The Chimera Secret

4

The sound of his labored heart pounded in Ethan’s head as he jogged along the sidewalk of Lathrop, just off Thatcher Woods. He checked his watch as he swerved by reflex around the occasional dog-walking pedestrian, glancing at perfectly manicured lawns fronting two-story condos worth more than he earned in a decade. Some even had turreted corner plots like miniature castles.

Ethan frequently jogged the route, because like almost all people he liked to dream. Nobody who lived alone as he did had any need for five bedrooms, three cars and a bathroom the size of a small apartment, but all the same it was something prettier to look at than the windy city’s north side. Kind of thing he’d once assumed that he and Joanna would have aspired to: kids, a dog, big house, the whole nine yards. Instead his life, along with his aspirations, had ground to a halt when she’d disappeared. He’d lost contact with friends, become consumed by grief and rage, embittered by life’s uncaring twists of fate.

He shook off the maudlin thoughts and picked his chin up along with his pace.

The cables of his earphones bounced as he checked over his shoulder and ran across the street, slowing his pace as he passed a large colonial-style house. Pure white clapperboard, broad windows, high hedges blocking access to the rear. Worth a cool two million. Ethan’s practiced eye picked out a robust-looking drainage chute running down the north wall from the roof, part of the hedge that was only four feet high, and a wrought-iron gate locked with a simple bolt and padlock.

Three routes of entry and egress. No, four. The southeast corner’s bedroom window opened out just above the slanted roof of the double garage below. An alarm system’s claxon was attached to the wall beneath the eaves, a deliberately overt statement announcing the presence of a security system within. Not that Ethan would have to worry about that. He wasn’t looking to break into the house.

He was expecting somebody else to break out.

The road opened out as he reached West North Avenue, turned right at the junction and resisted the temptation of the Starbucks on the corner. His belly was still full from his lunch with Natalie, and his mind likewise filled with thoughts about Joanna and the mysterious footage he’d seen so many months before.

‘You seen him yet?’

Nicola Lopez’s voice crackled through the microphone in his ear. Ethan replied between breaths as he jogged, the microphone picking up his voice and relaying it to his partner back at their office. Nicola Lopez was several years his junior, but as an ex-police detective she was no less capable.

‘He hasn’t shown. It’s a long shot anyway.’

Ethan had jogged past the big colonial every day for the past five, hoping for a brief glimpse of Marty Sedgewick, a 48-year-old banker out of North Cleveland, Chicago. Marty had been one of the high fliers of the nineties and beyond, forging a serious career in investments and emerging markets. Four-million-dollar mansion. Condo down on the quays Florida way, along with a mooring for his forty-two-foot cruiser. Then the economic bubble burst. As his employers faced economic ruin, Marty faced the sudden and unexpected spectre of bankruptcy when he was fired from his post in a dramatic move by the bank for which he worked. Instead of making the smart play and downsizing his life before the shit hit the fan, Marty Sedgewick got himself an idea too good to be true. He told his wife and three kids he’d left his job and was setting up for himself.

Using his credentials as a big man in the market, he played out what was left of their personal fortune, convincing everybody that he was a businessman thriving in the middle of the recession and that they, too, could have a slice of the pie. Baffling a series of investors ranging from executive jet companies to private childcare nurseries, he sucked in almost seven million dollars before the fraudulent Ponzi scheme he’d engineered collapsed around him like a deck of cards. With four million dollars of other people’s money to his name, Marty Sedgewick promptly abandoned his family and hightailed it to Mexico. He quite possibly could have stayed there had he been able to keep a low enough profile, but unfortunately Sedgewick couldn’t keep his remarkable coup to himself, and fourteen months later his overworked mouth had gained him a mugging, lost him almost a million bucks and ultimately landed him back in Chicago, this time in Cook County Jail.

Ethan was more used to pursuing hardened criminals with nothing to lose than people like Sedgewick, a pasty, balding man who worshipped greenbacks over his own flesh and blood. However, it had proven far harder to track Sedgewick down after he’d jumped his hundred-thousand-dollar bond than Ethan had anticipated. Somehow, the creep still had people willing to shield him from the law, specifically in River Forest. The trail had led Ethan to the street he now jogged every day, which unfortunately for Sedgewick was just a few blocks away from the good offices of Warner & Lopez Inc.

Ethan turned left onto North 72nd Court, jogging past a parade of shops before he reached a smallholding on the corner by a parking lot. The nondescript block held a single, security code protected door that led to the four small businesses within. He reached up and punched in his number as he entered the building and strode to the door of their office, pushing it open as he walked in and pulled off his earphones.

Filing cabinets lined one wall, and a series of pictures were tacked to another, each depicting a fugitive with a price on their head. Everything from minor two-bit felons up to hardened criminals with homicides under their belts. Two desks adorned the office; Ethan’s was tidy and organized with military efficiency. Nicola Lopez’s looked as though a tornado had gusted through it.

