Thicker than Blood (Zoe Bentley Mystery)

by Mike Omer

  “It’s your fault!” Daniel shouted at him. “With your fucked-up biting, and snarling, and hitting me, like a damn animal!”

  Daniel was right. He lowered his eyes.

  “Shit,” Daniel said. “Never mind. We still have work to do. Stay with her. I’ll get the van.”

  The man in control nodded, not daring to argue.

  Daniel left, still muttering curses.

  The man in control knelt by the battered woman and took out the syringe. He had work to do—he knew that—but he wanted to try to get some blood first. If it was only him, he could just drink his fill now, but he wasn’t the only one who needed the blood.

  CHAPTER 18

  Tuesday, October 18, 2016

  Bill Fishburne woke up in the middle of the night, his mouth dry. He shifted in the bed and tried to sink back into sleep, knowing that if he got up to get a drink, it’d take him ages to fall asleep.

  But the thirst nagged at him, and eventually he relented and sat up gently, not to wake up Hen.

  It was then that he realized she wasn’t in bed.

  She’d called him in the evening, telling him she’d have to work until after midnight. Wasn’t it midnight yet? It felt like much later. He sighed, fumbled for his phone, and lit its screen.

  It was seven minutes past four.

  The jolt of worry woke him instantly. His brain scrambled for an explanation and immediately found one—Hen must have returned home and then kept working on the computer. She did that every once in a while. When there was an important case. To reassure himself, he got up, slid his feet into his slippers, and padded to the bedroom window. They had a view out to the street, and their parking spots could easily be seen from the window.

  Hen’s car wasn’t there.

  He checked the rest of the rooms in the house, even peeking into Chelsey’s room. He verified with the clock in the kitchen that it really was after four in the morning, feeling the anxiety blossoming in his gut.

  Finally he grabbed his phone and called Hen.

  Her phone was offline.

  He could think of a simple explanation for all of this. Hen had stayed to work way beyond midnight and hadn’t noticed that her phone had run out of battery power. It had never happened before, but she did occasionally mention that other paralegals in the firm stayed all night working. He called her office number and waited as it rang, counting the seconds. When he reached thirty, he disconnected the call.

  He was annoyed with her firm—and with her. She should have texted him. He poured himself a glass of water. His hand trembled as he drank.

  He wasn’t really annoyed. He was scared. Hen would never have stayed at work so late without calling or texting him. She would have noticed that her battery had run out.

  Something was very, very wrong.

  He tried her office and her personal phone again. Nothing.

  He found Gina’s number in his contacts. He hesitated, knowing that calling anyone at four a.m. was a breach of every possible protocol. But his heart was thumping so hard it threatened to blow up in his rib cage. He hit send and waited for her to pick up.

  She answered after ten seconds. “Hello?” Her voice was sleepy, confused.

  “Gina, it’s Bill. I’m sorry to wake you up so late but—”

  “Bill Fishburne?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry, but I just woke up, and Henrietta isn’t home. She hasn’t returned from the office yet.” Gina worked in the same office as Hen. In fact, Hen had gotten her the job.

  “What time is it? She had to work late.”

  “It’s after four in the morning.”

  A long pause followed. “Did you try her phone?”

  “It’s offline. And she’s not answering in the office either. Do you think she stayed there all night?”

  “No! When I left, she said she’d be finishing up in about an hour. And that was at ten thirty.” Gina sounded wide awake as well, and her voice mirrored Bill’s fear. “Hang on. She worked with another paralegal . . . Jeff. I’ll call him, see if he knows what’s going on.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  She hung up, and Bill paced the kitchen. The seconds ticked by as he waited for Gina’s call, occasionally picking up the phone, then putting it down again.

  A tiny figure padded into the kitchen. Chelsey, blinking in confusion. “Daddy?”

  “Hey, pumpkin, it’s the middle of the night—go back to bed.” It took all of his self-control to hide the trembling in his voice, to speak softly.

