Chapter 23 #2
Luther grinned. Not a smile. A grin. A grin that said he'd found something he liked. "I can respect that,” he said. "You want to forge your own way. The question is, what way would that be, Ethan?"
"I dunno."
"You're young. You have plenty of time to figure out what you want." Luther took a sip and set the cup down. "You know, I've always said that where you don't empower your life, someone else will disempower it."
Ethan looked at him. Something about the sentence landed. Not because it was deep. Because it was the first thing anyone had said to him in weeks that wasn't about Fiona, or his father, or what he was supposed to be doing with himself.
"You like that?" Luther asked.
"Yeah. I guess."
Luther looked around the café for a second. The couple in the corner. The old man with his book. Lacey restocking napkin dispensers. He turned back to Ethan.
"Growing up, my father always wanted me to become a high court judge. Because that's what his father did before him. A family tradition. A legacy."
"You never wanted to do it?"
"It's an admirable profession. However, it has its limitations. Your hands are restrained by the legal system. A system made up by men to govern other men." He paused. "I mean, who decides what is right and wrong? Good and bad?"
"Well, if it didn't exist, we'd have chaos."
"That depends how you look at it." Luther glanced out the window. Across the street, sitting on the curb in front of the hardware store, a man in a torn jacket was hunched over with his head in his hands. Dirty. Twitching. A cardboard sign beside him that nobody was reading.
"For instance," Luther said. "You see that homeless man out there?"
Ethan looked. "Yeah."
"If I went out right now and gave him a hundred dollars, do you think that would be good?"
“Sure. It could buy him some food. Or a room for the night."
"That it could," Luther said. "If he used it for that. Chances are, though, he's going to spend it on whatever put him on that curb in the first place. And let's say he overdoses. Were my actions still good? Or are they now considered bad because of the outcome?"
"But you didn't know he would do that."
"Exactly." Luther pointed at him. "How do we know the ultimate outcome of our actions?
What I might deem as good could turn out to be someone's undoing.
And what another person might call heartless, walking past him without giving a cent, could turn out to be his saving grace.
" He paused and looked at Ethan. "You see, the only reason we call things good and bad, right and wrong, is to try and control society.
To have it function. But look around you, Ethan. Is it functioning?"
Ethan shrugged. He wanted to argue but couldn't find the seam.
"Just because the law exists doesn't mean bad things won't happen," Luther continued. "Like your girlfriend going missing. It doesn't mean they'll find who took her. Or that she'll be found alive."
Ethan's jaw tightened. "She's alive."
"Oh, I'm sure she is. I'm sure she's perfectly fine and she'll show up in a day or two.
" Luther's voice was gentle. Almost kind.
"We can convince ourselves of many things, Ethan.
We humans are excellent at that. Your sister, for instance.
Right now she probably has lofty ideas of changing the country.
Saving the unsaveable. Righting the wrongs.
But will she? Or will she simply witness the truth? "
"And what's that?" Ethan asked.
"That we cannot control the outcome of anything. Life is inherently uncertain. However." Luther set his cup down. "We can control ourselves." He looked outside at the homeless man. "The question is, do you know how to do that? And if you did, what would you control? What would you change?"
He glanced back at Ethan and smiled. Not the grin from before. Something quieter. More patient. A seed being planted by someone who knew exactly how long it would take to grow.
Luther finished his drink and stood. He reached into his jacket and placed a card on the table between them. Thick stock. Embossed lettering. A phone number and an address.
"If you ever need someone to talk to," Luther said. "A place to stay. Help with anything. My door is always open."
He left the card on the table and walked out. The door closed behind him. The draft of evening air came and went.
Ethan sat in the booth and looked at the card. He didn't pick it up. But he didn't push it away either. Lacey appeared with a fresh coffee and set it down in front of him.
“What did he want?”
“Nothing,” Ethan said.
But that wasn't true and they both knew it.
Something had shifted in the conversation, some boundary Ethan hadn't been aware of until it was already behind him.
Luther hadn't asked him to do anything. Hadn't offered anything.
Hadn't even been unkind. He'd just talked to Ethan like an adult, like someone whose opinions mattered, and in the current geography of Ethan's life, where his father kept secrets and his girlfriend was gone and his sister was leaving and nobody told him anything, that was worth more than it should have been.
He picked up the card and put it in his pocket.
The house was dark when Noah pulled into the driveway. There was another vehicle parked in front of his home. A jet-black Aston Martin DB12, its paint catching the porch light in a long clean line from hood to trunk. He knew the car. He knew the owner.
