by Mark Stone
I knew what was coming. I could see it all over him. So much anger. It could only go one place.
I steeled myself as Ethan grabbed me, using his massive frame to throw me to the side. I slammed hard against Tammy’s desk, which was only a few feet from Boomer’s office. She yelped in surprise, though I caught myself, breathing heavy and looking up at the man.
He paused for a second, as if realizing what he had done. A ruckus erupted in the station after that, with a few of the bigger officers grabbing Ethan and holding his arms. They pulled his hands together and started to toss cuffs onto them.
“Stop!” I said, pushing myself upright and walking back to the man. “Don’t cuff him. Don’t arrest him. None of that will be necessary.” I looked him square in the eyes. “Will it, Mr. District Attorney? We’re going to forget this happened, and Ethan and I are going to go into the break room and have some coffee and a talk.” Ethan still didn’t respond. “Unless you’d rather spend the night in jail? That can be arranged too.”
He still didn’t answer. Damn. This guy was stone. I moved closer to the man, still being held at the wrists and shoulders by officers. Leaning in, I whispered, “I’m the one who found her. I pulled her out of the water.”
I stepped back.
“Coffee,” Ethan muttered. “Coffee sounds good.”
Chapter 7
I sat the filled cup in front of Ethan and then rounded the table, taking a seat across from him. The break room had been emptied during Ethan’s rant and, not surprisingly, no one seemed to need to come in after I offered to have coffee with him in here. Of course, that didn’t stop people from gawking into the glass walled room like we were exhibits at the zoo or something.
“Don’t mind them,” I said, picking up my coffee and taking a sip. It had been a hell of a day for me; first with the body at the pier and then with my brother being brought in on drug charges he adamantly denied. Still, I knew without question that the day had been worse for Ethan. From the looks of him, staring down at his coffee with his hands folded around the cup, I figured he needed a splash of something in that coffee to really take the edge off. Maybe later though. Right now, I needed to make sure he was calm.
It's not them I’m worried about,” Ethan said, looking from his coffee up to me. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper like that. Pushing you was unacceptable, and I appreciate the way you reacted to it.”
“Getting flung across the room?” I chuckled. “You’re kind of a big boy, Ethan. I didn’t have much of a choice.”
“You know what I mean,” he answered, nodding firmly.
“I do,” I answered. “And don’t mention it. You should have seen me at my father’s funeral. I basically performed a wrestling move on my brother.” I blinked. “I didn’t figure I’d react that way to my father’s death. I never knew the man, but tragedy has a way of sneaking up on us.”
“Tell me about it,” he muttered. “No. I’m serious,” he added. “You said you were the person who found her body. Tell me about it.”
I took another sip of coffee, walked to the window wall and let down the blinds.
“I’m not going to start blubbering like a baby if that’s what you’re afraid of,” Ethan said, shaking his head.
“A man deserves the privacy to react any way he sees fit,” I answered. “I’m just giving that to you.” I sat back down on the chair and my leg started moving like a jackrabbit again. “First of all, we’re not sure if it’s her. I just want to lay that out there.”
“Don’t patronize me, Storm,” he said. “Emma knew Victoria as well as anybody in town. She was at the scene too, right? If she says it’s her, then it’s her.”
That was a strange way of putting it. I had naturally assumed that Emma was the one who gave Ethan the heads up about his wife’s body. If he was assuming she was there, that meant she hadn’t.
“Still,” I answered, unable to counter his point. “There’s protocol. There are steps and there are boxes that need to be checked for the both the county and the state. The body didn’t have any identification on it and, given the fact that your wife has been presumed dead for three years now, you can see why Boomer wanted to be absolutely sure before he brought it to you.”
Ethan looked back down at the table, shaking his hand and grinning in a way that looked embittered. He tapped his knuckled against the table top.
“You know, when Victoria went missing, people said a lot of horrible things about her. They said a lot of horrible things about me too. Gossip spread through this city like a disease. I was a prosecutor then, but it was still a juicy enough story to get people talking.”
“What happened exactly?” I asked, leaning in closer. “It might have been a juicy story, but it didn’t make its way up to Chicago so I never heard about this.”
I tensed a little as I looked at him. Asking people to relive the worst moments of their lives was never easy but, being a homicide investigator, it was the sort of thing I was used to. You never knew how someone would react to it though, and you never knew what kind of information might come spilling out of their mouths.
There was a difference between all of those times and now though, was that Ethan Sands wasn’t a suspect. Presumably, he had been cleared of any wrongdoing. He was a victim here; forced to live through it a second time all these years later, and then faced with the fact that things hadn’t quite gone the way he’d thought they had. His wife obviously hadn’t died all those years ago. She had died in the last few days, if what I knew about bodies and the way they decompose in the water held any weight. And it wasn’t an accident either. The bruises and gunshot wound spoke to that.
If I was going to figure out what happened to her though, I was going to need to go back to the night she disappeared, and the best person to help me do that was right across the table.
“Whatever you can remember,” I said, prodding him on when he didn’t answer.
