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Two days have passed since Camille Roberts showed up in my office, and while I’ve made several calls resulting in me making some headway on the case, it hasn’t been much. Other work has superseded it. Other rabbit holes have demanded my attention. Rabbit holes that have easier answers and instant gratification.
I flip on the lamp on my desk only to turn it off again. Using just the glow of my computer screen, I pick up the file on the senator’s kid, Lucas Bennett, and shuffle through it again, waiting for something to grab me.
Somewhere down the hall, I hear the steady hum of a vacuum cleaner. I close the file and stare at the wall. The paint is called Network Gray.I hate it. I’ve always hated it. It was Bethany’s choice, like most everything else in this place.
The file on my desk beckons me to pick it up. It screamsread me again,and I wonder what I might find if I dig deep enough. I know all too well about coming up with more than you went in for. Knowledge hurts people. There’s a saying that comes from the Alcoholics Anonymous world, that you’re only as sick as your secrets.
If a person has secrets, or even unfulfilled desires, and that person is hiding those from other people, they’re suppressing what they want and that makes them sick. The pain of suppression usually starts small, like a whisper. But over time, like anything, if it’s ignored, that whisper grows louder and louder, demanding more and more attention. Until it becomes too much and they find a way to meet that need.
I think of Lucas Bennett and try to put myself in his shoes. It’s not hard. I’ve been there. Sometimes I’m still there. I know what it’s like to carry the weight of the ever present, soul-crushing, gut-wrenching reality that you just don’t want to be alive anymore. I know what it’s like to not to want to exist, sitting day in and day out, listening to the sounds that only an empty house can make. Or hanging out in a dark office that’s painted a color you don’t even like, waiting for your phone to ring, or for a response on an app, just so you don’t have to go home alone, or sit alone with yourself any longer. That’s not living. It’s going through the motions with working lungs and a heart that continues to beat. It’s a sick and cruel form of punishment.
Sometimes I sit in therapy and I ponder the number of times I’ll see the furrow of Nick’s brow or the curve of Kelsey’s smile and I tell myself, maybe next week. Maybe next week I’ll get the guts.
Back when Bethany and I were still married, I mentioned having suicidal thoughts. I was worried I might actually act on them, and although I never would have admitted it at the time, in a way it was a call for help.
“And so why haven’t you done it, Ethan?” Bethany said when I told her how I’d been feeling. “Why haven’t you killed yourself?” We were fighting over the tile selection for the employee restroom and it just hit me. Enough was enough. I didn’t care about tile. I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t have an answer for her then. Back when it might have mattered. But I do now.
I refuse to leave my children the way my father left me, alone with my mother, desolate and filled with grief. It wasn’t the fact that he left, that one day he went out for cigarettes and never came back. That was the good part. It just would’ve been better if we hadn’t been constantly broke. Proving that Donovan Roberts was murdered will allow me to leave my children a nest egg behind, which is why I have to be careful. If I die before that happens, they get nothing.
Of course, I’d have to make it look like an accident. Or murder. Shouldn’t be too hard. This case is certainly teaching me the ins and outs of getting a proper pay out.
My phone lights up and I snatch it from the desk as though it may grow legs and run off. I wouldn’t be surprised. Everything else in my life has. I read the notification, which turns out to be from Apple, suggested tips on how to take better photos, capturing more details at night. If I hadn’t felt shitty enough before, I certainly do now.
Ali is never going to call. Denial runs deep. But it doesn’t run deep enough to silence that little voice inside that keeps telling you you’re missing an unpleasant truth.
I’ve sent Ali two messages from inside the app. I’d call her, or text, but I can’t let on that I have her phone number because I never actually asked her for it. You can find anything on the internet. But I need to be subtle. I don’t want to scare her off any more than I probably already have. Both messages in the app went unread. Not that I hadn’t expected that, but it still sucks. No one wants to be rejected, apparently not even by a possible serial killer.
