She felt a pang of shame at her cowardly certainty that night that she could not have helped the girl. Fuck me, I could’ve at least tried, she berated herself. Instead, all I did was type about it. And now look what’s happened.
Suddenly she wondered if this would give away her carefully crafted secret identity. The Lady of the Lakes could obviously have no comment on the disappearance of Rachel Matre; would anyone notice the omission and make the connection? She felt like Clark Kent, wondering at the meaning of that knowing look in Lois’s eye, and for a moment the fear left her.
Then it returned when she realized who wasn’t in the room: Ling Hu, the Chinese girl who vanished first. The one who’d just been found dead.
Carrie Kimmell whimpered. A similar clean space spanned her shoulders and trailed down her spine to the small of her back. There were only black lines so far, no colors, but the pain from having been inked directly along her backbone was obvious.
Then the two victims raised their bleary eyes to their captor, who stood against the stair rail catching his breath.
Time to see the monster, Rachel thought, and followed their gaze.
OFFICERS WERE IN the process of cordoning off Hudson Park with yellow tape by the time Ethan, Marty, and Helena arrived. Neighbors in bathrobes and other sleep-wear watched from the nearby yards, sipping coffee and chatting on cell phones. Three marked police cars were parked at the curb along with, most disturbingly, an ambulance.
Marty whipped his car onto the sidewalk before slamming on the brakes and bouncing them all forward against their seat belts. It brought a momentary smile to Ethan’s face; even after living in a city for ten years, Marty still couldn’t park worth a damn. The amusement vanished almost immediately.
They followed Marty across the park, ignoring the sign that instructed people not to walk on the effigy mound. The paramedics and uniformed officers clustered at the lakeshore looked up as they approached.
“Detective Walker,” a sergeant named Jimson said. He was older than Marty, with a thick salt-and-pepper mustache. “It appears to be just like the others.”
Marty nodded and called out, “Mr. Dawes?”
A thin black man wearing rubber gloves and goggles stood. “I believe he’s correct.”
“Can we see some of the clothes?” Marty asked. “These people knew the victim and might be able to identify them.”
The word victim rang in Ethan’s mind. He watched Dawes carefully pick up something he immediately recognized: Rachel’s gray T-shirt. He’d seen it hanging on the back of her bathroom door earlier before she left.
He saw by her suddenly pale complexion that Helena recognized it too. “That’s hers,” the waitress said, her voice catching in her throat. “That’s Rachel’s. It’s one of her favorites for running.”
“Are you sure?” Marty asked.
She nodded. So did Ethan.
Marty handed it back to Dawes. “We need to lock down a timeline,” he said to his brother. “I need you to tell me exactly what you remember about when she left. Helena, try to think of anyone who might have it in for Rachel, some old boyfriend or something. I know she has an ex-husband somewhere.”
“Don. He’s in Asia, last I heard. And this isn’t really his style, he’s more passive-aggressive. He’d be more likely to threaten to hurt himself to get her attention.”
“That may be, but anything you can give us will help. If Rachel was taken by the same man who abducted the others, what you know might help us find the common denominator among them. And then we might find the perp before anything else happens.”
They all knew what he meant. Helena nodded again, and her eyes filled with tears, but they never spilled out.
ETHAN NURSED his coffee at the diner counter and watched his cell phone beside the saucer. It resolutely did not ring. He’d taken the day off from work, ostensibly due to illness; the truth would take too long and sound too weird. Now he simply waited for Marty to report anything new, while his guts wrapped tighter and tighter around themselves. It was the same feeling of rage and helplessness he’d lived with in Iraq: He’d seen that man—his friend and brother soldier—standing over the brutalized body of a child, grinning and laughing with no more concern than if it had been some animal. When he thought about Rachel lying beneath someone with that same evil smile…
Several times he caught himself staring at the other patrons. They all probably knew Rachel better than he did. Could one of them be the culprit, bold enough to come back to the diner after committing some unspeakable crime? What about the scruffy guy huddled over his laptop? Or the old man flipping through a worn paperback?
