“What? What is it?” Reed crowded in behind her so that he could look too. “Well,” he said when he drew back, “do you suppose that’s an imprint of our backsides there on the side panel, or is this just an astounding coincidence?”
Before Ellie could say anything, the front door opened and Julia Parker emerged, her pale pink cardigan flapping in the breeze. She shouted at them over the whoosh of the wind. “What are you doing? Get away from there!”
“Your car looks as though it’s been in a recent accident, ma’am,” Reed hollered back. “You might want to get that looked at.”
“You’re not supposed to be here! He told me you would not come back!”
Ellie found her voice at last. “It was Sam who made those arrests go away, wasn’t it? He erased Shannon’s record.”
“Shannon Blessing was a whore.”
Ellie could hear the unspoken tagline: She got what she deserved. Her heart started pounding as the truth became clear. “She slept with him and he fixed her problems for her. That’s what happened, right?” Lonely Shannon Blessing, with her sad, smoky eyes and her large breasts and poor judgment. She’d been ripe for the picking. Ellie felt sick, for Shannon and for herself. She thought she’d been using Sam to get what she wanted, but maybe it was the other way around.
“You would know,” Julia shot back. “You want to know what a whore looks like, you can just look in the mirror.”
Ellie ignored the insult and pushed for the information she’d come for: “Did you see Shannon that day? The day she disappeared?”
“I went out of my way not to see her. She was trash! She was nothing.” Her cry was an equal mix of anger and anguish. A distant crack of thunder split the air and fat raindrops began to fall, melting the summer heat.
Reed advanced closer to where Julia stood on the porch, hugging herself. Ellie hung back, leaving the storm to fill the space between her and Sam’s wife. “How do you know? How do you know your husband was involved with Shannon?”
Julia tilted her face to the sky and the rain fell like tears. When she finally answered, her reply was for Ellery, not for Reed. “Oh, that’s always the best part for Sam. That I know. He leaves a paper trail a mile long and a mile wide.”
Thunder rolled the clouds around, closer this time to bowling them over, and the sky flickered with white flame. Ellery’s shoes were filling up with water. “We should go,” she said, nudging Reed.
Water flattened his hair to his face, accentuating his high cheekbones and hawk-like eyes. “We need the proof,” he said urgently. Rain dripped from his chin. “We leave now and she could destroy everything.”
On the stoop, Julia seemed to be dissolving under the weight of the water. “She’s not going anywhere.” If Julia Parker hadn’t left Sam by now, she never would.
“She may have tried to kill us,” Reed insisted, his back to Julia.
“And who are we going to call to arrest her—her husband?” Ellery shook her head. “Let’s get out of here before we get hit by lightning.” On cue, the sky cracked in half again, split by a bolt of electricity.
Reed was reluctant but eventually trailed Ellery back to the truck. The leather seats squeaked as they climbed inside with their sodden clothes. They sat there dripping, rain pounding like bullets on the roof, but Ellie did not start the engine. Julia had known the whole time, she realized, reeling with this shift in her universe. The little voice in her head was ironic and unamused: You should have known you couldn’t try to be someone else and get away with it.
“I hesitate to grant any weight to the ravings of an angry wife harboring homicidal intentions,” Reed began tentatively, but Ellery cut him off.
“I was sleeping with him,” she said. “Sam. Not for very long. Not many times. But it happened.”
“Ah.” Reed leaned his wet head back against the seat. “That does explain some things—for example, the sizable bruise on my posterior.”
Ellie felt her face go hot. “You have to understand. There are certain ways to get Sam’s attention, and so I picked the one I thought would have the most success. He wasn’t listening to me otherwise.”
“And apparently Shannon Blessing reached the same conclusion,” he said, but there was no judgment in his tone.
