Night Tides (5 page)

“Come on, Stephen,” a tall, dark-skinned girl in a tree-pattern T-shirt said as she stood. “It’s
my
right to eat without
his
smoking taking years off my life. I
will
be calling the city about this.”

Her companion, a slight, shaggy-bearded young man, put some money down beside their plates. “Smoking sucks,” he mumbled, and slunk out behind her.

“Oh, Christ,” Rachel said. “Caleb, seriously, don’t make me—”

“Buddy, put out the cigarette.”

Caleb and Rachel both turned to the blue-shirted man. He was looking steadily at Caleb.

“Kiss my ass,” Caleb said. “In the nineties I fought Saddam Hussein for you pissants, you know that? Desert Storm, does that mean anything to you?”

“Sure,” the man said. “Does Operation Iraqi Freedom mean anything to you? I fought him for every loudmouthed asshole in America.” His voice remained steady and soft, so that only Rachel and Caleb heard him. “Now, this lady’s asked you in a nice, friendly way to stop doing something you already knew you shouldn’t be doing. I’m
telling
you to stop doing it before you walk out of here with that cigarette burning in a real uncomfortable place.”

Rachel froze. The potential for violence had appeared so suddenly that she could do nothing to defuse it. Both men were large, but Caleb was middle-aged, dissipated, and used to intimidating people who never fought back. The younger man looked quite capable of making good on his threat. Could she have been that wrong about him?

For a moment the only sound was the incongruously smooth voice of Jamie Cullum on the CD player. Then Caleb stood and said loudly, “The hell with all of you!” He tossed the cigarette into the coffee cup left behind by the outraged girl and slammed the door on the way out.

For a long moment no one spoke. Then old Mrs. Boswell at the counter’s far end began to applaud, and everyone joined in. Even Rachel, tight-lipped, did the same. But as the patrons turned to one another to discuss the showdown, Rachel glared at the victor, her attraction to him now balanced by annoyance.

“Thank you,” she said. “Now I’d like you to go.”

He blinked in surprise, his triumphant smile fading before it had entirely formed. He was younger than she’d initially thought, perhaps not yet thirty, and the way the veins stood out in his neck said he was in better shape than the baggy shirt implied. He seemed none the worse for the confrontation, which also told her he was used to scenes like this. “I beg your pardon?”

“I was handling the situation. I know Caleb; I would’ve threatened to call the police, and he would’ve left on his own. Now, thanks to you, his pride’s hurt, and each time he sees you’re not here, he’ll be sure to come in and make an even bigger scene.”

“So you’d rather call the police than have someone just handle the problem?”

“Handle?” she snapped in a low, urgent voice, wanting nothing more than for this whole thing to be over. She must have read him completely wrong. He was one of the boys from last night writ larger, and older, and (she still hated to admit it) far sexier, but still a mere testicle with the power of speech. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes against her own fury and unwanted attraction. “I know you think you were doing a good deed, but try to understand this. Caleb was threatening
my
authority, not yours.
You
brought the prospect of violence into this, not him. You may be used to solving problems that way, and it may even work for you, but you won’t do it here. I won’t stand for it.” She was proud of her own eloquence; usually when she was angry she sputtered like an old outboard motor. “Now, I’ve asked you politely to leave. Or do I have to call the police?”

He stood and tossed a ten-dollar bill on the counter. “It’s your diner. Sorry for causing so much trouble.”

As the door closed after him, Helena said from behind Rachel, “That might’ve been an overreaction.”

“Probably,” Rachel said. And in the pit of her stomach, she knew it was true. Because at the last moment the emotion in his eyes had not been anger or humiliation but hurt. A man who could both back down Caleb Johnstone and still get his feelings hurt was a lot more than a walking gonad. And yet he had pride enough not to make a scene and to acquiesce to her demand that he leave. She felt the little shiver that, when she’d been a younger woman, meant she was half in love with some stranger she barely knew. She hated that feeling now.

