CHAPTER 16

TWO YEARS AGO, Jeffrey had thrown Ethan Green’s arrest jacket in Lena’s face, ordering her to read it.

Of course she never had.

She had pretended to skim the file, taking in every fifth or sixth word, then pushed it back in his face with a belligerent, “So?”

Jeffrey had given her the highlights, the rundown of Ethan’s crimes: grand theft auto, felony assault, forcible sodomy, rape. None of his words had penetrated—Lena was still in that phase where she thought of Ethan as two different people: the one who loved her and the one who would eventually kill her. The duality was not much of a stretch; at the time, Lena thought of herself in much the same terms.

Sibyl had been dead almost a year when Lena first met Ethan. She was living at the college dorms, working campus security, struggling to get through each day without putting a gun to her head. Ethan was working on his master’s degree. He had pursued Lena relentlessly, almost wearing her down.

A few months later, Lena got her job back with the police force and moved in with Nan Thomas. Ethan was still in her life; Ethan was still her life. His arrest file had stayed in her Celica the whole time, well concealed behind the CD changer in her trunk. Lena hadn’t wanted Nan to accidentally come across it. Truth be told, she hadn’t wanted to take it into the house where Sibyl had once lived. It was bad enough when Ethan slept over.

Lena walked across the weedy strip of land between the motel and the bar, her shoes crunching on broken glass and other debris that had been swept off the road. She passed the motel lobby on the way to her Celica. Though the night air was turning cold, Lena could still feel herself sweating as if she was sitting back in Hank’s hellhole of a house.

Grand theft auto. Felony assault.

The file was exactly where she had secreted it two years ago, black tire treads marring the State of Connecticut seal on the outside of the yellowing folder. Lena took it out and for some reason felt the need to hide the file under her shirt as she bolted up the stairs to her motel room. No one was watching her. There was no need for these furtive moves. She still felt guilty, though. Still felt as if someone, somewhere, was disapproving.

Maybe it would be better not to know. Ethan may have been calling Hank for money or support or perhaps he’d simply wanted to get in touch with Lena. She had moved from Nan’s and had a new phone number now. Had he sent letters to Nan? Had Nan hidden them from Lena, hoping she could sever the connection?

Lena hooked the do not disturb sign on her door. She yanked the curtains closed and sat cross-legged on the bed, still holding the file to her chest. She could feel her beating heart thumping against the thick stack of pages, sweat making the manila folder stick to her skin.

Slowly, she slid the file out from under her shirt. She ran her hand along the print, tracing the circle of the seal. Her fingers found the edge and she opened the file to find exactly the thing she never wanted to see again: Ethan staring back at her.

The mug shot had been taken a few years before Lena had met Ethan, back when he was eighteen. He’d kept his hair cut short when she knew him, but in the photo, his head was shaved bald. His lips curled into a sneer as he glared at the camera, and the little sign he held in his hand was askew, as if he couldn’t be bothered to keep it straight. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, something he never did anymore—or maybe he had stopped hiding his tattoos now that he was back in prison. They would serve him well inside.

ETHAN ALLEN GREEN a/k/a ETHAN ALLEN WHITE a/k/a

ETHAN ALLEN MUELLER.

Lena could remember the time Ethan had explained the origins of his name. They were both in his dorm room, squeezed together on his single bed. He was on his back and she had wrapped herself around him so that she wouldn’t fall off the narrow twin bed. Ethan was fairly short—he was only a few inches taller than Lena—but his muscles stood out from his body as if they were cut from granite. She’d had her head tucked under his arm, and the sound of his voice had vibrated in her ear.

Sometime around the American Revolution, he told her, Ethan Allen had been the leader of the Green Mountain boys, a group that had pledged its life to Vermont’s independence. During the war, Allen and his crew had captured a British fort. By some accounts he was a military genius, by others an ignorant, cold-blooded killer.

She had thought then as she did now that the namesake was not far off.

Forcible sodomy. Rape.

Lena knew only a little bit about Ethan’s life before he’d moved to Grant County. Ethan’s father had run out on him when he was a kid. His mother, a rabid racist, had married a man named Ezekiel White, a preacher of some kind. Ethan had changed his name to Green when he dropped out of his skinhead family. Lena had no idea why he didn’t go back to Mueller, his biological father’s name. Ethan didn’t like to talk about his dad.

When Lena had first met Ethan, he had claimed that he was working hard to change himself. Lena had accepted that, even respected it. As time passed, she had told herself there was no way he would be dating her if he still held on to his old beliefs. She was Hispanic—clearly so. She had become roommates with a lesbian—not just any lesbian, but Sibyl’s lover. Ethan seemed not to care. He was more than cordial to Nan. He had said that he was in love with Lena, wanted to share the rest of his life with her. He had said that being with her was the only good thing he had ever done with his life. That his words from his mouth so sharply contrasted with the blows from his fists wasn’t something she let herself think about too long.

HEIGHT: 5´6? WEIGHT: 160 SEX: MALE HAIR COLOR: BROWN EYE COLOR: BLUE RACE: WHITE

Race. His skin privilege, he called it. His white birthright.

TATTOOS.

There were so many—some Lena had even forgotten about. The arresting officer had documented them all, making notations about their origin, what they symbolized. Lena studied the photographs, really looking at the tattoos for the first time. She had always averted her gaze or kept her eyes closed when he took off his clothes. Even then, some of the images had managed to bleed through.

A row of SS soldiers on the left side of his chest saluted an image of Hitler on the right. Below this was a large black swastika that undulated across his ripped abs. His left arm was covered with scenes of war, soldiers shouldering rifles, their hats emblazoned with the double S. The other arm had barbed wire snaking up it, faint outlines of camp barracks in the background.

How had she touched this body? How had she let this body touch hers?

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.”