The Last Friend

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  SIX YEARS EARLIER

  A police officer stopped in front of the leather reading chair. The man seated there hung his head, his body angled forward. All he saw was the worn carpet and the police officer’s polished black boots.

  “Donovan?” The cop cleared his throat. “Mr. Glass, there’s a federal agent asking for you outside.” Glass, a slender man hanging on to his late thirties by a fingernail, was no stranger to the worst kinds of tragedies, the ones from which people didn’t normally bounce back. When he raised his attention to the officer, his red, puffy eyes looked lost.

  “Who is it? Ted Marshall? Mike Klein? Jordan Hawthorne?”

  The cop cleared his throat again before frowning. “Special Agent Klein, Chicago bureau. You want to talk to him?”

  The words took a while to sink in. After a couple of seconds, Donovan Glass blinked his red eyes and then nodded. Did he have an option?

  “Okay, but you have to meet with him outside. Can’t have the scene contaminated more than it already is.”

  After a delay, Glass sighed and pushed himself out of the chair. He understood. He wasn’t a stranger to tragedy.

  * * *

  The Glass house was a two-story home on North Williamson Avenue, a dead-end street in Oak Park. Not a bad street, although the apartment buildings a few lots down tended to get rowdy on Friday nights and especially over the long weekends. A few weeks ago, a police SWAT team had parked at the end of the street and stormed into a home a couple of blocks east, but it hadn’t affected the North Williamson crew. In fact, the convoy of police cars and the Cook County Medical Examiner parked outside the Glass residence was the most action North Williamson Avenue had seen in a while.

  When Donovan stepped out of his house and onto the front porch, he noticed some of his neighbors standing in the light from the streetlamps on the other side of the street. He made eye contact but looked away when they waved.

  “Everything okay, Donovan?” Ray, one of the neighbors, asked as he shuffled from side to side, rising up on his tippy-toes as if to see if he could catch a glimpse of blood or gore, maybe even a body bag.

  Raising his hand in a show of agreement, Donovan stepped off the front porch, walked past the uniformed cop standing on guard, and noticed Mike Klein under the maple tree they’d planted when they first moved here. Klein was a smoker, fifty years old, and in great shape. Still, he smoked, which turned his skin pale.

  Turning his attention toward Donovan, Klein gave him an upward nod. He exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Glass.”

  “Klein.”

  They shook hands.

  “Let me guess, you were in the neighborhood?” Donovan asked, the fake grin melting off his lips.

  “Something like that.” He took a long suck of smoke from his cigarette before he held it in and gave an indicative glance toward the house. “Amelia, huh?”

  Donovan started with a confirming smile but ended up erupting into tears. They poured out of his eyes, the pain pushing up his throat and escaping in a high-pitched choking sound. Klein exhaled, shook his head, and pulled Donovan into an embrace with his free arm.

  “Shhh,” Klein said, his eyes twisting into a tortured frown. He patted Donovan’s back. “It’s all right.”

  Catching his breath, Donovan stepped out of Klein’s hold. He wiped his face and shook his head. “This is what I came home to.”

  Another indicative glance from Klein. “Those aren’t the kinds of things that should get you out of the house these days, Glass.”

  Knowing where Klein was headed with the conversation, Donovan snapped his pointer finger out, aiming straight at the agent’s chest. “You gave us nothing, Klein. Almost a decade later, and you, Marshall, and Hawthorne gave us nothing.” He nearly spat the words as he rotated his accusatory finger toward the house. “That’s on you. Amelia’s on you, all of that nothing you offered us, and this is what happens.”

  “What were you really doing in Detroit, Glass?” Klein asked, his voice stern.

  Raising his eyebrows in a plea, Donovan stared straight into the federal agent’s soul. “You stripped away the last of our hope, Klein. Did you think this would end any other way?”

  Agent Mike Klein flicked his half-smoked cigarette onto the grass and smothered it with the sole of his shoe. His jaw muscles flexed, and he brought his face closer. “I promised that I’d find your daughter, goddammit.”

  Donovan’s eyes filled again. “And so did Jordan and Ted!” This time, when the tears dropped down his face, they did so with the same rumble of anger that had erupted with his words. “She’s been missing nine years, Klein. And now, she’s probably . . .” He couldn’t finish. Staring down at his feet, Donovan spun away from the agent and started back up toward the house.

  * * *

  Three days later, the upstairs bathroom sparkled. Removing the latex cleaning gloves from his swollen hands, Donovan stared at the tub from the doorway. That was where he’d found his wife, nearly twenty-four hours after she’d cut her wrists in a vile and horrific display of human rage and grief. She’d bled everywhere while he was out; one wrist, the one inside the tub, had discolored the water, while the other wrist dangled over the edge and bled out onto the cold tiles. His wife’s life had pooled onto the floor before crawling into the grooves and wandering through the pathways between those tiles. He’d had to use bleach to scrub the red tint out of the grout.