“But I’d rather overreact on principle,” Rachel continued, “than let anyone think they can start a pissing contest in here.”

“You realize you chased off a man whose butt looks good in khakis even to me?” Helena said.

“He’s just Caleb with better hygiene,” Rachel said with a scorn she most definitely didn’t feel. Then she turned to the room. “Okay, everyone, show’s over. Apologies for the disturbance.”

“That’s how men were in
my
day,” Mrs. Boswell said as she sipped her tea. “They had
spines.”

The bell over the door rang again, and Rachel looked up in time to glimpse another man leaving. She didn’t recognize him and looked around to see where he’d been sitting; it wasn’t that unusual for people to try to skip out on their checks. “Who was that?” she asked Helena.

Helena looked around. “Oh, it was the guy way in the back there. He paid. Don’t worry.”

Something about the brief view of him sent a shiver up Rachel’s spine. “Who was he?”

“I don’t know,” Helena said. “He looked familiar, so he’s probably been in before, but he wasn’t a regular.”

Rachel went to the window and looked out, but the man had vanished.

Helena shook her head and sighed. “Remember the good old days, when working the breakfast shift wasn’t dangerous?”

“Everything’s dangerous now,” Rachel said distantly, but Helena had already walked away.

CHAPTER FOUR

E
THAN
W
ALKER STOPPED
in midmotion as he climbed into his truck and looked back at the diner. The two-story building occupied a triangular lot where Williams Street and East Washington met at a forty-five-degree angle. His builder’s eye told him it had been erected sometime in the sixties and significantly refurbished at least three times since. The hand-painted sign over the door read simply,
Rachel’s
, in black letters on white, and flyers for local bands, yard sales, and political events covered the lower half of the big front window.

He slapped the edge of the truck’s door, and the impact traveled painfully up his arm to his shoulder. He closed his eyes and took a deep, slow breath. How
dare
that woman throw him out, when all he’d done was stand up for her? Where was her gratitude? Everyone else in the place appreciated his actions. Why not her?

He wanted to slam the truck’s door, stomp back into the diner, get right in her smug face, and say … well, what? What could he say? Clearly, despite the undeniable fact that she had lips he’d fantasize about for weeks and legs whose silkiness he could almost feel against his hands, she was not a woman he could get along with. In Madison, the great liberal-blue enclave in the middle of red-state Wisconsin, that wasn’t a surprise. Some days it seemed like every current and former hippie from all over the Midwest had landed here the way runoff collects in low spots. Unfortunately, there was no way to drain these people away to Iowa or Illinois the way water could be sent back into the lakes.

He closed his truck door and started the engine. The annoying
ping
continued until he finally gave in and fastened his seat belt. He’d be sure to pay Marty back for this humiliation.
I know it’s out of your way, but it’s my favorite local place and you’ll love it
, his brother had said.
I can’t believe you’ve never tried it
. Now he fervently wished that were still true.

As he put the truck in reverse, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw the woman standing in the window. Her hands were on her hips, which pulled the apron snug and accented her curves. It also made her resemble a parent ensuring that a troublemaking child left the playground. He couldn’t make out her expression through the glass and wondered if perhaps she regretted her words and would apologize if he went back inside.

Just the sight of her made his belly tingle, and other body parts also announced themselves. Annoyed, he adjusted himself and put the truck in drive. Could his two heads
never
agree, not even once? It didn’t matter anyway; she had publicly humiliated him, and that was that. The way she looked in that apron, one strand of wavy hair falling into her eyes, was completely besides the point.

Not to mention that, in a clinch—in
the
clinch—he’d likely fail to launch.
That memory
would return, and what now stood at attention would fall resolutely, immovably at ease.

He turned on the radio as he drove down East Washington, and .38 Special’s “Hold On Loosely” blared out, loud enough to cover his sing-along. And even though he knew the actual lyrics, he always sang the way he’d misheard them as a child:

Hold on, Lucy
And don’t let go
If you swing too highly
You’re gonna lose your toe… .

