Page 43 of The Cat's Mausy

Compromises

Felinus leaned over the back of Snake’s chair with a latte in hand as the hacker scrolled through the information on his screen. It was still dim outside, early for the amount of sleep Issac and Felinus had gotten between their talk and Issac’s nightmares jarring them both awake for the rest of the night. Issac did not wake up nicely from any of the dreams, jerking awake as if he were the one shot. Even when Felinus managed to coax him immediately back to sleep with a few murmured words of reassurance, he never seemed to stop trembling.

His men had arrived back in his apartment shortly after six and Issac immediately got up to shower while Felinus went to meet them with yesterday’s pants on.

Bat laughed himself stupid at the hickeys Issac had left on his neck and shoulders when they had gone to bed the first time. He threw a tube of concealer at Felinus before saying he was going to go down to the shops on the first floor to see if they had Issac’s shade. Tiger stopped Felinus from throwing the makeup back at Bat’s head.

“He really said his dad was the German Reaper,” Snake whispered for the fourth time after Felinus had given them a very summarized retelling of what Issac had told him last night. Who Issac’s father was and that he had been killed by one of his own people had been the only thing they hadn’t already known from Snake’s stress research after Felinus threw them all out.

“Yes, Snake,” Felinus said for the fourth time with a small sigh. “I’m still not understanding how you are having a hard time swallowing this information.”

“Because Lukas Maus has no arrest records,” Snake grumbled, typing at his keyboard.

“He wouldn’t have been a very good Reaper if he got arrested for murder,” Felinus pointed out.

“No, I mean he has no arrest record, Boss,” Snake said, looking up at him carefully to avoid knocking into his mug. “Not a single arrest, booking, warrant, anything. There’s a handful of pick-ups for questioning, but as far as the courts and government are concerned, Lukas Maus was an upstanding citizen with an unfortunate tattoo choice, who immigrated to the city from Germany thirty years ago, married Sarah Murphy twenty-six years ago, had a son they named Issac Ian Maus, and was killed in a mugging gone wrong fifteen years ago outside his home with his wife.”

Felinus frowned, suddenly feeling rather inadequate to a man who had been dead for fifteen years. Obviously, Felinus had never been arrested or even suspected of his larger crimes. Between Snake and careful clean-ups, there was nothing to connect Felinus or his men to the majority of the people they had hunted over the last five years. But in what Bat called “the B.S. time” (before Snake), he had gotten picked up for petty assault, battery, public intoxication, and even one particularly stupid burglary and kidnapping charge when he had climbed into the wrong window as a teenager. “Mugging gone wrong,” he asked instead of dwelling on the injustice of Issac’s dad being a better Reaper than he was a Capo Enforcer. “How did they confuse a hit with a mugging?”

Snake sighed in that frustrated way he did when gross incompetence was going on before him. “They didn’t,” he said, pulling up a police report. “Every single thing on here makes it obvious that theft wasn’t the motivation. She still had her watch and earrings. He had a knife concealed on his person. The only things that I think might have been missing were their wedding rings, but none of the reports make any indication if they were found in their home or were actually missing.” He typed something and a photo popped onto the screen of a young family posing in front of a cheap backdrop of a snowy field with a sad-looking plastic tree in the corner.

Issac was right. His mom had been very pretty even in this stiff Christmas card photo. She had green eyes, dressed in a green and red striped sweater, and her left hand was resting on her husband’s chest, a silver ring with a gem almost the same green as her eyes on her finger as she smiled at the camera. Lukas Maus was a head taller than his wife, broad across the chest; Felinus could see Issac in the way his nose and brow were shaped, his dad obviously fuller in the cheeks but once Issac was to a healthier weight… He does have his mom’s height, Felinus thought as he looked over the garishly festive sweater the German Reaper was wearing. The clover tattooed on one side of Lukas’s neck like every Clover before him was bright on his skin and he was smiling at the camera. Then his eyes dropped down to the small boy in front of them. The spitting image of the man holding his shoulder. Issac looked to be about nine or ten in the photo, with a more strained smile than his parents like most children do when they’ve been holding the look for more than five photos. Still, Issac looked like a happy little boy, dressed in the same matching sweater as his parents and carrying the soft fat of a well-fed child who hadn’t reached puberty.

“This was what they used to identify the bodies,” Snake said, leaning back and pulling his legs into his chair as he picked up his iced coffee. “A week after the murders, child services was called in to do a welfare check on a student that had missed school and whose parents hadn’t responded to any calls.”

Felinus’s stomach twisted into a knot. “It took people a week to realize Issac was alone?”

