NATE BACKED AWAY FROM EMMA, his fingers already on his phone.
“What are you going to do?” Emma asked. Her voice was shrill, the sharp pitch of an out-of-tune violin.
The truth was, he didn’t know what he was going to do. He shook his head, twisted the doorknob, but just as he was about to leave she called him back.
“You need to trust me, Nate.”
He looked at his wife, understanding that her words were a warning. Emma’s face betrayed no emotion. She was cool and calm, retreating behind the cold mask he’d been seeing more and more. No softness, no vulnerability.
He wanted to trust her. He always had. He’d trusted her empathy and her compassion, her desire to help others. He’d trusted what a wonderful, devoted mother and wife she was. He just couldn’t reconcile those parts of her with what she’d done.
The ends justify the means.
But what if they never reached the end?
Emma had done something wrong. But could he really turn her in to Hamilton and Greene when she’d done it for the right reason? Could he risk Josh getting even sicker because they couldn’t pay for his treatments, watch her get arrested, ruin her career, his career, their marriage, their family?
He backed away from her.
“Nate?” Emma drew an X across her chest and pointed at him. We’re in this together, she was saying. Tell me you still love me.
She needed reassurance. She needed him on her side.
Nate opened his mouth to reply, to say something, but he realized he couldn’t. There were no words left to say.
NATE DROVE too fast away from the hospital, the familiar mantra ricocheting like golf balls through his head:
You’re a bad person.
You’re cowardly. Weak.
Nobody can trust you.
Maybe if he hadn’t been so focused on Ben. Or Julia. Or on thinking his wife was having an affair. Maybe he would have seen it: her desperation to save Josh. Maybe he could’ve stopped it. But he’d missed it, and now he had no idea what to do.
No matter what, he’d lose something: his wife or his integrity.
Nate raced up the road toward the location Kia had texted him. He turned right to cross the bridge and was greeted by flashing lights as he parked next to the hiking path that led to the bottom of the waterfall.
He followed the path along a series of sharp switchbacks. The clouds were rushing like freighters through the sky. It was colder here, the air saturated with moisture from the waterfall’s spray. Small pellets of freezing water dashed against his head. The light quickly turned gray as the woods closed around him.
Nate had always loved the woods. When he’d lived in Seattle, surrounded by so much pavement and tall glass buildings, he’d missed the cool, peaceful beauty of the forest, the sharp call of crickets and the gentle murmur of the leaves rustling in the wind. Now, of course, everything was dying, the plants saturated, the ground muddy. But the evergreens still kept their glossy coats, even in the deepest depths of winter, a reminder that life continued around us, even in the darkest season.
Now he could hear the distant thrum of the waterfall pounding over the rocks. He could never hear that sound without remembering Robbie’s suicide, the temporary grave his body had found in the river.
Something prickled up the skin of Nate’s neck and he stopped, looked around. He felt a pervading sense of menace, something dark descending. He heard voices and saw Kia standing next to a few uniforms. Dr. Kathi Morris, the pathologist, was bent over a body on the ground among the trees about fifty feet from the path.
Nate greeted them and bent to look at Beatrice Flores as he pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and slipped them on. She looked younger in death than she had in her mug shot, her eyes closed as if she were sleeping. Her skin was tinted a bluish color, patches of lighter skin marbling through the dark.
“She was found by a woman walking her dog,” Kia said quietly. She nodded at a pale elderly woman and a small dog being attended to by paramedics farther along the path.
“Overdose?” Nate asked.
“Most likely.”
“It’s a strange place for it.” Nate turned to Dr. Morris. “How long has she been out here?”
“A few hours,” she replied. “Rigor mortis is established around her neck and jaw but less marked elsewhere. So I’d say three to four hours. Livor mortis is on her right side, but she was found flat on her back, indicating she was dumped here.”
Nate pinched the bridge of his nose. His bruised fingers throbbed.
Kia looked at him curiously. “You okay?”
Nate nodded. He had to get a grip.
“Can you check the back of her neck?” he asked Dr. Morris. “See if there’s a puncture wound.”
Dr. Morris wrapped an arm around Beatrice’s shoulders and heaved her onto her side. The girl’s long hair slid over her face. Nate knelt and scooped it off her neck, gently tucking it behind her ears.
They peered closely at the skin on her neck.
“There,” Kia said. She pointed at a tiny drop of blood that had formed just above one of her vertebrae. She met Nate’s eyes. “Just like Martinez.”