Within a verse and a chorus, he was smiling again.

A
FEW TURNS
brought him to the shore of Lake Mendota, the northernmost of the two big lakes separated by downtown Madison. Here his company, Walker Construction, was building a condominium complex in an area whose residents had exhausted all legal remedies—and the original builder—in an attempt to keep out the new development. The project was hugely behind schedule, and Ethan found out about the troubles only after he’d taken the contract. His company had almost tanked during his two years in Iraq, where he’d learned just how hard longdistance management could be even in the Internet age. And so he’d jumped at the first job that came along without doing his normal due diligence.
Lesson learned
, he told himself often and vehemently.

Ethan had spent his childhood on a working dairy farm outside the nearby town of Monroe, the polar opposite of bohemia. His father had always described Madison as the place where the liberals and freaks collected so they could best influence the state government. “Seventy-two square miles of druggies and homos surrounded by reality,” he called it, modifying the famous Lee Dreyfus quote.

Certainly the presence of the university had something to do with it, and when Ethan left home to attend school in Madison, he’d briefly flirted with both the liberal student establishment and the liberal student girls. But his small-town work ethic, morals, and sense of common decency drew him back from the excesses of sex, substance abuse, and relativism. By the time he graduated, he’d grown so disgusted that he didn’t even attend the ceremony. The presence of Al Franken as the commencement speaker didn’t help.

Since returning from Iraq eight months earlier, he’d been even more aware of the differences between the people he knew and respected and the rest of the city’s population. He hadn’t been around in the sixties, but it wasn’t hard to imagine that the tension was similar. Only the lack of a draft kept most of it off the streets and instead confined to the radios, newspapers, and blogs.

He slowed as he approached the construction site, and his reverie abruptly ended. Five police cars, an official-looking van, and an ambulance blocked the entrance. Yellow
Do Not Cross
tape encircled the property. A TV-station truck was parked farther down, although it appeared to be leaving. Neighbors stood outside their homes, clustered in small groups. His stomach dropped, and he felt suddenly cold. What the hell had happened?

He parked and climbed from his truck. Although it wasn’t yet nine o’clock, the heat was enough to plaster his shirt to his skin within three steps. He walked quickly over to his workers gathered next to the port-a-johns. “Who’s hurt?” he demanded.

The men looked blank.

Ethan clenched his fists. “There’s an ambulance.”

“Nobody hurt,” one of the electricians said.

Ethan’s mouth went a little dry. “Please tell me this isn’t an immigration raid,” he said.

“No, it’s your brother,” the welding foreman said. “The real cops.”

A quick look around verified that the cars were all city patrol vehicles and most of the men were in uniform. He felt a little relief. “And why are the real cops here?”

“Some girl got attacked here last night,” one of the bricklayers said.

“Attacked?” Ethan repeated.

“Sí
. The police got here the same time we did this morning. They found her clothes but no trace of her. I think they sent the ambulance in case someone finds her body.”

“And none of you bothered to call
me
when you called the cops?”

“Hey,
patrón
, we didn’t call the cops,” the bricklayer said. “They just showed up.”

“We thought your brother would call you,” the foreman said with a hint of petulance. “He said he knew where you were.”

“Ethan!” Martin Walker called as he came around the end of the Bobcat parked in the driveway. Clearly the small Asian and the tall, thickly muscled Caucasian had no blood connection, but growing up under the same roof had more than compensated. “I wondered if you were going to show up.”

“What the
hell
, Marty?” Ethan said. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“If I’d known you were going to be this late, I would have. Did you stop at Rachel’s diner?”

“Forget the
diner
, Marty. What’s going on?”

Marty nodded that they should move away from the workers. When they were out of earshot, Marty asked softly, “Didn’t you see the paper this morning?”

Ethan shook his head.

“Another college girl disappeared last night.”

“Here?”

