The Last Night (The Last Series Book 2)

by Harvey Church

  At that time of morning, it hadn’t been a long wait for the cab to roll up to the curb at 121 Cobalt. It was dark, he remembered, early-morning with a damp chill in his bones. The cab had arrived within five minutes, affording Ethan a bit of time to tidy up the mess he’d made during his frantic search.

  The taxi driver had hurried him to the first hospital. Northwestern ER, they’d said they were taking Raleigh to Northwestern!

  “Please calm down, sir. I’m sorry but your wife wasn’t admitted here.” The triage nurse had been backed up by two armed security guards while she explained this to him, multiple times.

  By the time they stopped at St. Joseph’s, the third hospital, Ethan had broken down, his world falling apart so quickly that there was nothing he could do to stop it or slow it down. There’d been a wild burning at the base of his skull, his spine aching from the kind of crippling cramps that could immobilize you.

  Sheer panic could do that: it was nothing like the movies where people run toward the danger to save the day, not for Ethan, anyway.

  The car behind him blared its horn, snapping Ethan out of his trance. Easing the Jaguar forward and merging into the next lane, he passed a mild fender-bender half a block up. After glancing over at it briefly, he continued to Wal-Mart, made his purchase, and then returned home to charge Raleigh’s phone and get on with his renovation project.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Of all the people Ethan knew, a handful had completed various renovations over the course of their homeownership lives—finished basements, upgraded bathrooms, kitchen overhauls. Whatever the project, the one thing that nearly all of his old friends claimed to hate the most was the drywall. And that was how Ethan had spent the rest of his Tuesday afternoon; drywalling the walls according to the old DIY book had Raleigh had bought him one Christmas after they’d moved in.

  As he lifted the final panel into place using one hand, his other operated a drill to secure it to the wall. He zipped two drywall screws into place, ensuring the panel would stay, then finished up the process just in time for someone to hit the doorbell. Being that this room wasn’t located at the front of the house, he couldn’t exactly peek outside to see whether the visitor was worth attending to—he hated to admit it, but he treated a regular delivery person differently than, say, a Jehovah’s Witness.

  Placing the drill’s battery in its charging base, Ethan wiped his hands down the length of his pants to rid his palms of dust, and then pulled the first and second plastic sheets away from the threshold between this formal room and the hallway. The two plastic sheets, along with the heavily-covered floor vents were meant to keep the dust out of the rest of the house and, so far, the strategy worked.

  A second chime of the bell sounded, and Ethan swore he wouldn’t be pleasant with whoever was on the other side of that door, regardless of whether they were delivering gifts or preaching the Good Word. But when he disengaged the bolts and pulled the heavy wooden door open, he reconsidered his resolve.

  Agent Klein was standing on the front porch, his back to Ethan while he finished his cigarette.

  “Oh, hey,” Ethan said as the federal agent turned around and faced him. He gave a single nod to the cigarette in his hands. “Can’t smoke inside. Raleigh’s got asthma.”

  Raising a skeptical eyebrow, Klein glanced down at the cigarette and seemed to consider it. Maybe his sudden change in focus had more to do with trying to hide his surprise at hearing such a comment slip past Ethan’s lips. “Yeah,” he said, agreeing.

  “I know she’s alive now,” Ethan said. I always knew, but now it’s more of a certainty than ever before.

  Lifting an eyebrow, Klein used his thumb and pointer finger to put out the cigarette’s flame. He didn’t even flinch, even though the pads of his finger and thumb came away black. “Alive, huh? How’d you come to that conclusion, Ethan?”

  Ethan pulled the door open a little more, inviting the federal agent inside.

  After tucking the half-smoked cigarette into his suit’s inside pocket, Klein smiled and stepped through the front entrance.

  “Whoa,” Klein said, staring into the depths of the house as he removed his shoes. “You’ve got some extensive renos going on here?”