“We’ll need a tox screen,” he told Dr. Morris. “See if it’s the same thing that killed Mr. Martinez and Ms. Williams.” He turned to Kia. “Did you question Ben this morning?”
“I couldn’t; he was asleep and the doctors wouldn’t let me in.”
“Let’s arrest him. We need his statement.”
Kia frowned. “We can’t do that. There hasn’t been a shred of evidence linking Ben to Martinez. No DNA, hair, fingerprints, nothing. Only Martinez’s girlfriend’s word that she saw Ben’s name on the phone. That’s not concrete enough. And you know we’ll never get through a grand jury with just circumstantial evidence.”
Nate made a frustrated sound at the back of his throat. Emma had told him Ben was involved, but he couldn’t tell Kia that without telling her everything else.
“He’s gonna flee as soon as he can.”
“We can’t arrest him when there’s no evidence he committed a crime. And you heard Dr. Morris; this girl has only been dead a few hours. Ben’s been in the hospital all that time. He didn’t do this.”
Nate pressed his fingers into his thighs. Hard.
She was right. So why had Emma implicated Ben?
More important, why had Nate believed her?
“We still have to question him,” Nate said, thinking fast. “He has a track record of making and dealing drugs. At the very least, maybe he knows who’s behind all of this: the murders, the drugs, the prescription fraud. It’s all tied together, I can feel it. Head back to the hospital and question him. See what he knows.”
Kia studied him, her face disapproving. She knew he was hiding something. He waited for her to challenge him, to ask what was going on, but she just shook her head and slipped her plastic gloves off with a snap. She tucked them in the trash bag at the edge of the crime scene and disappeared up the path without another word.
The CSIs had already roped off the area, little yellow evidence flags waving in the breeze. Nate stepped carefully from one to the next, trying to piece together the scene. The person who’d dropped Beatrice’s body had clearly tromped through the woods with her, rather than bringing her down the path.
Nate followed the broken branches through the woods for a good half mile. Whomever it was had been strong. Strong enough to carry a body this far through dense brush and trees. Although it didn’t look like the body had been dragged. Maybe two people had been carryng it? Eventually Nate emerged from the forest onto the road. Wheel marks were traced into the gravel. Nothing that could identify the vehicle, but definitely enough to indicate a car had been parked here.
Nate turned his flashlight on and took his time sweeping the area in a neat, precise grid. He didn’t stop until he reached the makeshift blanket beside the road, where all the evidence had been collected, tagged, and laid out. There, already bagged and tagged, was a black-and-white poker chip. Nate picked up the baggie, turning it over in his hand. The initials engraved on the back were JH.
“Shit. I think I know who this belongs to,” he called to a CSI. He held up the bagged poker chip. “Mind if I take it to question the owner?”
She nodded. “Sure, let me check it out.” She jotted something in the evidence log.
Nate walked quickly back through the woods to Beatrice’s body. He flashed back to another body. For years he’d used regret over Robbie as a stick to beat himself with. Now here he was, standing on the edge of a forked road, choosing between right and wrong once again.
Nate blinked, seeing Josh’s smiling face in his mind.
You’re a good guy, Daddy…
How could he look Josh in the eye and say he was one of the good guys if he let Emma continue down this path? What she was doing was wrong, and he couldn’t cover for it.
He wanted to be the man his son thought he was. More than that, he wanted to teach Josh to be good, to do better than him, to respond courageously to every challenge. Maybe it would still result in heartache and tragedy, but at least he’d be doing the right thing.
He fingered the chip in his pocket, deciding to call Lieutenant Dyson and tell him everything. But first he had one more question for Emma about the owner of this chip.
He snapped off his gloves, threw them in the trash, and slipped the evidence bag into his pocket, his knuckles brushing against the tin of toothpicks he kept there. He pulled it out and opened it, extracted a toothpick, and rolled it between his fingers. After a moment, he slipped the toothpick and the tin into the trash bag.
Nate knelt and squeezed Beatrice’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m going to make this right.”
Nate’s phone rang, and he straightened and answered it, his shoes crunching on gravel as he moved closer to the water. The waterfall hissed in the distance.
“Nate?” Kia sounded out of breath, as if she was running. “Ben’s not here.”
“What? What do you mean, not there?”
“One of the doctors said he left around lunchtime. He wasn’t under arrest, so they couldn’t hold him. Nobody knows where he’s gone!”