  Although Donovan hadn’t heard the footsteps creeping up the stairs and into the hallway behind him, he recognized the gruff smoker’s voice.

  “Walk me through the scene, Glass.” It was Klein.

  “Just in the neighborhood again?” Donovan didn’t even bother to turn a
round. How he’d neglected to lock the front door, he didn’t know. He’d probably forgotten to lock it last night, leaving the house open to any stray or lost psychopath looking for the North Williamson apartments. But with nobody left in his life, what did it matter?

  “Just me and you, pal. No locals to give me that look that asks me to go away.”

  “No smoking in the house.” Klein reeked, a smell that contended with the sting of bleach.

  “I quit.”

  Donovan grunted, wiped a finger across his upper lip, and pointed at the tub. “Why do people slice themselves up in the tub, Klein?”

  The FBI agent stepped past Donovan and stopped just inside the doorway. There was a baby-blue toilet on the wall to the right, next to a laminate vanity with a matching blue sink. The soaker tub would’ve been fashionable, except its blue veneer made it too old to be retro. Small space, but it had served the Glass family well. Even before Elizabeth had been abducted, the house worked well for a young family of three. The teenage years might’ve complicated things a little, would’ve forced a bathroom schedule upon the trio, but there was a stand-up shower in the basement and a two-piece on the main floor. It would have worked, and if it hadn’t, they would have moved someplace bigger.

  “Donovan.” Klein was leaning toward Donovan’s nose. “I know it’s tough, but what else can you tell me? What time did you get home, anything else that stands out in here, that sort of thing.”

  Donovan nodded, the questions too familiar from nearly a decade prior. “It was four thirty when I got home from Detroit. Where’s Jordan? He used to come around a lot.”

  Klein swallowed and looked away, running a finger along the countertop. “Agent Hawthorne is no longer with the bureau, Donny. Now, let’s focus on the scene, okay? Tell me about the Detroit trip, before the Wayne County boys put your fun to an end.”

  Swallowing the dryness in his throat, Donovan gave a nod. “Left at nine the day before, drove straight there.”

  “With?”

  “Myself. I was by myself. And there was no fun.” He shook his head, frowning and looking away. The agent placed a hand on his shoulder, but Donovan shrugged it away. He didn’t want Klein’s empathy; the whole thing with Detroit pissed him off. Maybe that was what Klein wanted, so he nodded at the tub again. “Like I said, I got home at four thirty, and she was in here, already dead.” He explained how he’d found her, the bit about one arm in the tub, the other dangling over the edge, the blood on the floor. “And a few tea candles, all of them burned out by the time I got here.” He nodded at the vanity. “Pictures of Elizabeth, one of her tutus—I mean, one of her teddy bears.”

  “The elephant?”

  Another difficult swallow. Donovan nodded. “I can’t blame her, Klein.”

  The agent reached inside his suit jacket and produced a pack of cigarettes.

  “I thought you quit.” Donovan said before shaking his head at the realization that Klein was being facetious earlier. “No smoking in the house.”

  Klein grinned as he pushed the cigarettes back into his inside pocket, and Donovan wanted to punch him in the face.

  “Donny, what do you mean, you ‘can’t blame her’?”

  “Not for killing herself—that was just another bad decision on her part. But for wanting her daughter with her when she died.” Donovan choked on the last word. There’d been so many times in the years since his daughter’s abduction when he and Amelia would reminisce about the nights she would squeeze into their bed and rub their backs or forearms, soothe them back to sleep before they could drag her back to her own bedroom just down the hall. “She wanted to feel those nights again,” Donovan said, except he hadn’t explained to Klein what “those nights” had meant to his dead wife.

  Still, Klein nodded, turning his face away from Donovan as he surveyed the small bathroom. After a brief silence, Klein pointed to the tub and then to the vanity. When he turned his attention to Donovan, his chin looked heavy, numb.

  “Suicides like these, the vic’s sending a message, Donny.” He gave a nod that said he was 100 percent certain about it, too. “You were out, chasing down a lead about Elizabeth that got you arrested, and your wife’s in here thinking she’s a lot closer to finding your daughter than you are.”

  CHAPTER 2

  PRESENT DAY

  It came two days after his missing daughter’s twenty-third birthday—the knock that changed Donovan Glass’s life forever. His front door. It was a heavy knock for ten o’clock in the morning, loud enough to distract him from the newspaper he was reading in the kitchen at the back of the house.

  Placing his reading glasses on the breakfast bar, where he ate most of his meals these days, Donovan tucked in his plaid shirt and made sure the zipper of his jeans was drawn shut. Pushing into the second half of his mid-forties by now, he was old enough that he didn’t always check those things before going out, but he was still young enough to remember to check at all.