He closed his eyes and took several deep, calming breaths. It was just like Iraq, all right—the friends and enemies looked the same, spoke the same language, smiled the same smiles. You didn’t know you’d been tricked until the bombs went off.
If any clue turned up, any revelation, Marty would alert him. Every minute that passed, though, added more time to Rachel’s ordeal, and Ethan knew far too well what a man might do to a woman in that amount of time.
And to think that less than twelve hours earlier she’d been pressed against him, skin to skin, gloriously alive. The memory of her touch, her breath, the movement of her skin against his—it had been somehow more. Not just sex, not just physical gratification, but some connection that made all his worries irrelevant. So what if he’d only known her, really, for a day? In some ways it felt like he’d waited his whole life to find her.
And now she was gone.
He’d lost a lot of things in life, most with no protest. He wasn’t losing Rachel without a fight.
OCCASIONALLY HELENA glanced at Ethan, but mostly she left him alone. She was torn between her natural suspicions of him—after all, he was the last one to see Rachel—and her instinctual sense that he really was one of the good guys. Still, worried reticence and sociopathic guilt could look a lot alike.
Helena, with Jimmy’s help, had finally opened the diner for the usual crowd. But Ethan’s large, silent presence unnerved them all. Helena told the others that Rachel was down with the flu, and if Ethan hadn’t been stoically perched at the end of the counter, staring into space, it might’ve worked. However, the combination of Rachel’s absence and Ethan’s grim demeanor kept conversation to whispers, and people who normally sat and visited for an hour finished their food and scurried quickly out the door.
Helena looked at the clock. She hated to send Ethan away, since he had nowhere to go except home or his office, where he would be alone. But he was getting to her too.
“Helena,” Mrs. Boswell said softly, and motioned the waitress closer. “You keep staring at that man down there. Isn’t he the one who chased away Caleb Johnstone?”
“That’s him,” Helena said.
“Is he expecting another fight today?”
Helena looked at his straight shoulders and wary demeanor. “Hon, I think he always is.”
ETHAN SUDDENLY sat up straight. How had he not thought of the obvious? He motioned for Helena, and when she arrived he said urgently, “That guy I chased out of here the other day—what was his name?”
“Caleb Johnstone,” Helena said with a frown. “Why?”
“No reason,” Ethan said as he stood. “I’m going home to clean up a little, okay? Marty knows how to reach me if there’s any news, and I’m sure he’ll call you too.”
Helena reached across the counter and grabbed his arm. “Do I look like an idiot?” she hissed. “Marty knows to talk to Caleb. He’s probably already done it.”
“Marty can ask questions, sure,” he said, his voice a quiet rumble. “But I can get answers.” He pulled his arm free and rushed out the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THANKS TO THE Internet, finding the address was a snap. It was on the far west side of town, past Middleton going toward Sauk City, on a dead-end road. Ethan showered, changed into comfortable jeans and an old Bucky Badger T-shirt, and put a gun beneath his seat. It was a S
mith & Wesson M&P automatic, and he had a permit for it, since he often carried large sums of money. But he had no real intention of using it. What he wanted to do—what he needed to do—could be done only with his bare hands.
As he backed out of his driveway, he thought briefly about calling Marty. But he couldn’t. It would compromise Marty professionally, and he would never do that.
CALEB JOHNSTONE’S house was a small brick ranch design, built during the early seventies. An old Toyota hatchback, all four tires missing, was up on concrete blocks in the driveway, with a maroon Ford pickup behind it. The yard was ragged around the edges, and grass grew up through cracks in the concrete drive. The holly bushes along the front porch were tall and irregular. Behind the house stood a wooden work shed with a green fiberglass roof.
The house windows were all dark, reflecting the harsh afternoon sun from their smudged and neglected surfaces. The garage door was down and the front door closed behind the screen. It was impossible to tell if anyone was home.
