The Last Night (The Last Series Book 2)

by Harvey Church

  Grabbing his head, Ethan pulled on his hair while simultaneously shaking it from all the confusion swirling in his mind. “I thought it was the three of you. Maltby, Hyatt, and you.”

  “And your wife.”

  “Yes, and Raleigh!” Deep breath. “So if Maltby and Raleigh left you and Hyatt on the boat, who came back a couple of days later? Maltby and Raleigh?”

  “No, no, Maltby and the guy who met us at the marina.”

  Ethan was confused. He massaged his temples.

  “So when Maltby and the other guy came back,” Medic Two continued, spelling it out for him so he could follow along, “right away, Hyatt and I knew. Something bad happened. I mean, there was the dried blood all over the back of that van. And there was something else in Maltby. That guy wasn’t so happy-go-lucky anymore. He looked like, well, like he’d murdered someone. And when we got to the cabin, we confirmed that. Hyatt wasn’t happy—he was downright pissed off—but I kept my mouth shut. This wasn’t part of it.”

  “You killed Raleigh?” The words came out as a croaking sound.

  “Not me. Maltby and the other guy.”

  “Jeez.” He felt the color drain from his face and, when he looked down at his hands, he saw lines and a steady trembling that suggested he’d somehow aged ninety years in the span of the past five minutes.

  “The other guy pointed us to the body, and we had to carry it—had to be a good two miles through some thick brush, uphill too, all four of us dragging this rolled up tarp or carpet or whatever with a corpse in it—and then we shoved it into the incinerator.” Medic Two’s face turned a little green at the memory, Ethan saw. But if he felt anything else—remorse, empathy, anything humane—it was lost in the gray of his cold eyes.

  They’d burned her.

  “Whatever happened, they’d obviously got the incinerator fired up before they left to come get us; it was burning real hot.” He raised his own hands, showed the scars on the back of them, purple marks that looked like a tattoo job gone bad. “Burnt myself pretty good, but at that time of year, there was still a bit of snow in those parts of Michigan. We, uh, we watched the orange embers flutter into the night sky. Takes about an hour to turn a human corpse to ash at those temps. And then we rode back to the marina, all quiet with the understanding of what happened out there. Maltby, Hyatt, and me, we climbed back into that boat and followed the sunset all the way across Lake Michigan and back to Chicago. None of us ever spoke about it, not then and not since.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Something shattered inside Ethan. His heart. His sanity. His focus. All of the above, perhaps. He didn’t know how he’d gone from the study room on the fourth floor of the Harold Washington library, across the street, and into the alley between the neighboring building and its mammoth parking garage. He didn’t remember how he’d forced Medic Two onto the ground, how the man’s face had come to be painted red with blood, or how long his fists had been slamming into the man’s face.

  “Where is she!”

  To his own ears, Ethan sounded like someone else, someone possessed.

  Medic Two raised his hands halfway to his face before Ethan’s fist connected with flesh and bone. There was a cracking sound. Another blow and the younger man’s eyes rolled back. After the next one, he went limp.

  Ethan was amazed by all of the blood.

  After a final blow that caused a sick, sucking sound, Ethan released his grip on Medic Two, let the man’s body collapse onto the grease- and grime-stained asphalt. Looking around, he noticed the traffic behind him, rolling along at a casual pace. With a garbage dumpster partially concealing him, he doubted anyone had even noticed what had been going on—how long have I been beating this man?—and even if they had seen anything, like Medic Two’s nose breaking and spraying blood out of his nostril like a lawn sprinkler, it was unlikely anyone had thought to call the police.

  With the prison a few blocks west, this type of thing probably happened all the time in these parts.

  Still, despite his own rationalization, Ethan didn’t want to take a chance. Moving quickly, he grabbed Medic Two’s wallet out of his back pocket. He took the cash, all fifty dollars—three tens and a twenty—a couple of credit cards, and of course his driver’s license.

  Thomas Braun. He was thirty-four and had a DeKalb address at 494 Longview Drive.

