The Last Night
Harvey Church
Copyright © 2018 by QuoteStork Media, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For my wife… to the night you were taken away in an ambulance.
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Preview: The Last Friend
Why I Write
Acknowledgements
Also by Harvey Church
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Chapter One
The day Ethan Vernon became a true multi-millionaire, his past came back to bite him. With a vengeance, in fact. The kind of retribution that spawns bribes and ends lives.
It didn’t start out that way. It started as a nibble, prompted by the fact that if his wife hadn’t disappeared seven and a half years prior, he wouldn’t be stepping up to the teller wicket as a multi-millionaire in the first place. And he never would have gone to the Second City bank branch on North Ave, with a big smile on his face as he stepped up to the teller and handed her the insurance check for two-and-a-half million dollars.
“Deposit,” he said, keeping his voice low. There was nobody else in the branch.
The young teller’s blue eyes widened as she glanced down at the check and absorbed the enormity of his request.
“Savings account,” Ethan said, his heart pounding in his ears as he wiped his clammy palms down the thighs of his jeans.
Now that the courts had declared Raleigh dead in absentia, the insurance company had been cleared to pay him. And that meant he’d been able to “retire” from his analyst job at Exact Data Systems, a data center for a large credit card company. By retiring at the ripe old age of thirty-five, Ethan was hoping to finally move on with his life as an official widower.
But, as the wide-eyed teller tapped away at her computer, depositing the money into his bank account, what had begun as a nagging nibble that Thursday afternoon quickly escalated into a morbid gnawing. The kind that breaks the surface of the skin, draws blood, and leaves scars.
“Do you need a receipt?” the teller asked him.
Ethan shuffled his weight from one leg to the other, wiped his palms dry again, and then cleared his throat. “Does it show in the account right away?”
“Certainly does, Mr. Vernon.”
He nodded, tapped the teller wicket, and then turned on his heels and walked away.
Once Ethan left the Second City branch and settled behind the wheel of his new Jaguar F-Pace SUV, he felt like he had finally moved past the bad chapters of his life. However, that relief—of finally being free of the past and of all the bad things that came with losing a wife without ever knowing what had happened to her—lasted all of three minutes.
As he made his left turn onto Halsted, intent on driving north into one of Chicago’s many rejuvenated neighborhoods, Ethan came across a car accident. A violent and messy one, the type where parents tell their children to look away.
A Jaguar SUV—just like his except blue instead of white—had been t-boned with such force that it had rolled over multiple times, toppled the traffic light at the next intersection across both lanes, blocking Ethan’s and the oncoming lanes, and finally came to rest against a bus shelter. Understandably, traffic had come to a standstill; people had killed their engines and stepped out to watch the emergency crew—three trucks from the Chicago Fire Department, a pair of police cars, a single ambulance—from behind their open vehicle doors.
Ethan also stopped his Jag to have a look. He killed the engine with a shaky push of the ignition button, unclasped his seatbelt, and then stepped out from behind the steering wheel. Recently retired with two-and-a-half million dollars in the bank, he wasn’t exactly in a big hurry to get back to a desk or, in his case, a home that had remained empty and hollow since Raleigh had disappeared seven and a half years ago. If anything, the distraction offered by the violent accident was welcome.
Unlike the other onlookers, who watched from their vehicles or behind their open doors, Ethan moved toward the other Jag, the mangled heap of blue metal where the first responders were working frantically to reach the passenger, or passengers, inside the quiet, smothered cabin.
“Where’s the car that hit him?” he asked, approaching a large man with red hair and a white goatee outside a big Mercedes-Benz.
The ginger Benz owner pointed a thick finger in the opposite direction. Half a block away, Ethan saw a large heavy-duty Ford pick-up that seemed to be watching on. That truck was a matte-gray monster. It had four rear wheels and a reinforced chrome front grill that was meant more as insurance to ensure the pedestrians, wildlife, or cyclists (or in this case, Jaguars) it struck would die on impact rather than end up permanently injured.
“Must’ve been booking it,” the Benz owner speculated. “Betcha he was clocking fifty miles an hour.”
“Uh huh.”