Ellery looked to the house, where Julia was still standing in the rain, staring out at Ellery’s truck. The sheets of falling water obscured Julia’s expression, but Ellie could feel her presence in a way she had not allowed herself to consider before. “Why won’t she just go back inside?” she muttered as she clawed a hank of wet hair from her cheek.
Reed gave a ghost of a smile. “Because then you would win.”
Ellery glanced over at him with a frown. “You sound like you speak from experience.”
Reed seemed to contemplate this for a long minute. “I did not cheat on my wife with any live women,” he replied at last as he plucked several tissues from the box between them and blotted his face and neck.
“That’s a creepy way to put it,” Ellery answered.
He grimaced and shook his head. “Oh, I didn’t cheat on her with any dead women either, not in the biblical sense. But I was away from home for weeks at a time working cases, and I guess you could say I saved the best parts of myself for the job. I cheated my family by giving them only the scraps I had left available after another exhausting case. Sarit is strong and smart and fully capable of running her own life. She didn’t need me in the same way the victims did, or at least that’s what I told myself.”
“And what did she tell you?”
His eyes crinkled with his rueful reply. “She told me to pack my things and move out. No, that’s not fair. She said other things before that, but I didn’t stop long enough to listen.”
Ellery looked beyond him into the rain and saw that Julia had disappeared from the porch. “Sam said she’d long since stopped caring what he did with his time, but I guess maybe he said a lot of things that weren’t true.”
“That beer bottle you found in the woods behind your house—did it by chance belong to Sam Parker?”
Ellery answered with a short nod and then hung her head. “He told me to make it go away, that our affair coming to light would hurt me as much as it hurt him.”
“I reckon he’s incorrect on that assumption,” Reed said dryly.
Ellery shivered, suddenly cold as well as wet. Her relationship with Sam was now the least of the secrets coming to light. “I suppose we have to go tell him the truth.”
“Maybe he already knows.” Reed turned his head slowly to look at her. “Have you thought about that? He’s seen your scars up close and might have had occasion to wonder, especially if he was familiar with the cursory details of the Coben case. As Ms. Jenkins so ably proved to us this morning, the connections are obvious when you know where to look.”
“No,” Ellery said swiftly. She started the engine with shaking fingers and turned up the heater to warm the inside cabin. Outside, the storm battered the truck with gusts of wet rain, turning the streets around them into shallow, rushing rivers. “No, not Sam.”
“I can’t help but notice we keep ending up here,” Reed continued. “First Mark Roy disappears from the area, and now we find out Shannon Blessing may have had an intimate relationship with Sam Parker. Plus, he certainly had a relationship with you, one where you weren’t giving him everything he wanted. If he somehow figured out your connection to Coben…”
“No,” Ellery said, more certain this time. “He didn’t know.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“You heard Julia. The best part for Sam is that she knows. If he figured out this huge thing about me, he would’ve made sure I knew that he knew.”
“The birthday cards,” Reed pointed out. “Those texts. Someone is definitely sending you a message, Ellie.”
Happy birthday. I know it’s you. Ellery held her hands up to the heater to try to put some feeling back in her fingers. “Maybe,” she conceded after a moment, the word barely
more than a whisper. Someone had to get close enough to take her DNA to put on those cards. “But what are you really saying? That you think Sam is behind the abductions?” Surely he must realize how insane that sounded.
“It’s not a perfect fit,” Reed agreed. “From what I can tell, Sam Parker enjoys power as far as it goes but isn’t interested in fighting too hard to achieve or maintain it. He took a chief’s job in a small town where he gets to be the boss with no daily challenges to his authority. He probably resents the money his wife brings to their relationship but enjoys its benefits, so instead of ending the marriage, he demonstrates his anger through serial infidelity. But he’s lazy about it. He doesn’t pursue his extramarital partners but takes advantage of the women who come his way. This suggests a man who is willing to abuse his bully pulpit when he has the opportunity but doesn’t go out of his way to seek new subordinates. Abducting three healthy adults is a lot of work, when you get down to it, and that’s the piece of the puzzle that doesn’t quite fit here.”
