“Ethan grew up in the middle of that, Lena. He was raised on hate.”
Lena sat back, her arms crossed over her chest again. Jeffrey studied her closely, wondering if any of this was news to her or if White had already explained, putting his own spin on the story.
Jeffrey said, “He was charged with assault when he was seventeen.”
“They dismissed the case.”
“Because the girl was too scared to testify.”
She waved her hand at the file. “He’s on parole for kiting some checks in Connecticut. Big deal.”
Jeffrey stared at her, because that was all he could do. He tried to walk her through the evidence. “Four years ago tire marks from his truck placed him at the scene where a girl was raped and killed.”
“Placed at the scene like I was?” Lena asked, sarcasm dripping from her voice.
“The girl was raped before she was killed,” Jeffrey repeated. “Sperm taken from her rectum and vagina proved that at least six guys raped her before she was beaten to death.” He paused. “Six guys, Lena. That’s plenty to hold her down while each guy takes his turn.”
She gave him a blank stare.
“Ethan’s truck was there.”
Lena shrugged, but he thought he saw her composure begin to slip.
“That’s how they got him to flip, Lena. The tire marks matched his truck. They already knew where to find him, because he was on their sheet for this kind of thing.” He tapped the file. “You know what he did? You know what your boyfriend did? He ratted out his friends so he could save his own ass, and, like every good rat, he admitted he was there, but he swore on a stack of Bibles he didn’t touch her.”
She said nothing.
“You think he just sat in that truck, Lena? You think he just sat there while everybody else was taking their turn? Or do you think he was out there getting his piece? You think he helped hold her hands down so she couldn’t scratch them? Maybe he helped keep her feet apart so they could get a better angle, or maybe he had his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream.”
Still she was silent.
“Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, though. You wanna do that?” Jeffrey asked. “Let’s say he sat in his truck. Let’s say he just sat there watching them rape her. Maybe that was enough to get him off, watching them hurt her, knowing she was helpless and he could save her but he didn’t.”
She started to pick at the scar again, and Jeffrey kept his eyes on hers, trying not to watch her hands.
He said, “Six guys, Lena. How long did that take, for six guys to rape her while your boyfriend sat in the truck watching—if that’s what he was really doing, just watching?” Lena was silent. “And then they beat her to death. Hell, I don’t know why they bothered. By the time they were finished with her, she was bleeding from every place they could fuck her.”
She chewed her lip, looking down at her hands. Blood was flowing pretty steadily from her palm, but she did not seem to notice.
He let his guard down for just a moment, unable to stop himself. “How can you protect him?” he asked. “How can you be a cop for ten years and protect scum like that?”
His words seemed to be striking home, so he continued, “Lena, this kid is bad. I don’t know what it is you’ve got going with him, but . . . Jesus Christ! You’re a cop. You know how this kind of asshole can slip around the law. For every piece-of-shit little thing he’s been picked up on, there are twelve big things he gets away with.”
Jeffrey tried again. “His father’s spent hard time—federal time—for selling guns. We’re not talking handguns. He was trafficking sniper rifles and machine guns.” He paused, waiting for her to say something. When she did not, he asked, “Ethan tell you about his brother?”
“Yes,” she said, so quickly that he was sure she was lying.
“So you know he’s in prison?”
“Yes.”
“You know he’s on death row for killing a black man?” He paused again. “Not just a black man, Lena. A black cop.”
Lena stared at the table, and he could tell she was shaking her foot, though who knew if it was from nerves or anger.
“He’s a bad kid, Lena.”
She shook her head, though she had enough proof in front of her. “I told you, he’s not my boyfriend.”
“Whatever he is, he’s a skinhead. It doesn’t matter if he let his hair grow out and changed his name. He’s still a racist bastard, just like his father, just like his cop-killing brother.”
“And I’m half spick,” she shot back. “You ever wonder about that? What’s he doing with somebody like me if he’s a racist?”
