The Second Son

by Martin Jay Weiss

  Next thing Ethan knew, he was in the back seat of a police car, alone and cold; the damp chill in the air made him shiver, as did his worsening situation.

  As they drove by Dancing Rabbit, he saw Elvis and other Rabbits standing out front, watching Ethan pass in a caravan of police cars, as if they had captured him themselves.

  Was it pride or pity on their faces? Ethan wondered, feeling angry, betrayed and more confused. He had gone back to Dancing Rabbit for answers, and he was being carted off to jail with more questions.

  The policeman riding shotgun told his partner that they had orders to take him to the Monterey County Sheriff’s Department. He didn’t say why, but he mentioned that it was a bit of a drive and he wanted to get home as soon as possible to celebrate his birthday.

  Ethan and Jack had recently celebrated their thirtieth birthday, the big three-oh. He thought about how his worst problem back then was not making Fast Company’s top thirty under thirty.

  Perspective.

  He remembered how Brooke had pulled off his birthday celebration without a hitch, when he walked onto the Pacific Terrace at One Pico, the elegant restaurant at Shutters on the Beach, and a cacophony of a hundred or more shouted, “Surprise!” Stunning LED light balls dropped from the sky and the entire courtyard overlooking the beach was illuminated by hundreds of tree bulbs. A sea of people cheered. Music blared. Champagne flowed.

  “Told you I could pull one over on you,” Brooke bragged when she saw the look of surprise on his face. “You have to be on your toes with a girl like me.”

  Now Ethan was staring out the window of a police car and thinking he should have paid closer attention to the details.

  —

  Monterey Sheriff’s Department was swarming with news reporters and cameras as the Big Sur police car drove up. Ethan covered his face until they disappeared into the underground parking. The arresting police officers led him inside and delivered him to the Monterey team. They booked him, took his mug shot and prints, and locked him in an empty jail cell.

  He lay down on the cot and stared at the ceiling, thinking that it would be a long night, but it wasn’t five minutes before an officer summoned him.

  “Let’s go, Stone,” the officer said as he unlocked his cage.

  “Am I being released?”

  The officer laughed. “Not a chance.”

  Ethan was told to wait in the interrogation room. A few minutes later, Big Sur Detectives Ramsey and Johnson came in and took seats across from him.

  “Remember us?” Ramsey started, flashing his Big Sur badge.

  Ethan felt relieved to see familiar faces. They were honest-looking faces. “Yeah, from the car accident.”

  “Do you understand why you’re here?” Ramsey asked.

  “It’s obviously a mistake,” Ethan tried to explain. “They said I was being arrested for murder, which is ridiculous. I didn’t kill anyone, I’ve never even heard of the guy they say I killed…It’s all just absurd!”

  “Is it?” Johnson held up his smartphone so Ethan could see and played a shaky video.

  Ethan watched the video clip of Jack standing over Wade’s dead body and then running away.

  “Jesus, Jack!” Ethan muttered.

  “Who’s Jack?” Ramsey asked.

  “My brother. We’re twins.”

  Johnson laughed. “Haven’t heard the evil twin excuse in a long time.”

  “He’s not evil,” Ethan snapped. “And how can that possibly be me since the guy in the video is clean-shaven?” Ethan tugged on his facial hair. “Do you think I grew this in a few hours?”

  Johnson adjusted his thick geriatric glasses and turned to Ramsey. “You caught that.”

  Ramsey nodded.

  “Let’s say that this is your brother,” Ramsey pressed on. “Any idea why he did this?”

  “He couldn’t have.” Ethan folded his arms and shook his head. “He was obviously scared. Something made him run.”

  “Innocent people don’t run,” Johnson said, “they call the police. He’s standing there in broad daylight holding a Ruger nine-millimeter semiautomatic.” Johnson held up his phone again so Ethan could see the frozen image of Jack.

  “The murder weapon,” Ramsey added.

  Ethan shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  After a long pause, Ramsey continued, “Tell us about Dancing Rabbit. You had said that your girlfriend worked there.”

