The Darkest Hour

by Anina Collins

  We sat down at the round table too large for the hotel room, and as I stared at her, struck by how similar she looked to her sister, he didn’t waste any time getting to the heart of the matter. “How long have you known Michael Thompson?” he demanded to know.

  Mariah narrowed her eyes in confusion and shook her head. “I don’t know anyone by that name. Who is he?”

  “The man whose house you were at in Ellicott City in September when the police were called because you and he were fighting so loudly his neighbors worried someone might get hurt. Your name is on the police record. So what’s your relationship with him?”

  “I don’t have one! You’re confused. I’ve never met this Michael Thompson person. Why are you asking me this?”

  Alex continued to press her to admit she knew him. “Police reports don’t lie, Mariah, so you can drop the act. You were at his house with him, so you obviously know him. I want answers, and I want them now.”

  She jumped from her seat and began to cry. “I don’t have any answers for you! Why are you doing this? I just lost my sister. Are you being this way because everyone in this town thinks you’re the one who killed her?”

  I saw Alex wince like what she said pained him. Even hearing her say that made me sick to my stomach, but in the state she was in, she wanted to lash out.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard all about it since they dragged me back to this godforsaken town. They think you did it, and now you come to me looking to blame my sister’s death on me in some way.”

  Before things got out of hand and there was no turning back, I stood from the table and walked over to talk to her and hopefully help her see that’s not what we wanted to do to her. I approached her as she began to sob harder and said, “We aren’t blaming you, Mariah. That’s not what this is about. Alex cared about Bethany. He would never hurt her just like you wouldn’t. We just want to understand why you would be at that man’s house, a man who wrote Bethany letters threatening her after she broke up with him.”

  Mariah stopped crying, and looking away, she quietly said, “The only thing I can think of is this thing we used to do when we were younger. Whenever one of us got into trouble, we’d claim to be the other. We even have fake IDs with our pictures but the other’s name on them. We looked so much alike that it was easy to fool people. Maybe she gave the police my name when it was her.”

  Behind us, Alex said angrily, “I’m assuming you can prove you weren’t in Ellicott City when this incident occurred?”

  She nodded and dried her eyes. “The first time I’ve left Ohio in years was to visit Bethany in December. If it was September, it was her, not me with him.”

  While I tried to get my brain around all she’d said and all we’d found out about Michael Thompson, Alex stood and brusquely thanked her as he walked out without another word. I apologized for upsetting her and ran after him. When I finally caught up with him in the art-deco style lobby of the hotel, he looked more lost than earlier when I’d found him outside Schultz’s.

  “Hey, what’s going on? This is good news, Alex. If it was Bethany there with Thompson, then we know they fought and he was upset with her. I don’t know why he waited all these months to finally lash out, but he’s our guy.”

  Almost as if he didn’t hear me, he nodded and said, “Yeah, I guess that’s it.”

  A group of people coming back from a night of drinking stumbled past us, so I pulled him by the arm toward the door and out of their way. “Let’s go talk to Derek and tell him what we have. He’ll be able to bring Michael Thompson in and then this will all be over.”

  I saw a look of recognition came over Alex’s face, and he smiled. “Let’s go talk to him then.”

  Ten minutes later, we sat in Derek’s living room decorated in typical bachelor fashion with a ridiculously large TV and little else but two chairs and a couch for visitors to sit on. Wearing a pair of sweatpants and a Ravens t-shirt, he propped his feet up on the coffee table to listen to us unravel our tale of Michael Thompson and his need to hurt Bethany because she’d left him. When we finished laying out our case, he put his hands behind his head and made a clucking sound.

  “Sounds pretty good to me. I never knew Bethany the way you described her, though. She sure changed from that sweet girl I knew when she first arrived in town.”

  His comment made me realize in some ways she really had changed. But in other ways that I hoped people would remember her for, she was the same great girl who had come to Sunset Ridge after college at the University of Maryland and fell in love with the small town she said reminded her of the one she grew up in.

  “I’ll have him brought in for questioning in the morning. You two can feel free to sit in.”

  Alex said nothing and turned to leave, but I figured I should warn Derek about Michael Thompson’s tenuous hold on reality. “He’s got problems, so keep that in mind when you talk to him.”

  Derek looked over at Alex as he walked out his front door and then back at me. “It looks like he’s not the only one.”

  I found Alex waiting for me once again, this time looking up at the night stars as he stood in the cold. Wanting to help but not knowing what had made him so unhappy, I said, “How about we go to McGuire’s for a drink? It probably won’t be too busy, and we can talk.”

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath in before opening them again and lowering his head to look at me. Blowing the air out of his mouth so it billowed like frosty white smoke next to my head, he nodded and in a resigned voice said, “Okay.”

  It felt like it took everything he had inside him to say that one word.

  We found the table furthest away from the bar where my father and a few diehard McGuire’s regulars sat talking about the upcoming Super Bowl and the Patriots’ dynasty. I poured us two glasses of scotch and promised I’d tell my father about the case later before returning to join Alex.

