The Last Night (The Last Series Book 2)

by Harvey Church

  The cover of the trade magazine had captured his full attention. On its cover, a man in full scientist gear had his arms crossed and a big grin on his face. Standing behind this man were several younger men, all of them sharing some trait from the big man who took up most of the image. The large-font caption next to this family of scientists read, “Challenging the Laws of Biochemistry: Deploying Deprocessing Methodologies in Addiction Research.”

  Big words, big terms, but the image got Ethan thinking because the older man on the cover was Lawrence Parker, the President of ParkerPharma, and the younger men behind him were three of his four sons. But more importantly, as that man’s employee, Raleigh had been working on something that could help people kick severe addiction to opiates.

  Was all of this related to her disappearance?

  Shaking his head, Ethan set the magazine aside and continued to dig through the box on the desk when he noticed Lisa’s return. He sensed her standing in the doorway behind him, watching.

  Knowing it was time to leave—Klein and Tate would likely be banging on the door or trying to break it down—Ethan began repacking the box and pretended to chance a glance back toward the open doorway where Lisa stood. He smiled at her.

  “You’re leaving already?” she asked. She didn’t exactly pout, but Ethan felt like he was letting her down.

  He nodded and grabbed the trade magazine with Lawrence Parker on its cover. “I’ll return this.” He would, too; he didn’t need to two copies.

  Lisa’s face registered sadness, but not because of him. It was loneliness; Ethan knew that look too well because he’d experienced it every day for the past seven and a half years whenever he looked in the mirror.

  “I’m sorry I can’t stay longer.”

  Lisa escorted him back to the front door. “If I come across anything else, I’ll call again.”

  With his shoes tied and his hand on the doorknob, he faced Lisa one more time. “How about we grab lunch sometime, Lisa?” He knew she needed to get out of the house, knew what it was like to be in her position of loss. Those early days made suicide seem like a viable alternative.

  She blinked hard a couple of times.

  “You need to get out of the house,” he told her. “See people. Do things.” Fresh air to keep the sanity alive, otherwise you might snap out of a rage-induced fugue and find another man’s blood on your hands. “As much for me,” he said, the words spilling out before he could stop them, “as it is for you. Okay?”

  Lisa agreed, her lips tightening, her eyes coming back to life. “I’d like that, Ethan.”

  “I would too,” he said, and then he bolted from the mini mansion, wondering what kind of trouble he’d just gotten himself in if his instincts were right and Raleigh was indeed alive and ready to come home.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  When Ethan arrived home, he noticed that Agent Klein and Detective Tate had either come and gone, or they hadn’t arrived yet. With the trade magazine rolled up in his hand, he hurried across the backyard, entered his house and placed his jacket on one of his three hooks. But unlike the millions of times he’d walked right past the hooks in the past seven and a half years, Ethan stopped this time and considered those empty hooks, the three of them that were waiting for Raleigh’s return.

  But she’s not coming home, is she?

  As the pit of his stomach dropped, Ethan blinked back the tears. Did he really, instinctively know she wasn’t dead, or did he want to believe it so much that he’d gone to such stupid lengths as making sure there were damn hooks available for her jackets? Sliding a hand through his hair, Ethan considered all of the other things he’d done. Hell, even when he fell asleep at night, he made sure he’d kept to his side of the bed.

  Is this all just crazy optimism?

  And then this afternoon, there was the matter of his blacked out memory.

  It all felt connected, each little detail joined by a thin thread, and Ethan didn’t like where that thread was headed because it suggested his involvement in Raleigh’s disappearance wasn’t an innocent one. Maybe he’d abused her, maybe in those moments of self-defense during one of her frantic outbursts of wild rage. Maybe he’d not only saved himself from getting hurt, but maybe, oh, jeez, maybe he’d used force to disable or restrain her.

  The kind of force in the photographs Klein had shown him.

  Ethan felt sick to his stomach.