“Seems like it,” Snake sighed. “It probably would have been longer if his teacher wasn’t so dedicated to her job. I read her statement. She said that Issac never missed a day of school unless he was sick and that Lukas always called to let them know the second he decided his son wasn’t well enough to go in. Her statement also said that Lukas never missed her calls if they were made during school hours, so when she hadn’t heard from him the first day and her calls went unanswered, she wanted to get services and the police involved immediately but her admins wouldn’t let her. They made her wait until the following Monday and it was another day before a social worker could actually get to the apartment.” He sighed again, closing his eyes. “This whole thing stinks, Felinus. I looked into Issac’s foster care records last night. It was like they were trying to set him up to fail. The counseling he got was minimal at best. His annual check ups were often rescheduled and reported fading bruises explained away by accidents. Every foster home he was placed in was located in a school district that was failing to thrive and full of gang activity. I don’t think a month went by when there wasn’t some sort of incident report from the fosters, the schools, or the social worker that didn’t involve someone claiming Issac was somehow involved with trouble.” He rubbed at his face. “If these hadn’t been sealed when he turned eighteen, I don’t think any college would have taken him despite the four-point-oh GPA he graduated with.”

“Why was it sealed,” Felinus asked, frowning down at Snake. “If it was as bad as you say-”

“O’Hare did it,” Snake said then waved a hand when Felinus narrowed his eyes. “Not like the man personally sealed Issac’s records, but he’s the force behind it. The Don and Volkov have hands in the funding for this sort of thing, but O’Hare is the person who keeps his hands on the pulse of the kids aging out of the foster system. The policy is that all records, no matter how minor or extreme are sealed by either the child’s eighteenth birthday or high school graduation. There is an extremely well-paid judge who pulls every record on June fifteenth of every year and signs the order to seal them. It would take no less than that judge specifically to unseal them. The only exceptions are kids who get adopted or otherwise out of the system before their eighteenth birthday or graduation, or kids who have been tried as adults. The first group just needs to contact the judge before they turn twenty-one and it’ll be signed away. The other group… well, no one has tried to seal those as far as I can tell.” He looked up at Felinus. “I fell down the rabbit hole on this one, I’m not going to lie. Whatever the Clovers may have done to Lukas Maus, Fergus O’Hare has been a driving force to keep kids out of any of the organizations and going into legit careers. He even personally looks after a group of boys whose dads had all been killed after the war due to gang activity. Reads kind of like a big brother mentor program, on paper at least.”

Felinus grimaced and sipped his coffee. Everything he had heard about O’Hare made him out to be some sort of humanitarian. The Don liked the Irishman, wanted to introduce Felinus to him, and usually that was enough for Felinus to judge a man’s character. But he couldn’t stop thinking about how Issac had flinched at O’Hare’s name, how he had said that the man who killed Lukas and Sarah Maus had been someone they trusted. “What’s O’Hare’s middle name,” he asked, trying to sound casual.

“Um,” Snake said slowly, giving Felinus a weird look and setting down his still-untouched coffee to type. “Sean. Why?”

Not him, the angel on his shoulder said with a sigh of relief.

He just didn’t pull the trigger,the devil pointed out.

Felinus drank more of his coffee, weighing his options. He hadn’t told his men that Issac knew who exactly had pulled the trigger that night, and Issac had said he didn’t want to hunt the man down.

No,the devil said. He said he wasn’t stupid enough to do it alone. Now he has you. You could do it for him. Esposito and Volkov will protect you if the Clovers try to call for blood. They are the ones who let a Casualty Orphan suffer this injustice for fifteen years.

“Issac said that the man who killed his parents that night was someone he was named after,” he said and continued when Snake started to take a breath. “I don’t know what he wants to do. Right now he seems to be leaning towards your approach, but he could switch around to Tiger’s or fall somewhere in the middle once he settles in a bit more. But I don’t think he’s going to tell me who it was and I’d very much like to have a short list of names in case the bastard gets wind of Issac still being around.”

Snake’s lips pressed together in a grimace and he nodded. “It’ll probably be someone close to his dad’s age or older and active when Issac was born and at their deaths,” he said, looking at his computer screen. “I’ll start searching. Issac doesn’t strike me as particularly Irish but Ian…”

“There are a lot of Ians with a clover,” Tiger rumbled, having wandered over sometime during their conversation. “The shower turned off two minutes ago and Brutus is almost done with breakfast.”

“I’ll work on this later,” Snake said quickly, tapping at his keyboard as all the windows closed to reveal a snake photo edited to look like a blushing pop idol.

Felinus looked up at Tiger, frowning at the large German man. “Did you know,” he asked him.

Tiger’s head tilted slightly to one side. “He understands German still,” he said. “It was reasonable to think a parent spoke it at home before he was taken away. But no, I did not in all my imaginings think he would be the son of the German Reaper. That is a title that was whispered like a prayer.”

“Was he one like you?”

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