“What about it?” Jeff asked, turning around in his seat. He looked like a sweetheart; pierced septum and a two missing front teeth.
“I bet, if you ask your friend—Willy, was it?—he’ll tell you this guy had a lot more money than just the few thousand the medics handed over to the cops as evidence.”
Jeff and Rob shared the kind of glance that confirmed Ethan was probably correct.
Grinning, Ethan took the last sip of his cappuccino. “You think those guys are there to save your life, but you better not take your eyes off of them.” He held visual contact with Jeff, Rob, and the quiet one before giving a final nod. “Get their badge numbers, or whatever they carry. Make sure they’re legit, because. . .” he felt his face warming up, the first sign that he was starting to lose control of his emotions. “First responders aren’t always real first responders.”
They stared back at him like he was insane.
After wishing the trio a good day, Ethan left Barney’s. Once he stepped outside, he inhaled a deep breath of fresh downtown air. It was nice and warm, the kind of day that had him wishing he didn’t have so much renovation work to get done back at the house. Because no matter how much Phil wanted to deter him, Ethan knew that Raleigh would be home.
Soon.
And once she walked through those doors, he’d have a nice new room to show her.
Chapter Eighteen
Once Ethan arrived home and parked his Jaguar in the garage, he started across the back yard and, right away, he noticed the yellow sticky note taped to the bars on the door that led to the basement. It seemed strange that someone would leave a note on the back door (he was grateful for those iron bars), but then again, anyone who wanted him to see a note would know that he parked the Jag in the rear of the house, never out front. Which meant Ethan was unlikely to see a message on the front door where most people would leave it.
Descending the stairs to the back door, he reached out and tore the note off. He had to wet his sleeve with his tongue in order to make sure he cleared all of the adhesive gunk from the iron bar where the note-writer had taped it.
The handwriting on the small square was on par with a doctor’s—illegible for the most part—but the message was clear.
Come see me at the Roosevelt office – SA Mike Klein
After a disappointing lunch with Phil, Ethan was encouraged to see that the FBI hadn’t forgotten about what was important: Raleigh’s disappearance. No doubt, Klein had come across some sort of lead now that he had a starting point (Paul Hyatt) in the investigation.
Punching a celebratory fist into the air, Ethan returned to the detached garage and made the half-hour commute to the Chicago FBI field office.
Special Agent Klein’s office had more in common with a janitorial closet than what Ethan expected from a federal agent’s office space. There was no window, and the bare walls were almost purely white (except for the light-gray accent wall behind the desk) and the overhead light had a twitchy flicker. Klein waved Ethan into his office ahead of him, and then sat down at the tidy desk before glancing up at the light and sighing at it.
“I was hoping to book an interview room, but they’re pretty popular today,” Klein said with an apologetic tone and an embarrassed shrug. “So we’re stuck in here.”
Ethan rubbed his hands together, the same way Phil had earlier at Barney’s. “What do you have for me, Agent Klein?” He was hopeful, eager to get started with the juicy details.
Klein stared at Ethan for a moment. “I thought I asked you to stay put on this investigation, Ethan?”
Offering an innocent chuckle, Ethan shrugged. “I know, but you’ll be happy to hear that I not only avoided drama, I did some great legwork for you.”
His leathery face didn’t move. At all.
“For starters, Paul Hyatt’s wife—”
“Lisa,” Klein offered.
Ethan snapped his fingers and grinned. “Yes, Lisa doesn’t have much of an alibi for the night Raleigh disappeared.” Ethan started to wiggle his eyebrows, but stopped when it sunk in that it might come across as insensitive. And the fact that Lisa hadn’t been able to say what Paul had been up to that night was actually a sensitive matter, at least enough for agent Klein to dig deeper into it.
“Why’s that, Ethan? Because she couldn’t remember what her husband was doing on some arbitrary evening seven and a half years ago?” He shook his head, frowning. “I’m sorry, what is it that you’re thinking, exactly?”