  Because maybe in one of those instances of self-defense or restraint, he’d blacked out with Raleigh just like he had with Thomas Braun. It explained why all of his and Raleigh’s “joint” friends had disowned him following her disappearance. All of them except for Phil, an old friend who had never supported their marriage and who had even gone so far as to suggest Raleigh was seeing and lunching with another man.

  An affair!

  When the doorbell chimed, Ethan snapped out of his thoughts. Shaking the fog and fear out of his head, he hurried upstairs to the front door. Through the window at the side of the door, he noticed the federal agent’s Ford Taurus on the road before he saw the agent himself, up on the porch, finishing up a cigarette.

  Just Klein’s Taurus. Detective Tate wasn’t going to arrest him. Not now, anyway.

  Opening the front door, Ethan reminded Klein that he couldn’t smoke in the house, another autopilot request that wouldn’t matter if Raleigh were indeed death.

  “Nice to see you, Ethan.” He entered the house, the stub of the cigarette no longer burning. “You were pretty irrational on the phone,” Klein said, removing his shoes. “Mind telling me what you were going on about?”

  Irrational? Doing irrational things to achieve rational goals . . .

  After showing Klein to the breakfast bar and tossing the magazine on the counter, Ethan grabbed a bottle of water for himself and explained what had happened. Everything, starting with the phone call and the trip to the John Hancock.

  “You blindly wired this guy a quarter of a million dollars?” Klein facepalmed himself and whistled at the incredible figures. “Get me the banking information, I’ll engage the authorities in the Barbados, see what we can do about getting a trace on that cash.”

  “You’ll get it back?” Why couldn’t he, he was the FBI after all.

  Klein shrugged. “It’s unlikely, but I suppose if this Braun character hasn’t moved the money already, we can see if there any diplomatic avenues to have it returned.” He frowned and studied Ethan a little closer. “What else can you tell me about Thomas Braun?”

  Ethan was a little confused. He’d told him everything he remembered about Medic Two; his face, that night seven and a half years ago, the way he’d approached Ethan at the observation deck at the John Hancock, the smirk on his face at library, the way those gray eyes had rolled back in the alleyway, everything.

  But . . .

  Now he had a better idea. Stepping away from the breakfast bar, Ethan hurried upstairs to the guest room.

  This bedroom consisted of their old bedframe, a four-post bed next to the single window that looked out at the dog park where the crack house had once stood. The bedframe had been his mother-in-law’s, an anniversary gift now that she was done with it. There was a roll-top desk in the corner, also a second-hand “gift” from Raleigh’s mother, and the old IKEA dresser that they’d shared in those early days.

  For the same reason that Ethan had stopped and pondered the three empty hooks in the basement, he stood at the door to the guestroom and considered why he’d held on to all of this junk. Had he honestly believed that his wishful thinking could have kept Raleigh alive? Had it all been a crazy and desperate act of self-conviction so that he could avoid dealing with his own guilt?

  Remembering the purpose of his trip upstairs, Ethan approached the roll-top desk and grabbed the laptop from underneath. He unplugged it from the power supply and hurried back downstairs where he opened it and searched for Thomas Braun. Half a dozen results appeared, all of them belonging to the usual social media suspects.

  Sure enough,
the top listing linked Ethan directly to Braun’s Facebook profile. Braun’s pic was a display of what most men wished to look like when they weren’t wearing a shirt. He also held a young boy in his lean yet muscular arms who couldn’t be more than three years old, a beach in the background. However, Braun’s relationship status was listed as “single.”

  “That’s him,” Ethan said, pushing the laptop closer to Klein. “That’s Thomas Braun.”

  Withdrawing his mobile phone from his jacket’s inside pocket, Klein tapped away a few notes. Ethan watched the older man’s eyebrows draw closer together as he fumbled through whatever he was typing. And then Klein took a pic of the computer screen.

  “I’ll have our team get me a background on Braun,” Klein said, placing his phone face-up on the countertop. “So far, since your panicked call earlier, we’ve had the CPD walk through that alleyway off Congress. Reports of blood, but no body. Also, none of the area emergency rooms triaged a beaten male.” Klein watched Ethan for a reaction.

