Beyond Reach

  Lena turned the page, found yet another photograph. Ethan’s thick, brown hair had concealed more tattoos. In an arc at the base of his shaved skull were the words Sieg Heil. On the top of his head was another black swastika.

  Beside the photo, someone had explained, Hitler salute on back of head generally given after six years of active involvement. Swastika on head usual tag for leaders of North Conn. skinhead group.

  The last photo was a close-up of the underside of his left arm. Just at the base of his bicep was the letter A with a dash beside it. A-negative. The cop had written an explanation on the back of the picture, Hitler’s Waffen SS, the Death’s Head Battalion who guarded the concentration camps, all had their blood types tattooed under their arms. Symbolizes rank of general in white power movement.

  Lena had never asked about the letter under Ethan’s arm, never wanted to know the truth of his past. Now, she was confronted with the truth—overwhelmed with it. Every photo was like a slap in the face.

  This was the father of the child she had left in some trashcan at the clinic in Atlanta. This was the man with whom she had shared her days two whole years of her life.

  After Ethan had been taken back to prison, Lena had tried and failed miserably to be with another man. Greg Mitchell had lived with her several years before, and it seemed like fate when he reentered her life around the same time Ethan was leaving it. Nothing worked between them, though. She was not that same person from before, something that at first Greg took as a good thing. Later he came to be almost frightened of her.

  From the beginning, Lena had tried to hide her true self from Greg, to cloak her darkness and rough edges. She reined in her emotions so much that she spent most of her time with Greg feeling like a shell of what a human being should be. Sex between them was disastrous. After Ethan, she no longer knew how to be with a man who was gentle, how to kiss him and hold him and take pleasure from him instead of pain.

  If Angela Adams had stuck around, if she had been a mother to her two young girls instead of abandoning them to Hank, would Lena have ended up with Ethan? Would that defect inside of her, the one that drew her to his violence, his ruthless control, never have been triggered? Or would Lena have ended up like Charlotte Warren, still living in Reese, raising a couple of kids, waiting for her husband to come home from work so she could put supper on the table?

  Ethan’s rap sheet was nearly thirty pages long. Most of the notes were written in the dry, minimalist style of a seasoned cop who knew better than to put too much on the page so some dickhead lawyer could later twist it all around and throw it back in his face during a trial. Lena knew how to read between the lines, though, and as she scanned records of arrest after arrest, she started to get a sharper picture of Ethan’s life before they met.

  He’d started young, his first arrest coming when he was thirteen. He’d stolen some clothes from the local Belk. At fifteen, he was arrested for trying to steal a car. Both cases had been referred to juvenile court. Both times, he had been given probation. That couldn’t have been it, though. You didn’t go from stealing clothes to stealing cars without something in between. Lena knew that for every one crime you caught these guys doing, there were four more hiding in their closet. She would have bet good money that Ethan had boosted at least ten cars before they caught him in the act.

  His record stayed clean until he reached the age of seventeen. Then, he’d been accused of sodomizing a fifteen-year-old girl. Two weeks later, the charges were dropped. Lena gathered from the terse language in the report that the girl’s parents hadn’t wanted to put her through a trial. This was fairly common and probably wise. The world liked to believe differently, but any cop could tell you that there was nothing more horrible—or more likely to ruin a woman’s life—than a protracted rape trial.

  There was a notation on this arrest: Suspect bears tattoos and markings associated with violent neo-Nazi sect. Suggest referral to FBI for monitoring.

  Ethan was nineteen when he was arrested for assault. He’d used a knife during a fight, which brought it to a felony charge. The victim had apparently been cut pretty badly, but he refused to cooperate with police so the charges were reduced. Again, Ethan walked away from a serious charge.

  Three more years passed before the Connecticut State Police heard from Ethan Green again. Lena imagined this was during the time Ethan had finished his undergraduate degree and started his master’s. That was probably the one thing about Ethan that scared people the most: he was smart, even gifted. He gave lie to the ignorant redneck racist. When Lena had first met him, he was trying to get into the PhD program at Grant Tech and probably would have made it had he not been arrested.

