Hello, Junie. What would you like to know?
“Who the hell is ‘the Yeti’?” asked Peter. But he already knew.
“That’s what we called my dad.” June’s mouth quirked. A complicated expression, neither a smile nor a frown.
Traffic was clearing and he could finally get onto 99, the smaller highway heading north along the Sound. He hit the gas. “That’s the Yeti? The guy who bought you a gun for your fourteenth birthday?”
“I told you I had an interesting childhood.”
It was the opening Peter had been waiting for. “Tell me about your dad.” He was genuinely interested, but he also was thinking about his last conversation with Lewis.
She made a face. “I’d rather not.”
“Come on,” he said. “You keep bringing him up. You must want to talk about him.”
She shook her head. “My dad was a control freak. He used to work in software, which is how he met my mom. When I was a kid, he started his own business, but it fell apart and he moved us out to this remote little valley in eastern Washington. According to my mom, he was getting really weird, even then. Overprotective, compulsive, the whole thing. He was obsessed with getting the place self-sufficient, so we would never need to leave the valley. My mom got offered a job at Stanford and wanted to take me with her. My dad said no. One day she went off to a conference and didn’t come back. I was ten.”
“Jesus,” said Peter. “That must have been hard.”
“Understatement of the year.” June shook her head. “She told me later that she tried to get custody for years, but my dad had a really good lawyer. I guess it got pretty ugly. She had a whole file cabinet just for the legal paperwork. Anyway, I stayed there in the valley while things got worse. He gave me a bracelet once. I slipped on some rocks and broke it, and it turned out to have some kind of electronic chip inside. No wonder he always knew how to find me when I ran away. When I was fifteen, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got serious and made a plan to find my mom. I didn’t take anything with me that he’d given me, and I finally got away. When my mom called my dad to let him know where I was, he showed up at her house. I locked myself in my room while he stomped around and yelled about how we weren’t safe, none of us were safe. Mom had already called the police. When he heard the sirens, he left.”
Carefully, Peter said, “What do you mean by ‘things got worse’?”
She gave him a look. “If that’s a polite way to ask if he molested me, the answer is no. He just got more paranoid, more overprotective. We were way out in the country, and I needed a security code to get into the house. We had a big shed where he worked, and he stopped letting me inside. Said it was for my own good.”
“Did you see him again after that?”
“He came back to Palo Alto twice more. My mom had helped me get a court order declaring me an emancipated minor, which in California you can do at fourteen. I already had my GED, which made it easier. And we had a restraining order. He started out nice, but got upset pretty fast. My mom always called nine-one-one the minute she saw him, and he always left when he heard the sirens.”
“Did he hit you? Did he break things?”
“He definitely broke stuff, but he never hit me or my mom. Angry, but not necessarily at us. He seemed kind of frantic, actually. After he left the last time, I remember thinking if it wasn’t so scary, it would have been sad.”
“Do you remember what he wanted?”
“He wanted me to come back home, where it was safe. He kept saying it, over and over. Come back home, where it’s safe.”
“That’s it?”
She shrugged. “That’s it. I haven’t seen him since. It must be twelve years now.”
“But why do you call him the Yeti? That’s not his name, is it?”
“His same is Sasha,” she said. “He’s kind of a giant guy, and his friends used to call him Sasquatch. When his business began to fail, his hair turned white overnight. So Mom and I started calling him the Yeti. At the time it was a joke. We didn’t realize there was something really wrong with him.”
Sasha Kolodny, thought Peter. Why is that a familiar name?
Then he remembered.
“He’s still there? In that valley?”
“I have no idea. Like I said, I haven’t seen him in years.”
“So you were pretty close, you and your mom.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t look at him. “Can we stop talking about this?”
“Sure,” he said.
36
June was typing again, reading aloud as she did. “Is Tyg3r aware that an unknown entity tried to purchase Tyg3r from Hazel Cassidy?”
Yes.
“Did Hazel Cassidy attempt to use Tyg3r to discover the identity of that unknown entity?”
Yes.
“Was Hazel Cassidy successful in that attempt?”
No.
“How many attempts did Hazel Cassidy make?”
Thirty-one attempts.
“When was the last attempt?”