‘Whatever I can remember?” he asked, looking at me as though the statement was an insult. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve gone back to that night in my head, Storm? Or how many times investigators have asked me that exact question?”
“You know how this works, Ethan,” I said calmly. “I have to have information if I’m going to--”
“This isn’t how any of this works,” he said quickly, cutting me off. “My wife was dead three years ago, not today. She went out on that boat and she never came back. There was no bullet. There was no murder.” He shook his head. ‘Except there is. Somehow, she didn’t die three years ago. She just died, which either means that she was taken and I was too useless to help her, or she left me and I was too stupid to realize it. Either way, I should have done better.”
I took a deep breath, looking at the district attorney. “Blaming yourself for something that’s beyond your control is quick way to an ulcer and nothing else.”
“And what if it was in my control?” he asked, balking at me. “I was so damned focused during that time. There were whispers that my predecessor was on his way out and even rumors that I would make a good replacement,” Ethan said, still tapping his knuckles against the table top. “I let those rumors get the better of me. I threw myself into my work, in an embezzlement case that ended up going nowhere, and I let a lot of other stuff fall by the wayside.” He stopped for a beat and cleared his throat. “I felt her pulling away even before that though. So maybe I was just using the work as a distraction. Maybe that’s all it ever was. Still, when she presented me with the divorce papers, it took me by surprise.”
“You were getting a divorce?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. I hadn’t gleaned that from the conversation Boomer and I’d had about this, and the admission took me by surprise.
“No. Not anymore,” he answered. “We’d worked our way through it. That was the part of it that stung the most. We’d been through this awful time together and made it through only to have our future ripped away one senseless night.” He looked at me, blinking. “Or, at least, I th
ought that was what happened. In truth, I guess I might have never had any idea what was going on with her.”
“Tell me about the night she disappeared,” I said gently, taking another sip of coffee. “She was out on a boat in the middle of the night. Do you have any idea what she was doing out there?”
“I don’t even know whose boat it was,” Ethan said, shaking his head. “It wasn’t registered to anyone and, when we found it, there were no fingerprints or surviving DNA evidence other than hers. As for why she was out there, I couldn’t say for sure. I had been working late that night and when I got home to find she wasn’t there, I assumed she was out for a walk. She had started taking those right before her death.” He shook his head. “Or, right before the time I thought she died, I suppose. Either way, I fell asleep and when I woke up the next morning and saw she hadn’t returned, I called the police.”
After hearing Ethan’s account, there was little wonder why Ethan might have been suspected in the case or why it eventually went cold. There was no body. There was little to no evidence, and there was no reason to believe she might still be alive somewhere. Accidents happen on the water all the time, especially on dark water. Bodies are often never recovered.
“I know what you’re doing, by the way,” Ethan said, finally dipping into his coffee. “I question people for a living myself. You’re not half bad at it. It helps to make them feel comfortable, doesn’t it?”
I blinked at the man, unsure of how to respond. Yes, I was trying to make him feel comfortable in hopes he’d open up, but that wasn’t the only thing that was going on. I was also genuinely concerned about the man and what he was going through. I needed to make sure it didn’t go any further than it needed to.
“The last time we spoke, you told me I didn’t need to get too close to an investigation. You suggested that maybe I wasn’t seeing things clearly and that I needed to take a step back,” I said.
“And you didn’t listen to me,” Ethan answered.
“Well, I’m a hardheaded fool. Got it from my momma, but you strike me as someone who practices what they preach.” I leaned further, placing my hand on the table. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this. No matter how deep it goes. That’s a promise, and I don’t make promises lightly. If this is your wife--”
“We both know it is,” he said, cutting me off.
“Then I’m going to figure out what happened to her. I’m going to get justice for her and you, and I’m going to do my best to get answers for all the questions swimming around in your head right now. You’ve just got to let me do that.”
“I’m not you, Storm,” Ethan said, shaking his head. “I might have come here in a tizzy, asking for explanations. But that was between two friends.” He looked down. “Or, at least, it should have been. I know an investigation has to take place, and I don’t intend on inserting myself in it.” He swallowed hard. “Just do your job and, in the meantime, I’ll finally bury my wife.”
A light knock came on the door, and then it opened. Boomer strode in, a Manila envelope in hand.
“You two look like you’re getting along better than office gossip would lead me to believe,” he said, closing the door behind him.
“You know how overblown stories get in the telling,” I said, nodding at him. “Wouldn’t have happened if you’d have come out of your office.”
“I wasn’t in my office,” he replied. “I wanted to put a rush on certain things so I went down to see Emma and Jonah in forensics.”
“And?” Ethan asked, a catch in his voice. The question was a formality on a couple of different levels. He’d already told me he trusted Emma’s identification and besides, we both knew Boomer would be carrying an envelope if the person on a slab in the morgue right now had been determined to be somebody else.
“The fingerprints were a match,” Boomer answered, pulling up a chair and sitting down next to me. “I’m sorry, Ethan. It’s Victoria.”
“And the cause of death was the gunshot wound?” he asked, without even taking a beat. The man had steeled himself for this.