“That’s a good question,” he told her. “You might want to ask yourself that the next time you look in the mirror.”
She finally stopped picking at her palm and pressed her hands together on the table in front of her.
“Listen,” he began, “I’m only going to say this once. Whatever you’re messed up in, whatever it is with this kid, you need to tell me. I can’t help you if you get yourself dug into this any deeper.”
She stared at her hands, not speaking, and he wanted to grab her and shake her, to make her say something that made sense. He wanted her to explain to him how she could be mixed up with a nasty piece of shit like Ethan White, and then he really wanted her to tell him that it was all some kind of big misunderstanding and that she was sorry. And that she was not going to drink anymore.
What she said was, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He had to try again. “If there’s something you’re not telling me about all this . . . ,” he said, hoping she would fill in the rest. Of course she did not.
He tried a different tactic. “There’s no chance you’ll get back on the job with this guy around your neck.”
She looked up, and for the first time in a while he could read her expression loud and clear: surprise.
She cleared her throat, like she was having trouble finding her voice. “I didn’t know that was an option.”
Jeffrey thought about her working for Chuck now, and the situation rankled as much as it had the first day he had heard about it. “You shouldn’t be working for that jerk.”
“Yeah, well,” she said, her voice still low. “The jerk I was working for before kind of made it obvious I wasn’t wanted.” She looked at her watch. “Speaking of which, I’m late for work.”
“Don’t leave it like this,” he said, aware that he was begging. “Please, Lena. I just . . . Please.”
She huffed a laugh, making him feel like an idiot. “I told you I’d talk to you,” she said. “Unless you’ve got something to charge me on, I’m out of here.”
He sat back in the chair, willing her to explain this all away.
“Chief?” she said, putting as little respect into the word as was humanly possible.
He skimmed the file, reading aloud from the list of charges that never saw the light of a courtroom. “Arson,” he said. “Felony assault. Grand theft auto. Rape. Murder.”
“Sounds like the latest best-seller,” she said, standing. “Thanks for the chat.”
“The girl,” he said. “The one who was raped and beaten to death while he sat in his truck and watched?” She did not leave, so he continued. “Do you know who she was?”
She came back fast. “Snow White?”
“No,” he told her, closing the file. “She was his girlfriend.”
Jeffrey sat in his car in front of the student-union building, staring at a group of women taping posters to the light poles around the courtyard. They were all young and healthy-looking, dressed in jogging outfits or sweats. Any one of them could have been Ellen Schaffer. Any one of them could be the next victim.
He was here to tell Brian Keller that his son was probably murdered. Jeffrey wanted to see what the man’s reaction to the news would be. He also wanted to find out what Keller had not wanted to say in front of his wife. Jeffrey hoped that what Keller said would give him a solid lead
to go on. As it was, all he had was Lena, and Jeffrey could not accept that she was involved in this.
Last night Sara had kept hitting on the differences between the Rosen and Schaffer crime scenes. If someone had staged Andy Rosen’s suicide, they’d done a damn good job. Ellen Schaffer was a different matter. Even if the killer had not known about the aspirated tooth, the arrow in the yard was a pretty obvious taunt. Sara had suggested at one point that the differences between the two crimes could indicate there could be two killers instead of one. Jeffrey had dismissed her idea last night, but after seeing Lena and Ethan together this morning, he was not sure of anything.
Lena had been a different person in the interrogation room, someone he had never met before. The way she had not just defended Ethan White’s past but denied that he had harmed her made Jeffrey want to question everything she had said so far in the case. He’d been a cop for a long time and seen how abusers sucker in even strong women. It was amazing how similar their methods were and how easily some women were swayed. There were thousands of women sitting in jail right now because they’d been caught holding dope for their boyfriends. Thousands more had probably committed some kind of crime because they knew that jail was the only way they could protect themselves from the abuse.