  At the front door, he glanced through the peephole and discovered a woman with purple hair. She wore glasses and had a pierced nose, a classy diamond stud that could be easily overlooked.

  The young woman seemed anxious, shifting from one foot to the next on the front porch. When she turned her attention back to the door, Donovan unlatched the two deadbolts and pulled the heavy slab open. He even tried to smile, but the sudden motion of that door swinging open had startled the purple-haired woman, and he felt that smiling at this point might come across as creepy.

  “I’m sorry,” Donovan said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  She blinked hard and seemed to assess him. It took a long time.

  “Miss?”

  She extended her hand, and Donovan noticed that it held a trembling cup of Barney’s specialty coffee.

  “For me?”

  She pushed the cup toward Donovan’s hands, so he took it.

  “So can I, uh, help you?”

  The young woman eyed the coffee. “It’s a dry double-espresso cappuccino. Lactose-free milk,” she said. Her voice came out as choppy, possibly ragged from nervousness. “They don’t sell the butterfly cookies anymore, haven’t in years.”

  The mention of his preferred espresso drink was surprising all by itself, but the butterfly cookies set him off, and the cup began trembling in Donovan’s grip just like it had in hers. He used his other hand to steady the shaking, and then he scrutinized the woman standing on his front porch. Before he could say anything, she took a deep breath and stared right back into his eyes with an apologetic stubbornness in her gaze. It didn’t last long. Her lips quaked, and she stared down at her feet. Her shoulders hunched forward, and Donovan watched her nostrils flare.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Glass, but Lizzy—Elizabeth—your daughter, she’s dead.”

  Donovan’s stare jumped from the young woman to the Barney’s cup. When he removed the steadying hand, he noticed that the cup no longer trembled.

  “Who are you?” he asked, his voice coming out hoarse and raw. As much as he’d feared this day would come, shouldn’t Special Agent Klein or Marshall be the ones telling him about his daughter’s death?

  When the young woman looked up, Donovan saw that she’d been crying; her eyeliner had smeared across her cheeks. “My name is Monica Russell. I was your daughter’s last friend.” Her nostrils flared again as she wrestled her own demons. “I promised her I would come and tell you about how she lived . . . and died.”

  The cup in his hand began shaking again, but he didn’t drop it. Instead, his knees gave out, and Donovan Glass, a true grown man, collapsed in front of a woman who looked more like a punk-band groupie than any kind of friend his dead daughter would have ever brought home with her, and he sobbed into his open palms.

  “Mr. Glass? I don’t mean to come across as insensitive, but do you think I can come in?”

  Kneeling in the foyer, Donovan nodded, noticing Monica’s leather boots with the studs rising up the back seam as she stepped past him. He felt her hands hook under his
armpits as she tried to pick him up and move him out of the way so she could shut the door, close out the prying stares of the neighbors.

  Those first impressions painted a kind image of Monica Russell, the way she eventually helped him to his feet and tossed his arm over her shoulder before walking him to his now ratty leather reading chair in the front room.

  But even then, as Donovan settled into his chair, he couldn’t help but wonder what kind of predator he’d allowed in his house.

  CHAPTER 3

  Monica helped herself to the bottled water in the refrigerator and brewed Donovan a cup of Nespresso. For a middle-aged man whose full head of hair had more pepper than salt, Donovan was behaving like a geriatric bum. At least, that was how he felt. Taking the Nespresso with both hands, he allowed a smile to curl onto his lips as Monica remained standing next to him.

  “Sorry about the Barney’s,” he said as he took a hesitant sip. “I know it’s not cheap.”

  Twisting the cap off the water like a brute, Monica shrugged. “Lizzy said Barney’s was your favorite.” She took a sip and placed the bottle on the coffee table that separated Donovan’s reading chair from the love seat. Her comment about Barney’s added legitimacy to her claim about knowing his abducted daughter and being her last friend in the world before she allegedly died.

  Donovan had to remind himself that nobody would know that kind of detail about his espresso preferences. Barney’s had been his Saturday morning treat with his daughter—cappuccino for him, decaf latté (not a hot chocolate with tons of sugar like most girls her age) and a butterfly cookie for Elizabeth. He hadn’t gone back to Barney’s very often after Elizabeth went missing, and definitely never again since Amelia took her own life.

  “Besides,” Monica added, snapping him out of his own thoughts, “I’m sure it was cold.”

  Donovan kept smiling. As a widower, he’d become something of a recluse, captivated by his own thoughts about a hopeless death, alone. At least Amelia had known he would find her in the tub after she cut her wrists; Donovan had nobody except for the occasional friend and his brother-in-law who might stop by. It would be that friend who would detect the smell of rotting flesh once he failed to answer the door.