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go-bag.”
     
“A very bad go-bag. Too many clothes. Not enough cash. No credit cards. And this.” She held up the address book. “If this is a list of contacts in whatever his business was, this is very unprofessional.”
     
I held up a hand, began counting on my fingers. “Drugs, guns—”
     
“It doesn't matter,” Alena interrupted, dropping the address book on the bed. “Whatever it was he was into, his sins caught up with him. Come, dinner's ready.”
     
She walked out of the bedroom. I stared at the scattered clothes, the two passports, the address book, the gun. I thought about my own go-bag, waiting on the top shelf in the front closet, resting beside Alena's.
     
Wondering how much longer I had before my sins caught up with me.
     
     
    CHAPTER
Four
Alena took the car, leaving before dawn. If things went well, she could do the drive to Tbilisi in four hours. If things went the way they normally did, it would take her closer to eight, accounting for the appropriate checkpoints and shakedowns. I didn't fear for her well-being. Anyone who tried to take something from her she wasn't willing to give would draw back a bloody stump, and that was only if she allowed them to keep their life.
     
For my part, I knew Alena left before dawn because I was awake when she did it, and that was because I hadn't been able to sleep. I couldn't stop thinking about Tiasa. Whoever Bakhar Lagidze had been before he'd come to Kobuleti—and clearly hehad been someone he was trying to escape, to put in the past—I could imagine Tiasa no more culpable in it than Koba was.
     
There were a handful of reasons to have taken her alive.
     
Not a single one of them was pleasant.
     
     
Georgians, in the main, are not early risers, and Mgelika Iashvili was no exception. I had been waiting at his office for forty minutes already when he arrived just before eleven. Only a handful of officers were present prior, and many of them I knew by name. I spent the wait with small talk, mostly about how much the tourists were a necessary evil this time of year and how much we all hated the fucking Russians.
     
A couple years back, the police in the Adjara Autonomous Province, of which Kobuleti was a part, received new patrol cars and new uniforms from the Interior Ministry, as part of President Saakashvili's efforts to stamp out corruption and rebuild the public trust in the nation's police. The money came as trickle-down American largesse, brought about in turn through Georgia's cooperation in the Global War on Terror. In addition to spiffy new duds and shiny new cars, the money also went to training, improving border security, and to aid stamping out corruption in the ranks.
     
The new uniforms were baby-boy-nursery blue, and less totalitarian looking than the Soviet-era-influenced ones that had preceded them. The cars were white with a navy stripe on the hood. The corruption remained.
     
Five minutes after Iashvili arrived, he invited me into his office, where a junior officer brought us the ubiquitous hospitality of a cup of tea, leaving us alone behind the closed door after we'd been served. I sipped—drinking tea fast in front of your host is considered an insult, almost, but not quite, as bad astoasting someone with beer rather than wine—and Iashvili and I made more small talk for a bit. By the time he finally asked me why I'd stopped by, I could feel the caffeine crawling in my veins.
     
“Bakhar didn't kill his family,” I told him. “He didn't kill himself.”
     
Until then, Iashvili had been smiling, friendly. Not so much now. “We're saying he did, David.”
     
“And I'm saying that I know he didn't.”
     
“And how would you know that?”
     
“It doesn't matter how I know. What matters is that you understand three things. I know he didn't do it. I know Tiasa—his daughter—wasn't killed, at least not at the house. And, most important, that I'm not asking you to prove otherwise.”
     
The hostility that had been