  “I heard voices.”

  “I was just talking to myself. Come on—let’s get you back to bed.” He approached her and put an arm around her shoulder, gently turning her around. She obediently shuffled back with him, and he helped her into bed, tucking her in. Her dark curly hair spread on the pillow as she snuggled, hugging her unicorn doll. Bill bent down, kissed her forehead, and stepped out of the room. He returned to the kitchen, setting his phone to vibrate so that its ring wouldn’t wake her up again.

  It’d been thirteen minutes since Gina had hung up. What was she—

  The phone lit up, vibrating. He slid his finger on the screen, had to do it three times because it trembled so badly.

  “Hello?” he whispered.

  “Bill, listen, I just talked to Jeff. He said they were both done by twelve thirty. They left the office together. He dropped Henrietta off at the train station and then drove home.” Gina’s voice cracked. She was on the verge of crying. “Are you sure she’s not home? Maybe she was so tired she fell asleep in Chelsey’s room? Or the bathroom? Or . . . or . . .”

  “Her car isn’t here,” he said hollowly. His gut had become a heavy, freezing slab of ice.

  “Maybe she went somewhere else? Or maybe . . .”

  “I have to go, Gina. I’ll call you once I find out where she is.” He hung up the phone.

  He wanted to lunge out of the house and look for her. See if her car was in the train station’s parking lot. But of course he couldn’t leave Chelsey alone. He contemplated calling Hen’s mother, telling her to come over and watch over Chelsey while he looked, but he didn’t want to scare her. And she’d wake up Chelsey by mistake, which would only make things much, much worse.

  He did the only thing he could think of. He punched in a number he knew by heart and had always hoped he wouldn’t need to dial.

  They picked up immediately. “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

  After calling the police, Bill had a while to wait by his own, in the dark house. He spent it mostly imagining endless reasons for Hen’s disappearance.

  He was hard pressed to recall a time he had been more terrified in his life.

  Chelsey had undergone a medical operation as a toddler, and that had been scary. But he had had Hen and Chelsey to comfort, and a doctor who’d kept telling him it was a routine operation, and nurses who kept coddling her.

  Now, all he had was fear and no one to talk to.

  Perhaps there’d been a train crash. Perhaps Hen had had an accident when driving back from the train station. Perhaps she’d recalled she’d forgotten something in the office, run back, and gotten hit on the way by a drunk driver and was now bleeding in a ditch somewhere.

  One of the theories he concocted was that she’d managed to lock herself in the train station’s bathroom. He clung to that possibility like a drowning man in a stormy sea, imagining her crying in the bathroom stall, waiting for morning so someone could get her out. Because the beauty of that theory was that at any moment, she would step into their home, traumatized but safe. And beyond an anecdote they could laugh about in a few years, there would be no impact on their life. Chelsey would wake up in the morning, not even knowing her mother had been missing for the entire night.

  When the police finally showed up, he opened the door before they knocked.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said in a low voice to the officer in the doorway. “Please try to be quiet. My five-year-old daughter is sleeping.”

  They were t
wo cops in uniform. The young one was black, making Bill feel slightly more at ease. He was taller than his partner, his face serious, his eyes alert. His partner was white, chubby, and short, and seemed at least ten years older.

  “Are you Mr. Fishburne?” the young cop asked.

  “That’s right. Please, come in. But be quiet.” If Chelsey woke up when the cops were there, she’d be terrified.

  They both stepped inside, and Bill closed the door behind them, keeping the night’s chill outside.

  “I’m Officer Ellis,” the young cop said. “This is my partner, Officer Woodrow. I understand that your wife hasn’t returned home from work yet?”

  “Yes,” Bill said. He blurted the entire story, doing his best to impress upon them that this was a real emergency, not a case of a silly woman who forgot to call her husband. He mentioned several times that she was a paralegal, that her phone was offline, that her associate dropped her at a train station—

  “And you said his name is Jeff?” Ellis asked.

