were both doomed, him and the bluebird. It was a juvenile, its feathers still speckled. It looked as if it had a broken leg. It couldn’t have been in the water long.
Clever. His death would look like an accident. Michael Joseph Parisi drowned this afternoon in his swimming pool apparently while trying to rescue an injured bluebird…
Christ. He’d look like an idiot.
Some murdering son of a bitch had dumped the bird in the deep end, knowing he’d bend over and try to scoop it up. Bluebirds were his hobby, his passion since his wife died six years ago. They’d had no children. His desire to help restore the Eastern bluebird population in Connecticut and his personal interest in bluebirds weren’t a secret.
Not like not knowing how to swim. That was a secret. Hell, everyone knew how to swim.
His mother had regularly dumped his ass in the lake as a kid, trying to get him to learn. It didn’t work. She’d had to get his brother to fish him out.
Was the bastard who’d planted the bluebird watching him flail and yell?
It’d look like a goddamn accident.
Rage consumed him, forced him up out of the water, yelling, swearing, pushing for the edge of the pool. It was so damn close. Why couldn’t he reach it? What the hell was he doing wrong? He could hear his mother yelling at him. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Michael, you’re such a wienie. Swim, for the love of God.
These days a mother like Marianne Parisi would be arrested for child abuse or put on pills or something. Total nutcase, his mother was, though she meant well. She died of a stroke when Mike was twenty-four, still thinking her second son would never amount to shit.
The pool water filled his nose and mouth, burned his eyes. He coughed, choking, taking in even more water. He couldn’t breathe.
There’d be a lot of crocodile tears at his funeral.
Allyson would do fine as governor…
Who the hell was he kidding? Allyson had her head in the sand. He’d tried to help her, and he knew that was why he was drowning now.
Murdered.
They’d have to cut him open. They’d find out he hadn’t hit his head or had a heart attack or a stroke. He’d drowned. The autopsy wouldn’t pick up where he’d been poked in the ass. It’d felt like a stick or a pole or something. The pool was fenced in, but the deep end backed up to the woods. His murderer could have hid there and waited for Mike to come outside, then tossed in the bluebird when he had his back turned.
Easier to shoot him, but that wouldn’t have looked like an accident.
He stopped yelling. He stopped flailing.
The faces of the living and the dead jumbled together in his head, and he couldn’t distinguish which was which, couldn’t tell which he was. Thoughts and memories, sounds came at him in a whirl. He could see bluebirds all around him, dozens of them, iridescent in the sunlight.
Ah, Mike, you had it good….
But all of that was done now.
He prayed the way he’d learned in catechism class so long ago.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…
His mother came into the bright light now, shaking her head, not with disgust this time, but with love and bemusement, as if she hadn’t expected him so soon. His wife was there, too, smiling as she had on their wedding day thirty years ago.
They held out their hands, and Big Mike laughed and walked toward his wife and his mother, and the bluebirds, into the light.
One
A ustin was in the grip of its fifteenth consecutive day of ninety-plus-degree weather, a quality of Texas summers Kara Galway had almost forgotten about during her years up north. Even with air-conditioning, she was aware of the blistering temperatures and blamed the heat for her faint nausea. The heat and the seafood tacos she’d had for lunch.
Not Sam Temple. He was another possibility for her queasy stomach, but not one she wanted to consider.
She’d been putting in long hours since Big Mike’s death two weeks ago, but memories of their long friendship would sneak up on her no matter how deep she buried herself in her legal work. Kara had met him through her friend Allyson Lourdes Stockwell, now the governor of Connecticut. She and Kara had gone to law school together, before Allyson’s husband died of cancer and left her with two toddlers to raise on her own.
Henry and Lillian Stockwell were twelve and eleven now. After Big Mike’s funeral, they’d flown back to Texas with Kara, and she’d dropped them off at a kids’ dude ranch southwest of Austin, a long-planned adventure that Allyson had decided not to cancel, despite the trauma of Mike Parisi’s death. Henry and Lillian had loved him, too. Everyone had.
The kids wrote to Kara, who was their godmother, from the ranch, complaining about the food, the heat, the bugs, the snakes. They never mentioned Big Mike.
Kara tried not to think about him, or his funeral. How he’d died. The Connecticut state police and the state’s chief attorney’s office were conducting a joint investigation. But none of that was her concern. All she should concentrate on were Henry and Lillian, who would be spending a few days with her after their dude ranch experience, then flying back to Connecticut to enjoy the last of summer and get ready for school.
Seeing them would be a welcome distraction.
George Carter stopped in the open doorway to her office and peered at her. “You sick?”
Kara focused on her boss. “I think I had bad seafood tacos at lunch.”
He winced. “There’s no such thing as a good seafood taco.”
At sixty-two, George Carter was a man of strong opinions, a prominent and respected attorney in Austin, a founding partner of Carter, Smith and Rodriguez, African-American, straightforward, brilliant, father of three, grandfather of two. He was also one of Kara’s biggest doubters. He made no secret of it. He said he liked her fine and didn’t hold her Yale education or her years as an attorney in Connecticut against her. He’d never even asked her about her Texas Ranger brother. His doubts weren’t personal. George was a buttoned-down lawyer who fought hard and played by the rules, and Kara was an out-of-the-box thinker, someone who came at problems sideways by nature, training and experience. She liked to get a fix on the complexities of a problem, understand every angle, every approach, before committing herself to a strategy. In other words, the two of them were polar opposites.
He’d agreed to hire her the previous fall on a one-year contract because, he said, he thought she brought skills and a way of thinking to the firm that it needed. At the end of the year, if the fit between her and Carter, Smith and Rodriguez worked, she’d become a full partner. If not, she’d be looking for work.
“Damn, it’s freezing in here.” He gave an exaggerated shiver. “I’m getting goose bumps. What’s the air-conditioning on?”
“Sixty-eight. I’m still acclimating to August in Texas.”
“You’re