  I placed his drink in front of him and sat down. He still wore that lost look on his face that bothered me. I wanted to rid him of that, to remind him that he was exactly where he belonged with the one person he never had to doubt.

  He took a few gulps of his drink and finally said more than a single word. “I wasn’t looking for forever with her, but I thought we were at least truthful. It seems like I was wrong in that too.”

  “I’m sorry, Alex. I’m sure she just went there to talk to him. She was crazy about you.”

  He sighed and a frown replaced the lost look he’d worn for the past hour. “You know when Helena was murdered, they thought it was me at first, and then when that didn’t work out, they told me it was probably someone she’d been seeing on the side because the way they killed her was so personal. It didn’t matter how many times I told them she wouldn’t do that to me. They still kept saying it was a jilted lover who did it, not that they ever really stopped believing it was me. They never thought for a minute that neither one of those theories were right.”

  I wanted to say Bethany was never right for him, no matter how much she liked him. I wanted to tell him that she hadn’t lied to him so much as just acted the way she always did with men. I couldn’t do that to him, though. He deserved to think of their time together as more special than that.

  “A lot of times the police don’t see the people involved in a case, Alex. All they see are victims and suspects and evidence.”

  He took a drink and smiled at me. “Not you, though. Maybe that’s why you have such good instincts for this. You see the people.”

  I wanted to change the subject, if only to get his mind off what he’d just found out about Bethany, so I said, “I can’t figure out what you three guys—you, Ken, and St. Clair—had in common to make you all get together to be such good friends, you know that? You’re three totally different people.”

  Just the mention of his friends appeared to ease his mind. With a grin, he explained, “We all began working in law enforcement around the same time. Ken was a little older than John and me and wasn’t a detective, but he was an intere
sting guy. He knew Helena before I did because Manger was his favorite restaurant. That’s why he was so thrilled when we got together. He liked to say that he’d always have a great table there from that point on because I was with one of the chefs.”

  As he sat there enjoying memories from long ago, I wondered what to make of the contradictory statements about the trio’s friendship I’d heard from all three men. Then again, it all had been so long ago, and from what I’d seen, men simply didn’t seem to read people well, no matter if it was professionally or personally.

  Well, most men. I was willing to give my partner a pass on that, and whatever his memories of that time were, they were clouded by a loss he still hadn’t gotten over.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Derek waited for us outside the interrogation room, his happiness at nearing the solution to this case evident by the huge grin on his face. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him look so happy when he didn’t have a drink in his hand or a woman on his arm.

  Not that I blamed him. I, too, couldn’t wait for this case to be over and done, but more than that, I worried the longer it dragged on, the longer Alex would suffer not only because of this case but also because of the one he never was able to solve.

  Rubbing his hands together, Derek said, “Good morning! You ready for this?”

  I looked at the closed door of the room and wondered how crazy Michael Thompson was this early in the day. He definitely seemed like the kind of guy who could go around the bend with just a tiny bit of caffeine in him.

  “How is he?” I asked, bracing myself for some madness to come.

  “Yeah, he was a mess when we saw him,” Alex added.

  Derek shrugged. “He doesn’t seem too bad to me, but I only saw him as they were bringing him in. I had them keep the cuffs on him just in case, though. I don’t need some crazy bastard tearing up the spot where I get my coffee every day.”

  A chuckle escaped my lips, and as Derek walked into the room, I turned and whispered to Alex, “Glad to see he has his priorities straight.”

  The smile he’d worn since we met at The Grounds that morning grew until it nearly stretched from ear to ear. “That’s our chief. Let’s hope he can handle this guy.”

  “If not, I’m ready. He liked me last time.”

  My first look at Michael Thompson told me something had drastically changed in him. The wild-eyed look he’d worn the entire time we spent with him on that back porch had softened so he looked like any ordinary person handcuffed and waiting to be questioned by the police. Even his posture had relaxed, making him look almost comfortable on the metal folding chair he sat on.

  Alex saw the change too, and his face showed his mix of concern and confusion as he sat down across from Thompson. Studying him, he looked at me and shook his head as if to ask what had happened to the man we’d seen.

  “Mr. Thompson, I think you know Officer Montero and Miss McGuire. They’re going to be sitting in on our meeting,” Derek announced as he opened up the case file and began to flip through the stack of pages the investigation into Bethany’s murder had become.

  “Elizabeth, right?” Michael Thompson asked timidly. “You were named after your grandmother, you said.”

  Impressed he remembered, I nodded to let him know he was correct. “I’m happy to see you doing better today, Michael.”

  He smiled and it went all the way up to his eyes. “Thank you, and thank you for trying to help me the other night. I wasn’t doing well.”

  “Okay, we need you to answer a few questions, Mr. Thompson,” Derek said, ending the brief moment of kindness I’d shared with Michael. “First, how did you know Bethany Lewis?”

  “I loved her. She loved me. We were going to be together forever.”

  An uncomfortable silence hung in the air, and I looked to my right to see Alex silently waiting for Michael to continue. I knew what he was doing as he stared at the man. He was adding up the months to figure out if Bethany had been telling Michael she loved him while she was dating him.

