Hush (35 page)

"His clothes were dull. He had no sense of
style, man."

"Anything else?"

"He talked like a college-educated white
guy."

"How's that?"

"I don't know. He didn't use any street
language."

"What about tone of voice? Was his voice
deep? High?"

"He had a soft voice. Talked like this: 'How
much do I owe you?' " the informant said in a smooth, low voice.
Then he laughed. "Yeah, that was it. Just like that. “How much do I
owe you?” He laughed again.

Ivy pushed the print button at the computer
where she'd been sitting, taking notes. The printer spewed out a
copy of the description, which they put with the composite, faxing
and e-mailing both to the papers.

Ivy and Max followed up the faxes with phone
calls to make sure they would make the morning editions. While she
had the assistant editor of the Herald on the phone, she got home
phone numbers of coworkers who might have information on Alex
Martin.

"Maude Cunningham would be your best bet,"
the editor told her. "She was his desk advisor."

After hanging up, Ivy gave Maude a call. "Can
I come by and talk to you?" Ivy asked. "I know it's late, but—"

"Come over," Maude cut in. "I won't be doing
any sleeping tonight."

While Max tied up loose ends at the
task-force office, Ivy caught a cab to Maude's Lincoln Park
address.

Maude reminded Ivy of Bette Davis toward the
end of her career. Tough, dignified, and a little scary. She
smelled like whiskey and cigarette smoke.

"Come on in," Maude said, standing in the
doorway of her apartment, the ceiling light casting a yellow glow
above her head. Behind her, a cat meowed. "I don't want Miss Kitty
to get out."

Ivy stepped inside, and the woman closed the
door behind her. The entryway walls were covered with framed
newspaper photos and articles. "Is this you?" Ivy asked, pointing
to a beautiful young woman standing next to the Queen of
England.

"Yeah, believe it or not, I used to be
good-looking. She used to be good-looking too." She let out a
cackle.

Ivy didn't even attempt a response. "What can
you tell me about Alex Martin? Do you know why he went to the
cemetery? Was he meeting someone?"

"He didn't mention the cemetery to me at
all." Maude shook out a filterless cigarette and lit it, blowing
out a cloud of smoke. "I think he thought he was going to get a
scoop, and didn't want me to butt in. If he'd told me it had to do
with the Madonna Murderer, I wouldn't have let him go." She pulled
a piece of tobacco off her tongue, then examined the lit end of her
cigarette. "I'd been bragging to him about getting the story, no
matter what. It was kind of exciting having somebody that young
around who looked up to me and wanted to listen to my bullshit.
Alex was a nice kid, but I had to edit the hell out of his stuff.
He'd go off on tangents that had nothing to do with the subject
matter. But he was good. Just needed some restraining, that's all.
He was after a Pulitzer, you know that?" She let out a sad laugh
and shook her head. "Poor kid."

The Chicago Herald and the Chicago Sun Times
ran the sketch along with the identifying characteristics of the
Madonna Murderer on the front page, right under an article about
international terrorists. The fact that the Madonna Murderer's
first victim had been buried in the Catholic cemetery where Alex
Martin's body was found had quickly gotten out, and that knowledge
now figured prominently in all media coverage.

When the paper hit the stands, task-force
members were waiting to read it and pass it around. Some had come
in early. Others, like Max and Ivy, had stayed the night in their
second-floor home away from home.

Shortly past daybreak officers hit the
streets in pairs, recanvassing all the former patients Regina
Hastings had visited, beginning with the interviews that had been
written by someone else's hand.

A brief lull gave Max the opportunity to call
Ryan Harrison's house to check on Ethan.

"He isn't here," Judy Harrison said. "Wait.
Let me see. Maybe he came over after I went to sleep."

The receiver clattered in Max's ear. He heard
her walk away, then heard her come back and pick up the phone.
"He's not here," she said firmly. "He and Ryan went to the music
show downtown yesterday. Ryan came home in the afternoon, but Ethan
stayed. He decided not to spend the night here, and said he'd catch
a ride home with you."

"Thanks." Max hung up, then immediately
dialed home.