  “Yeah. She did. About a year ago.”

  “Her name?” Johnson said as he pulled a pen and small notepad from his shirt pocket.

  “Brooke Shaw.” Ethan watched Johnson scribble her name down and wondered if he should say something about her false identity.

  “What did she tell you about Dancing Rabbit?” Ramsey asked.

  “She liked it.”

  Ramsey stared back, waiting for him to elaborate.

  “It’s one of those self-sustaining ecovillages. They promote community, teamwork, social responsibility. We did our corporate retreat there.”

  “Is that how you met Anna Gopnik?”

  Ethan nodded. “That’s right.”

  “The Dancing Rabbit folks didn’t have any information about Anna, no forwarding address, no idea where she came from. We found that strange.”

  Ethan was just about to tell them what Anna told him—without telling them he had seen her—when it dawned on him: he was picked up in Big Sur.

  “Why did you drag me all the way up here to the Monterey station?” Ethan asked.

  “This was closer for the FBI,” Johnson told him.

  “The FBI?”

  As if right on cue, the door swung open and a hard-boiled, steely-eyed woman in street clothes and an FBI badge around her neck barged in.

  CHAPTER 27

  Mr. Stone, I’m Special Agent Matz.” She shook Ethan’s hand—her grip as unassailable as her entrance. An Asian male twenty years her junior traipsed in behind her and announced, “We’ll take it from here, fellas,” as if he were parroting an episode of Law & Order. Only he wasn’t trying to.

  “Shut up, Shu!” Matz barked at her lackey.

  “What did I say?”

  “It’s the way you said it. Introduce yourself and state your purpose.”

  “Okay fine. I’m Agent Shu. FBI. And we need to talk to this man. In private.”

  Ramsey said, “We just have a few more questions, if you don’t mind—”

  “We do mind,” Matz interjected. “We gave very strict orders to hold him until we got here. You might have just mussed up a federal investigation.”

  “No disrespect,” Johnson said, “but you might have just mussed up a local one.”

  “Good to know,” Matz said, incensed. “That’s why we have the pecking order that we do.”

  Off her glare, Detectives Ramsey and Johnson begrudgingly walked out.

  Once the door shut behind them, Matz asked Ethan, “Do you know why we’re here?”

  “They think I killed a guy, but like I tried to explain—”

  “We know it’s not you in the video,” Matz said. “It’s your twin brother, Jack.”

  “Yes, but Jack wouldn’t hurt anyone unless he was being attacked.” Ethan’s impulse was to defend his brother even before he knew what he was defending. “He had years of Tae Kwon Do, which is all about being nonaggressive, using it only for self-defense—”

  “We know what Tae Kwon Do is,” Matz said. “And we agree that your brother was most likely attacked. The victim was no angel, God knows. No one is going to miss him besides an inmate or two. But there’s another matter we need to discuss.” She turned toward the two-way glass and yanked the privacy shade over the lurking detectives. “They have a missing persons dilemma in their district,” she told Ethan, as she took the seat across from him. “They think Dancing Rabbit might be invo
lved. And since you were there, they think you might know something about it.”

  Ethan nodded.

  “We have reason to believe Dancing Rabbit is actually helping people disappear, like a witness protection program for people who aren’t witnesses and probably don’t deserve protection.”

  They’re going to ask me about Anna.

  “We’re here to discuss one such person.”

  Here it comes.

  “You know her as Brooke Shaw,” Shu said.

  What? Hearing her name hit Ethan like a smack on the head.

  “You have no idea why your girlfriend left you,” Shu chimed in, “and you don’t even know her real name.”

  “You’re right,” Ethan admitted. “I don’t.”

  “And there’s something else you’re not aware of,” Matz told him: “She’s on the FBI’s most wanted list.”

  Ethan went numb.

  “We just learned she was using the alias ‘Brooke Shaw’ yesterday,” Matz said, “when our Stalker account alerted us.”