  Oddly enough, the charge that the Connecticut State Police finally managed to make stick was for kiting checks. Ethan had written a check to A&P for twenty-eight bucks and change when his bank account showed a balance of twelve dollars. He’d put his payroll check in to cover it the next day, but it was still illegal to knowingly float a check. This was the kind of arrest that indicated the cops had just been waiting to pounce on him. Millions of people shifted around money like this every day. You didn’t get caught unless somebody was watching.

  Ethan had been caught, though. If the judge was in a bad mood, he was looking at ten years in a federal penitentiary.

  Lena was turning the page to find out what happened when the phone rang. She jumped, papers scattering on the bed. Her first thought was that no one knew she was here, then she remembered Hank. She leaned over to pick up the receiver, then stopped, letting the phone keep ringing. A photograph had fallen to the floor and she bent to retrieve it, freezing in midair as she saw the image of a beaten woman lying in a pool of blood.

  Lena did not move to pick up the picture. She stared at it from a distance, taking in the black bruises on the young woman’s thighs, the bloody pulp of her face. The red burns around her feet and wrists indicated that she had been held spread-eagle, strong hands pulling back her arms and legs so that she would be open to any violation.

  Ethan’s last girlfriend.

  She was black.

  The phone stopped ringing as Lena stared at the photograph. The room turned deathly quiet. The air felt more stifling. The girl in the picture must have been lovely, her skin a soft milk chocolate. Like Lena, she wore her hair long, with curls that would have brushed her shoulders if her head had not been yanked back, her hair matted with blood.

  Evelyn Marie Johnson, aged nineteen. College student. Soprano in the church choir. Lena thumbed through the file, looking for more pictures. She skipped past the pages of lurid crime scene photos and found what must have been the woman’s school picture. It was a stunning “before.” Silky black hair, bow-tie lips, big brown eyes. She could have been a model.

  Lena found the crime scene report. Tire tracks had been found near her body. The impressions had been sent to the lab, which matched the tires to Ethan’s 1989 GMC truck. He was out on bail for the check kiting, awaiting sentencing. He flipped for a deal that would keep him out of jail if he testified against the killers.

  According to the girl’s sister, Evelyn had been taken from her house by four white men in the middle of the night. The sister had hid in the closet because she had seen the swastikas on their bald heads, knew what the tattoos meant.

  According to Ethan, he had been forced at gunpoint to take the men to Evelyn’s house. The year before, he had tried to leave the militant neo-Nazi group calling themselves the Church of Christ’s Chosen Soldiers, but they would not let him go. One of his former friends had stayed in the truck that night, holding Ethan at gunpoint, while the others went inside and abducted Evelyn. Ethan was then forced to drive them deep into the woods. His hands were tied with clothesline to the steering wheel, the keys to his truck thrown on the empty seat beside him. He sat there while he watched five men assault Evelyn and beat her to death.

  Ethan claimed the men had then gotten into a Jeep that had been parked in the clearing and drove off. He further
claimed that he had used his teeth to pick at the knots in the rope that tied his hands to the steering wheel, and that this had taken him at least an hour. Once he was free, he had not gotten out of the truck, not gone to his girlfriend, because he could already tell that she was dead.

  Instead, he drove home.

  The phone started to ring again and Lena’s heart stuttered. She closed the file, her hands shaking, feeling as if she had just let something evil out—something that would stalk her like a rabid animal, not resting until she was punished. This was just how Ethan had been on the outside: relentless, savage, cunning. He had told Lena that he would never let her go and she had forced him away, pried his fingers from her life and sent him back to hell where he had come from.

  Was Ethan reaching out to Hank in order to get to her?