“It’s not an arbitrary night,” Ethan said, his tone coming out as argumentative when, in fact, he was downright annoyed. “It’s the night—”
“Raleigh disappeared, I know. But to an innocent woman and her innocent, late husband, it’s just another night.”
“True, but the police sketch—”
“That sketch resembles Paul Hyatt, I’ll give you that.” Klein nodded, a thoughtful and slow motion. “But her husband wasn’t trained as an EMT. In fact, he has no science-related credits beyond whatever courses he needed to graduate high school.” Klein narrowed his eyes. “So, you see the dilemma I’m facing?”
Clearing his throat, Ethan shifted in his hard plastic chair. He opened his mouth to speak, to point out that the scar on Hyatt’s face, but he had trouble finding the right words.
“I also understand there was a disturbance at the Waukegan Harbor and Marina.” Klein’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you, Ethan? And, keep in mind, that could very well be a rhetorical question.”
Clearing his throat one more time for good measure, Ethan raised a finger as if he had an incredibly important point to make. “As a matter of fact, I do. Paul Hyatt named his boat after my wife.”
Again with the motionless facial response.
“It’s called ‘Sea Rally,’ Agent Klein. It ‘appears’ to be a racing name when you see it on the boat,” Ethan explained, feeling a little stupid with Klein’s unimpressed stare on him, “but when you say the name out loud, it’s obviously some kind of slap in the face.” This time, he bypassed the eyebrow wiggles and pointed at his own nose. “My face, Agent Klein, a slap in my face.”
“That’s enough,” Klein half-snapped. His response indicated that he wouldn’t have been a fan of the eyebrow wiggle. In fact, he seemed outright disgusted with Ethan.
“Wait. Between Paul’s face on the police sketch, his lack of an alibi, and now my missing wife’s name on the back of his boat, it seems like more than just coincidence. You must see that.”
“And what if it is?” Klein asked, his face turning a little red. “What if it is just a coincidence?”
“It’s not. It’s not a coincidence.” He could hear the volume rising in his voice. “Whatever happened to my wife, that man was involved.”
Shaking his head, agent Klein reached into his desk. He seemed to have given up on Ethan’s desperate argument, on his insistence that the obvious facts could lead to his missing wife. But like Ethan and his conspiracy theories, agent Klein clearly had an agenda of his own. He had a train of thought to pursue, at theory to validate, or, most likely, a bunch of paperwork that needed to get done on Raleigh’s long-forgotten case.
Which was surely why he’d left that note for Ethan to pay him a visit. And so, with his own agenda to push, Klein produced a file folder from the desk drawer.
“I want you to look at some photos, Ethan,” he said. He seemed neither impressed nor truly engaged. Again, like there was paperwork to complete and the photos he needed Ethan to review were part of the process that would allow him to finish it.
“Photos of what?” Ethan asked.
Klein nodded, but the question hadn’t called for a yes or no response. He pulled a stack of two-dozen photographs from the folder. “While you’re looking through them, I want you to tell me, one more time, what happened that night.”
If Ethan had been in denial about being annoyed before, that denial disappeared with Klein’s absurd request. “Again? We just went through
everything the other day, Agent Klein—”
“Dates, times, details,” Klein said, cutting Ethan off. Yes, he’d definitely given up on the previous conversation, as if all of those valid points were meaningless. He was now more interested in going through whatever motions his protocol demanded. “One more time, Ethan.”
“Maybe we should record it?” Ethan asked, spitting out the suggestion and realizing it might come across as insulting. “Because I’m starting to think you’re not paying attention to me, my theories, and, ultimately, what happened to Raleigh seven and a half years ago.”
“Just hoping that something or some kind of memory or other key detail might get jostled loose,” he said with a tired sigh. “So tell the story again, maybe that’ll happen, alright?”
Maybe, but almost definitely unlikely.
After matching Klein’s stare, Ethan finally shook his head and sighed. “Okay, I guess. Let’s do this.”
Chapter Nineteen
Ethan motioned for the stack of photos that Klein had withdrawn from his file folder. Once Klein seemed confident in Ethan’s commitment to telling the story, yet again, he released his grip and let him take the entire folder.