  And the only reaction Ethan had was one of horrified familiarity. No body. No reports from the emergency rooms of someone matching Braun’s description or injuries. It wasn’t so much a reaction of familiarity as it was one of déjà vu.

  “So,” Ethan said, shifting on the stool as if that might shake the strange, erie sense of déja vu and disbelief, “you’re telling me that Thomas Braun walked away from what I did to him?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  It seemed too convenient, too easy. Ethan remembered the man’s blood on his hands, his body going limp on the filthy asphalt. It was the scene of a murder.

  “Why, Ethan? Were you expecting something else?”

  Ethan chuckled, relieved that the boy in Braun’s social media profile picture wouldn’t hear that his daddy was dead. Not today, anyway. He also found a bit of humor in the question that Klein had just asked about whether he’d been expecting something else. “Truthfully? Yes.”

  “That he was dead? You really thought you’d killed him?

  Taking a deep breath, Ethan nodded. “The way you just explained things to me, I expected you to add that an ambulance that doesn’t exist showed up, shoveled him inside, and then carted him off on a boat so that the evidence could be incinerated in the backwoods of some remote Michigan town.”

  Except Klein wasn’t tickled. In fact, he grabbed his phone and navigated to another screen. “Funny you should mention the backwoods of Michigan, Ethan. Listen to what I’ve discovered since our last visit.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Klein scrolled through his phone. The federal agent definitely had more images stored on his device than Ethan had on his. But, then again, Klein likely had numerous files with many different photos, one file for each case he was working. When he finally reached whatever he was looking for, he turned the screen to Ethan and asked him what he saw.

  Silly question, but Ethan humored him. “It’s the medicine cabinet.” He frowned, remembering staring at this very image not that long ago, in fact. He’d seen it during one of their earlier “visits,” the first time he’d asked Ethan to tell the story of Raleigh’s last night, tell it right from the start with the flickering light above Klein’s desk and the gray walls that made him want to scream. Ethan couldn’t make out the faded print on the third bottle. “I don’t remember what pills I had, but they all look like they’re expired.”

  Klein’s eyes bore into him. He barely blinked and, Ethan saw, he sure as hell wasn’t looking at the image on the phone in his hands. “Uh huh. And the bottles in Raleigh’s name?”

  Leaning closer, Ethan squinted and sounded out the names the way a first-grader might attempt reading his first novel. “Serophene and . . . Hydrea.”

  “Do you recall what those prescriptions were for?” Still staring, still keenly interested in Ethan’s response.

  “I think the first was help with fertility and her cycle or something, and the other was to regularize her platelet count.” He let out a confused breath. “You said discovered something since our last visit, Agent Klein, but we’ve been over this stuff already. What did you mean when you said that?”

  After allowing his stare to linger for a half second longer than necessary, Klein snapped his phone back. He flipped through a half dozen more photos and stopped at the one where Raleigh had posed for the police photographer, her eye bruised, her lip bulging. Klein didn’t have to point the phone at Ethan to get a reaction from him.

  “I don’t want to see that,” Ethan said, turning away. Because when he saw that image now, he was reminded of what he’d done to Thomas Braun earlier. Without question, the fake medic’s face would look a lot like Raleigh’s once he washed the blood away and posed for his next social media selfie. Drawing the parallel between his outburst today and the image on Klein’s phone, Ethan felt sick to his stomach.

  “Platelet count, huh?” Klein locked the screen and slipped the phone back into his jacket pocket. “Any idea why she needed to take those pills, Ethan?”

  He nodded, raising an eyebrow because he wondered if Klein ever listened to him at all. “Yeah, to reduce the platelet count.”

  “But why? What was her condition?”

  At last, Ethan knew that it was one of those rhetorical questions he liked to ask. The federal agent already knew the answer; he obviously wanted to see if Ethan knew his wife as well as he’d claimed to know her. “She, well, she had a rare blood disease.”

  For the first time ever—or for as far back as Ethan’s memory would go back—Klein half-grinned. “Yeah, you’re right. According to her medical file, she had, or has a condition called Essential Thrombocythemia. Do you know what ET is, Ethan?”