  She should just leave it be. None of this had anything to do with her. The Ethan part of her life was over. Whatever reason had compelled him to make those calls to Hank was none of her business. It did not explain who had killed Lena’s father and mother. It did not explain why Hank had lied to her all of those years, or why he was pushing himself into an early grave.

  Lena snatched up the phone to stop the ringing. “What?”

  “It’s Rod.”

  “Who?”

  “Rod,” the voice repeated. “From the desk?”

  The carrot-headed idiot. “What do you want?”

  “Somebody keeps calling to see if you’re in.”

  Lena opened the file again, scattering pages and photographs as she looked for Ethan’s prison intake sheet. “A man or a woman?”

  “Woman,” he answered. “I told her you were out. Figured when you didn’t answer the phone that you didn’t want to be bothered. That cool with you?”

  Lena found the number she was looking for. “Can you get me an outside line?”

  “I was just—”

  If her stupid cell phone worked in this place, she would’ve already hung up. She enunciated each word clearly. “I said I need an outside line.”

  “Hold on.” The kid heaved a pitiful sigh so she’d know that he was doing her a favor. There was a click, then she had a dial tone.

  Lena dialed the long-distance number, her hands still trembling. She stood to pace, glancing at the clock by the bed. It was past midnight.

  The switchboard picked up; a recorded voice told her to listen to the message because it had recently changed. She pressed the zero key and nothing happened. She pressed it a couple of more times and the phone started to ring. After twenty-three rings, a polite-sounding man answered, “Coastal State Prison.”

  Lena looked down at the floor, saw the photograph at her feet.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Detective Lena Adams with the Grant County Police Department.” She gave her badge number, reciting it twice as he wrote it down. “I need to arrange a meeting with one of your prisoners for first thing in the morning.” Her eyes were locked on the school photo of Evelyn again, the curly black hair, the warm smile on her perfect lips. “It’s urgent.”

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON

  CHAPTER 17

  JEFFREY TAPPED HIS FINGERS on the steering wheel as Sara sat beside him talking on her cell phone. Lena’s knife had not killed Boyd Gibson. Jeffrey had known deep in his gut that there was no way she had killed the man. Obviously, someone was trying to frame her for the murder. That somebody could very well be the reason Lena had left the hospital. She was a cop to her core. Lena would have taken one look at Jake Valentine and known the only way the sheriff could solve a crime is if somebody handed him the pieces. That was why she ran. She was out there trying to put together the pieces for him.

  The only problem was explaining how the murderer had gotten Lena’s knife. She had carried the blade for a while now. There was no way she would give it up without a fight. Whoever had taken the knife off her might have injured Lena in the process. Was that why she’d hidden out at the school? Jeffrey should have followed Valentine and examined the blankets they’d found. If there was blood on them, then Lena might be in even more trouble than he’d suspected.

  “Okay.” Sara had his notepad in her lap and she scribbled something down, saying, “Right, okay,” into the phone. He guessed from the arrows she was scrawling that she was taking directions, and hoped she’d be able to decipher the words once they were on the road. Sara had the worst handwriting of anyone he’d ever met.

  “Thanks,” she finally said, closing the phone. She told Jeffrey, “There’s a Holiday Inn about forty minutes from here.”

  Just the thought of the clean, reliable hotel chain made him smile. “We’re moving up in the world.”

  “It’s about time.” Sara put on her seat belt. “I am so ready to get out of this place.”

  He turned the ignition key and the engine purred to life. “Tell me something,” he began, indicating the glowing satellite navigation screen on the dashboard. “Does this thing have a memory on it?”

  “Hank’s address, right?” She started to toggle through the options, looking for the address. Jeffrey shook his head as he watched her. She hated to use a cell phone, would barely touch a computer, and refused to do anything more complicated with the DVD player than press play, but somehow, she had figured out the navigation system well enough to breeze through the screens.

  Jeffrey drove out of the lot and headed toward town. “It’s near the school,” he told her. “You could walk there pretty easily.”