But before glancing down at the first image, Ethan noticed that the fed’s eyes remained glued to him. Like he was watching for a reaction, and for good reason because once Ethan’s attention gradually shifted south to that first photo, he experienced the first jolt of shock from this exercise.
That first photo was from that night. It was an image of the bathroom, a folded evidence card on the floor where Raleigh had collapsed.
Happy now? Was this the reaction you wanted from me?
“Time, date, and details,” Klein said, his voice more of a distant drone than a demanding command.
Staring at the photo, Ethan could almost smell Raleigh’s perfume, her shampoo, her distinct fragrance, just staring at the spot where she’d collapsed, the old bathroom vanity. It felt like the last night he’d seen her alive.
“Time, date, and details,” Klein repeated, reeling Ethan back to the present of Klein’s monotonous office.
And so, after wiping his eyes, Ethan repeated what had happened that night. How she’d rolled out of the bed, the tired mattress springs stirring him awake. The time was somewhere around four in the morning. Seeing the image was beyond hypnotic; it felt like a recurring nightmare coming to life.
Swallowing back the bile in his throat, Ethan quickly flipped to the next photo. That one was an image of a man he didn’t recognize. He had brown hair with strokes of gray through the sides, right next to his temples. If he had to guess, Ethan would peg this unfamiliar man at roughly a few years older than him. The man wore a suit, had diamond-studded cuff links at the end of his shirtsleeves, and he seemed to be talking to someone else, someone stranding off-camera.
A corporate type of guy.
“Who is this?” Ethan asked, looking up and finding Klein’s constant stare. If he’d been watching for a reaction to this second photo, he would not have caught much.
“Time, date, details,” Klein repeated. Then, with a nod to the photo, “What happened after Raleigh fell?”
Was that a hint? Ethan looked back at the corporate man’s photo, trying to find the relevance between this unfamiliar face (was he a part-time paramedic, a real one, did he own the Chicago EMS, what was his story?) before flipping to the next one.
Another man. This photo was the kind of shot you’d see in a police drama on television, the one they take with the perpetrator holding up a black plaque with his or her name printed in white letters.
“Time, date, details.”
“I, uh, I went to her side.” Ethan looked up and Klein was still staring back. “She wasn’t breathing, so I ran to her side of the bed and . . .”
That’s it, isn’t it?
Next photo. An image of half a dozen medicine bottles inside the bathroom cabinet, the labels turned toward the camera. Four of them were in Ethan’s name, half of which had expired prior to the date stamp in the photo’s lower right corner; two in Raleigh’s, both current. Ethan didn’t recognize his prescriptions, but he recognized the Serophene for Raleigh’s cycle—wait, maybe it was to enhance her ovulation, that was it—and the other, Hydrea, for her high platelet count. It felt weird seeing her name on those stick-on labels.
Scratching the side of his face, Ethan knew he had another answer, an obvious one he hadn’t picked up until just now. “I, um, I grabbed her phone and pressed the link to make an emergency call.” The phone. The call he’d made, how it had been intercepted.
But there was more than that, wasn’t there?
“Time, date, and—”
“Had to be shortly after four in the morning.”
Next photo. A man in a bathing suit who looked a lot like Terry, the caped clown from the Waukegan Harbor & Marina last week. Ethan looked up, met Klein’s stare and pointed at the photo. “This guy, I know. But only because I just saw him. His name is Terry.”
“At the marina,” Klein said with a nod. “So let’s get back to that night, okay? Any familiarity between this man and the night Raleigh had her fall?”
“No, none.” He’d have recognized Terry at the marina if he’d been present that night, one of the other medics. But he hadn’t been. So Ethan flipped to the next photo and continued with his narrative, getting to the part where the one medic—was it Hyatt? He couldn’t remember but was pretty sure it could have been the young one—turned around and suggested— no, he’d nearly insisted she go with them to the hospital, hadn’t he?
