Frankie shrugs. “Or he’s already killed Tane.”

“Finn needs Tane to help him launder the cash, maybe try to dip into one of the accounts Tane set up for the Sureños. He’s got someone babysitting him. Finn’s been in prison for years, disowned by his family. Who could he trust? Maybe someone he did time with, but a former soldier who served with him, who knows at least something about the money? That’s my guess.”

From his perch in the chair, Uncle Gavin says, “She’s right.”

“Thanks,” I say. “Now you can explain what the fuck you meant when you said that you have his money.”

Uncle Gavin thinks for a moment, and that’s when I realize how old he looks, his face worn as an old hardcover. He will die one day, I think, and the realization is like being hit by a garbage truck.

“Your father came to me, a few months before he died,” Uncle Gavin says. “He was desperate. He told me about the money, how it was sitting in a Kuwaiti bank. How he’d tried to contact the DoD but no one wanted anything to do with it. How he felt guilty about taking the money, and how by going to the DoD he felt he’d betrayed Yousef, Cortez, even Finn. He wanted to move the money stateside, but then he lost his job at the bank.”

“And that meant he lost whatever inside access he had as a banker,” I say. “It would be a lot harder to transfer that kind of money without leaving some sort of record or involving another banker.”

“He wanted to get the money to the survivors of that day in Baghdad,” Uncle Gavin says. “And for Alanna’s sake, I said I’d help him. And then … and then they were killed, and I took you and your brother in, and I had to decide what to do with that money.”

“It was you,” I say at the same moment the thought strikes me. “You sent the duffel bags of cash to Cortez and Yousef.”

“Only because your father said that’s what he wanted to do with it,” he says. “I knew someone who could transfer the money stateside without leaving an electronic footprint. And then I withdrew it all in cash.”

“Why?” Ethan asks, and then answers his own question. “Less traceable.”

“Virtually untraceable,” Uncle Gavin says. “Cash can be more convenient than money in a bank account.”

“Why did you never tell us any of this?” I ask.

“Because your father didn’t want anyone to know.” He pauses. “And I didn’t want to damage your memory of him.”

And there’s nothing I can say to that.

Ethan clears his throat. “So where is it?” he asks. “The money?”

Uncle Gavin says nothing for a moment.

“Uncle Gavin?”