There was no answer.

"Did anybody take a call from my son
yesterday?" he asked the room of burnt-out, half-asleep people.

That question was followed by a lot of head
shaking.

"I'll check the books." Ivy uncurled stiffly
from the couch where she'd spent the last hour with her feet tucked
under her, trying to stay awake. Two others jumped up to help.

Every phone call was entered into a logbook,
with the time, subject, and caller ID. In a matter of minutes, they
were done.

"Nothing here."

Max tried calling home again. Again there was
no answer. He called Ethan's hockey coach. He called the homes of
several of Ethan's buddies. He called the bagel shop, hoping to
find that Ethan was filling in for a sick coworker at the last
minute.

Nobody had seen or heard from him.

Feeling sick to his stomach, Max put in a
call to the crime lab's fingerprint expert, Joel Runyan. "Get any
prints off that hockey stick?" he asked.

"Three different ones," Joel said, "but so
far we haven't found any matches in our database."

"I've got a print I'm going to fax you. I
want you to see if it matches anything you lifted from the stick.
And Joel, I need those results immediately. Drop whatever else
you're doing." After hanging up, Max hurried to his office and
pulled a set of fingerprints from his desk. He enlarged them on his
copy machine, then faxed them to the lab. He was heading out the
door when Ivy caught up with him.

"I'm going home," he told her without
stopping.

She fell into step beside him. "Is something
wrong?"

"I can't get in touch with Ethan."

“I’ll come with you.”

Traffic wasn't bad, and they made it to Max's
in less than forty minutes.

At the house, there was no sign of Ethan. "I
don't think he's been here since yesterday," Max said, panic
beginning to grab him by the throat. He called Ryan's house again.
They hadn't heard from him.

"Let me talk to Ryan," Max said.

Ryan was put on the phone. "I'm sorry, Mr.
Irving. I tried to talk him into coming home with me, but he wanted
to stay."

"Did he say where he planned to go, what he
planned to do after he left Navy Pier?"

"He was going to call you, or catch the
subway to your office. That's what he told me, I swear. I
swear."

"I believe you." Max hung up, then quickly
gathered some recent photos of Ethan. "Come on."

They ran outside and dove into the car. Max
took off, tires squealing as he made a U-turn, heading back in the
direction they'd come.

"Maybe I should drive," Ivy said, clinging to
the door as he swerved in and out of traffic.

"I'm okay."

"Are you thinking Ethan's disappearance has
something to do with the Madonna Murderer case?"

"I didn't want to hear those word spoken out
loud."

He pulled sharply into the right lane,
cutting off a white Taurus. The driver honked and threw him the
finger.

"You're jumping to conclusions," Ivy
reasoned. "Ethan was probably hanging out with some friends, maybe
got drunk, and was afraid to come home. Didn't you tell me he's
done that before? Didn't you say he's under probation for
drinking?"

"Yeah, but he's been doing so well."

Max rubbed his forehead. Sweat trickled down
the side of his face. "You're probably right. My brain is foggy.
Too many sleepless nights. I'm overreacting, that's all." But he
didn't stop sweating, and he didn't stop cutting people off.

Max's phone rang, and he quickly answered it.
It was Joel Runyan from the crime lab.

"The set of prints you faxed matched one of
the prints found on the hockey stick," Joel said.

Max's throat tightened and his stomach
knotted. "Are you sure?" Max asked, his voice strained. "How many
points?"

"Fourteen."

A fourteen-point match was nothing to
dispute.

"Who do the prints belong to?" Joel
asked.

Max swallowed. When Ethan was little, he used
to like to have his prints taken. Max had a drawer full of them.
"My son," he said. "They belong to my son."

"Have you seen this kid?"

"Have you seen this kid?"

Separately, Max and Ivy moved quickly from
one vendor to the next, showing Ethan's school photo as they
went.

There were hundreds of vendors, and as they
worked their way forward with no results, Max's panic grew.

Finally a guy with a nose ring grabbed the
picture from Ivy and stared at it. "Yeah, I saw him. He bought a My
Bloody Valentine album from me."