  Tossing the empty wallet and loose credit cards into the dumpster, Ethan used Braun’s sweater to wipe as much of the man’s blood off his own hands. He’d need a faucet and soap to get rid of the minutiae evidence—to make it Spic and Span—but once he figured he didn’t look like a serial killer anymore, Ethan stepped over the limp, beaten man and walked through the rest of the alleyway. He emerged on Congress, wondering if this was the way he’d come. He really didn’t remember.

  In fact, as he ignored the stares—I’m just being paranoid, they’re not staring at me—and continued north on Dearborn, heading back toward the parking garage near Barney’s, he wondered if maybe there were other memories about that night that could be evading him as well.

  Why else would Klein have asked to hear the details again, over and over?

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  It took Ethan half an hour under a hot shower to stop trembling. And then, seated at the breakfast bar, he finally picked up Raleigh’s old mobile phone, swapped the SIM card back to his, and dialed Agent Klein’s number.

  Midway through the fourth ring, Klein picked up with a sigh. “Klein.” As if Ethan might be interrupting him when, in fact, he had another puzzle piece to contribute to the seven-and-a-half-year investigation known as Raleigh’s disappearance.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Ethan said, not bothering with identifying himself because he felt that Klein already knew; the sigh said it all. “When he said what they’d done to her . . .” He burst into tears, choking hard and letting the tears pour out of his eyes until he could barely breathe.

  “Ethan?” And then, “Ethan, what are you going on about?”

  “I think I killed a man.” He wept some more, remembering the blood on his hands. It reminded him of the image Klein had shown him, the one of the priest with Raleigh’s hair on it. “He said they shoved her body into an incinerator. In Michigan.”

  Another sigh from Klein’s end of the call. “Just pull yourself together.”

  Struggling to calm himself down, Ethan asked the question he’d been avoiding for over seven and a half years. “What if what they said was right, Mike?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  A couple more choked sobs escaped. “If those police reports were the truth and I’m the violent one, the abusive husband, the one who hurt Raleigh, and faking the kidnapping was her only way of getting out of the marraige, you know?” He reached across the counter and tore a strip of paper towel off of the standing rack to dry his face.

  It took Klein a while to speak up, a moment of silence that really had Ethan questioning the type of monster he’d been toward Raleigh. Of course, he remembered her outbursts, remembered the plates and glasses and anything else she could get her hands on, all types of objects getting flung toward him in her moments of anger. He remembered wishing she had a better arm, a consistent one, because whenever she threw something at him, he never knew whether she’d nail it or miss by a long shot. But what he didn’t remember was what caused those outbursts. Had it been him, all along? They’d blamed some of it on the Hydrea, said if it pushed her platelet count too low, it could result in outbursts, but adjusting the dosage had never really helped. So maybe it had been Ethan.

  “I did this to her, didn’t I, Agent Klein?” He felt ill again.

  “I’ll swing by in an hour, Ethan,” he said with a final sigh before hanging up.

  As Ethan bolted from the kitchen and hurried to the bathroom, he heard his phone ringing. But it would take a few minutes of dry heaving before he would get back to it and find a message, this one from Lisa Hyatt.

  She knew where Paul had been the day of R
aleigh’s disappearance, and would he be so kind as to stop by the house so she could explain.

  Chapter Forty

  Like the last time he’d visited Hyatt estate, Ethan parked his Jag at the hibernating fountain. Before he reached the front stairs, Hyatt’s widow opened the door, and she looked bad. Worse than he felt, in fact, even after he’d slept like crap, possibly murdered a man, and then realized that it was possible he’d blacked out all of his bad memories about how he’d treated Raleigh

  Opening her arms for a hug, Ethan complied once the front door latched shut. He didn’t like the feeling it left, a bad aftertaste of an embrace between the two people connected through tragedy.