Ethan parked on the street, in front of the plastic mailbox. The nearest houses were a half mile in either direction, far enough that a scream from inside the house might not be heard. His chest tightened as he inadvertently imagined what Caleb Johnstone might do to Rachel to elicit such screams.
Ethan knew how hard it was for soldiers to go back into society. Once they’d been through training and emerged with a soldier’s mind-set, the civilian life felt alien. Ethan was lucky, in that sense. He’d done a good job regimenting and disciplining himself long before he joined the army, so the personality change wasn’t as great. But for a certain type of soldier, normal life, with its ennui and necessary compromises, was frustrating and infuriating. He’d seen that frustration in Caleb that morning at the diner.
Ethan opened the mailbox and flipped through the mail. It was all junk, except one letter from the VA. All were addressed to Caleb Johnstone, so evidently he lived alone. “He was quiet, kept to himself,” Ethan muttered ironically as he walked up the drive, making no effort at stealth.
He was about to climb the porch steps when he glanced again at the work shed. Something about it held his attention, the same way a particular “abandoned” vehicle had once done in Iraq. In that instance, the shivers had proved all too prescient; two insurgents burst from it, weapons blazing, and before they were both mowed down, one triggered the explosives inside it. Without Ethan’s instincts, his whole squad would’ve been wiped out. So he would be a fool to ignore them now.
He moved silently around the end of the house and peered into the backyard. A patio with rusted furniture and a grill that hadn’t been used recently were just outside the sliding glass doors, and an empty clothesline sagged across the yard. A limp wire fence marked the property’s edge, with fields beyond it. Nothing spoke of recent use, except for the worn path from the back door to the shed.
He considered going back for the gun but decided it would only escalate things and might put Rachel in additional danger. Bullets flying around would make no distinction between kidnapper, hostage, or rescuer. He took a deep breath, then quickly strode to the shed and opened the door.
His eyes took a moment to adjust. The shed was a typical jumble of tools and engine parts, with an old lawn mower disassembled in the middle of the floor. But the shaft of sunlight streaming in past him revealed something far more disturbing.
Pinned to the far wall was a magazine centerfold, with Asian throwing knives stuck into it at strategic anatomical points. On the floor beneath was a large pile of other discarded pictures, all similarly mutilated. Ethan felt a rush of both fear and triumph; clearly Caleb had issues with women, issues that could turn sexual and violent.
“What the hell are you doing here?” a voice bellowed behind him, and Ethan whirled. Caleb stood in the shed doorway, holding a long hunting knife.
Ethan was not even conscious of his movements. The next moment of awareness found him astride Caleb, with the older man facedown on the grass, his right arm bent behind his back. The knife lay several feet away. Over the blood pounding in his ears, Ethan said, “Where’s Rachel?”
“The fuck are you talking about?” Caleb said through clenched teeth. “Get off me!”
Ethan bent the arm a fraction more. His shadow fell across Caleb’s back, and sweat dripped from his face onto Caleb’s shirt. “I’m so not in the mood. Answer me, or get ready for orthopedic surgery.”
“I haven’t seen her!” Caleb yelled. “Not since two nights ago!”
That, Ethan realized, was the same night he’d seen Caleb at the pizza place and Rachel emerging from Father Thyme’s. “Tell me about two nights ago,” he said.
“Fuck you!”
Ethan was ready to snap the man’s arm when he noticed the unmistakable slanted door at one end of the house’s foundation. The path to it was as clear as the one to the shed. “What’s in the basement, dickhead?”
“Nothing!” Caleb cried, but with no sincerity. In a voice so calm it was almost comical, he added, “Look, just let me go and we’ll forget this whole thing, okay? I won’t call the cops and I won’t press charges.”
Ethan stood and pulled Caleb to his feet. He held the older man’s arm locked behind his back. “Why don’t you show me the ‘nothing’ you’ve got down there?”
“It’s just old parts and furniture and shit, really.”
“I’m an antiquarian,” Ethan snarled. “Move.”
