Night Tides (19 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

E
THAN AWOKE
,
saw Rachel’s note on the clock, and lifted it to check the time—3:30 A.M. Wouldn’t she have to get up in an hour or so to get the diner ready for breakfast?
He
would have to get up around then, since he had to go home first before heading to work. He frowned, then went into the bathroom.

As he washed his hands, he scanned the little room for a sign that Rachel was some kind of lunatic. No strange prescriptions in the medicine cabinet, no collections of male body parts lined up in the towel closet. Everything seemed normal.

He went naked into the living room and looked around at her home. The night’s events, now that his larger head was in charge, began to seem especially strange. Sure, he was relieved that he’d been able to keep it up, that the vision of the dead Iraqi girl’s ripped and beaten body hadn’t intruded. But sex in the lake? Sex
with
the lake? It had all seemed eminently reasonable at the time and even immediately afterward. But now that his mind wasn’t heat-fogged, he began to seriously wonder about Rachel’s sanity. Where was she now? Normal people didn’t go for walks at 3:30 A.M.

He picked up the picture on the coffee table. It showed two girls, one clearly Rachel, the other just as clearly a close relative, likely the sister she’d mentioned before. They looked happy, content, normal. But, really, who displayed family photos where they
didn’t
look that way? Just because the trauma didn’t show didn’t mean it wasn’t there. He knew that for a fact.

He returned the picture to its spot, then crept through the dark apartment looking for other, more-recent photographs. Softly, he sang his childhood misheard version of “Sister Christian”:

Motorhead
What’s your price tonight?
If I am missing light
,
You’ll pee all right tonight… .

He stopped abruptly when he realized what he was doing. He felt a rush of shame and disgust. He was
snooping
.

Julie used to snoop through his place when they were together. He knew where everything should be and could tell when something had been moved. There was no pattern to her searches, she was simply looking methodically through his life, like a good reporter. Except he wasn’t the subject of an article, he was her boyfriend. And now he was doing the same thing to Rachel.

He retrieved his pants, then sat on the couch. He was no longer sleepy and didn’t want Rachel to find him wandering naked through the apartment when she returned. He turned on the TV and began surfing the channels, finally settling on a basic-cable showing of
Caddyshack
. Tainter emerged from wherever he’d been and curled up on the cushion beside him.

By the time the movie ended, the sky was light gray outside the windows, and Ethan realized that Rachel had not returned.

E
THAN PACED
the short length of Rachel’s living room as he held his cell phone to his ear. His clothes were wrinkled and his hair was a bedhead tangle. Helena watched him, arms folded across her chest. She’d arrived for work, come upstairs to see what was keeping Rachel, and found Ethan. Now, despite her initial amusement, she shared his concern. Rachel was far too responsible to simply fail to show up without a reason.

“Marty,” Ethan said suddenly, making Helena jump. “Listen, can you come by Rachel’s diner? Sooner would be good, soonest would be best. I may be overreacting, but I’ve got that creepy feeling something’s happened to Rachel.” He paused. “Yes, we went out last night.” He paused again, then sighed in embarrassment.
“Yes
, I spent the night here. Are you coming?… Okay, bye.”

He snapped the phone closed and turned to Helena. “Marty will be here shortly.”

Helena nodded. She trusted Marty and believed he wouldn’t have vouched for his brother if Ethan had been one of those crazy woman-beating ex-soldiers all too common in the world. “Thanks,” she said. “It’s not like Rachel to do this.”

He nodded. “Is there any coffee downstairs? I could use a cup to clear my head and help me wake up.”

“Sure,” she said, and gestured toward the door. As he preceded her down the steps, she glanced back at Rachel’s apartment, looking for anything out of place. Ethan had had plenty of time to clean up any blood or other evidence, but if he’d hurt Rachel, there should be
some
sign. But she saw nothing. Even Rachel’s cat seemed unconcerned.

Still, as she followed Ethan downstairs, she reflected on his broad, muscular shoulders and how much damage they, and his army training, could do to a lone woman in the middle of the night.

I
N THE DINER’S
cramped kitchen, Marty listened calmly to Ethan’s story. When his brother finished he said, “Okay, let’s start somewhere logical. Where would she likely go at that time of the morning? A restaurant? A coffee shop?”