  Pulling out of the awkward hug, Ethan avoided Lisa Hyatt’s gaze. He knew she wanted more, a conversation about the weather or how has she been doing, but he didn’t exactly have time for “more.” Special Agent Klein had promised to drop by in an hour—that left just ten minutes for this visit given the travel time. Plus, with the way Ethan had blacked out and lost track of himself earlier today, he felt vulnerable being at Hyatt’s house alone. Knowing what he’d done to Paul Hyatt’s former accomplice, he didn’t know what he was capable anymore, and he didn’t trust himself, not even with her.

  “Thank you for coming, Ethan,” Lisa said, her voice raw, as if she’d been crying. “I found something that might interest you.”

  Ethan followed her into the grand room, the one with the big windows that overlooked the resort-like backyard. There was a bottle of Dasani on the table, along with a folded piece of paper, its edges curled, slightly discolored with age. He glanced over at Lisa and caught her biting her fingertips. She looked nervous, and when she noticed his stare, she snapped her hand away from her face.

  “Take a look.” She walked to the sofa on the opposite side of the room and sat where she’d been the first time he’d visited, the big table between them.

  Taking a deep breath, Ethan understood why the water had been placed there; his mouth had gone dry, he already needed a sip and he didn’t even know what the paper would reveal once he opened it up. And so, before he grabbed the page, he twisted off the Dasani’s cap and swallowed a heavy gulp of water.

  “What is this?” Ethan asked, letting his finger hover above the sheet.

  Lisa raised a hand to her face and simply nodded at him to pick it up. Her eyes had gone wide, though.

  After considering her for a moment, he finally allowed his hand to come down on the page and slide it off the edge of the glass, bringing it into his lap. He gave Lisa a final glance to see if she might change her mind about him seeing whatever was on that page, but when her eyes refused to meet his, Ethan looked down and unfolded it.

  A receipt.

  According to the logo at the top, it came from a place called the Elmwood Marina in Traverse City. Michigan.

  Ethan raised his attention to Hyatt’s widow again, and this time she met his stare. Her eyes were moist and seemed to ask, “Didn’t I say you’d be interested?”

  Offering an agreeing nod, he looked at the receipt a little closer. He saw the date; two days after Raleigh had climbed aboard that ambulance. If the story Thomas Braun had told him had any truth to it, this was the day the trio of medics had incinerated his wife. The day they departed Michigan—Traverse City, if this receipt meant anything—and sailed home.

  When Ethan turned his attention to Lisa again, she dabbed at her eyes.

  “I don’t remember being on a trip to Traverse City, Ethan,” she said, her voice soft and afraid. “We didn’t own a boat back then. And I don’t remember Paul ever telling me about a boys’ trip to Traverse City.”

  He considered her words, the dampness in her eyes, the tone of her voice. Ethan knew that Lisa Hyatt was telling the truth. Nodding, he looked down at the receipt again. The sole item was for gasoline, four hundred dollars’ worth. “So, if he wasn’t there with your boat, whose was it?”

  “I don’t know. Shit, Ethan, I don’t even know what Paul would have been doing there, but when I came across this receipt, I remembered what you said and . . .”

  Ethan stared at Lisa, his eyes hard. He wondered if he’d stared at Thomas Braun the same way before he’d blacked out and ended up finding the young man bleeding to death in that alley. Shifting in the sofa, Ethan looked away and took a few deep breaths, not wanting to experience the same thing here with Lisa Hyatt. She was trying to help.

  Clearing his throat, Ethan asked, “Where did you find this receipt?” The question was more a way to hear his own voice and ease himself back to reality than anything else. He knew this, so when Lisa started to respond, Ethan had to focus on listening.

  “The office sent a box of things over. Didn’t know what to do with it all, so I started going through it.”

  “Work. Why would he—?”

  “Because!” She started crying and covered her face with her hands. “Don’t you get it, Ethan? Paul had secrets from me!” She pointed at the receipt in Ethan’s lap. “That’s from right around the time your wife disappeared, isn’t it?”

  He nodded, wanting to point out that just because he recognized her dead husband as one of the medics, it didn’t mean he was right. Hell, Ethan was starting to doubt his own grip on reality, he barely trusted his own eyes and memory! He decided to change gears, taking a new approach. “Does the name Thomas Braun mean anything to you, Lisa? Or Maltby?”