“Maybe. We’re still working on that. Anyway, this one was just like the others. You know what Dad always says: Once is a fluke, twice a coincidence, but three times is a pattern, man, and I’m going to start feeling the heat. These are the kinds of things Nancy Grace gets her panties in a wad over.”

The shift in tone from the breakfast scene to this one left Ethan a little off balance. So a third girl had vanished from the busy, overpopulated downtown isthmus. He knew about the others, from the news and from Marty. The first girl had been a Chinese exchange student and thus merited little media notice; Faith Lucas, though, was a white, blond cheerleader and swimsuit model who came from a prominent family of Green Bay Lutherans. The Sunday headline after her disappearance referred to her as the
Golden Girl Gone
, and the national media was sniffing around more than anyone liked. And now a third girl had vanished.

“Shit,” Ethan muttered softly. “So what exactly did you find here?”

“A set of footsteps across the site, a cut security fence, and more tracks down to the water’s edge. The missing girl’s clothes in a pile. No blood on them, and they weren’t ripped or torn like she struggled. Every button, zipper, and snap was undone. I don’t think she was attacked here, though; in the other two, there were two sets of tracks down and one set back. I think the perp left the clothes here to throw us off. He probably called the tip line himself.”

Ethan looked past his brother at the dozen officers and investigators carefully examining the ground. Be yond them lay the orange fence netting that warned equipment drivers of the soft lakeshore, and beyond that were the trees he’d been told to leave intact regardless of how their roots interfered with the plumbing. One section of the fence was cut and pushed aside, and a man powdered it for fingerprints. “I know this is a big deal, Marty,” Ethan said, his teeth clamped tight against his fury at the universe, “but do you know how far behind we are on this project?”

“Yes, and I’m really sorry, Ethan. But I didn’t pick the site.”

Ethan nodded. “I know. How long will it be before we can get back to work?”

“At least a day.”

“A whole
day?
Marty, every day
counts
on this one. It’s my first job since I got back stateside. We’re supposed to be roofing this thing by now, and we just started putting up the girders. That kind of delay means we won’t finish before winter, and
that
means we’ll have to finish next spring. Contractors don’t get good references if they’re a year overdue.”

“I’ll do what I can, but this is a crime scene, and we have to keep it pristine until we’ve gotten all the evidence.”

“If all he did was walk across it and throw down some clothes, how much evidence can there be?”

“Not much, probably. But these days the crucial clue might be microscopic. You watch
CSI
, you know how it works. I suppose you could have your lawyer yell at the chief about it… .”

Ethan snorted. “Yeah, that’s the publicity I need:
Local contractor couldn’t care less about missing girl
. That’d be all over
The Lady of the Lakes
by lunchtime. Hey, maybe it was that blogger who called in the tip.”

“If we could track him down, I’d sure have a few questions for him. He knows way too much about a lot of things. But we’ve tried before. No judge in touchy-feely Madison will give us a subpoena for the ISP records, because he stays just this side of probable cause and everyone’s concerned about his right to free speech.”

“I thought it was a woman.”

“Online you can be anything. And more than one thing.”

Ethan fumed silently for a moment longer. “Okay, I’ll leave you to your job; that way at least
one
of the Walkers will be working here. I’ve got to send the guys home, and then Dad’s supposed to meet me at the office.”

Marty’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “He is? Why?”

“You know why. Why does he ever come to the big city?”

“Well… tell him I said hi. Chuck and I will try to get out there sometime soon.”

“Does he let Chuck in the house yet?”

“No, just onto the porch. I guess he’s afraid of fag tracks on the carpet. But he offers him a beer now.”

“I thought Chuck didn’t drink.”

“He pretends. He even wore a Packers T-shirt last time. Fake it ’til you make it.”

“He’ll never be able to fake it enough for Dad.”

Marty patted him on the arm, then walked back to the crime scene. For something that needed to be kept immaculate, Ethan thought, they’d done a tremendously good job of tearing up the muddy area in their search for clues. He took a deep breath and went to tell men who got paid only when they worked that, for the next day at least, there was no work for them.