“The lake,” Ethan and Helena said almost in unison. Then they looked at each other, but neither laughed.

“Which lake?” Marty asked.

“Monona,” Ethan said. “Hudson Park.”

“Have you checked it?”

“No, I called you first.”

Marty scowled a little, then said, “Excuse me,” and went into the apartment stairwell to use his phone.

Ethan turned to Helena. “You know about the lake?”

“I know she goes skinny-dipping in it a lot.”

“Do you know why?”

She snorted. “Hell, Rachel does a lot of things I can’t explain. I think she just likes the danger element of it, being naked in the middle of town.”

Ethan nodded as if his thoughts were identical.

Marty returned. “I put in a call, and a uniform’s going to check. He’ll call me when he gets to the park.”

“Thanks,” Ethan said, scratching his chin. He needed a shower and a shave.

Helena took Marty’s arm. “Come on, we’ll have some coffee while we wait.”

Helena had not opened the diner. She couldn’t run the place herself, and it seemed somehow disloyal to pretend nothing unusual was afoot. A few people came to the door and peered inside, then gave up. She poured three cups of coffee and placed them on the counter.

They all jumped when Marty’s cell phone rang. He snapped it open and turned his back, barking, “Walker speaking.” He listened for a long moment, then said, “Call it in, then. We’ll be there shortly.”

He faced them, and his expression, previously merely annoyed, was now grim. “They found clothes at the lake. We need to get down there and see if you two can identify them.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

T
HE KIDNAPPER KEPT
Rachel wrapped in the blanket as he again threw her over his shoulder and carried her from the truck. He seemed to have difficulty managing the weight and paused to shift his grip several times. Rachel fought the choking claustrophobia as the blanket pulled tight against her face. The tape holding her wrists and ankles was still secure. She recalled an old poster her dad kept in the garage, of a bikini-clad girl holding a distinctive gray roll. The caption read,
It’s not broken, it just needs duct tape
.

The sound told her he carried her across gravel, then up a short set of steps. His shoulder dug painfully into her ribs. A door opened, and she sensed they were now inside. Floorboards creaked beneath their combined weight. Lights came on, filtering through the fabric.

Then another door opened and they descended more steps. These practically screamed their protest, wood and nails straining to support them. Her abductor labored as well, his breath coming in great openmouthed gasps. Five steps and they were again on the ground, and he bent to drop her on the floor. She landed on her belly, and he pulled on the edge of the blanket. She unrolled like Cleopatra.

She came to a stop on her back, her weight painfully on her wrists. A fresh rush of shame at her near-nudity made her blush. The floor beneath her was rough concrete, and the air was stiflingly hot. A bare lightbulb hung almost directly overhead, momentarily blinding her. She turned her head and saw the one thing she hoped she wouldn’t.

Another woman, undressed and bound with plastic ties instead of tape, lay on her stomach. And beyond her, a second one raised her upper body to see the new arrival. This girl, whose hair was still visibly blond despite days of accumulated grease and grime, seemed to be smeared in some sort of paint. From her navel down past her knees, swirls of color, mostly red, covered her. The skin beneath and around these swaths was pale and clean, not filthy like her arms, feet, and face.

Rachel stared, trying to resolve this into something that made sense. She knew the girl’s name from the news stories and flyers posted everywhere, including in her own restaurant: Faith Lucas, the
Golden Girl Gone
.

Faith squirmed into a seated position, and suddenly Rachel understood. The girl wasn’t covered with paint, she was covered with
tattoos
. And they were fresh, some still bleeding, which explained the red smears as blood mixed with the antiseptic lotion covering the most recent additions along the tops of her thighs. Others, less recent, were scabbed over.

The other girl stared at Rachel over her gag. There was something familiar about her too. When Rachel took in her single garment with its pattern of little red hearts partly obscured by sweat and grime, she suddenly realized that this was Carrie Kimmell, the first girl the lake spirits had asked her to help. She, too, bore the marks of recent tattooing, this time on her shoulders and upper back.

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.

O
FFICERS 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.

E
THAN 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.

O
CCASIONALLY
H
ELENA
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.”

E
THAN 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.