Lopez leaned back in her chair, her long black hair pinned up in a ponytail and her dark almond eyes shifting with impatience.

‘Just break into the goddamned house,’ she snapped. ‘Hundred thousand bucks bond sitting on his ass in there just waiting for us and you’re jogging-miss-daisy past his window every day.’

Ethan smiled as he tossed his microphone onto thick piles of paper on his desk.

‘There’s no point in one of us getting busted. The cops will only take Sedgewick into their own custody before cutting us loose. We gotta play it smart and let him come out to us.’

Lopez shook her head and gracefully twirled a pen through her fingers.

‘We gotta play it smart. I’ll be tapping those words onto your head in Morse Code with a baseball bat if the police bust Sedgewick before we do. Six weeks of work down the tubes.’

‘You win some…’ Ethan replied.

Lopez huffed and puffed for a few moments more but said nothing as she turned back to her computer.

Ethan could understand her frustration. As a kid Lopez had walked out of Guanajuato in Mexico twenty years before with her family and little else and somehow made it into the police department of Washington DC as a homicide detective. Diligent, obedient and full of idealistic enthusiasm, Lopez had seen her partner shot and killed by a corrupt senior officer, an event which had ultimately led her to resign her post on the force and join Ethan in the far less secure world of bail bondsmen and private investigations. Now she was spontaneous, impulsive and sometimes downright aggressive, traits that fit their chosen profession surprisingly well but also made her unpredictable. Her silence lasted for less than thirty seconds. She couldn’t let it go and looked up at him.

‘You know we’ve spent four thousand bucks hunting that asquerosa, and all the while he was hunkered down less than two hundred yards from where we’re sitting?’

‘He’s fooled the detectives on his case too,’ Ethan pointed out.

‘They’re on payroll. We’re not.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ Ethan asked as he flopped down into his chair. ‘You think that we should have just not bothered chasing him at all? You can’t win the prize if you don’t buy a ticket.’

‘Very poetic,’ Lopez replied, rolling her eyes. ‘But right now we’re just sitting here while Sedgewick stays holed up in his buddy’s mansion. As long as the house owner is holidaying in the Caribbean or whatever he told the police he was doing, they’ll believe the house to be empty. Maybe it is.’

‘It’s not,’ Ethan replied. ‘I’ve seen movement inside. Sure, no lights, television or movement of vehicles, but somebody’s tucked away in there.’

‘You sure you’re not losing your mojo?’ Lopez asked, her expression serious now.

‘Why?’

‘Y’know,’ she shrugged. ‘Because of what happened, what you saw on that video, Joanna.’

Ethan sighed heavily, and even as he did so he realized that maybe she was right. Every time he was reminded of what had happened he felt a tiny piece of his soul flutter away. He swallowed thickly.

‘I can still do my job.’

Lopez kept her gaze on him for what felt like an age. ‘Not saying that you can’t, just wondering if you can do it as well as you used to, is all.’

‘I can still do the job.’

Lopez shrugged but didn’t answer as she fixed her eyes back on her screen. Ethan watched as the glowing monitor reflected in her dark eyes, a strand of black hair falling down to frame one side of her face. Under different circumstances they might have become more intimately involved by now, but a series of remarkable events just months before had extinguished any spark of romance.

During a previous investigation for their biggest and most secretive client, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lopez had gotten too close to a client who had wound up dead. Mixing business with pleasure had resulted in tragedy for her, something that Ethan was not keen to check out himself. Soon after, like a ghost long forgotten, news of Joanna’s survival surfaced, news that had both elated and haunted him ever since.

Lopez was right. A year ago, he would have busted into that place and dragged Sedgewick’s cretinous bulk into custody. Now he was sitting on his ass hoping that fate would play into his hands. A lifetime’s experience to the contrary told him what he needed to do. Be bold. Carpe diem.

‘Maybe we can tease him out,’ he suggested.

‘Sure,’ Lopez replied, not taking her eyes off her monitor. ‘Every cop in the city looking for him, he’s being hunted by people he’s swindled out of millions of bucks and who’ll ice him at the first opportunity, but we’ll make him forget all about that and just walk right into our hands.’

Ethan pictured the big colonial house and ran the layout of the streets through his mind for a moment, and then made his decision.

‘It’s worth a shot.’

Lopez looked at him. ‘Great. What kind of candy you suppose he likes?’

Ethan grinned as he reached out and picked up one of a dozen cheap, untraceable cellphones stacked neatly on one side of his desk.

‘Latino.’

Ethan tapped a number into the cellphone as Lopez shot upright out of her chair, her flawless skin flushing.

‘What the hell are you going to do?’

Ethan leaned back in his chair as the line buzzed in his ear.

‘You said it yourself, we can’t just sit here doing nothing while Sedgewick stays holed up in his buddy’s mansion.’

‘Yeah, but—’

Ethan raised a finger to silence her as the line connected.

‘Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?’

Ethan responded in a shaky, nervous voice.

‘I’d like to report a break-in in progress. Can you send help please, right now?’