  “When did you and Bethany begin dating?” Derek asked, and I couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that I sat surrounded by three very different men who’d been with her.

  “We started seeing each other last spring. At first I couldn’t offer her anything, so it was just once or twice and then we stopped. But then we realized we still cared for each other and started seeing each other all the time by the Fourth of July.”

  I listened to Michael talk about his relationship with Bethany and tried to remember if she ever mentioned him even in passing in any of our conversations, but she never said anything about anyone named Michael. She hadn’t talked about anyone in her life during the spring and summer. She’d appeared to be interested in Alex that whole time.

  “What do you mean you started seeing each other all the time by the Fourth?” Alex asked, his characteristic coolness absent from his voice.

  “Whenever she would come to where I worked because her paper used us, we got together.”

  “Asher and Mitchell?” I asked.

  Michael nodded. “Yes. I worked there until they let me go a couple months ago.”

  “Okay, now about the incident in September when the police had to come to your house because you and Bethany were fighting. What happened?”

  Knitting his brows, he frowned as he answered, “She told me that she’d fallen in love with someone else. She said she met someone here in Sunset Ridge and she couldn’t see me anymore. I told I couldn’t let her go, so we got into a fight. I never hit her or did anything but yell. I was upset. I loved her, and I thought she loved me. I lost everything just to be with her, and then she wanted to leave me for someone else. I couldn’t let her do that.”

  Derek stopped writing in his notes and looked up. “So all those months passed by and you couldn’t handle that she left you and you killed her.”

  “What?” he shrieked, his expression pure horror at what he’d just heard. “I would never hurt Bethany. Someone killed her?”

  He buried his face in his hands and began sobbing like a baby as the three of us looked at each other. Was he just acting like he didn’t know she’d been murdered, or was this truly the first he’d heard of the crime?

  Never one for having much respect for emotions, Derek asked, “Are you saying you didn’t know Bethany Lewis had been murdered, Mr. Thompson?”

  Michael dropped his hands from his face and the realness of his tears was evident all over his drenched cheeks. “Of course I didn’t know. How could you ask that? I loved her. If I knew she died, I would have been beside myself with grief.”

  Derek seemed confused as to what to ask next, so I jumped in and said, “Because the letters you wrote her sounded pretty threatening. You didn’t sound like you’d be beside yourself with grief in them.”

  Wiping his face, he stopped crying and looked toward me with horror in his eyes. “You think I’d kill her? I loved her. I would never hurt her for anything in the world. I couldn’t hurt her like that.”

  “Like what?” Derek asked, jumping on his comment as an admission that he knew more than he was pretending to.

  “Like murder,” Michael answered, much to Derek’s disappointment. “I would never do that. Why would anyone kill her? She was beautiful and sweet. I loved her.”

  “You didn’t sound like this in those letters you wrote her. You sounded like a man who wasn’t going to let anyone else have her if you couldn’t, even if that meant killing her,” I said even as my gut began to tell me Michael could no more kill Bethany than I could.

  Confused, he shook his head and asked, “What letters?”

  I looked over at Derek as he lifted them out of the file. “The letters you wrote telling her you couldn’t go on without her and you couldn’t let her continue living if she left you.”

  Michael raised his still handcuffed wrists to move the letters in front of him and began to read. He scanned the words he’d written, and I saw the sadness settle into his face as they came bac
k to haunt him.

  He looked up, his eyes full of sorrow, and fighting back tears said, “I know what these look like, but I would never kill anyone, especially not Bethany. I wanted her back. I never gave up on the idea that we’d be together again.”

  “They look bad, Mr. Thompson,” Derek warned. “You pretty much say you’re going to kill her.”

  “No!” he cried out. “I was just out of my mind when my wife left me and took the kids. I got help, though, and once they put me on my meds, I was okay. I didn’t mean to make it seem like I would ever hurt her.”

  “But you weren’t that way when we were at your house yesterday,” Alex quietly said next to me. “You didn’t look okay then.”

  “I didn’t take my meds for a few days and I went off the rails by going back to the house. But as you can see, I’m okay now. As long as I take the pills my doctor gave me, I’m okay.”

  He didn’t seem to be lying about that. Compared to the wild man I’d tried to connect with the last time we were together, now he seemed downright relaxed, even calm, except for protesting his innocence and mourning the news of Bethany’s death. His eyes didn’t flash the madness I had seen in him, and his voice remained level, for the most part. Whatever he was taking, it was working this morning.

  Alex leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “What about the bloody knife on the counter we saw? How do you explain that?”

  Hanging his head, Michael pushed up his left sleeve to show us a fresh wound a few inches above his wrist on his forearm. “I wanted to kill myself, but I couldn’t when I thought of my kids hearing their dad killed himself, so I didn’t do it right. Not even deep enough for stitches.”

  My heart went out to him. He looked so disappointed that he couldn’t even kill himself to put an end to his pain. Next to me, Alex sat crestfallen after hearing Michael’s explanation. Like me, he no doubt understood that Michael Thompson probably wasn’t Bethany’s killer, which meant we were back at square one again with no suspects.