Caleb suddenly went limp. Reflexively Ethan’s hand opened as he reached to catch him. Caleb spun and slammed the heel of his right hand into Ethan’s chin. Ethan felt the impact to his toes. He thought he’d also been hit in the back of the head, until he realized it was simply his skull smashing into the ground as he fell.
Caleb straddled his chest, the big knife at his throat. He was bright red with fury, and his eyes gleamed. “All right, pretty boy, let’s see how tough you are, now that you’re not showing off for your precious Rachel.” He slid the blade against Ethan’s skin, nicking it just under his jaw. “Think she’ll still like you if I slice up that pretty face?”
The pain cleared the haze from Ethan’s brain. Now he was mad, as he’d been only a couple of times in his life.
He knocked the knife away, slicing his hand in the process. He grabbed Caleb by the crotch and crushed what he found there. Caleb shrieked, high and trilling. Ethan grabbed his throat with his left hand, lifted him, and drove him back into the house’s brick wall. Caleb fell to the ground and keened his agony.
Breathing heavily, wincing as sweat stung the cut on his jaw, Ethan yanked Caleb back to his feet. “If you’ve hurt her, cocksucker,” he snarled, “you’ll choke on your own balls.” He resisted the urge to drive his fist into the man’s now-pale face.
Blood from his injured hand soaked into Caleb’s shirt as he pushed the man toward the basement door. The latch wasn’t locked, and Caleb opened it with trembling fingers. Ethan kicked one door aside, then the other, and shoved Caleb down the stairs ahead of him. When he reached the bottom, he froze.
Three rows of marijuana plants filled the open space beneath hanging growing lights. They were thick, healthy, and damp from the misting humidifiers scattered around them. He saw no doors that might lead to other rooms.
“This is it?” Ethan asked.
“What did you expect?” Caleb croaked, still unable to stand upright.
Then a new voice said, “Don’t either one of you dumb shits make a move.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
IT HAD TO be anticlimactic, Rachel thought, but this was ridiculous. The kidnapper who’d riveted the city with his reign of terror was a short, gaunt man with a fringe of hair that grew to his shoulders and failed to compensate for the bare skull above it. His bald forehead shone with the sweat of his exertions. His too-large T-shirt nearly hung off one shoulder, Flashdance-style, revealing ropy muscles beneath sickly skin. He appeared to be in his forties, with graying stubble on his chin. His eyes were hidden in shadows. Elaborate tattoos curle
d up his arms and peeked from his collar.
Then Rachel blinked in surprise. She knew this man. She’d seem him twice recently without recognizing him, but now that she saw the ink on his arms and neck, she pegged him immediately. But he wasn’t her ex-husband, or Curtis, or Caleb Johnstone.
Arlin Korbus—the man who’d slipped out of the diner after Ethan faced down Caleb and who had approached her at Father Thyme’s, where Patty Patilia was playing. And the man who, three years before, had given her the tattoo below her navel.
Without a word, Korbus turned and climbed the stairs. The door slammed shut, and the dead bolt on the other side clicked into place. The three women lay still on the basement floor, listening. Above them they heard footsteps, muffled TV voices, the sounds of a refrigerator compressor bumping on and off. Water sluiced through the pipes that ran along the ceiling.
The room was like a sauna, filled with the nauseating scent of bodily odors and functions. By squirming and pushing with her bound feet, Rachel managed to sit up against the wall. Then she instantly regretted it, as the damp concrete seemed to crawl with mold and other, more-mobile things that scurried against her skin. She leaned forward, her own breath loud in her ears. Her shoulders and lower back ached.
Arlin Korbus. A man she hadn’t seen in years and wouldn’t remember now except that she’d spent a long, semidrunken evening staring at him as he drew the effigy tattoo beneath her navel. His studio was called Korbus Inks, and he’d been recommended by several diner patrons back when she’d first taken over for Trudy. At the time she’d felt no discomfort or ickiness with his hands so near her most intimate area, which had been her biggest worry. And she hadn’t knowingly seen him since.
Night Tides Page 18