The Chimera Secret Read online

‘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

  RIVER FOREST, CHICAGO

  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.

  Ethan turned left onto North 72nd Court, jogging past a parade of shops before he reached a smallholding on the corner by a parking lot. The nondescript block held a single, security code protected door that led to the four small businesses within. He reached up and punched in his number as he entered the building and strode to the door of their office, pushing it open as he walked in and pulled off his earphones.

  Filing cabinets lined one wall, and a series of pictures were tacked to another, each depicting a fugitive with a price on their head. Everything from minor two-bit felons up to har
dened criminals with homicides under their belts. Two desks adorned the office; Ethan’s was tidy and organized with military efficiency. Nicola Lopez’s looked as though a tornado had gusted through it.

  Lopez leaned back in her chair, her long black hair pinned up in a ponytail and her dark almond eyes shifting with impatience.

  ‘Just break into the goddamned house,’ she snapped. ‘Hundred thousand bucks bond sitting on his ass in there just waiting for us and you’re jogging-miss-daisy past his window every day.’

  Ethan smiled as he tossed his microphone onto thick piles of paper on his desk.

  ‘There’s no point in one of us getting busted. The cops will only take Sedgewick into their own custody before cutting us loose. We gotta play it smart and let him come out to us.’

  Lopez shook her head and gracefully twirled a pen through her fingers.

  ‘We gotta play it smart. I’ll be tapping those words onto your head in Morse Code with a baseball bat if the police bust Sedgewick before we do. Six weeks of work down the tubes.’

  ‘You win some . . .’ Ethan replied.

  Lopez huffed and puffed for a few moments more but said nothing as she turned back to her computer.

  Ethan could understand her frustration. As a kid Lopez had walked out of Guanajuato in Mexico twenty years before with her family and little else and somehow made it into the police department of Washington DC as a homicide detective. Diligent, obedient and full of idealistic enthusiasm, Lopez had seen her partner shot and killed by a corrupt senior officer, an event which had ultimately led her to resign her post on the force and join Ethan in the far less secure world of bail bondsmen and private investigations. Now she was spontaneous, impulsive and sometimes downright aggressive, traits that fit their chosen profession surprisingly well but also made her unpredictable. Her silence lasted for less than thirty seconds. She couldn’t let it go and looked up at him.

  ‘You know we’ve spent four thousand bucks hunting that asquerosa, and all the while he was hunkered down less than two hundred yards from where we’re sitting?’

  ‘He’s fooled the detectives on his case too,’ Ethan pointed out.

  ‘They’re on payroll. We’re not.’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ Ethan asked as he flopped down into his chair. ‘You think that we should have just not bothered chasing him at all? You can’t win the prize if you don’t buy a ticket.’

  ‘Very poetic,’ Lopez replied, rolling her eyes. ‘But right now we’re just sitting here while Sedgewick stays holed up in his buddy’s mansion. As long as the house owner is holidaying in the Caribbean or whatever he told the police he was doing, they’ll believe the house to be empty. Maybe it is.’

  ‘It’s not,’ Ethan replied. ‘I’ve seen movement inside. Sure, no lights, television or movement of vehicles, but somebody’s tucked away in there.’

  ‘You sure you’re not losing your mojo?’ Lopez asked, her expression serious now.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Y’know,’ she shrugged. ‘Because of what happened, what you saw on that video, Joanna.’

  Ethan sighed heavily, and even as he did so he realized that maybe she was right. Every time he was reminded of what had happened he felt a tiny piece of his soul flutter away. He swallowed thickly.

  ‘I can still do my job.’

  Lopez kept her gaze on him for what felt like an age. ‘Not saying that you can’t, just wondering if you can do it as well as you used to, is all.’

  ‘I can still do the job.’

  Lopez shrugged but didn’t answer as she fixed her eyes back on her screen. Ethan watched as the glowing monitor reflected in her dark eyes, a strand of black hair falling down to frame one side of her face. Under different circumstances they might have become more intimately involved by now, but a series of remarkable events just months before had extinguished any spark of romance.

  During a previous investigation for their biggest and most secretive client, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lopez had gotten too close to a client who had wound up dead. Mixing business with pleasure had resulted in tragedy for her, something that Ethan was not keen to check out himself. Soon after, like a ghost long forgotten, news of Joanna’s survival surfaced, news that had both elated and haunted him ever since.

  Lopez was right. A year ago, he would have busted into that place and dragged Sedgewick’s cretinous bulk into custody. Now he was sitting on his ass hoping that fate would play into his hands. A lifetime’s experience to the contrary told him what he needed to do. Be bold. Carpe diem.

  ‘Maybe we can tease him out,’ he suggested.