In Birmingham, back when Jeffrey was working patrol, he had been called to one woman’s house at least ten times. She was the communications manager of an international company and had two degrees from Auburn. At least a thousand people all over the world answered to her, and every time Jeffrey came to her house because her neighbors had called, she stood there in the doorway, her face bleeding, her clothes torn, saying she had fallen down the stairs. Her husband was a scrawny little fuck who called himself a stay-at-home dad. In reality he was a drunk who could not keep a job and lived off his wife’s money. Like most abusers, he was charming and gracious and blind to what his wife looked like when he was finished with her. These days a cop didn’t need the wife’s testimony to arrest her husband for abuse, but back then the laws had protected the husband.
Jeffrey remembered one time in particular. He was standing on her doorstep in the freezing cold, watching blood drip down her leg and pool at her feet from God knows what, while she insisted that her husband was a gentle man who never laid a hand on her. In fact, the only time Jeffrey ever saw the husband touch her was at her funeral. He reached into her coffin and patted her hand, then gave Jeffrey the biggest shit-eating grin he had ever seen and said, “That last step was a killer.”
Jeffrey had worked two years with the medical examiner trying to get something on the asshole, but while you could show with a fair amount of certainty that someone had fallen down the stairs and broken her neck, proving she was shoved was a little more difficult.
All this brought him back to Lena and how she behaved this morning. She was right that the hair match only circumstantially linked her to Andy Rosen. The fingerprint on the book could be explained away by a good lawyer. Jeffrey had trained Lena himself, and he knew that she was more than familiar with the ins and outs of forensic investigation. She would have known to be careful. She would have known exactly how to cover her tracks. The question was, did she have it in her? Was she so wrapped up in Ethan White that she would do anything to cover for him?
Jeffrey had to look at the facts, and the facts made Lena look suspicious as hell, especially considering her hostile attitude in the interrogation room this morning. She had all but challenged him to put the pieces together.
As much as he did not want to, Jeffrey made himself consider the two-killer scenario Sara had brought up last night, one who’d killed Andy and stabbed Tessa and one who’d killed Ellen Schaffer. The weak point they kept coming back to was Tessa’s attacker in the woods. After looking at Ethan White’s sheet, then talking to Lena, Jeffrey had to consider a variation on the theory.
Ethan could have killed Andy Rosen. Lena had come late to the scene. She could have called Ethan on her cell phone and told him Tessa was in the woods. There was no telling where either of them was when Ellen Schaffer killed herself, but Jeffrey knew that Lena would have noticed the discrepancy in the ammo. She knew more about guns than any man he had ever met. He took little consolation in the fact that Lena’s involvement in this could be as a mere accomplice. Under Georgia law she was just as guilty as Ethan.
He rubbed his eyes with his hands, thinking he was being ludicrous. Lena was a cop, despite the fact that she wasn’t carrying a badge. Crossing the line into murder, even as an accomplice, was not something she would do, no matter what kind of charm Ethan White poured on. This was crazy, and there was no reason to suspect her other than that she was being difficult. As Sara had pointed out, Lena thrived on being difficult.
He took his cell phone out of his pocket and called Kevin Blake’s office. The dean of Grant Tech liked to give people the impression that he was a very busy man, but Jeffrey knew for a fact that Blake spent most of his free time on the golf course. Jeffrey wanted to make an appointment with the man to update him on the case before Blake sneaked out early. Blake’s secretary put Jeffrey right through.
“Jeffrey,” Blake said. He was using the speakerphone, and if the tension in Blake’s voice was not enough to tell Jeffrey that someone else was in his office, the speakerphone was.
Blake asked, “Where are you?”
“On campus,” he answered. Keller had told Frank he would be in his lab all day if Jeffrey wanted to talk to him alone. Before Lena this morning, Keller had been the best avenue Jeffrey had to explore. Jeffrey knew that it would be easy to get sidetracked, but there was nothing he could do with Lena right now, and he knew better than to go at Ethan White with nothing to use as leverage.