Ellie blinked, awed and a bit rattled by Reed’s incisive commentary. “Can you do that for just anyone?” she asked, wondering what he would have to say about her.
Reed was still concentrating on his own thoughts and did not seem to hear her. “But we can’t discard his obvious connections to two of the three victims—and to you—and I have to say: if we’re wondering why Bea Nesbit might have pulled over late at night, other than for someone she knew, you could imagine that flashing blue lights might have done the trick.”
Ellery said nothing to this. She shifted the truck into gear, and it practically floated down the road into the flash floods. The storm had reached a climax over Woodbury, pounding the earth like a prizefighter delivering the knockout blows, as the trees bent in tremulous submission. She wondered which of them would be left standing when it was finally over.
* * *
By the time they reached the station, the storm had lessened to a steady rain, with just occasional gusts of wind, and so Ellery and Reed still had to run a gauntlet of reporters with microphones and umbrellas. They shouted questions at her that Ellie did not let herself hear. She hummed under her breath to block out the noise and then gasped with relief as she made it inside the building. Their wet sneakers squeaked across the linoleum floor of the entryway as Ellie used her ID to open the door to the inner bullpen. She stopped short on the threshold when she met the charged atmosphere on the other side.
The men were all there—Sam, Jimmy Tipton, Chuck Taylor, and the others—watching the old TV set mounted in the corner. “Fox News Special Report,” the screen read across the bottom, and Ellie recognized immediately the Missing poster Monica Jenkins had shown her this morning. They all turned their heads in unison to stare at Ellery, and maybe at Reed too, as he was standing behind her, his breathing heightened as he realized what was going on. No one said anything, so Monica’s voice from the TV filled the silence. “Abigail Hathaway switched to her middle name, Ellery, when she was in college at Williams, where she majored in history and is remembered as a quiet but serious student.”
Ellie’s mouth dropped open as she saw her freshman-year roommate, Orla Boone, come onto the screen. “She was more of a loner, I would say. I never knew anything about her past. Ellery barely spoke to any of us. She was the only one who didn’t put up pictures from home or anything like that.”
“Is it true?” Sam’s eyes were dark, his jaw set.
Ellie lifted her chin a fraction and stood her ground. “Yes, I decorated my side of the room with posters of the Clash.”
“Don’t get cute with me,” he snapped. “I mean the rest of it.”
Ellie saw this was going to be her punishment, having this conversation out in the open in front of everyone. “Yes,” she said quietly. “It’s true.”
“Someone drops off a severed hand on your doorstep, and you don’t think to mention maybe there’s a reason for that?” Sam seemed both angry and flabbergasted, as though he didn’t have the tools to consider such a breach of protocol. He looked behind her to Reed. “And, you, Agent Markham, you kept all this to yourself, even as I had to go over and tell the Nesbits that someone carved up their daughter?”
“We didn’t know there was a connection at first,” Ellery began.
“Oh, that’s a load of horseshit, Ellie, so don’t even try. You go around for years peddling this theory about how there is a murderer in town, abducting people off our streets, and you never once mentioned that you have some relevant experience in this area. Maybe if you explained exactly what was going on, we all might have listened a little harder.”
“Chief, if I may,” Reed cut in. “You must understand that Ellery was in a very vulnerable position here.”
“All the more reason she should have opened her mouth and said something!” Sam replied, his voice growing bigger, until it seemed to cover everything. “You said these people were dying, Ellie, but you didn’t tell me that they were all going missing the same time you were abducted! When Bea’s hand showed up, even then you didn’t mention that oh, by the way this was a coded message from some deranged psychopath who might be aping one of the sickest, most famous serial killers the country has ever seen. We could’ve been way out ahead of him by now. Maybe we could’ve caught him. If this son of a bitch takes another victim, it’s on you, Ellie. It’s on you and your silence.”
