Free Blood Bond by Sophie Littlefield

less. Shaved and dressed mechanically. Never stopped sifting through what he knew, tumbling new information in with everything else, even while he slept. He learned to trust this near-fugue state, the strange combination of veiling and intensifying; eventually, the answers came in fits and starts, slipping almost furtively from his subconscious mind to the part of him that burned for resolution.
    But he was having trouble on this case. It wasn’t just his attraction to Marva—it was the backdrop against which he’d met her: the canvas of white privilege to which he’d feigned indifference for so long it had almost ceased to bother him. Almost. Until someone like Engler made some offhand remark— I mean no offense to your, uh, religious beliefs —that reminded him that when you weren’t part of the canvas, the barriers never went away. And if Joe really had been interested in Marva, guys like Engler would consider it their duty to remind him he wasn’t welcome.
    Joe felt anger simmering dangerously close to the surface, making something far more complicated of his simple attraction to a woman. But emotions had no place in his job. There wasn’t room for them. Joe picked up an unused napkin and folded it into smaller and smaller squares, wondering how he’d allowed this breach in his focus, and what to do about it. He’d promised himself he would never give less than all of himself to the job the day he walked away from medical school and into the police station to inquire how he could become a cop. In a decade of police work—the first few years in San Francisco and nearly seven on the Montair force—he’d never broken that promise.
    THE SOURCE of Joe’s dramatic change of direction was no mystery. On a sunny autumn day in 2001, his father had been beaten within an inch of his life.
    Osman Bashir had gone out in the late afternoon before dinner to buy a simple metal washer. The kitchen sink was leaking, and Joe’s mother said she couldn’t stand to work in the kitchen with the sound of the dripping water. Osman was a man who liked to try things himself before calling in a professional. With both his sons in graduate school—Omar in the MBA program at UCLA, Joe studying medicine at UCSF—he had begun to allow himself the small indulgences of a man approaching retirement, and puttering around the condo was his favorite hobby. He was even considering turning part of the boys’ room into a sort of shop, with a small workbench and a pegboard for his tools.
    Osman didn’t care for Home Depot. He liked small stores, where he could find his own way through the aisles. He was willing to drive out of his way. Across the Fremont border into Sunol, there was a little hardware store he’d visited before.
    Coming out of the store with his small package, the top of the brown bag carefully folded down like a lunch sack, Osman was smiling when a pickup truck with two men in it screeched to a halt in front of him. Osman thought the men wanted directions. It was a matter of pride to him that, having lived in the area since emigrating in 1970, he knew his way around very well.
    Afterward he had no memory of the attack, but witnesses—and there were several, since it took place in broad daylight on a busy street—said one of the men used an aluminum baseball bat. It was September 19, 2001.
    There followed a long, touch-and-go hospital stay before the many months of physical therapy began. Mumtaz and Omar hovered around the hospital room, their eyes rimmed with red, receiving the many friends Osman had made at the accounting firm, the condo building, the Islamic Center, the municipal pool where he swam twice a week. Joe came every day and stayed as long as he could stand it, which was usually less than half an hour. Seeing his father with tubes taped to his skin, his eyelids seeming to grow more translucent every day, spurred in Joe an urgency to act, to