  Ethan followed his stare into the main hallway, noticing the plastic sheets containing the chaos in the living room. But there were other things in the hallway that made the work look even more exhaustive than it really was. There were boxes of hardwood, buckets of drywall mud, a few extra sheets of uncut drywall, a bunch of tools. To Klein, it probably looked like Ethan was demolishing the entire interior.

  “Last week, you said you hadn’t touched your mother-in-law’s money,” Klein said, his voice level and even.

  “Or the insurance money,” Ethan added.

  Turning his attention, Klein’s stare jumped from one eye to the next. It looked as if he might be reading an invisible script. “Has that changed?”

  “No, it’s all money that I’ve saved through work. Remember? The insurance money needs to get repaid,” Ethan said, raising a hand. He stopped himself from making the Star Trek sign like he had with Chantal at Darcy’s Wireless. “Once Raleigh’s back, I think it’s safe to say we might spend some of her inheritance. I was thinking of taking her away. Nice vacation, something long so she can let go of the trauma. We never had a real honeymoon, so I’m going to take her away, somewhere nice. And, of course, we can also get reacquainted.”

  “Uh huh.” Klein sounded unconvinced as he stepped past Ethan and walked deeper into the house. At the living room, he used a finger to move the plastic sheets aside and take a peek into the room. “New floors and walls? What’s that all about, Ethan?”

  Stopping next to him, Ethan reached out and pulled the plastic even farther. Nobody without a pair of shoes would want to step into that room; there was so much dust and other crap on the floor, which Ethan planned on tearing up later tomorrow, after the drywall mud had dried and been sanded down.

  “Ethan?”

  “It was due,” he said at last.

  Klein didn’t seem convinced. He turned away and studied some of the supplies.

  “Before she was taken from me, Raleigh always complained about the orange stain of the ‘retro’ oak floors.”

  Frowning, Klein glanced down at the dark, espresso-colored hardwood underneath his socks.

  Putting the pieces together, Ethan chuckled. “First thing I did once my company’s stock price jumped after the financial crisis,” he explained, “was cash in, tear up the old floors, and install this nicer dark stuff. It was tough enough, walking around this house without the memories we’d built haunting me. Eventually, I managed to redo the entire place.”

  With a narrowed stare, Klein met Ethan’s gaze and pointed at the stacked boxes of planks pressed up against the hallway wall. “Looks like you’re going back to the color she hated?”

  Ethan followed the muzzle of Klein’s finger and noticed the boxes of hardwood flooring, a tiny “window” cut into the cardboard packaging to reveal the orange tint of the planks inside.

  “Notwithstanding the fact that I still don’t know why you think she’s even alive, I’m a little confused about why you’d go back to the original color that she hated, or something close to it?”

  More chuckling, and Ethan could feel the color rising onto his cheeks. “One thing at a time, right?”

  Klein widened his eyes for him to get to the point, so Ethan cleared his throat and nodded that he would.

  “Okay, so the reality is that kidnapping victims are traumatized by their experience. Raleigh’s been gone for seven and a half years, so I think it goes without saying that she’ll be a little traumatized, right?”

  “Uh huh.” Following along, but not exactly convinced.

  “The way I see it, and I’ve done a bit of reading on the subject, Raleigh will want the comfort of home—this home where we built all of our memories. Happy memories. And a loving family member—me—can remind her that whatever n
ightmare she’s endured, well, that nightmare’s now over. Finally.” I’m going to be the knight that saves her.

  No reaction from Klein.

  Ethan swallowed the nervousness—he’d taken a couple of 100-level sociology courses at college, so he wasn’t an expert on these things. “If it were me,” he said, settling on brutal honesty, because for the past seven and a half years, he’d imagined a million times what kind of horror his wife was enduring, imagined it in such graphic detail that he’d convinced himself he was actually sharing her pain and (hopefully) lifting some of the trauma and assuming it himself, “I’d want . . . home. I’d want Raleigh’s body curled around mine, her arms wrapped around me while we sit on that shitty sofa we bought when we graduated college and moved into this place.”

  Klein raised an eyebrow. “So, where’s the shitty old sofa?”