  “Your new face recognition feature made the match,” Shu added.

  “You hacked us?”

  “He didn’t say that,” Matz said.

  “You created an app that helps people do suspicious things,” Shu said. “It attracts dangerous people. So yeah, we monitor the site.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Look who doesn’t like their privacy invaded?” Shu taunted.

  Ethan wanted to take a swing at the guy. “We only use public information.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck what you use,” Shu spewed, “it’s still creepy, just like you stalking your ex-girlfriend—”

  “Shut up, Shu,” Matz snapped. “No one wants to hear your opinion, or your politics.” She leaned in closer to Ethan and said, “This is a lot for you to digest right now, but you need to know the truth about her.”

  “You’re right,” Ethan said, preparing himself. “Why is the FBI looking for her?”

  Matz told him: “She’s wanted in London for the murder of her father.”

  “Murder—?” Ethan choked.

  It keeps getting worse.

  “She loved her father,” Ethan said defensively. “She wouldn’t hurt him. She couldn’t kill a fly. She can’t even eat meat.”

  “She must be completely innocent, then,” Shu said, condescendingly.

  “Jealousy can make people do terrible things,” Matz said, as if she were making a profound point.

  Ethan recalled the first conversation he had with Brooke about why he started Stalker. Ethan had said, “Our site finds people that don’t want to be found, for a fee… Sometimes people can’t move on. We help them get closure.”

  Brooke responded, “Because jealousy makes people do terrible things?”

  How would Matz have known that?

  “Have you been listening to my conversations? Is my phone bugged—?”

  “Don’t be paranoid,” Matz said. “I’m trying to tell you what your girlfriend’s motive was. The Godeaux family had an awful lot of drama—”

  “And an awful lot of money,” Shu injected.

  “—Betrayals, infidelities, inheritance discrepancies, and bitter jealousies that eventually led to murder.”

  “Godeaux?” Ethan whispered. “Is that her real name? Godeaux?”

  “Yes,” Matz confirmed, “her real name is Stella Godeaux,”

  “Stella Godeaux,” Ethan repeated as he thought again of the passage she had underlined in Tropic of Cancer: As soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the loose. What did she lose that was so irreplaceable? Why was she on the loose? Maybe she never told me anything so I wouldn’t be able to talk if the FBI ever picked me up.

  “British Semi-Salic law says that children inherit an estate after the extinction of the last parent,” Matz said. “This was about money.”

  “It’s always about money,” Shu added.

  “After her father passed,” Matz continued, “the family estate would presumably be divided between Stella and her brother. There must have been some unexpected surprises because the brother wasn’t happy. He made accusations that the will had been tampered with, and worse, he was suspicious about the circumstances surrounding their father’s death. He demanded an autopsy and, sure enough, the results proved that the old man’s heart failure was provoked by a dose of cyanide.”

  “Maybe the brother poisoned the father,” Ethan suggested. “He also had motive.”

  Matz shook her head. “After the autopsy, the court ordered the hospital to release the security footage in their father’s hospital room. The hospital rooms all have cameras to monitor the patients. This was Stella Godeaux’s last visit.” Matz nodded to Shu. “Show him the footage.”

  “This is what we call indisputable evidence,” Shu said as he pulled an iPad Mini from his pocket and played the security video. The footage was taken from a high, wide angle, and it was grainy, so details were not perfectly clear, but Ethan could make out a woman enter a hospital room. She had long black hair and was wearing a full-length raincoat over a red dress. She approached the patient, an older man with his eyes shut. The woman looked down on the man for a long while and then pulled a syringe from her purse and inserted a liquid into the IV. When the woman turned to leave, she glanced in the direction of the camera. It was brief and it was blurry. And it certainly looked like Brooke.

  Ethan heard himself gasp.

  “Her father had been admitted to a hospital and treated for a mild heart attack,” Matz said. “According to the doctors, he would have made a full recovery. An hour after Stella Godeaux signed out at the visitors’ desk, a nurse found her father dead.”