“No,” Boomer answered just as quickly. “That certainly didn’t help, I’m sure, but there was enough water in her lungs to constitute drowning.”
Which meant someone likely shot her and threw her overboard. There was little to be gained by going over the events that likely led to his wife’s death in front of Ethan. His head was already spinning enough. I didn’t need to add to it.
Besides, Boomer was about to lay something on him that would do that job and more.
“That’s not all,” Boomer said, and I could tell by the way he shuffled uneasily in his seat that what he was about to say was going to be hard for Ethan to hear.
“What?” Ethan asked, obviously picking up on the same thing as I did, seeing as how he glared at Boomer with more than a little fear in his voice. “What else could there possibly be?”
“I know you’re probably upset with me for not telling you about Victoria the instant I got the news,” Boomer started. “And I understand that. Just like I know that you understand the reasons I couldn’t. Now that we know it’s her for sure though, I’m obligated to keep you abreast of things, assuming you want to be.”
“And why wouldn’t I want to be?” Ethan asked, narrowing his eyes into thin slits on his face.
“You’ve been through enough of these cases to know the answer to that,” Boomer said. “Sometimes, in instances like these, things about the victim are uncovered, and they’re almost always unfavorable things, Ethan.”
“Boomer,” he started, breathing heavy. “I--”
“You already went through this, Ethan,” Boomer cut him off. “You mourned her already, and it was as hard as hell. I’m not ashamed to say that I wasn’t sure you were going to get through it, but you did. You sure you want to throw yourself into it again?”
“Do I want to?” Ethan asked, his voice laced with disgust. “Of course, I don’t want to, but I didn’t want to do it the first time. This is my wife, Boomer, my damned wife. I stood in front of God, my parents, and everyone I hold dear in this world and I swore I would take care of her. I promised I would protect her, and I failed. The least I can do for her now is find out why. I need you to get to the bottom of this for her and for me.” Ethan’s eyes shot over to me. “And while I won’t get in the way of your investigation, that doesn’t mean I’m going to bury my head in the sand and pretend today didn’t happen.”
“Fair enough,” Boomer sighed. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Boomer took a deep breath, looking down at the table top. “She wasn’t the only one who died, Ethan.”
“What?” Ethan asked, and I had to admit that my curiosity was piqued too.
“Emma finished up her autopsy,” Boomer explained. “She was pregnant, Ethan.” He reached out and placed his hand on top of Ethan’s. “When your wife died, she was pregnant.”
Chapter 8
“What do you think happened?” I asked Boomer, standing in the department parking lot and watching Ethan drive away. The news of his wife washing up after having been thought to be dead for three years was a lot to handle. The fact that she was pregnant proved to be too much.
The district attorney excused himself and, before we knew it, he was in his car, peeling out of the parking lot.
“I think he just needs some time,” Boomer answered. “It’s a lot to process. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if it was Debbie,” he said, alluding to his own wife of nearly ten years.
“I meant Victoria,” I answered, looking to him. “What do you think happened to her? Kidnapped? Or did she just fake her own death to get out of her marriage?”
“Honestly,” he scoffed, shaking his head. “Neither seems likely. This isn’t Aruba. Women don’t just go missing in droves here, especially out on the gulf. What you’d be talking about is something like sex slavery, right?”
“I suppose,” I answered, my entire body shuddering at the idea. If there was anything more morally repugnant, I
couldn’t think of it.
“I’m gonna say that’s doubtful,” Boomer answered, sighing heavily. “In my experience, that kind of thing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s been three years since Victoria’s disappearance and in that time, I haven’t heard so much as a peep about other women disappearing or a kidnapping ring in or near town.” He shook his head again and looked at me. “No, if disappearing was something that was done to her, it was more than likely as some sort of revenge against Ethan for someone he locked away.”
“That’s not what you think happened though, is it?” I asked, staring at my friend. I knew Boomer well enough to know when he was invested in an idea, and this was definitely not one of those times.
“She didn’t go out on that boat for no reason. Couple that with some of the whispers in town, and I’m just not convinced she didn’t have a hand in her own disappearance. I wasn’t chief of police back then, Dil,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “If I had have been, the case would never have been closed when it was. It was big deal down here, Dil. Reporters, news vans, the Coast Guard, the whole nine yards. You know how that goes. A couple weeks went by with nothing, and they all moved on to bigger stories and more recent tragedies. Victoria was resigned to yesterday’s news, and I think that’s what she wanted.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m guessing, even if she made that decision, a bullet to the neck wasn’t on her wish list.”
“No,” Boomer resigned. “That’s why I’m putting you on the case.”
“Me?” I asked, looking over as a breeze coming off the gulf blew through my hair and cut into the early evening heat.
“Yeah you, you jackass,” Boomer answered. “You weren’t down here when it happened. So you can look at it with fresh eyes and what’s more, I’ll be damned if your bleeding heart ass hasn’t already promised to help Ethan anyway.” A smile spread across Boomer’s face. ‘What’d you tell him? That you’d ‘make it right, no matter what the cost’ or something dramatic like that?”