped death on work calls.
“What does being a federal prosecutor entail?” Amelia had asked him once.
Death, he’d told her. Big death, to be precise, the kind West Coast crime syndicates deified. They left a body count he wouldn’t reveal, only that it was big, capital “B”. His job was to end those organizations. “Crush them” was the phrase he used. Big death made her father a harder man.
These days, work followed him home like a shadow through the door as he indicted the Velasco syndicate. Smaller and flashier, the Velascos ran the drug and sex trade in Las Vegas. They were a thorn in her father’s side, but nothing more. The Moriartys were his white whale, his obsession.
They possessed ironclad control over their territory from Seattle to San Diego and called themselves a family, but weren’t by bloodline, only ritualistic oaths.
A violent brotherhood steeped in dark mythos, they bucked the old-world traditions of the Irish mob but formed traditions all their own.
When her father whispered “crush them” with vitriol in his voice and hate in his heart, she knew he meant the Moriartys.
“I won’t make it tonight,” he said, the disappointment too personal for a work call. “Enjoy your little party, Rich.”
The diatribe ended with the thud of something—his cell phone, probably—hitting the desk. The scratch of vinyl came next. Amelia’s father was a sensible man—stoic and wise—but predictable. After troublesome days, he vanquished his vexations with The Dark Side of the Moon.
Amelia slumped against the doorframe. It’d been a month since their fight, a month of existing like strangers. The bass line of “Money” thumped louder than usual. A clarion call for compassion, it thrashed on her heart. Someone had to budge first. As always, that someone would be her.
Down the hall, Amelia hesitated at the threshold of his office where dust motes glittered in the golden hour. With his back to her, her father stared out the window at a thicket of trees. Their lush canopies swayed in splendid unison against a violently blue sky.
For late June, Portland was downright balmy. The sultry novelty wore off a week ago, and the city sweltered beneath a dome of unrelenting heat. Cool reprieve had rolled in today on cotton puff clouds.
“You don’t have to knock, Amelia,” her father said before her knuckles met the door.
With a glance over his shoulder, he frowned at her dress hitting mid-thigh. Fatherly disapproval came wrapped in cellophane she saw right through. He knew better than to say anything, though, so they did their little dance. He smiled stiffly. She tried at levity.
“Nothing says ‘I’m here to party’ like a vintage sweatshirt, Dad.”
He shrugged at the halfhearted joke and spared just as little humor. “Nostalgia dies hard, I guess.”
His Harvard Law sweatshirt had gone threadbare years ago, and the ink faded years before that. He wore it in stark contrast to his dark hair, combed and side parted, and a salt-and-pepper beard trimmed neat against his chin.
Amelia motioned to his phone unscathed from its tumble. “Everything okay?”
The coffee mug at his lips obscured a scowl, but his steely gaze said the rest. No, absolutely not.
His friendship with Richard Dauer was in shambles.
They’d met in law school, but Rich’s charisma led him down a path as the city’s most prominent defense attorney.
“A high society man,” her father called Rich, all too pleased to pin the moniker to his old friend.
What started as an innocent jab had sharpened with time and could cut to the bone with bitterness.
“It’s fine,” he said but contemplated his desk. “I need to work anyway.”
Amelia eyed the tatty folders and chicken scratch notes, most bearing the Moriarty name. Then there was her father. His hair greyed at an alarming rate and dark circles permanently rested beneath his eyes. The case would be the death of him, and their fight just seemed petty.
Amelia almost said as much, but a photograph slotted in the keyboard caught her attention. In it, an older man flashed a candid smile on the razor edge of laughter. It was a bizarre memento amongst court filings and affidavits.
“Who is that?” she asked.
Her father took another swig from his mug and set it down hard. Coffee splattered a nearby folder.
“Liam Moriarty.”
“He’s the one you’re after?”
“Not quite. He ran the organization for decades but stepped down. I’m after the man who took his place.”
With a knot in her belly, Amelia came closer to his desk. The question on her lips didn’t need asking, and it wasn’t her place to pry.
“Who took his place?” she asked despite herself.
“A man named Emory Holt.”
Her father spit out the hard “T” like venom, so at odds with the sweetness she’d put on the name. Amelia saw it coming but still nearly lost the floor. She swallowed hard and scrambled for some composure.
“That’s his son?”
“Not by blood, but important enough that he inherited the empire. Emory Holt is something else. Calculated, deliberate, secretive.”
“Would Burt have known him?”