  “Then why didn’t they arrest her?” Ethan asked.

  “She had already fled the country. As soon as the autopsy was ordered, she split. They knew the flight she was on when she had entered the US as Stella Godeaux. But she’d had a few days’ head start and didn’t leave a trail. Our friends at the SIS asked us to help, but we couldn’t find her. Like I said, we didn’t know that she was using the identity of Brooke Shaw until your site made the connection.”

  Ethan looked shell shocked. “The SIS?”

  “British Secret Service,” Shu grinned, “MI6…Bond. James Bond.”

  Matz and Ethan both snapped, “Shut up, Shu!”

  Ethan turned to Matz. “What do you want me to do?”

  Her voice softened. “Just keep looking for her. She’s not done with you.”

  Ethan smiled, without giving his face permission, hoping that Matz was right, that she wasn’t done with him. He wasn’t done with Brooke—or Stella—either.

  It must have shown on his face because Matz explained, “If she were done with you, she wouldn’t be tracking you still.”

  ”The GPS signal on your iPhone doesn’t shut off,” Shu said.

  “You searched my phone?” Ethan asked.

  “He didn’t say that,” Matz said.

  Shu smirked.

  Anna Gopnik was right about Brooke tracking him, but all the new information about her still didn’t mesh with what Ethan knew, or thought he knew. She was the least materialistic, most spiritual person he had ever met, and now these agents were claiming that she killed her father for her inheritance. He was sure they were all missing something.

  “Think of the press you’ll get,” Shu said, “‘Stalker founder uses his controversial site to track down his killer runaway bride.’ That’s advertising you couldn’t pay for.”

  Getting press for Stalker was the last thing Ethan cared about just then, but he knew what they were getting at. “You want me to set her up?”

  Matz nodded; Shu grinned.

  “No one has heard her side yet,” Ethan protested. “I’m telling you, none of this sounds anything like her.”
/>   “You saw the footage in the hospital,” Matz said.

  “And innocent people don’t run,” Shu said, repeating what Detective Johnson had said about Jack.

  “Unless there’s another explanation.”

  Matz was growing impatient. “Like what?”

  Ethan searched for possibilities. “Maybe someone made her kill her father. Maybe her father asked her to do it. Maybe she’s protecting someone. Maybe she has a twin sister.”

  The agents both laughed.

  Ethan was at a loss. He didn’t have a clue whom she’d be protecting, and he was running out of ideas.

  “Anything is possible,” Matz said empathetically. “We all want to find out what really happened, the truth. Once we find her, she’ll be sent back home, and she’ll get a fair trial. So help us.”

  “Let the courts decide if she’s innocent,” Shu added. “Have some faith in the system.”

  Faith was something Ethan usually had plenty of. Sitting there hearing about his brother and girlfriend both killing people was surely testing every last bit.

  “We’ll get you released from here tonight,” Matz said. She snapped her fingers and Shu pulled a plastic bag from his pocket with Ethan’s iPhone inside. “Keep your phone with you at all times so she can keep tracking you.”

  Shu handed Ethan his phone. “And so we can stay in constant communication.”

  “What about Jack?” Ethan asked.

  “I was just getting to that,” Matz said. “We’ll make sure he walks.”

  “Do you really have the authority to release someone in this situation?” he had to ask.

  “If we really wanted your brother, he’d be here right now instead of you,” Shu crowed.

  “Then you know where he is?”

  “The phone company gave us his last few calls, and what do you know?”

  “Shut up, Shu.” Matz turned to Ethan. “We’ll exonerate your brother. We can make that happen, if you promise your full cooperation.” Matz extended her hand. “Do we have a deal?”

  CHAPTER 28

  The rising sun glimmered off the Monterey police complex. Ethan shielded his eyes so he could see the tow truck release his car from its hooks. The driver who was ordered to bring it up from Big Sur at four in the morning to convenience a yuppie murder suspect was not looking happy, but he smiled as Ethan’s brand-spanking-new Tesla Model X dropped hard.