  “Yeah, he’s another paralegal—”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “Not too well. I saw him once at a party. But he seemed like a good guy.”

  “Does your wife ever mention him? Does she talk to him on the phone?”

  “Uh . . . no, not that I recall.”

  “Does she often stay at work late?”

  It dawned on Bill that the cops were concocting theories of their own, based on their own experience. A woman who had a fling and fell asleep in her lover’s bed, not noticing the time. Or maybe a woman who went out drinking and just hadn’t returned from her late night of partying. This was probably what they mostly saw. Didn’t they always say on TV that the police didn’t investigate a missing person report until twenty-four hours had passed?

  Bill felt a desperate need to convince the cops that this was not the case. Henrietta would never do any of those things. It was so out of the realm of possibility that he never entertained those thoughts.

  “Henrietta would never just . . . not return, okay? She didn’t leave me. She’s not with another man. She’s not drunk in a holding cell. There’s something wrong.”

  “Mr. Fishburne,” Ellis said. “I understand. We will look for your wife.”

  “Maybe she locked herself in the bathroom in the train station,” Bill said helplessly. “And her battery ran out.”

  “We’ll check it out,” Ellis said. “Can you give us the names and phone numbers of your wife’s associates? The ones you talked to? And the address of her firm, please.”

  He did. He showed them a picture of her. He watched them leave, the red and blue lights flickering as they drove away.

  It was after five in the morning. He would need to wake up Chelsey in an hour, and Hen still wasn’t home. And he’d have to explain somehow why there were no Mommy snuggles this morning and why he was the one combing Chelsey’s hair.

  CHAPTER 19

  The early-morning chill had a bite to it, but Zoe didn’t really mind. Once she started jogging, she’d mostly stop feeling the cold. She had a hat covering her ears and slim gloves for her fingers. Her nose would still feel like an icicle by the time she was done, but it was a small price to pay.

  She used to hate jogging.

  Andrea had dragged her a few times, when they lived in Boston, and Zoe had found the experience dreadful. Part of it, she had to admit, was that Andrea kept talking throughout their jogs, while all Zoe could do was grunt the occasional “Uh-huh” in between one labored breath and the next, her lungs feeling as if they were about to collapse into a black hole.

  But ever since her ordeal in Texas the month before, she needed fresh air, and lots of it. She went for long walks at first, but that didn’t do enough to curb the bursts of claustrophobic panic that hit her randomly throughout the day. Those dissipated almost completely once she ran.

  Andrea had explained over and over that she needed to stretch. Her sister had a list of what seemed like hundreds of stretching techniques, some so complicated they reminded Zoe of illustrations in the Kama Sutra. Zoe’s patience was just enough for a twenty-second stretch routine. Andrea had threatened her with terrible sports injuries, but Zoe decided, with zero evidence to support it, that her body wasn’t the kind that got injured while running.

  So she did her three stretching exercises and began running. When they’d gotten to Chicago a week before, she’d quickly discovered one of the city’s best assets, as far as she was concerned—the Lakefront Trail. Better than any jogging route in Dale City.

  It was still dark when she started, with a hint of blue dawn above the lake, the shoreline almost impossible to discern. A thin layer of clouds stood between the lake and the sky, a vista of ever-changing fluffy mountains.

  Her mind worked differently when she ran.

  Throughout the day, her brain churned and bubbled, a frothing soup of ideas and theories and unanswered questions. But when she ran, her thoughts quieted down, and she could focus on one thread, carefully reviewing it, thinking it through to the end.

  She thought of Catherine Lamb’s gruesome murder. But this time, instead of focusing on the actual act, she considered the moments before. The two men, approaching Catherine’s house. Did they approach on foot, or did they drive there? Did they talk on the way? When they approached the door, did they walk side by side, or was one of them leading, the other behind?