"Max!" Ivy could feel her heart thudding in
her stomach.

Let him be okay. Let Max's son be okay.

Max turned toward her. Walking sideways, he
backtracked, cutting through the mob to reach her side. "You've
seen him?" Max asked. "When?"

"Yesterday. I saw him a couple a times
yesterday."

"Have you seen him today?"

The vendor shook his head. A woman showed up
and slipped behind the table, dropping a copy of the Chicago Herald
on top of some boxed and sorted CDs. "Here's your paper, hon."

"He was with a guy who looked kinda like
that," the vendor said, pointing to the sketched face looking up at
them from the paper.

Ivy thought Max was going to pass out.

He swayed a little. He squeezed his eyes
shut. He pulled in a shuddering breath, then brought a closed fist
up hard against his mouth, as if to keep an anguished sob from
escaping. And he just stood there, for the longest time.

Ivy grabbed his arm. "Come on, Max," she said
softly. He didn't move, so she grabbed him by both arms, shaking
him firmly, saying, "Max. Don't fall apart. Not now. You can't fall
apart now."

He let his fist drop away from his face.
Bloodshot eyes stared hard at her, as if trying to figure out who
she was, and what she was doing there. Then she saw the
recognition, saw the detective taking over for the father who
couldn't function. He straightened. Side by side, they hurried from
the building, heading for his car and Area Five Headquarters.

His dad would find him, Ethan told himself.
His dad would find him, and when he did, he would beat the holy
shit out of the guy who'd done this to him.

Panic flooded through him, and a sob would
have escaped if his mouth hadn't been covered with duct tape. He
couldn't feel his hands or arms anymore; they were bound tightly
behind him. He couldn't feel his feet, which were tied at the
ankles. His hair was stuck to his head, and he knew he'd been
bleeding.

He was lying on the floor in a dark room. He
had no idea how long he'd been there, because he'd been
unconscious. The son of a bitch had hammered him, knocking him
out.

The smell.

The smell was so bad that he kept gagging
against the tape. And what terrified him so much was that it
smelled the way Max sometimes smelled underneath the lemon
shampoo.

He tried to pray, but kept forgetting the
words. He kept thinking about all the horrible stories he'd heard,
not from his dad, but from some of the officers at the police
station. Ethan used to go down there when he was little. He even
had a cop uniform. Different officers would sit him on their desks
where he would swing his legs back and forth and fiddle with his
pretend badge, thinking it looked real, thinking it was real. And
if he asked an innocent question, the officers would tell him the
answers with stories he hoped were made up. He would go home and
have nightmares, worrying that someone might come in and steal him
during the night, or cut out his liver and eat it. He used to
become so terrified that he made his dad keep the hall light on all
night.

He couldn't quit thinking about those stories
he thought he'd put away along with his pretend police uniform, his
pretend badge. Stories about predators, about evil people who had
no conscience, who enjoyed making people suffer before finally
killing them by strangulation, or bludgeoning, or cutting off piece
after piece until the victim bled to death or died of shock or
both.

He whimpered in terror. If he was going to
die, he wanted it to be fast, to be over as quickly as possible. He
didn't want to be tortured.

Don't torture me. Please don't torture
me.

He wanted to just close his eyes and
disappear. Just close his eyes and no longer exist.

Where was his dad? Was he looking for him?
No. Probably not. He thought he was at Ryan's. Max probably didn't
even know he was gone.

Please come. Please find me. Don't let him
cut me up. Don't let him hurt me anymore.

He wished he could shut off his brain, but he
couldn't, and his thoughts just kept moving forward. His breath was
coming in short little puffs. In his panic, he began to
hyperventilate.

After he was dead, Ruby would peel off his
skin and use it to make lamp shades. He would cut him up and put
him in a suitcase. He would dump the suitcase in the water
somewhere, weighting it down with cement blocks. And Ethan would
sink down, down, down. . . .

"Music," Ivy said from behind the wheel of
Max's car, driving as fast as she felt was safe. "What if it's not
mathematics, but music?"

Her words finally sunk in, with Max slowly
responding from another realm. "Music?"