The Last Thing She Ever Did(49)

“That’s okay,” he said, lying to her. None of what they’d done was okay. “After this call, we can’t talk about anything like this on a phone again. That means texting too.”

“I’m going crazy,” she said.

“No,” he said. “No, you’re not.”

“I am. Really, I am.”

He ignored her. “I told Damon I had a twenty-four-hour bug. I told him that you got sick at the bar exam. Okay? No more stories. Nothing elaborate. Nothing convoluted. Keep things simple. People who’ve done this kind of thing are always tripped up by what they say after they’ve done it.”

“This kind of thing” was murder, he knew. He wouldn’t dwell on that.

He heard Liz swallow. “What about Carole and David?” she asked.

Owen turned his body toward the window. The sidewalks were full of people shopping and finding their way to one of the city’s farm-to-table places that had been featured in the Oregonian. The car show and the Charlie Franklin story had provided a one-two punch to one of the last summer weekends.

“Be yourself,” he said.

“I don’t know who I am anymore.”

“You’re Liz Jarrett. You love Carole. Go help her get through this.”

It was not a suggestion but an order.

Liz was a woman who knew how to stand her ground, but she knew that under her feet the ground was shifting and at any moment she was going to fall. It would be a hard fall, one from which she would never recover. She couldn’t push back at an order. She no longer knew who she was.

“But—” she started to say, before letting her words drop.

There was no arguing with something as horrific as what she’d already done.





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

MISSING: FIVE DAYS

Owen caught a glimpse of himself in his office window. Damon was right. He did look terrible. His eyes were accentuated by dark crescents. Stress mottled a smooth complexion that was usually marked only with three-day stubble. Owen needed to pull himself together. He needed to help Liz get herself together. They needed to take a deep breath. Both of them. They needed a moment to stem the grief and shock that had enveloped them. If they didn’t, they’d surely get caught. Owen put his iPhone in a Starbucks cup that he’d retrieved from the trash. It was good that he’d bought a twenty-four-ounce drink the other morning. His usual twelve-ounce “tall” would never be big enough to contain the phone. He put the paper cup back in the trash and covered it with a bunch of other papers. That night the janitor would take the trash to the dumpster. He’d tell everyone that he’d lost his phone as he went about the business of reassembling contact names and numbers into a new device.

It was smart not to make any adjustments to his routine.

As he sat there facing the empty Eames chair, his necessary betrayal played over in his mind. He’d let Liz believe that Charlie was dead when he went into the garage. He’d let her carry the burden of what she thought she’d done. He rationalized his actions as the only way to save their marriage, their very lives. He’d killed the neighbor kid because he knew that he’d lose everything if his wife were arrested for murder.

He’d worked too hard for the Lumatyx deal and the cash that was going to pour over him like the sweetest nectar known to man.

Charlie would have told on them.

They’d never get that big house on the river.

He told himself, What’s done is done.



Esther felt her phone vibrate as she sifted through reports. She glanced at the image of her mother that appeared on the screen. Lee Nguyen had been calling for days. At all hours. Esther had grown tired of her mother’s need to say she was sorry when she really wasn’t. After her father died, Esther’s mom had sought to strengthen their bond, but each time she’d found a way to remind her of some disappointment—her failed marriage, her dubious career, her casual sense of style.

All of those things seemed so petty, so insignificant. Charlie Franklin was missing. This was no time for her mother to interject herself into her daughter’s life. Not when another mother was desperate to find her own child.

Esther felt the gold sea star pendant around her neck and rejected the call.



The swipe of Brad Collins’s Visa card and a quick telephone conversation with the bartender at Anthony’s confirmed the Ohio man’s story.

“He’s not our guy,” Esther said.

Jake shrugged. “Still a perv, though.”

“I don’t know, Jake,” Esther said.

Jake thought he saw a little sympathy in her eyes. It puzzled him. “You don’t feel sorry for him, do you?”

“No,” she said. “Just thinking about his case. That’s all. He was twenty-two when he got picked up for molesting that student. The boy was seventeen. Consenting. Seems pretty close in age.”

“Still a perv,” Jake said.

As Esther saw it, the law is always black-and-white. It has to be. The shades of gray distinguishing criminals were the province of the district or county attorneys who handled the overwhelming caseload that came through their offices every day. They alone had the authority to decide the shades. Not the police.

“Yes, the law says so,” she said.



An hour later, David Franklin pounced on Esther in the lobby of the Bend Police Department. He was a handsome man, but the anger in his face twisted his features into what reminded the detective of a gargoyle she’d seen on a church in a village in France when she toured there with a high school group. At the time, she’d thought the gargoyle looked like one of their chaperones. Now, however, she saw the missing boy’s father as the physical embodiment of the terra-cotta figure. His eyes had narrowed, and his mouth was a slash of anger.