Ethan continued forward as the firefighters got the Jaws of Life contraption set up for the tricky extraction. Once the hydraulic lines were all hooked up, the mechanical jaw began chewing through metal, a sound that made Ethan cringe.
At that moment, with the on-site demolition taking place to his left, Ethan realized that he wasn’t walking toward the big wreck anymore. Instead, he was headed straight for th
e ambulance, his attention focused on its wide-open rear doors.
The ambulance’s interior was vacant. No paramedics inside; they were standing by at the scene, the gurney open and waiting closer to the Jag for whatever mess remained of the driver and passengers.
That was also when another medic appeared, walking out from the front of the ambulance with his hands on his hips.
“Can I help you, sir?” His voice was stern and suspicious, as young as Ethan’s. But it wasn’t his voice that Ethan cared about. In his tight-fitting EMT uniform, the brown-haired medic frowned. Ethan knew that suspicious scowl, but the rest of the medic’s face meant nothing.
I’d know the face, even after all of these years.
“Sir, you need to return to your vehicle,” the medic said. “We’ll get you on your way shortly.”
Not recognizing the EMT—not his lips, eyes, voice, or any other aspect of his physical appearance—Ethan finally allowed a deep breath. It came out as a relieved sigh before he turned and stepped back from the ambulance, its wide-open back doors, the empty treatment compartment watching him.
For most people, that ambulance wouldn’t have been a big deal. But for Ethan, the last time he’d stared into the back of an ambulance like the one at the scene of that horrible accident, a trio of EMTs had pushed Raleigh inside and closed the doors.
It was the last night he’d ever seen her.
Chapter Two
When Raleigh and Ethan were first married in ‘09, their three-level detached home at 121 Cobalt had been neighbors to a crack house to the left and an old woman’s home on the right. In fairness, all three homes were in desperate need of repair, but theirs was clearly in the best shape. They’d bought the fixer-upper with plans to stay for a few years and then rent it out, either to the owner of the crack house so he might expand his operations or, preferably, to a family member of the lovely old lady next door (Yvonne) so they might keep a closer eye on her.
But then less than a couple of years into their homeownership life, Raleigh was taken away in an ambulance, and Ethan held on to the house in case she might some day find her way back. In a strange twist of fate, the city invested heavily in their northern ‘burb, cleaning up the streets by demolishing a lot of the despaired housing and allowing hungry and eager developers the opportunity to erect high-rent apartments and luxury condominiums.
Yvonne, the old lady next door, died in 2012, and the sole benefactor of her estate had gone and spent a small fortune renovating the property. The crack house was shut down, demolished, and turned into a dog park (which was why Ethan hated dogs; those little baggies full of crap always found their way onto his property).
The lane behind his home got cleaned up, too. A fresh coat of asphalt, high-intensity LED streetlights, and a handful of privately owned CCTV cameras kept it relatively safe. Just seven years prior, he’d been afraid to drive his then-decade-old Toyota Corolla down that alley; today, as he steered his new Jaguar off of Aldine, he didn’t even check to make sure his doors were locked.
Besides, Ethan’s neighbor, Yvonne’s beneficiary, drove a Porsche worth $200,000 and had a Range Rover for those notorious snow-heavy days in the winter.
Once Ethan reversed the Jag into the detached garage, he waited for the rolling door to seal shut before getting out. Old habits. Plus, despite the transformation in this area, it was still wise to play it safe. From the garage, it was a short walk through the fenced-in backyard, down a set of concrete stairs to a basement door with its original, heavy iron bars that were easier to keep than to replace. He used two different keys to disengage the old-school deadbolts and then let himself into the laundry area.
At the other end of that room, next to the door that led to the basement’s narrow playroom—pool table, flat-screen television, a duo of leather recliners—was a coat rack, six hooks along the top. Three of those hooks, the ones closest to the door, had jackets hanging from them; Ethan’s leather winter jacket, the formal trench coat he’d worn to work for the past six years, and a wind-resistant athletic coat for when he jogged or did other outdoorsy, active things, which wasn’t often. The remaining three hooks were vacant, always available for when Raleigh returned, something he’d always imagined happening. But now that the courts had declared her dead, it seemed the odds of his wife walking in and tossing her own jacket onto one of those hooks were no longer in his favor. Maybe, he thought as he his hand brushed across the coat rack’s empty slots, those hooks would remain vacant forever.