Sure, I’d like to sleep with her again, but I also have other motives. Lucas Bennett’s journal entries indicate he might have dated Ali. There are certain behavioral similarities between what he described and my experience with her. Using an alias. Turning up unexpectedly. The sudden mood shift. The walking out abruptly.
His journal made him sound sad and lonely at times. Not atypical for an artist type. He described periods of feeling high and low. He wrote he felt like he was getting nowhere. Nothing too out of the ordinary for a young man his age. If he wanted to end his life, he certainly didn’t leave any clues about it. But who is to say how a person really feels inside? I know his journal was just a glimpse in time. A snapshot of a moment. To understand more, I’d have to speak with those closest to him and I can’t get around to that until next week. I have the kids this weekend.
For now, I have three main questions: Does Ali Brown have a type? It seems that she might. Should I be scared? Probably. Am I scared? A little.
It’s not a bad thing. Fear is always informing you. Although surely if she were planning to kill me, she would have responded to my direct messages or at least shown some level of interest. Otherwise, what’s in it for her? Why would she wait? Also, it seems very unlikely that she would go after someone so high profile, like a senator’s kid. Unless, of course, she didn’t know.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ethan
Here’s a lesson for everyone. Never give up. Ten minutes later, ten minutes after I told myself it wasnevergoing to happen, a notification from the app came in. I have three messages, two from women I’ve matched with, and the only one I really want, a message from Ali.
She apologizes and says she’s had to take an emergency trip out of town for work, but that she has a gift for me and could I go to this address tonight, as in the next half hour. It sounds like a terrible idea. I jot down the address and then look it up. It takes me to the Circuit of The Americas, the Formula One racetrack just outside of town.When you get there,she wrote,ask for Chris. Tell him Ali sent you. He’ll be expecting you. He’ll be expecting me too. Just explain about the last-minute emergency trip. Act really sorry, and it’ll probably work.
I check the time on my phone. The map app says it’ll take me twenty-eight minutes to get there from my office. If this is how she’s planning to kill me, I don’t care. I’ll give her an A for effort. It’s one way I hadn’t thought of myself.
* * *
This is racing school,Chris explains to me. He’s a handsome fellow, tall and tanned, the kind of man you’d be sorry for the lady in your life to know. It’s too late for that, but I keep a close eye on him, anyway. I wonder if he’s slept with her. When I ask how he knows Ali, he only smiles and changes the subject, and I pretty much have my answer. Not only that, if he’s doing this kind of favor, he’s in deep. But at least he isn’t dead.
Chris hands me a suit and a helmet, a pen, and a very long waiver with lots of fine print. It’s all wasted ink. I would have signed it in blood.
The track at night is really something. It’s all lit up and empty. It smells like fuel and burnt rubber and the scent of tires long after they’ve struck the asphalt. “This is amazing,” I say as he directs me toward the passenger seat of the car. Not only has he slept with the woman of my dreams, he’s about to show me he’s an incredible driver too. He looks over at me from the driver’s seat and smiles. “You ready? I’m going to show you what an automobile is capable of doing.”
That’s the last thing I hear before I am slammed back into the seat. We’re going one hundred and fifty miles an hour straight at a wall into a hairpin turn. Next are the corkscrew turns and my heart is about to beat out of my chest. The entire ride has my hair on end. I know, without a doubt, the car is going to flip. We’re going to wipe out.
After the fourth hairpin turn, I realize then what Ali’s done. Her gift is not just about the racetrack. It’s a great metaphor. Everyone likes when they’re in control. If you’re on a motorcycle and you’re in frontandyou know what you’re doing, then you’re relatively comfortable. But if you’re on the back, it’s an entirely different ride.
Ali sent me a follow-up message before I got here that didn’t make a lot of sense then, but it does now. She said this is how most people live their life. It’s like they’re on the back of the motorcycle and on the front is all the demands in their life. That’s who’s driving—all the things they’re afraid of, all the things other people want from them, all the things they’d like to do right now. The problem is they don’t really know what to do to make those things happen. So they get whipped around.
