His name is Richard William Bins. Born 8/1/1950. Des Moines, Iowa, I think. Name a price and get back to me.

Henry

I hit send.

I make my way back upstairs. Back in my room, I fall to my knees and lift the mattress off the box springs (this is where I hid a Playboy in my youth — I only ever had one, December 1995, Samantha Torres) and retrieve the red folder.

I was surprised when Ingrid told me the folder was sitting in the safe when she returned to the condo. An oasis in a desert of mayhem, the safe stood open, the red folder sitting benignly on the middle shelf.

The only other things that were in the safe were two of Lassie’s prized jingle balls, and they were taken by one of the goons who destroyed the condo.

To say Lassie was mortified to learn this would be an understatement. I didn’t even know cats could cry.

I walk back downstairs, grab a peanut butter smoothie from the fridge, and find my dad’s tan leather La-Z-Boy and fall into it.

Lassie pitter-patters down the stairs and jumps into my lap.

“Hey, buddy.” I scratch behind his ears. “You looked mighty comfortable last time I saw you.”

Meow.

“Murdock kept farting, huh?”

Meow.

“My dad too?”

Meow.

“Yes, it must have been from the sauerkraut.”

Meow.

“Murdock ate seven Reubens. Wow, yeah, that is a national security risk.”

I give him a spoonful of peanut butter smoothie and he laps it up. We spend the next five minutes sharing the smoothie, then he settles onto my lap and falls asleep.

I set the empty glass on the small chair-side table and pick up the red folder. I’d spent ten minutes pouring over the pages every day for the past week.

The first page is an eight-by-ten picture of my mother. The landscape is green and lush. My mother stands in front of six men, all of South American descent. They are covered in filth and three are shirtless. My mother has a gun leveled at them. She is wearing blue jeans and a tan shirt. Her head faces the camera, chestnut brown hair cascading to her shoulders and emerald green eyes shimmering under a high afternoon sun. High cheekbones and a square jaw scream of her eastern European ancestry. I would guess her to be in her late thirties.

I know from the file that the picture was taken in Honduras between 1985 and 1988, the years my mother spent teaching the Honduran nationals how to best interrogate prisoners.

I flip to the next page in the file.

My mother was born Elena Janev on April 23, 1948, in the former Yugoslavia — what is now Macedonia.