  Ethan winced. “I don’t exactly have it anymore. And since I can’t replace shitty, I thought I’d do the next best thing, which is renovate the house to make it look like it did before she was carted off in that kidnapulance. So she can feel like she’s come back. Like she’s come home.”

  “Huh.” If Klein was impressed with Ethan’s label for the ambulance, he didn’t let it show. “And now do you want to explain why you think she’s alive?”

  “I was afraid you’d never ask,” Ethan said, sighing melodramatically and motioning for him to step even deeper into the house.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Agent Klein sat on one of the stools at the breakfast bar and laced his hands while Ethan grabbed his and Raleigh’s phones and swapped the SIM cards. He explained to Klein what he’d done the night before.

  “So watch this,” Ethan said, turning the phone so that Klein could see the lock screen with the picture of Raleigh and him at one of Mary’s fancy parties.

  When Ethan pressed the Emergency link, Klein shot him a death stare.

  “Relax,” Ethan said, grinning. “It’s not a prank call. Just watch.”

  With the phone on speaker, they listened to the double beeps and watched the text on the screen change to Call FAILED.

  “Did you see that?” Ethan asked.

  Klein didn’t seem all that tickled. “What did I miss?”

  “The call failed!” Ethan reined in his excitement and held himself back from jumping. The work he’d been doing in the living room had distracted him from all of this investigative work, but now that he was back at it, he laughed hysterically. “It failed!”

  “So what? It happens.”

  Staring back at Klein, Ethan pressed the Emergency link again. Same result. He pressed it a third time, and that was when Klein shifted on the stool and cleared his throat.

  “Ethan, why don’t you just come out and tell me what the hell I’m missing here.”

  Smirking at the federal agent, Ethan realized he needed to take another approach. After a moment of thinking about it, he told Klein to pull out his phone. “Okay, so the first thing you’ll notice with your lock screen is that the Emergency link is capitalized. On Raleigh’s, it’s not.”

  Klein’s eyes moved from his device to Raleigh’s, then back to his own. If the federal agent was getting excited about this, the emotion wasn’t spilling onto the surface of his face.

  “Let me spell it out.”

  “Please, Ethan, just get to the damn point.”

  “Raleigh’s phone has an app called Pry-Jack installed on it.”

  Still, Klein’s expression remained flat.

  “That app can be used to—”

  “I’m familiar with Pry-Jack, Ethan.”

  “The person who installed it hijacked her outgoing emergency calls.”

  Klein frowned.

  “See, you were right. It wasn’t an elaborate kidnapping. It was . . . well . . . the call I made to nine-one-one wasn’t intercepted, Agent Klein. It was purposely redirected to another number.”

  Shifting on the stool, Klein started to reach inside his jacket, which was where he kept his cigarettes, but then he stopped himself. He was clueing in to what Ethan was saying. Finally.

  “In this case—” Ethan had memorized the toll-free number “—that number is one-eight-hundred, five-five-five, nineteen-seventy-seven.”

  Klein returned to playing the silent waiting game, so Ethan kept talking.

  “It’s a number provided by PowerTeleCom, an online, one-eight-hundred service. For ten bucks a month, you can put a toll-free number on your website and have calls redirected to your mobile phone while you lay on a beach.”

  The way Klein’s lips moved, as if he might be ready to speak up, to finally say something, Ethan knew he’d stirred the federal agent’s interest.

  “You can find out who owned that line,” Ethan said. “PowerTeleCom would have client records for years, and if you subpoenaed—”

  “But what’s the relevance, Ethan?” Shifting gears. Ethan figured he was changing the focus so that he wouldn’t know that Klein was going to do exactly that: subpoena the hell out of PowerTeleCom and find out who’d registered that number seven and a half years ago.

  “What do you mean by ‘relevance,’ Agent Klein?”

  Klein cleared his throat. “What I mean is: what makes you so certain that Raleigh wants to come home after all of this time and, to a lesser degree, is even still alive?”