  She seemed to think about it, the tears pausing and her face returning to normal for a couple of seconds before winching up again. “What else don’t I know about Paul? Who are these men, Thomas Braun and Maltby? Were they involved with my husband? With what happened to your wife?”

  Although Ethan caught himself nodding, he forced himself to stop before Lisa lowered her hands and could see him doing that. “It’s probably nothing,” Ethan said, not quite believing it, but knowing that what he said was the absolute truth; Thomas Braun could be nothing more than an opportunistic con artist, albeit one that Ethan swore had helped Lisa’s husband abduct his wife. And Maltby, he’d been the one who’d rolled his wife’s dead body into that tarp, hadn’t he?

  “I’m so sorry,” Lisa said, snapping Ethan out of his thoughts. He couldn’t help but wonder if he’d blacked out again because Lisa’s face seemed impeccably dry all of a sudden. Blotchy, but dry. “I can show you the rest of what was in that box, if you think it will help.”

  Am I ready for that?

  But, as if working on autopilot, Ethan nodded that it would, rising out of the sofa with the Elmwood Marina receipt still in his grip. “I’d like that.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Paul Hyatt had an office on the second floor of his huge home. The desk was located next to a window overlooking his lavish front yard and brick driveway. As Ethan settled at the desk with the banker’s box open before him, he glanced out that window and saw the water fountain, his Jaguar on the other side of it. He wondered if Paul would sometimes sit in that very same chair, crack the window open on those late nights and listen to the calming sounds of the fountain’s cascading water, the same way Ethan remembered lying with Raleigh the summer before she disappeared, that night when they’d made love at her mother’s pool, the two of them staring up at the sky and allowing their minds to soak in the sights and sounds of their surroundings.

  Lisa reached into the box and produced a handful of documents.

  “This is the documentation for our boat,” she explained. “I knew about this, but not the receipt that’s dated a few months before we bought Sea Rally. Why would he be putting so much gasoline in a boat he didn’t own yet?”

  Skimming through the documents, Ethan didn’t find anything of great value in the first pile of pages. Big deal, Paul Hyatt had purchased a boat a few months after making that deadly trip to Michigan, registered it, paid to have some work done. Most of that work had been arranged through the yacht club, but there were half a dozen other “contractors” that had unfamiliar names. None of those names belonged to Thomas Braun or
a man named Maltby, or any derivative of those names, nothing like “Braun Upholstery,” or “Maltby Marine Equipment.”

  “Anything else, like receipts or whatnot, from that same period as the Traverse City receipt? I’m curious about that trip, Lisa,” he said, explaining himself as he checked the time on his watch. It would take a good twenty-five minutes to get back home; Klein would likely be waiting for him. Or, more likely, the federal agent would leave and call to arrange another meeting. Or maybe he’d even send Detective Tate from the Chicago Police Department back, this time to arrest Ethan for what he’d done to Braun in that alleyway.

  “I didn’t see anything, but then again, I didn’t look much harder after I found that receipt.” Lisa reached into the box and produced several magazines.

  Ethan flipped through a few of them. Some looked familiar, issues of trade magazines like BioOptics World Magazine and Life Science Leader in particular. Raleigh would often bring them home a month after they arrived at the office and the new issues arrived. She liked to read them, claiming she didn’t get to indulge in the trade magazines that ParkerPharma kept in the staff lunch room because she never took her lunch break.

  A lie, according to Phil.

  Gulping, Ethan came across one particular trade magazine he remembered seeing around the house. Somewhere, in some box in his master closet or the attic, he’d likely dig up this very same issue; it was the one she’d brought home in the month of her disappearance.

  “Can I, uh. . .”

  He felt Lisa’s hand on his shoulder. “Take whatever you like, Ethan. I’ll be right back.”

  “Thank you,” Ethan said, sensing her hand sliding away and listening to her footsteps as she left the office and slipped into the hall. He didn’t know where she was headed, didn’t even think about it.