  Sara found the directions. The tinny, woman’s voice told him to prepare to take a right in three hundred feet. In Jeffrey’s opinion, the engineers had made a big mistake when they chose the voice for a computer. Nothing annoyed a man more than hearing a woman tell him where to go.

  Sara said, “I have that map I bought at the convenience store somewhere in the suitcase. Downtown is just a big rectangle with a forest in the middle. I’d bet you good money there are all kinds of trails through there.”

  Jeffrey loved the way her mind worked. “Trails Lena could have used to get from the hospital to Hank’s the night she escaped.”

  “Or that she’s been using over the last few days to get around without being seen.”

  Jeffrey waited for the computer to finish telling him to bear left. “You mind if we check that out after we get to Hank’s?”

  “Of course not.”

  Jeffrey followed the prompts, driving past the town dump and the high school, one looking remarkably like the other. They saw the courthouse and the Elawah County Library, which both shared the same squat 1950s feel as the other municipal buildings in town.

  He took a left onto Corcoran Court and recognized where they were. He pointed to the satellite system, asking Sara, “Can you turn that thing off?”

  She pressed a button, toggled the dial, and the tinny voice stopped mid-sentence.

  The silence was unbelievably welcome.

  Jeffrey pulled up outside Hank’s house. The cruiser he’d seen there the day before was gone. He guessed Valentine had called in the troops to search the school.

  “This is it,” he told Sara.

  “It’s…” She didn’t finish the thought. There weren’t a whole lot of nice things you could say about the place. Hank’s house was by far the biggest dump on the block.

  “His car is gone,” Jeffrey told her.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Did you put out an APB?”

  “I left that to Jake.”

  “Was the mailbox like that when you were here before?”

  “Yes.” He saw that it was still duct-taped onto the post, the door hanging by a thread. “Cherry bomb,” he said, knowing the signs.

  When he’d been a kid, Jeffrey and two of his friends had cherry-bombed just about every mailbox in the neighborhood one Halloween. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been smart enough to cover their tracks. The sheriff had simply knocked on the doors of the only three houses in the neighborhood that still had undamaged mailboxes in their front yards.

  Jeffrey got o
ut of the car and went around to open Sara’s door.

  She looked up at Hank’s house as she got out, frowning. “Do you think it was always like this?”

  Jeffrey took in the weeds growing in the front yard, the patches of raw wood showing where the paint had chipped off. “Looks like it.”

  “It makes you wonder.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If maybe somewhere,” she began, her voice troubled, “the mother of our child is living like this.”

  He hadn’t been thinking about that; the adoption was an oasis to go to when things got too overwhelming. She was right, though. People from good homes and solid families usually didn’t feel compelled to give up their children. That wasn’t to say they were any better than poor people, but usually the well-off were able to pay somebody else to raise their kids if they didn’t want to do it themselves.

  “Oh, God.” Sara covered her mouth and nose with her hands. “Do you smell that?”

  Jeffrey nodded, not wanting to open his mouth for fear of something coming out. Unnecessarily, he put out his hand to stop her from going up the front steps.

  “Is it a body?”

  He hoped to hell not. “Wait here.”

  The smell got worse the closer he got to the house. Jeffrey stopped, seeing that the front door had been busted open and hastily repaired with duct tape. The tape looked new.

  Jeffrey glanced at Sara. “Stay there, all right?”

  She nodded, and he raised his hand to knock on the door. The door shook from the impact, but the tape held. He knocked a little harder and guessed from the way the door moved that it had been taped from the inside as well.

  After several knocks with no answer, he turned back to Sara. “What do you think?”

  “I think if I hadn’t been standing here you would have busted down that door ten minutes ago.”

  She was right. A good kick just under the knob sent the door flying. The jamb was busted out, the recess for the lock completely missing. Sharp metal edges jutted into the air like knives where the flashing had been ripped from the wood. Jeffrey drew his gun, giving Sara a nod to stay put before heading into the house.