  “Aha.” Ethan turned the phone to him, deactivated the Sky-Jack app, and navigated to the phone’s photo folder. “These are all pictures of us, Agent Klein. Pictures that prove our love, that reinforce that I was her ‘one and only,’ and that she loved our little life, our marriage, and everything we were.”

  Either Klein didn’t share that belief, or he was one hell of a great poker player because his blank stare revealed nothing.

  But Ethan knew of a way to convince him. “Last week, you suggested this wasn’t a kidnapping, right?”

  Still that blank stare.

  “So instead of bugging Hyatt’s wife, I focused on the other two possibilities.” Ethan used his fingers to count them off, starting with his index finger first. “Either she was taken away by a team of legitimate paramedics where one medic looked exactly like Paul Hyatt. And that team screwed up so bad that a first-responder-wide conspiracy was at play to cover it up.”

  “Or?” Klein seemed afraid to ask.

  “Or Raleigh herself was the mastermind behind the elaborate scheme, even though that doesn’t make sense because she wasn’t the one to suggest getting into the ambulance in the first place!” Ethan tapped the side of Raleigh’s phone, bringing his attention back to the most-compelling piece of evidence. “If Raleigh wanted to leave me, and if she felt she couldn’t just walk out that door—which she could have done, by the way—then why are there photos of our happy times on this phone? With Pry-Jack, she could have hidden all kinds of photos, whatever she wanted. But she chose to hide these.” Ethan looked down at the photo of their picnic in Ravinia Park, remembering how much fun they’d had that day.

  “Ethan…” he sounded empathetic.

  “She’s alive, Agent Klein. And we need to find her.” He refused to accept the federal agent’s skepticism.

  Klein sighed. Shaking his head, he stepped off of the barstool and motioned toward the front door. “I think we should grab some lunch. I bet with all of this excitement you haven’t eaten all day, have you?”

  Ethan said he’d had eggs and toast.

  “This morning?”

  He shrugged.

  “Grab a clean pair of pants,” Klein said, already starting down the main hallway toward the front door. “I’ll be waiting in the car. I have something I want to show you.”

  Chapter Thirty

  The diner that Klein had in mind was located in South Chicago. As they began their commute, Ethan began to feel a little uncomfortable. Morgan Park was in South Chicago. Did that mean Klein knew about him spending five grand on enlisting Python’s help to crack into Raleigh’s old iPhone? Even if he knew about it, why was it even a concern? No, Klein
wouldn’t care about that; he’d care about the end-result, which was that Raleigh was indeed taken from him.

  But Klein didn’t take him to Morgan Park. Instead, the federal agent took an exit in Roseland and, after lighting a fresh cigarette and opening the Ford’s windows, maneuvered his FBI-issued Taurus along the sketchy streets to a diner that had Ethan wondering if this was all some weird joke. And then, as if to answer Ethan’s uncertainty, Klein unlatched his seatbelt and got out of the car.

  When Ethan didn’t follow, the federal agent glanced back into the car with a curious twist to his face.

  “Are you joining me, Ethan? I’ve got the expense covered, in case you’re afraid to dip into those untouchable savings of yours.”

  Letting out a reluctant sigh, Ethan stepped out of the Taurus and joined Klein for the short walk through the busy parking lot to the diner’s front doors. Inside, the place looked like something straight out of the fifties or sixties, except cleaner.

  “What is this place?” Ethan asked once they were shown to an old-fashioned booth.

  “This place is like Monet for your taste buds.”

  When a larger woman with “Sally” on her nametag came for their order, Klein asked for the special—scrambled eggs with sausage, hash browns, and toast. “And a grapefruit juice,” he added. “Same with my friend.”

  Ethan asked for an apple juice instead, and once Sally was gone, noticed how Klein had removed his phone from his jacket and was turning it toward him.

  “Since I couldn’t locate my original files, I had to ask the Chicago Police to provide me with details of those assault allegations,” Klein said, keeping his voice low and, with his phone turned toward Ethan, navigating to a photos folder named “VernonE.”