The Shadows of Pike Place (A Thomas Austin Crime Thriller #2)

by D.D. Black

"Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all." –Sophocles "Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets." –Paul Tournier "Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead." –Benjamin Franklin

Sasha was her eldest granddaughter, and nothing like Kyon. Polite, smart, beautiful, and, above all: normal. In the fall she’d be heading to Stanford to study engineering.

In the moment before she died, Eleanor Johnson gripped a single thought long enough to fill her last breath with bitterness: which one of those scheming bastards poisoned me?

“The sisters seem kinda normal to me actually. And Junior… sure he was rude, kind of a jerk. But his mom just died, he’s been in prison. I don’t know, money makes people odd. It rarely turns people into killers.”

“People lie about their health. Doctors can be wrong. Point is, I spent a couple days certain the case would come down to money. Often, cases do come down to money.

There was something in the smell of the place that triggered his synesthesia.

‘Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and all that is in it.’ Psalms Ninety-Six.”

“Well, if you have no faith in God, in a higher power, isn’t it all just nothingness? Good and evil, truth and lies. Without faith, why does anything matter?”

“Because. The night Nanna died we were playing video games, and they were sitting next to each other on the couch, sharing a box of chocolates.”

“Older I get, the more I realize nothing is better than having someone to spend time with, someone you love and like, family, people you want to be better for, someone you want to grow old with.”

Amakazes. Made from espresso, sake, maple syrup and fresh ginger, they were like nothing Austin had ever tasted. Bitter and sweet, spicy and cold, it made him feel like he was being drugged with sleeping pills and splashed with ice cold water at the same time.

Humans excelled at finding patterns and using them to predict things. Of course, this also led people to create patterns where there was only chaos, to find conspiracies where there was only human fallibility, complexity, and randomness.