  He nodded. “High platelet count.”

  “And?”

  Feeling the emotion welling in his eyes from the memory of those early days when they were trying to figure out what was going on with Raleigh, he had to look away. “It’s actually a form of cancer, one that doesn’t reduce life expectancy, but it’s cancer nonetheless. Before we knew what was going on, Raleigh would get these killer headaches. She’d faint or experience horrible chest pains.” Scowling, Ethan remembered how they’d thought, at one point, that she’d been having a heart attack. One of the hospital visits had even suggested a mini-stroke, and they’d ordered an emergency MRI and ruled out any brain cell damage. It had been a trying time in their relationship, the worry that something was terminally wrong with the woman he loved and wanted to marry. Heartbreaking, in fact.

  Still nodding, Klein seemed to take a renewed interest in the conversation. “Something else, Ethan. ET causes blood clotting.”

  Yes, and that clotting could sever the flow of oxygen to the brain, which was why there’d been tingling in her fingers and numbness in her face and arms, Ethan knew.

  “It’s also not uncommon for people with ET to suffer from bruising, nosebleeds and bleeding from their gums and mouth. Were you aware of that?”

  “Yes.” He’d known it all along, but now it was starting to make a little bit of sense, the conclusion that Klein was trying to help him draw. “And, you’re right, Agent Klein, Raleigh would sometimes wake up with a bruise on her face, something that wasn’t there the night before.” Before the medical team had figured out the symptoms or the occasional blood on her pillow, it had been an extremely scary mystery.

  But if Klein thought that maybe Raleigh had suffered from one of those fainting episodes on that last night, he was wasting time. Raleigh hadn’t just fainted that night. In fact, ever since she’d started taking Hydrea, she hadn’t suffered another fainting episode, hadn’t even complained of any other symptoms . . . except the bruising. As if to make sure she hadn’t “faked” taking her pills, Ethan remembered how Detective Price (Tate’s predecessor) of the Chicago Police had counted her remaining pills and deduced that she’d been on track since the last renewal to have followed her prescription to perfection.

  “All due respect,” Ethan sighed, “but what
happened that night wasn’t related to her condition, Agent Klein.”

  “You called me today thinking that maybe you’d beaten your wife,” Klein said, as if he hadn’t even heard what Ethan was saying.

  Yes. He’d blacked out, lost a chunk of time from his memory, a sizeable one that erased any recollection from when he’d moved from the Harold Washington library to an obscure alleyway. And with his earliest memory being blood all over his fists and arms, and Thomas Braun’s body limp at his feet . . . what else was he supposed to think?

  “Do you think it’s possible that someone else, seeing these bruises on your wife, might have arrived at a conclusion that you’d beaten her?”

  If Klein was proud of his deductive powers, he wasn’t letting that pride show. The only expression he bared to Ethan was the same stoic stare as always, which both unnerved and comforted Ethan. “Only a few of our friends still talk to me since Raleigh disappeared,” Ethan said, half muttering to himself and afraid to quantify “few” as “Phil.”

  “Any reason they might have thought you’re capable of abusing her?”

  Ethan shrugged. “Honestly, the way I remember it, Raleigh was the one with the short fuse.” But my memory could be seriously flawed after what I’ve witnessed today, I’m afraid.

  The federal agent nodded, seemed to think about it before informing him, “Hot tempered individuals tend to hook up with similar, alpha-type personalities.”

  Massaging the bridge of his nose, Ethan shook his head. “I think, maybe, I blacked out. Or I’ve repressed those memories.” Still shaking his head. “I have no other way to explain it.”

  At last, with his eyes still glued to him, Klein asked. “So, what can you tell me about Elmwood Marina in Traverse City, Ethan?”

  The question caused the type of involuntary response that even the most seasoned poker player couldn’t cover up. Ethan couldn’t help it; he glanced toward the folded receipt at the other end of the counter, poking out from underneath the trade magazine he’d taken from Lisa Hyatt. They were the only things that appeared mildly out of place in the entire house.