Page 67 of Unwanted

Agent Gallagher smiled. “Good. Think about all of this, and then we’ll talk.” He looked between Jak and Harper again. “By the way, what are you two doing for Christmas?”

Harper glanced at Jak. “Christmas?” he whispered.

“Do you remember Christmas, Jak?” Harper asked softly.

He shook his head. “I don’t know Christmas.”

Something sad came into Harper’s gaze. Christmas must be very good. Lots of things must be very good that he’d never known about before. “It’s the holiday of Jesus’s birth.”

“Jesus?”

Both Harper and Agent Gallagher laughed, but their laughter was the nice kind, Harper’s eyes dancing. Jak smiled too. “Never mind that for now.” She looked at Agent Gallagher again. “I usually go to my friend Rylee’s house. But it’s her first Christmas with her new husband’s family…so I don’t have any plans.”

“Well then, it’s settled,” Agent Gallagher said, standing. “You’ll spend it with me and my wife. I insist.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

The old woman peeked through the crack in the door, peering at Mark, eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“Hello, ma’am. Almina Kavazovic?”

“Yes.”

“Agent Mark Gallagher. I’d like to ask you some questions if I may.”

“About what?” she demanded in a heavily accented voice, not widening the door an inch.

“A man who used to live in the apartment next door to you.”

Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly. Almost. Mark caught it and knew his hunch had been right when he’d gotten the list of tenants at the apartment building Driscoll’s sister had mentioned and found the name Kavazovic on it.

“Dr. Driscoll? What about him?”

“Ma’am, this conversation would be a lot easier if you’d let me come in for a few minutes. I have—”

The chain lock disengaged with a soft clatter, and the door opened before Mark could finish his sentence. The woman stood back to allow him entrance, an old lady in a flowered house dress, her hair tucked into a dark handkerchief wrapped around her head. “I knew this day would come,” she said, her voice suddenly holding none of the suspicion, only resignation. She turned, and he shut her door, following her to the living room, where she’d already sunk down into an easy chair that faced a flowered love seat. The furniture was well worn, but the room was neat and tidy, lace doilies atop almost every flat surface. Mark sat and waited for her to speak.

“What did he do?” she asked.

“He’s dead, ma’am.”

She met his eyes then, though she didn’t appear shocked. “Yes,” she said matter-of-factly, “it is for the better then.”

“Will you tell me about Dr. Driscoll? How you came to know him?”

She sighed, a weary sound that rattled in her throat. “He was my neighbor, like you say. I didn’t know him much, just that he work for government. I come from Bosnia in nineties during the war. My family try to come, but they…” She trailed off for a moment, and Mark waited until she continued. “They cannot.”

Mark didn’t ask her to elaborate on that, and he could imagine the reasons her family had run into trouble attempting to immigrate. Red tape…holdups…inadequate finances… He wondered how she’d made it out, but that was somewhat immaterial.

“I go to Dr. Driscoll, ask him if he can help since he have government job. At first he say no. He cannot help. Then he come back later and say yes. He can help me if I take a job for him, follow his rules, and tell no one.”

“What job was that, ma’am?” he asked, his heart sinking, figuring he already knew what she was going to say.

“To take care of baby. To raise him until Dr. Driscoll is ready to train him.”

Train him? Mark had expected her to tell him about raising the baby, but not about…training. He remembered back to his own roaming questions about Driscoll’s interest in the Spartans. “What kind of training?”

“He do not say. He just tell me I must not coddle the boy or I would be doing him disservice. He tell me to feed boy and care for him, but no more. Do not coddle,” she repeated. “That is very important, he say. It is the good way.”

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