  ‘Sure,’ Lopez replied, not taking her eyes off her monitor. ‘Every cop in the city looking for him, he’s being hunted by people he’s swindled out of millions of bucks and who’ll ice him at the first opportunity, but we’ll make him forget all about that and just walk right into our hands.’

  Ethan pictured the big colonial house and ran the layout of the streets through his mind for a moment, and then made his decision.

  ‘It’s worth a shot.’

  Lopez looked at him. ‘Great. What kind of candy you suppose he likes?’

  Ethan grinned as he reached out and picked up one of a dozen cheap, untraceable cellphones stacked neatly on one side of his desk.

  ‘Latino.’

  Ethan tapped a number into the cellphone as Lopez shot upright out of her chair, her flawless skin flushing.

  ‘What the hell are you going to do?’

  Ethan leaned back in his chair as the line buzzed in his ear.

  ‘You said it yourself, we can’t just sit here doing nothing while Sedgewick stays holed up in his buddy’s mansion.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  Ethan raised a finger to silence her as the line connected.

  ‘Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?’

  Ethan responded in a shaky, nervous voice.

  ‘I’d like to report a break-in in progress. Can you send help please, right now?’

  5

  Lopez’s face plunged in disbelief as she vaulted across her desk toward him, scattering paperwork and old Styrofoam cups. Ethan kept the cellphone pinned to his ear as she fumed.

  ‘What’s the address, sir, and how many suspects can you see?’

  ‘1454 Jackson Avenue, ma’am,’ Ethan replied. ‘I can see four men, but there may be more.’

  ‘Units are on the way. Where are you calling from?’

  ‘I have to go and secure my front door right now!’

  ‘Stay on the line please, sir.’

  ‘The hell I will, they might try to break in here too!’

  Ethan killed the line and then switched the phone off.

  ‘What the goddamned hell was that?’ Lopez raged. ‘You’re sending units to the same block? What the hell are you going to do if they see Sedgewick?’

  Ethan slipped the plastic rear of the phone cover off, pulled out the SIM card, and snapped it in two as he looked up at Lopez.

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because you’re going to give him a ride out of trouble.’

  ‘The hell I am!’ Lopez shot back. ‘This is your goddamned mess and if you think I’m going to dig your sorry ass out of—’

  ‘You’ve got about three minutes,’ Ethan said, ‘to park up near his house and wait for him to come out.’

  ‘Why don’t you do it?’ Lopez demanded.

  Ethan stood up and tossed her the keys to his Suburban. ‘Because he likes Latino girls, not ex-marines from Chicago. That’s half the reason he holed up in Mexico. Let’s go.’

  Lopez caught the keys and followed Ethan out of the office. As she headed for the Suburban she cast Ethan a final indignant look.

  ‘What am I going to be waiting for?’

  ‘The house I called the break-in for is directly behind the one Sedgewick’s hiding in. He’ll see the cop cars from inside. Judging by his profile and history, my guess is that he’s a narcissist,
a moral coward and prone to rash decisions based on self-preservation. The first mistake he’ll make when he sees those cops pouring into the house behind his is to run for the front door. He’ll think the cops are there for him.’

  Lopez blinked.

  ‘You better be right about this. And why’s he going to get into my car?’

  ‘Just be ready.’

  Ethan slipped his headphones on and jogged back down toward Jackson Avenue as Lopez drove out of the lot and away in front of him. Ethan made good time, running hard down Jackson and then swinging two rights to bring him back up the block on the other side just as he heard sirens screaming inbound along West North Avenue.

  Ethan ran harder as he saw, in the distance, Lopez’s black Suburban pull into Lathrop and ease in alongside the sidewalk. Lopez got out, opened the rear passenger door and pretended to fiddle with something in the back.

  The sirens got louder, and between the big houses ahead Ethan glimpsed an occasional flash of red and blue lights as several squad cars screeched to a halt outside. Distant shouts of armed cops echoed between the trees of the expansive lawns stretching between the two houses as he jogged closer.

  Moments later, Ethan got lucky.

  The front door to the colonial opened and Ethan saw a portly man hurry out. He shut the door behind him, glanced up and down the street, then blundered down the front path as he pulled a baseball cap down low over his eyes. Even from fifty yards away Ethan could tell it was Sedgewick, his ill-fitting pants and hastily pulled-on jacket doing little to conceal his bulging belly and awkward, shambling gait.

  Sedgewick reached the sidewalk and cast a long glance at the Suburban before turning toward Ethan. Ethan stopped running, yanked off his earphones and pointed at Sedgewick as he shouted out at the top of his voice in the direction of the cops.

  ‘He’s here! I can see him! It’s him!’

  Sedgewick’s eyes flared beneath the rim of his baseball cap as he looked up and stared at Ethan in horror. The fat man whirled on the spot, searching desperately for someplace to hide, and in an instant he loped across the street toward the Suburban.