Jonah crossed his arms over his knees. “How do we begin?”
“Talk,” Brett said.
The word was as gentle, as kindly sounding as could be expected from his demonic voice.
“Since you’re here to help, I’m guessing you know the situation—that Amber disappeared and I’m the husband who won’t let the story die, who thinks she’s still out there in the marshes, while her father is convinced I’m a loser and Amber’s just run off from me.”
Brett nodded.
“What the papers didn’t tell you is that her father, Carlton, hates me for a good reason.” He looked to the faux wood laminate floorboards. “I cheated on Amber.”
He glanced up at Brett, waited for a reaction. Nothing, just a blink.
“I didn’t tell her until a few months into the engagement. So at first she didn’t know if she was gonna go through with the wedding. And then after the wedding there was new contention, which is why we went to the couples therapy.”
“You told her?” Brett said and stopped to swallow. A small grimace. “Or she found out?”
“I confessed to her. I may seem like a real scumbag to you now, but I did truly love her. The cheating wasn’t that important. I mean, if it was only a few moths after we started dating, and we’d been together for years afterward, what did it really matter?” He looked Brett over, expecting condemnation. The face was still blank. “But I couldn’t marry her and keep the secret.”
He took one of the remote controls off the glass coffee table that sat between them, watched it move as he twisted it in his hands.
“I want you to know that Carlton always hated me, from the very beginning, before the cheating. Said I was pitiful, that Amber could do better than a guy who worked at a coffee shop. A year later, me and my buddy owned the coffee shop—Roast and Relax, downtown. Didn’t matter to Carlton. Still a loser in his eyes. Then, of course, Amber told him about the cheating shortly before the wedding. And after the new … um, contention surfaced, it was Carlton’s idea that we go to the couples therapist, Dr. Nogulich, an expert he’d heard about. Carlton tried to swoop in after treating her like shit her entire life, take on the sanctimonious role at the expense of his daughter’s loser husband.”
“Explain,” Brett said.
“Amber had cerebral palsy.” He stopped. He’d said had. Amber had cerebral palsy. Past tense. Even though he’d made peace with it, the sound of it was still abrasive. “It was slight but very much a part of her. A limp, poor function in the left side of her body. She was never good enough for Carlton, flawed, always trying to prove herself to him.”
Brett cocked his head slightly.
“I’m serious, man,” Jonah said. “What kind of father wouldn’t want the search for his daughter to continue as long as possible? I’m telling you, he didn’t give a shit about her, and her disappearance is because of the police district he worked in when he was a cop, District C11. Shady stuff goes down there—corruption, internal affairs investigations. And I think Amber was a victim of it all, years after Carlton retired, some old grudge, somebody getting payback. Carlton’s holding a press conference later, at the police headquarters downtown.” He looked at the clock. “In two hours. Trying to discredit me once and for all.”
“We go,” Brett said.
“To the press conference?”
Brett nodded.
Jonah hesitated. “Okay.”
Great. Just great. Gonna go to the press conference where everyone would recognize him and where he would be persona non grata, at least in the eyes of those supporting the man throwing the conference.
“Carlton will double down on his narrative—that Amber is out there somewhere, off the grid, finding herself after the couples therapy finally revealed to her what a loser her new husband is, what a huge mistake she made. But I’m gonna keep fighting him. More private searches in the swamp. We need to find her. I need to find her. I’ve already made my peace, but I need … closure.”
Brett raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, closure. I know she’s dead. I just feel it. If I don’t seem as depressed as you would have thought, that’s why. I’ve already been mourning for two months. My wife’s dead. Have you ever known someone so deeply, been so connected that you can just … feel it?”
Brett didn’t reply, but Jonah could tell he’d struck a chord. The man’s expression lost a tiny bit of its neutrality, cheeks sinking, eyes expanding a fraction.
“She’s dead. Another victim of District C11. She’d been working on something this past year, some sort of research project, she called it. Wouldn’t tell me what it was. She began shortly after I told her about the cheating. She wasn’t a vindictive type, not in the slightest, but she said I had no right to pry into her business after the secret I had kept from her. She said she’d tell me about it eventually, after she was finished.
“I think she was investigating C11. See, she worked as a police dispatcher, trying to win Carlton’s respect, one of the few ways a person with palsy could work for the police. I think she started looking into things at the dispatch center, what resources she had available to her there, and something sparked, put her on this quest. It might have been some wish fulfillment too. Her childhood dream was to be a detective.
“So when she moved all her stuff in a couple months ago, our plan was to run out the lease here while we search for a house. She took over the second bedroom, transferred the office from her old apartment, had the place covered with sticky notes, made me promise to not look at anything, that her investigation was important and she’d share everything with me when it was over. When the cops came, they took all her stuff,