Blake said, “I’ve got Albert Gaines here with Chuck. We were about to call you at the station and see if you could come by.”
Jeffrey suppressed the curse that wanted to come.
“Hey, Chief,” Chuck said, and Jeffrey could imagine the smug look on the other man’s face. “We got some doughnuts and coffee here for you.”
There was a grumbling sound that was probably Albert Gaines.
Blake said, “Jeffrey, could you drop by the office? We’d like to talk to you.”
“I can be there in an hour,” Jeffrey told him, thinking he would be damned if he came running when they snapped their fingers. “I’ve got a lead to track down.”
“Oh,” Blake said, probably thinking he would have to postpone his tee time. “Sure you can’t just run by here a second?”
Albert Gaines grumbled something again. He was a gruff man, and he demanded answers from his subordinates, but he had always been supportive of Jeffrey.
Blake had obviously been reprimanded. His tone was brisk when he said, “We’ll see you in about an hour, then, Chief.”
Jeffrey closed his phone, holding it to his chin as he watched the group of girls move on to the next section of the courtyard. He got out of the car and walked toward the student union, stopping to look at one of the posters. At the top was a blurry black-and-white photo of Ellen Schaffer and a separate, even blurrier one of Andy Rosen. Beneath these were the words “Candlelight Vigil.” A time and a location were given, along with a new suicide hot-line number that had been set up through the mental-health center.
“Do you think it will do any good?”
Jeffrey jumped, startled by Jill Rosen.
“Dr. Rosen—”
“Jill,” she corrected. “I’m sorry I frightened you.”
“It’s okay,” he said, thinking that the mother looked worse than she had the day before. Her eyes were so puffy from crying that they were barely slits, and her cheeks looked gaunt. She was wearing a white long-sleeved sweater with a collar that zipped into a turtleneck. As she talked to Jeffrey, she clutched the collar together in her hand, as though she were fighting the cold.
“I look a sight,” she apologized.
“I was just going to talk to your husband,” Jeffrey said, thinking he had blown the op
portunity to speak to Keller alone.
“He should be here soon,” she told him, holding up a set of keys. “His spare set,” she explained. “I told him I’d meet him here. I just needed to get out of the house.”
“I was surprised to hear he was at work.”
“Work restores him.” She gave a wan smile. “It’s a good place to hide when the world is falling down around you.”
Jeffrey knew exactly what she meant. He had thrown himself into work after Sara divorced him, and if he hadn’t had a job to go to every day, he would have gone crazy.
“Here,” he told her, indicating a bench. “How are you holding up?”
She exhaled slowly as she sat down. “I don’t know how to answer that.”
“I guess it was a pretty stupid question.”
“No,” she assured him. “It’s something I’ve been asking myself a lot lately. ‘How am I holding up?’ I’ll let you know when I get an answer.”
Jeffrey sat beside her, looking out at the campus quad. Some kids had wandered out onto the lawn for lunch, spreading blankets and taking sandwiches from brown paper bags.
Rosen was staring at the students, too. She had the edge of her shirt collar in her mouth. He could tell from the frayed material that this was a nervous habit.
She said, “I think I’m going to leave my husband.”
Jeffrey turned to her but said nothing. He could tell that her words took effort.
She said, “He wants to move. Move away from Grant. Start over. I can’t start over again. I can’t.” She looked down.
“It’s understandable to want to get away,” Jeffrey said, trying to keep her talking.
Rosen indicated the campus with a tilt of her head. “I’ve been here nearly twenty years. We made our lives here, such as they are. I’ve built something at the clinic.”
Jeffrey let some time pass. When she did not add anything more, he asked, “Did he say why he wanted to move?”
She shook her head, but not because she did not know why. There was an almost unbearable sadness in her voice, as though she’d decided to admit defeat. “That’s his response to everything. He’s all macho bluster, but at the first sign of trouble, he runs away from it as fast as he can.”
A Faint Cold Fear Page 24