Danil’s Mate
PROLOGUE
20 years ago
“That guy right there, Dora. The one in the back of the line. What do you notice?” Pandora Katsaros’s dad asked her as he passed his eight-year-old daughter a pair of binoculars.
Dora balanced up on her knees in the front seat of the unmarked car, careful to keep her head out of the line of sight, just like her dad had showed her. She focused the binoculars and zoomed in on a man in a red cap.
“He’s got one hand inside his coat. And there’s a bulge there. I think,” Dora said as she zoomed further with the binoculars, “I think he’s stealing something. Yup. See, there he goes out the side of the building. He definitely stole something.”
Stavros Katsaros fired up the car and followed the man in the red cap as he skittered down the block to his own car. The two cars got on the highway.
“Theories?” Stavros asked his daughter as he trailed the man’s car at an inconspicuous distance.
Dora thought hard, putting some puzzle pieces together in her mind, then shifting them when they didn’t fit quite right. “Some. But I need more info.”
Stavros inwardly grinned at his daughter’s response. He’d taught her well.
About twenty minutes later, the cars pulled off the highway and into a very white-bread neighborhood. Every house looked the same. Even the kids playing in the yards all looked the same. Tossing balls and playing with dollies. Not for the first time in her life, Dora was glad that her dad wasn’t like all the other dads. She never wanted to have a normal life. Not if it was this boring.
Stavros pulled the car off to the side of the road, under a shady tree, and again passed the binoculars to his daughter. He already knew what the man was up to, but he was curious if Dora could put it all together.
She furrowed her brow as she watched the man in the red cap bound up a carefully kept lawn. He called out something to a boy who was drawing with sidewalk chalk on the driveway. The boy looked up and sprinted over to him. The man bent down and pulled a brand new catcher’s mitt out of his coat. The boy lit up like it was Christmas and held the mitt in the air.
Dora could hear her father snapping picture after picture with his high definition camera. The one with the lens a mile long.
“It was a baseball mitt. And he gave it to that kid,” Dora muttered to herself. She thought about how she might run to her own dad across a lawn like that. “But that’s not his kid. I don’t think. They’re greeting each other like they’re still getting to know each other.”
Stavros grinned to himself as he listened to his daughter work out the details under her breath. She was on the right track.
“And that is definitely not his wife,” Dora muttered as she watched a pretty lady in a blue dress come out on the porch of the house and smile down at the man and the boy. “And he stole it. He stole it. Why did he steal it? Something there.”
Dora paused, then tossed the binoculars on the seat beside her in victory. There was a smug look of satisfaction on her eight-year-old face. “Second family. He’s not the real father, he’s still trying to win that kid over with gifts. But he had to steal it so that his real wife, the one who hired us, wouldn’t see the purchase on the credit card statement.”
Her father, still taking pictures, held his hand out for a high five without even looking up from the camera. “You got it in one, Pandora. You’re gonna make a hell of a PI someday, kid.”
Dora leaned out the window as she and her dad headed back home, having gotten all the proof they needed for his client. The wind smacked her face like water at the topmost roll of a wave. In that moment she didn’t need anything else. Not a fancy house, or new toys, or a vacation to Disneyland. All she needed was her dad and a little mystery for the two of them to solve together.
CHAPTER ONE
“Damn it,” Danil Malashovik growled as he glanced at the time on his car radio. His mother was going to deep fry his ass for being late to yet another Sunday dinner. But, he supposed he didn’t really have a choice. There were only so many Public Defenders in Spokane, Washington.
And when duty called, Danil answered. It was in his genes. He came from a very long line of ridiculously hardworking men. His father had worked the wheat fields in Belarus for ten hours every day of Danil’s young life. Until they’d come to America a decade ago.
Danil pulled his car into the parking lot of the northwest precinct. He hoped he could wrap this up quickly. He was starving and he knew for a fact that his mother was making babka. His barbaric brothers wouldn’t save him a single bite if he wasn’t there when it was first put on the table.