But, telling this story for the millionth time, something nagged at Ethan from the shadows. As he continued providing details, he felt like he was truly missing something. Something about Raleigh’s phone, maybe. There was one other detail about it that he just couldn’t identify, some latent memory that remained constipated in his brain. It sure felt like there was a lot of validity to what Klein had been saying about hoping to jostle something. Something had definitely been jostled about the phone, but Ethan couldn’t pin it down.
The next photo featured another man; curly hair, bloodshot eyes, a bushy mustache. But there was something with the smirk on this man’s lips. So faint that Ethan caught himself staring at it closely and questioning whether it was really there at all.
“Time, date, and details,” Klein repeated, his voice starting to sound impatient, tired.
He sees the recognition in my eyes, doesn’t he?
Taking a deep breath, Ethan looked up at Klein. “That’s a lot of medics, right? Three of them? A call in the middle of a weeknight, and three medics show up. Seems excessive, right? Am I on the right track?”
Ethan motioned to the image, the curly-haired heavy drinker who thought he was either Pablo Escobar or a PI from an eighties television series.
Raising an eyebrow, Klein was unconvinced. “That’s Mister Chambers. Charles Chambers, my twelfth-grade English Lit teacher at Linden Park High School.” He nodded at Ethan to flip through the images, but Ethan simply stared back him.
“Is this a complete waste of time, Agent Klein? Is that what we’re doing here?”
He motioned to the images again. “Time, date, and details, Ethan.”
After a mild hesitation, Ethan finally returned to the photos. The retelling of that night ended five or six photos shy of reaching the end of the stack, so he simply glanced at those last images in silence. The entire time, Klein watched him, even as Ethan reached photos of people who had to be friends or colleagues of Paul Hyatt (one of them, Ethan recognized from the funeral home, the father of the boy who’d glanced back on him as he entered the building). But, like everyone else in the stack, the people with links to Hyatt didn’t look familiar from the night Raleigh had climbed into the ambulance.
It was a bust.
Handing the photos back to Klein, Ethan thought back to the conversation he’d heard at Barney’s over lunch. “Is it possible Hyatt was involved in this cover up but didn’t know th
e people he was working with?”
Klein didn’t seem all that impressed. “How so, Ethan?”
He explained the three kids at lunch. “Something those kids left out was that, if these people were all strangers, they couldn’t be linked by the police. And these people—your English teacher as an example—probably aren’t linked to the one solid lead we have, which is Paul Hyatt. Right?” He watched Klein’s expressionless response.
At last, the federal agent shook his head. “Again, you’re suggesting a level of complexity that just doesn’t make sense. Between you and me, Ethan, I’ve never seen someone kidnapped like that. Not domestically, anyway.” He shook his head some more.
“What about the medic, the one that insisted Raleigh go with them?” Ethan talked about that for a while. Time, date, and details. “He made a convincing case for her to jump onto that stretcher, right after she’d decided to wait it out at home. There’s something in that, Agent Klein.”
And that was when Klein shifted, pulling the photos back into a tidy pile inside the file folder and tucking it back in his desk drawer. If he’d been done with Ethan’s speculative theories earlier, he sure didn’t want to hear another one now.
“Listen, Ethan,” he said, sighing. “There’s a reason the FBI isn’t taking a more active interest in Raleigh’s so-called disappearance. Not only did it happen seven and a half years ago, but there’s evidence that suggests she wasn’t even kidnapped.”
“A cover up, then.” Even to Ethan’s own ears, he sounded a little unstable. Desperate. “Chicago EMS messed up and made the whole incident go away by pretending it never happened—”
“No, Ethan,” Klein said, staring hard at Ethan now.
Whatever it was, Ethan didn’t get the feeling that this conversation would end well.
“You ever wonder why the Chicago police arrested you?”
No, he hadn’t. He didn’t have to wonder because he knew about the falsified charges of domestic abuse. They’d itemized a series of complaints, allegedly from Raleigh herself. Apparently, there were photos, none of which were ever made available to him, which meant it was all a line of crap to try and get him to confess to abuse that never existed. “I already told you,” Ethan said, his face and patience burning up, “they thought I’d made the whole thing up. But my neighbors backed me up and—”
The Last Night (The Last Series Book 2) Page 8
