Storm Front

The Orioles had long been “we” in the Storm house hold. With a few exceptions, this had been an act of shared suffering by the Storm men.

“We would have beat the Yankees if Jimmy Johnson had been Jimmy Johnson,” Derrick said.

“Didn’t realize you still paid that close attention.”

“Some things are in the blood, whether you want them there or not, old man.”

“Hey, it was only fifteen years between postseason appearances,” Carl said, then added in a lower voice: “It better not be another fifteen or I might not make it.”

Derrick let the macabre comment pass.

“I see the old Westing house still works,” he said.

“Yeah. Why? You want to take it apart again?”

Derrick laughed. As a boy, his father had insisted his son know how to take apart and reassemble a radio — and understand the functions of all the parts he saw along the way — as if this were some basic survival skill every young man needed.

“Let’s just worry about the car, Dad.”

The younger Storm probed the Buick with his eyes first, then his hands. Soon, he zeroed in on a bundle of wires near the windshield-washer fluid reservoir.

“Here’s the problem,” he said. “Check out the fusible link wire.”

Carl frowned, cursed, and grabbed some drugstore glasses off his workbench. Once the glasses were perched on the end of his nose, he shined a flashlight at the offending area. “I’ll be damned,” he said, looking at a wire that had been Southern fried into a melted mess. “I can’t believe I missed that.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s your culprit,” Derrick said.

Carl took a glance at his wristwatch, a Casio that was at least as old as the car. “Auto parts store is closing up. I can tackle this in the morning. Let’s get a beer.”

Derrick followed his father into the time warp that was his boyhood home. Little had changed about the house in well over thirty years. The house cried out for a woman’s touch, but Storm’s mother had died in a car accident when he was five. Derrick had only vague memories of her and knew little about her. The sum total of what his father ever said about her was “She was a heck of a woman, your mother.” Then he’d make an excuse to leave the room.

Carl went over to the mostly barren refrigerator — current inhabitants: mayonnaise, Kraft American singles, yellowing lettuce, hamburger rolls stale enough to be brittle to the touch — and grabbed two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon from a half-full twenty-four-pack. In his years away from his father, Derrick had developed a palate for crafted microbrews of varying sorts. He was currently indulging an IPA phase. But in the house of his father, he honored the local custom: an American macrobrew.

They settled into seats in the living room — Carl in his favorite Barcalounger, Derrick on the paisley patterned sofa — and cracked open the beers. This was a kind of unofficial ritual between the Storm boys. Derrick shared most all of his cases with his father. It was partly because he valued his father’s insights. It was mostly because Carl Storm was his insurance policy. Jedediah Jones would leave Derrick Storm to rot in that Tibetan prison if it was politically expedient. Carl Storm would never rest until his son came back safely.

And so, as they drank, Derrick told his father about the trail of dead bankers, the certainty of Volkov’s nefarious hand at work, and the possibility of Chinese involvement. Carl Storm listened with the practiced ear of a seasoned investigator. Carl had been career FBI, joining the Bureau in an era when it wasn’t quite as polished as it had since become. Back then, it was more of a blue collar crime-solving unit. Their suits were cheaper and so were their educations. The Hollywood influence had yet to transform them into self-styled supercops. They were more like regular cops, albeit very good ones. You still didn’t want to get Carl Storm going on how J. Edgar Hoover had really gotten a bad rap from the media.

Of all the things Carl had taught Derrick through the years, the ability to think like a detective was chief among them. In many ways, the son’s abilities now outstripped the father’s. But the old man could still surprise him. It took two beers’ worth of time for Derrick to lay out everything.

“It sounds like your spook buddies are too focused on finding a link between the suspects that’s either a person or a business deal,” Carl said when Derrick had finished. “What if the link is what they did separately? You said Kornblum and Motoshige had their hands in a lot of things, but Sorenson only did those fancy money swaps, is that right?”

Derrick nodded. Carl continued: “Then this is just a theory to kick around until something better comes along, but money-swapping might be your common element. It’s the only thing all three shared that we know of for sure.”

“Good point,” Derrick said.