Quiet frenzy tinged Amelia’s question as the pieces abruptly came together. The folder wasn’t bits and bobs of random information, but a dossier on Emory, a man exalted in the criminal underworld. Shame shaded her fascination of him, those nights she found her way back to that folder, back to him.
Her father circled his desk and sat at the edge. The prosecutor’s pose, he did it when he needed to coax out the truth. Maybe he thought it disarmed or tempered his severity. It didn’t.
“I don’t think so. Why? Did he say something to you about Emory or the Moriartys?”
Amelia eyed the door with the instinct to bolt. She inched toward it in a shuffle and conjured a flimsy explanation.
“No, I was just curious. On the phone with Rich, you said…”
“Yeah, about that.” Her father slowly rose from his desk and stuffed his hands in his pockets.
Amelia knew that move too. He was gearing up to drop a bomb.
“Burt’s wife is disputing his cause of death.
The FBI has agreed to investigate. I doubt it’ll amount to much, but they may ask you some questions. Routine stuff, nothing to worry about.”
Heat exploded across Amelia’s cheeks and spilled down her chest. “Disputing how?”
No longer impassive, concern carved a canyon between her father’s brows.
No, not this.
Amelia needed him to cosign her denial, to tell her that Burt really was a sad old man who took his own life, that it had nothing to do with that folder or his warning to her.
“She thinks it was foul play.”
Amelia’s throat ached with the promise of tears. “You mean murder.”
She should’ve seen it coming. People said funerals were for the living, but so too were the questions because “why” and “how” didn’t matter to the dead. Everyone knew the “how,” but why would Burt take his own life?
He wouldn’t. He hadn’t.
“Amelia, is something wrong?”
Her father edged closer. His searing gaze could take her apart, overturn every piece until he was satisfied she had nothing to hide.
Some nights, Amelia sat at the dinner table with Burt’s warning rattling in her head as her father ate his supper in small bites. She wanted to carve out the secret like a malignant growth and drop it onto his plate. This was his world, not hers.
He’d given her a chance, but what could she say? The folder told one tale—the Velascos wanted Emory dead—and one her father probably knew well, so why promise her silence?
Amelia didn’t know. But then there was Burt and how she dreamed some nights of his secrets poisoning him. What if those secrets could poison her father too?
A thunderclap rattled the window, and they both turned to a darkening sky. Outside, the trees bent against the assault of rising wind, the canopies in chaos.
“I’m fine,” Amelia said and buried her tears behind a phony smile. “I have to go. The weather’s turning, and I’m already late.”
She started for the door, but the cold snap of her father’s voice stopped her.
“Why are you running?”
She swung around, certain of his anger, but found hurt etched on his face instead. “Dad, I told you. I—”
“That’s just it. You used to tell me everything, and now there’s a part of you I can’t reach. Are you that angry with me that you have to run from home? Why pack like a maniac just so you can leave early? And why Arizona, of all places?”
He meant the randomness, the way she seemingly closed her eyes and pointed to a map. That wasn’t far from the truth. For good reason, he called her his wildflower and saw in her something hard to tame. Amelia flourished in places he couldn’t understand.
But home had always been elusive, a state of the heart more than a place to put down roots. Arizona promised belonging she had yet to find and an escape from the secret she held inside. It burned him up that she wanted to leave so badly.
“Not every decision I make is anchored to you,” Amelia said and licked the tears from her lips. “I’m leaving in two days, and there’s nothing you can say to stop me.”
Her father drew a deep inhale and conceded with his chin tucked to his chest. “You’re right. I should let you go.”
Amelia didn’t know if he meant the party or her. She saw him clearly for the first time since their fight; not cold and needlessly cruel but devastated and reeling. He finally seemed to see her clearly too; not a darling disappointment but lost at sea and sinking.
She waited for something, anything other than his impassive stare. His lips pressed together, though, and in a rare moment, he curated his words with care. Amelia took the silent blow. The things he didn’t say wounded her worse than those he did.
“A storm’s coming, a bad one too. You and your mom be careful tonight.” Insult to injury, he dug in his wallet and handed her three twenty-dollar bills. “In case the food sucks and you wanna stop for something on the way home.”
Amelia took the money with nothing else to say. They talked in circles around what they were after—a sweeter past where they didn’t exist like strangers.
He turned to his computer, a go-to conversation ender, and Amelia took her cue to leave. In her bedroom, she snatched her purse and slipped into a pair of flats then collected her mom before heading to the car.
When she fired up the engine, the radio babbled “Bad Moon Rising,” the DJ’s homage to nasty weather.
Up above, powderpuff clouds yielded to the black mass marching in, the sky no longer violently blue.