  It was difficult to imagine. The whole notion of Glover collaborating with another man was strange. Glover was a man who stalked and murdered alone. He hid under a carefully maintained facade of a nice, friendly man, someone you could have a drink with. And when he shed that facade, he didn’t allow people to see it. Obviously, he didn’t want to be caught. But there was more than that. Glover wanted to be liked.

  When he was their neighbor, all those years ago, he’d gone out of his way to be friendly with her entire family. He would talk with her parents about politics, his opinions always matching her father’s. But if her parents argued about politics, he would quickly find merit in both sides and make them both feel pleased with themselves. He would ask for neighborly favors, cunningly figuring out that when someone did you a favor, they often began to like you more. And he’d been absolutely charming with Zoe, giving her what teenagers most wanted, a nonjudgmental listening ear. He wanted to be liked in the way a psychopath did. Not because he was remotely interested in anyone else, but because when someone liked him, it affirmed his positive opinion about himself. He watched people’s reactions to him like a man checking a mirror, verifying that he looked good.

  And also because he judged human connections to be useful. And he was right. After all, didn’t the police and her own parents prefer to take his word over Zoe’s?

  But he’d shown his true face to someone, an accomplice. What made him do it? And how had that worked?

  The sun had emerged between the clouds, instantly painting the sky in a bright orange, the light giving the waves in the lake a shimmer. Zoe took out her phone, took a wobbly picture. She made a mental note to send it to Andrea.

  She ran past Ohio Street Beach. Her eyes glanced at the smooth sand, where three months before, Krista Barker had been found dead, her body embalmed. She and Tatum had arrived at the crime scene bickering and arguing and hating each other’s guts. It was a lifetime ago.

  Turning around, she started making her way back while nudging her mind gently back on track.

  Glover didn’t show his true self, not even to his partner in crime, she decided. Glover wanted to be adored by everyone, and the only people who saw his true self were his victims. And aside from her and Andrea, none of the women who saw that side survived. Perhaps the main reason he was so obsessed with her was that unlike others, she had really seen him for who he was, all those years ago.

  No, whatever Glover showed his partner was another disguise. He’d be friendly and accommodating and fun to be around, just like with everyone else. And when he finally broached the subject of hi
s need, he would do it very carefully, in a way that made it seem like it wasn’t his fault at all. He would be the victim in his narrative. Who would he blame? Women? Society? His own parents? Whoever it was, it would be the thing that would get him the most sympathy from his partner. Sympathy and collaboration.

  And he’d have to find the right partner. Someone he knew for sure wouldn’t be horrified or disturbed by what Glover told him. How had he found him? Had he searched online for like-minded people and, by a stroke of luck, found one who lived nearby? It felt wrong. As much as she hated to admit it, a large part of Glover’s charm was face to face. His easy smile, his disarming build, his easygoing body language. All a disguise, sure, but one he wore well. And he would use it when he sought someone he could trust.

  She could see the parking lot in the distance and slowed her jog to a walk, breathing hard. Cupping both hands in front of her face, she breathed on them softly, thawing her nose.

  Glover had met his accomplice face to face. Like Tatum had said, he had either met him at church, or he had met him somewhere else, and then his newly found friend had introduced him to the church. But what would Glover do in a church? Repent of his sins? Pray?

  Something was missing. She needed to learn more about Riverside Baptist Church.

  CHAPTER 20

  Riverside Baptist wasn’t much to look at on first sight. A redbrick structure with a single tower, the entrance a simple arched crimson door. But as Tatum parked the car, Zoe noticed the little things. The blooming flower beds lining the external walls. The clearly tended lawn in the churchyard, three freshly colored wooden benches on its edge. Unlike the rest of the street, the area surrounding the church was clean of dry leaves. This place was tended with care.

  Her phone rang just as Tatum switched off the engine. It was O’Donnell.

  She motioned Tatum to give her a second and hit answer. “This is Zoe.”

  “Bentley.” O’Donnell’s voice was sharp and icy. “Why did you tell the press that you were helping us with the case?”