She stiffened as if he’d slapped her. Reed’s hand clenched into a fist. “Now hold on, that’s not fair,” he said.
“I’ll tell you what’s not fair! I’ve got three people missing, probably dead, and it turns out the key to figuring out this mess might be one of my own officers, and I’m about the last person to find out about it. My ass is hanging in the breeze on national television. How the hell am I supposed to convince anyone I can run these investigations when I don’t even know what’s going on in my own unit? Jesus Christ.” He held his head with both hands and then shook it as if to clear his thoughts. “You,” he said, pointing to Reed, “you come in here and tell me absolutely everything about the Francis Coben case. Leave nothing out this time, not one goddamn detail.”
Ellery felt the tension radiating from Reed, that he wanted to fight the order, but he stepped forward anyway. “Yes, sir. Happy to answer any questions,” he said tersely.
Ellie moved to follow him, but Sam held up a hand to her. “Not you. You stay out here and go over the reports from the abductions, starting with Bea Nesbit and leading up to the discovery of her hand, and you add anything—I mean anything—that you left out the first time. You sit right there at your desk and you don’t leave the building without my say-so. You definitely do not talk to the press. Do you understand?”
Ellie froze, acutely aware that everyone was still watching and that she was standing on Sam’s turf. She was not without ammunition—the beer bottle, the odd suppression of Shannon’s records, and Julia’s attempt to kill her the night before—but it was mostly supposition without hard evidence at this point, and revealing it out in the open would tip off Sam and probably make her look like a lunatic to everyone else. So she forced a curt nod to Sam and went to her desk, watching as Reed disappeared into the chief’s office. When the door shut, it was like air returned to the room, and the other officers resumed their work. All except Jimmy Tipton, who ambled over to her.
“Holy shit, Hathaway,” he said as he planted his ass on the corner of her desk. “That is some story you’ve been hiding. You know, I saw one of Coben’s photos when I visited my cousin out in Chicago a few years ago. Must’ve been around the tenth anniversary of the case. One of the museums had a big spread dedicated to the story, with news clippings and pictures and interviews. There wasn’t anything in there about you.”
“My name was kept out of it,” she said, not looking at him. She had pulled out Bea’s file to go over it again, as the chief had ordered. Only this time, she was going to be looking for any evidence that a cop might be involved.
“They said he nailed his victim
s into the closet. Is that why you’ve got all those nails at your place?”
The words made her freeze, long enough to forget about her current task, long enough to hear his previous statement echo inside her head. I visited my cousin out in Chicago. Ellie looked up and fixed him with a hard stare. “I didn’t know you were from Chicago,” she said.
“I’m from Philly, born and raised. But I got some family out in Chi-town. They aren’t going to believe it when I tell them about you.” Tipton slid off her desk, but he didn’t move away. He loomed over her, casting a shadow across her desk. He clapped a hand on her shoulder, making her jump. “Good on you, Ellie, taking Coben down like that. You’re a lot tougher than you look. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get the next one too.”
* * *
After more than an hour, Reed emerged from the chief’s office, pink cheeked and grim, looking like a boy who’d just escaped the principal. He dragged a chair over to Ellie’s desk and sat next to her. “Well,” he said, taking a deep breath, “if Sam Parker knew the whole story before this, he’s putting on an excellent show to the contrary. He is well and truly pissed off right now.”
Ellery tightened her hold on her pen, scratching in the margins of the notes she’d been making. She could only imagine the questions Sam had asked. “I’ve been through Bea Nesbit’s file again,” she said, “and there is nothing new here that I can see. There’s nothing I can add. Believe me, if I thought I had direct knowledge that would help this case, I would have outed myself to Sam long ago.”
“I know.” Reed looked distracted. “He’s on the phone with the state investigators now. They’re probably going to want to go another round with you. With me, too, for that matter.”
The Vanishing Season Page 19