No, she’ll be back.
Swallowing the lump in his throat, Ethan let himself out and climbed upstairs to the reading room. He flicked on the television then wandered over to the big, open-concept kitchen. He could still see the television from behind the breakfast island, could even switch the channels with the remote. Before getting started with his dinner prep, he clicked through to WGN-Chicago, confident they would report on the destruction he’d witnessed on Halsted after leaving the Second City branch earlier.
Sure enough, as the pasta boiled and he was mid-way through cooking a batch of his signature meatballs (his secret: fresh garlic and basil), the male news anchor’s (Chad Worthington) tone turned somber and he announced “yet another fatality” on Chicago’s streets.
“But instead of gunfire,” Jasmine Laflamme, his female co-anchor, chirped in, “this fatality involved two vehicles traveling at high speeds along Halstead, north of, well, North Avenue earlier this afternoon.”
The single victim was a man named Paul Hyatt, “a successful, local businessman and consultant to some of the nation’s most prolific boards of directors,” according to Chad.
By now, Ethan had abandoned his meal prep and moved around the large breakfast island to get a closer view of the television in the reading room. Both anchors were gorgeous, living billboards for the young and beautiful. But as pretty as he found Jasmine with her light-reflecting teeth, fake breasts and too-perfect blonde hair, nothing could jolt his heart like seeing Paul Hyatt’s picture.
I thought I’d never recognize him.
When Ethan opened his mouth to curse, nothing came out. He entered the room and sat down in a reading chair, making it just in time as his legs turned to jelly and collapsed beneath him. He had to breathe in through his nose. Exhale out his mouth. His jaw was set, arousing a pain that originated in the roots of his teeth and stretched up like a lightning bolt through his jaw and into his skull.
This isn’t happening.
It had been seven and a half years, but Paul Hyatt’s face hadn’t changed.
Ethan knew that face.
Those eyes had haunted him each night before he fell asleep.
He recognized the scar.
Paul Hyatt wasn’t a prominent business figure. He wasn’t a consultant. No. He was one of three medics who had helped Raleigh climb onto the stretcher and then rolled her into the back of an ambulance that apparently never existed.
Chapter Three
Once Paul Hyatt’s face dropped from the screen, allowing Chad and Jasmine to rave about a local football team’s recent winning streak, the loud ringing in Ethan’s ears subsided to a level where he could think again. Maybe not clearly, and maybe not straight, but once the panicked alarm quieted, he managed to convince himself to make a phone call.
19th District - Chicago Police Department.
Stumbling out of the reading chair, he returned to the kitchen. The meatballs were sizzling in the frying pan as he walked past, so he gave the handle a quick shake to roll them over. The bright brown patches underneath the meatballs made his stomach drop. Such a sad sight. But he remained focused on the task at hand, hating himself (not for the first time) for not allowing magnets to go on the front of his stainless steel refrigerator door. That stubbornness meant the business card that belonged to the detective working Raleigh’s disappearance wasn’t easily located.
He had to dig through the piles in the bills drawer next to the oven. Five minutes later, he finally found it. The corners were folde
d, rounded. A stain of something orange had been smeared across Det. Brandon Price’s name, right below the checkerboard line that seemed more fitting for a taxi driver’s business card than a detective’s. With a trembling finger, he located Price’s numbers—office, cell, fax—in the bottom right of the old card. He called the first one.
When a receptionist answered, he asked for Detective Brandon Price.
“I’m sorry, he’s no longer with our district. You’ll want Detective Declan Tate.” Before Ethan could object—he didn’t even know what he would offer as an objection; plus he didn’t know anybody else at the Chicago Police—the line was ringing and a male picked up.
“Homicide, Tate.” Direct. Authoritative. Calming.
Homicide? Raleigh was a missing person…
“I, uh, um…” He realized he was fumbling, desperate to stay afloat after what he’d just seen on the television.
The Last Night (The Last Series Book 2) Page 1
