‘Who’s we?’ she asked him finally.
‘Nicola Lopez, my partner. Former DC detective. She’s solid.’
‘She’d be solid if she was still a ranked detective,’ Natalie uttered. ‘She fall on hard times too?’
‘Partner got killed,’ Ethan replied as he felt his jaw tighten as it so often did when he thought about Lopez. ‘Corruption. I don’t blame her for leaving the force after what happened.’
Natalie took a deep breath before speaking.
‘Ethan, the last time you went looking for Jo it nearly killed you.’
Ethan managed a ghost of a smile. ‘That’s why I’m asking you to do it instead.’
‘Charmed, I’m sure.’
‘I’m not doing any field work this time until I have a solid lead,’ Ethan said. ‘I don’t need much, Nat, just a bit of time in the books seeing if there’s anything that’s been overlooked. Congress might not know anything but it’s a good place to start. The National Security Agency might know something too.’
Natalie laughed.
‘Sure, no problem. I’ll just march into the most secure agency in the world and ask to borrow some coffee or something.’
‘It’s more than I’ll be able to do,’ Ethan replied. ‘I know Congress is about to start an investigation into the intelligence community. Your team will have unprecedented access to files from the CIA, DIA, NSA and God knows who else.’
‘Do Mom and Pop know about this?’
‘No,’ Ethan replied quickly, ‘and let’s keep it that way, okay? I don’t want them worrying.’
Natalie’s eyes flickered with sheet lightning. ‘Like you didn’t want them worrying when you disappeared for four years? Jesus, Ethan.’
Her words sliced through his shame, but he did not try to avoid it. Like a victim of depression who cuts for the relief the pain brings, he faced it head on, sucked it in and let it settle in his guts.
‘I’m back now,’ he replied, ‘and I’m not going to make the same mistake again, Nat, but I can’t let this go until I know what the hell happened to Joanna. I need closure.’
Natalie’s gaze bore into him from across the table.
‘You lost her once, Ethan, and it tore you apart. You seem like you’re finally getting over it and now you want to dive straight back in like nothing’s happened. You ever think that if she’s out there, she might have contacted you by now? You ever think that she might not want to?’
Ethan felt tiny pricks of pain in the corners of his eyes. ‘Every day.’
Natalie’s eyes softened.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ she said. ‘Just make sure that it’s what you really want, Ethan.’
She looked down at her menu. Ethan glanced out of the restaurant windows at the bleak surface of the lake and asked himself the same question he’d been asking himself for six months: Is this really what I want?
4
The sound of his labored heart pounded in Ethan’s head as he jogged along the sidewalk of Lathrop, just off Thatcher Woods. He checked his watch as he swerved by reflex around the occasional dog-walking pedestrian, glancing at perfectly manicured lawns fronting two-story condos worth more than he earned in a decade. Some even had turreted corner plots like miniature castles.
Ethan frequently jogged the route, because like almost all people he liked to dream. Nobody who lived alone as he did had any need for five bedrooms, three cars and a bathroom the size of a small apartment, but all the same it was something prettier to look at than the windy city’s north side. Kind of thing he’d once assumed that he and Joanna would have aspired to: kids, a dog, big house, the whole nine yards. Instead his life, along with his aspirations, had ground to a halt when she’d disappeared. He’d lost contact with friends, become consumed by grief and rage, embittered by life’s uncaring twists of fate.
He shook off the maudlin thoughts and picked his chin up along with his pace.
The cables of his earphones bounced as he checked over his shoulder and ran across the street, slowing his pace as he passed a large colonial-style house. Pure white clapperboard, broad windows, high hedges blocking access to the rear. Worth a cool two million. Ethan’s practiced eye picked out a robust-looking drainage chute running down the north wall from the roof, part of the hedge that was only four feet high, and a wrought-iron gate locked with a simple bolt and padlock.
Three routes of entry and egress. No, four. The southeast corner’s bedroom window opened out just above the slanted roof of the double garage below. An alarm system’s claxon was attached to the wall beneath the eaves, a deliberately overt statement announcing the presence of a security system within. Not that Ethan would have to worry about that. He wasn’t looking to break into the house.
He was expecting somebody else to break out.
The road opened out as he reached West North Avenue, turned right at the junction and resisted the temptation of the Starbucks on the corner. His belly was still full from his lunch with Natalie, and his mind likewise filled with thoughts about Joanna and the mysterious footage he’d seen so many months before.
‘You seen him yet?’
Nicola Lopez’s voice crackled through the microphone in his ear. Ethan replied between breaths as he jogged, the microphone picking up his voice and relaying it to his partner back at their office. Nicola Lopez was several years his junior, but as an ex-police detective she was no less capable.
‘He hasn’t shown. It’s a long shot anyway.’
Ethan had jogged past the big colonial every day for the past five, hoping for a brief glimpse of Marty Sedgewick, a 48-year-old banker out of North Cleveland, Chicago. Marty had been one of the high fliers of the nineties and beyond, forging a serious career in investments and emerging markets. Four-million-dollar mansion. Condo down on the quays Florida way, along with a mooring for his forty-two-foot cruiser. Then the economic bubble burst. As his employers faced economic ruin, Marty faced the sudden and unexpected spectre of bankruptcy when he was fired from his post in a dramatic move by the bank for which he worked. Instead of making the smart play and downsizing his life before the shit hit the fan, Marty Sedgewick got himself an idea too good to be true. He told his wife and three kids he’d left his job and was setting up for himself.
Using his credentials as a big man in the market, he played out what was left of their personal fortune, convincing everybody that he was a businessman thriving in the middle of the recession and that they, too, could have a slice of the pie. Baffling a series of investors ranging from executive jet companies to private childcare nurseries, he sucked in almost seven million dollars before the fraudulent Ponzi scheme he’d engineered collapsed around him like a deck of cards. With four million dollars of other people’s money to his name, Marty Sedgewick promptly abandoned his family and hightailed it to Mexico. He quite possibly could have stayed there had he been able to keep a low enough profile, but unfortunately Sedgewick couldn’t keep his remarkable coup to himself, and fourteen months later his overworked mouth had gained him a mugging, lost him almost a million bucks and ultimately landed him back in Chicago, this time in Cook County Jail.
Ethan was more used to pursuing hardened criminals with nothing to lose than people like Sedgewick, a pasty, balding man who worshipped greenbacks over his own flesh and blood. However, it had proven far harder to track Sedgewick down after he’d jumped his hundred-thousand-dollar bond than Ethan had anticipated. Somehow, the creep still had people willing to shield him from the law, specifically in River Forest. The trail had led Ethan to the street he now jogged every day, which unfortunately for Sedgewick was just a few blocks away from the good offices of Warner & Lopez Inc.