Donovans 01 - Amber Beach

anything, how can you be sure it was a man, much less the same one?”
    While Honor picked at her crab, she thought of ways to sidestep the question. None came to mind. Nor did any explanation that wouldn’t make her sound like a New Age wacko.
    “Honor?”
    Sighing, she quit fiddling with the crab leg and looked across the table at Jake.
    “Are you the macho kind who feels all superior when a woman talks about pretty reliable, really nonlinear ways of getting information?” she asked.
    It took Jake a moment to sort out what she was trying to say. Even then he wasn’t sure, until he remembered Kyle’s famous hunches, a kind of gambler’s luck that he laughingly said came to him from the Druid side of the Donovan blanket. His mother’s side.
    “Nonlinear information,” Jake said neutrally. “Is that a fancy way of saying your woman’s intuition is at work?”
    “I prefer to call it a hunch. Men don’t make sarcastic jokes about hunches.”
    “Okay. You have a hunch that the same man has called you twice tonight and had nothing to say. What else?”
    “You’re going to think this is weird.”
    “So are crabs. Did that stop me?”
    She smiled crookedly.
    If he hadn’t already known she was Kyle’s sister, Jake would have been certain now. That off-center smile was a big part of the Donovan charm.
    “One of the men who answered my ad in the paper made my skin crawl,” Honor admitted.
    “Did he touch you?”
    Though Jake’s voice hadn’t changed, her breath caught. She sensed that he was angry as certainly as she had sensed the mysterious caller’s malevolence.
    “No,” she whispered. “I didn’t even let him in the front door.”
    “Why?”
    “His eyes.” A shudder worked through her. “They made a snake look friendly.”
    “Most of them are.”
    “You and Faith. She says the only kind of snakes she worries about have two legs.”
    “Drink some more wine,” he said, filling her glass. “You look tighter strung than a steel guitar.”
    She took a few quick sips, then a healthy swallow. With a whispery sigh she settled into her chair and began looking at the crab with interest again.
    “Other than eyes,” Jake said, “was there anything memorable about the guy?”
    She hesitated, fork halfway to her mouth, and thought about the short time the man had been at her front door.
    “He was Caucasian,” she said, “over thirty, medium height, medium weight, medium brown hair, medium everything except his voice. He had an odd accent.”
    “European?”
    “Maybe, but it wasn’t French, Italian, or German.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Pretty sure. Faith and I have worked with a lot of Europeans in our business.”
    “There’s a group of recently arrived Russians in Anacortes,” Jake said slowly. “They’re day workers, mostly. Then there are the Finns and the Croatians, but those families have been here so long that only the grandparents talk with an accent.”
    “For someone who lives in Seattle, you sure know a lot about Anacortes.”
    “I was raised here.”
    “Oh. Is that where you met Captain whatshisname, he of the bright orange Zodiac?”
    “Conroy. What kind of clothes was Snake Eyes wearing?”
    “Generic stuff. Dark wind shirt and pants, like a warm-up suit. Leather jacket, cheap from the look of it. Some kind of athletic shoes, not new. A baseball cap that looked like it had hitchhiked from hell.”
    A picture of a snake-eyed man half a world away flashed through Jake’s mind. Even as he told himself it was extremely unlikely, he couldn’t shake the memory of Dimitri Pavlov’s little black eyes and standard E-Bloc thug couture, the kind of clothes that would be thought fashionable only in a country where Western consumer goods were rare.
    The problem with Pavlov as Snake Eyes was simple: no money for a ticket to the United States. Half the time Pavlov couldn’t even afford vodka. On the other hand, rumors that the Amber Room had been found would bring quite a gathering of international carnivores. Compared to the dead czar’s priceless amber art, the cost of a plane ticket was nothing. Some crooked entrepreneur could have financed Pavlov’s travel expenses in the hope of making an astronomical profit when the Amber Room was found.
    “Did the man have all his fingers and thumbs?” Jake asked.
    Honor grimaced, remembering the cops’ questions about the dead man who had washed up on a rocky island beach.
    “I didn’t count,” she said slowly, “but I