Noah pulled in beside it and glanced through his passenger window.
Natalie Ashford sat in the driver's seat, her face half lit by the glow of her phone.
She looked over when his headlights swept across her.
She didn't wave. Didn't smile. Just watched him with an expression that was somewhere between resolve and exhaustion.
He killed the engine and got out.
"Natalie." He walked toward her as she stepped out of the Aston Martin and closed the door behind her. "I thought we talked about this. It's not going to work."
"I get it." Her voice was steady. Rehearsed, maybe, but not cold.
"You don't trust me. You think I've been my father's eyes and ears.
That what you and I had meant nothing more than a means to get close to you.
" She paused. "And I get it. I shut you down every time you want to talk about him.
But you have to know that he's my father. He could end my world in an instant."
"And that's why this doesn't work. Look, we had some good times together, but..."
"You need a reason to trust me." She nodded and looked off toward the forest. The porch light caught the edge of her jaw and the dark fall of her hair across one shoulder.
She stood there for a moment, then reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a small brown paper bag. She held it out to him.
Noah took it. Frowned. "What is this?"
"Take a look."
He opened the bag and tilted it toward the light. Inside was a single blue latex glove, sealed in a clear evidence bag. He stared at it.
"Where did this come from?"
"The Hale murders," Natalie said. "There was a blue latex glove submitted as evidence.
It went missing. You know that Sergeant Anita Emerson checked it out of evidence storage.
The DNA from it was never processed." She held his gaze.
"Had it been, you would have known whether it matched Travis Rudd, the one accused of killing Rebecca and Jacob Hale. Or whether Travis had an accomplice."
"The driver of the black truck?"
She nodded.
The brown bag sat in Noah's hand. He could feel the weight of the glove inside it, negligible in grams, enormous in everything else. He looked at Natalie and then at the bag and then at his dark house behind him where nobody was home and nothing was simple.
"Where did you find this?"
"My father had it."
"How long have you known?"
"A couple of months."
"And you waited until now to tell me?"
"I didn't know what it was at the time." She stopped. "And..."
"Right. He's your father." Noah exhaled. He turned the bag over in his hands and felt the shape of the glove through the paper. "I'm not sure what this does for me. I can't prove this was in your father's possession unless you're willing to be a witness."
"No. I can't do that."
"Then how can I use it? I can't explain where it came from without exposing you. I can't submit it as evidence with a chain of custody that traces back to your father's safe. The glove might be proof, but in the eyes of the law that case is closed."
Natalie looked at him. "As is the Carter Lyle case. But you believe he didn't do it, don't you?"
"How do you know that?"
She didn't answer.
The forest was quiet. A boat’s engine growled from somewhere across the lake.
"Look, Natalie. While I appreciate you coming forward with this, it really doesn't change anything between you and me. If anything, it just proves to me that..."
"I just wanted you to know that I'm with you." Her voice softened. "That you mean something to me."
"Even if it meant seeing your father put away?"
She looked off again.
Noah smiled, shaking his head. "That's why you brought this to me.
Isn't it? If you had just told me where it was and we raided his home, the connection would be there.
But without it being found there, or you stepping forward as a witness, I doubt this will be admissible, no matter whose DNA is on it. Luther would stay out of prison and..."
"You would have answers," she said. "Isn't that what you want? Isn't that why you keep asking me about my father?" She paused. "I didn't have to give you that. I just wanted you to know that I care. About you. And..."
She brought a hand up toward his face. He caught her wrist, gently, and lowered it.
She nodded. Understanding. Not surprised. She'd known before she came here how this part would go. She stepped back and opened the door of the Aston Martin.
"Good night, Noah."
He watched her pull away. The taillights of the DB12 traced a red line down the road and around the corner and then she was gone, and the forest was dark again, and Noah stood in his driveway holding a brown paper bag that contained the most dangerous piece of evidence he'd ever held.
He went inside. Locked the door. Set the bag on the kitchen table under the light and sat down across from it.
The glove sat there. A single piece of latex that had been in an evidence locker, then in a sergeant's hands, then in a crime lord's safe, and now in a state investigator's kitchen. Every person who had touched it had done so for their own reasons and none of those reasons were the same.
He thought about testing the DNA. He thought about what it might show. He thought about the chain of evidence that didn't exist and the courtroom that would never see it and the answers that might live inside a blue latex glove that he could never officially ask for.
Noah sat in the kitchen for a long time. Then he got up, put the brown bag in the back of his home office closet behind a box of old case files.