Karin Slaughter - Skin Privilege

Ethan's rap sheet was nearly thirty pages long. Most of the notes were written in the dry, minimalist style of a seasoned cop who knew better than to put too much on the page so some dickhead lawyer could later twist it all around and throw it back in his face during a trial. Lena knew how to read between the lines, though, and as she scanned records of arrest after arrest, she started to get a sharper picture of Ethan's life before they met.

He'd started young, his first arrest coming when he was thirteen. He'd stolen some clothes from the local Belk. At fifteen, he was arrested for trying to steal a car. Both cases had been referred to juvenile court. Both times, he had been given probation. That couldn't have been it, though. You didn't go from stealing clothes to stealing cars without something in between. Lena knew that for every one crime you caught these guys doing, there were four more hiding in their closet. She would have bet good money that Ethan had boosted at least ten cars before they caught him in the act.

His record stayed clean until he reached the age of seventeen. Then, he'd been accused of sodomizing a fifteen-year-old girl. Two weeks later, the charges were dropped. Lena gathered from the terse language in the report that the girl's parents hadn't wanted to put her through a trial. This was fairly common and probably wise. The world liked to believe differently, but any cop could tell you that there was nothing more horrible – or more likely to ruin a woman's life – than a protracted rape trial.

There was a notation on this arrest: Suspect bears tattoos and markings associated with violent neo-Nazi sect. Suggest referral to FBI for monitoring.

Ethan was nineteen when he was arrested for assault. He'd used a knife during a fight, which brought it to a felony charge. The victim had apparently been cut pretty badly, but he refused to cooperate with police so the charges were reduced. Again, Ethan walked away from a serious charge.

Three more years passed before the Connecticut State Police heard from Ethan Green again. Lena imagined this was during the time Ethan had finished his undergraduate degree and started his master's. That was probably the one thing about Ethan that scared people the most: he was smart, even gifted. He gave lie to the ignorant redneck racist. When Lena had first met him, he was trying to get into the PhD program at Grant Tech and probably would have made it had he not been arrested.

Oddly enough, the charge that the Connecticut State Police finally managed to make stick was for kiting checks. Ethan had written a check to A amp;P for twenty-eight bucks and change when his bank account showed a balance of twelve dollars. He'd put his payroll check in to cover it the next day, but it was still illegal to knowingly float a check. This was the kind of arrest that indicated the cops had just been waiting to pounce on him. Millions of people shifted around money like this every day. You didn't get caught unless somebody was watching.

Ethan had been caught, though. If the judge was in a bad mood, he was looking at ten years in a federal penitentiary.

Lena was turning the page to find out what happened when the phone rang. She jumped, papers scattering on the bed. Her first thought was that no one knew she was here, then she remembered Hank. She leaned over to pick up the receiver, then stopped, letting the phone keep ringing. A photograph had fallen to the floor and she bent to retrieve it, freezing in midair as she saw the image of a beaten woman lying in a pool of blood.

Lena did not move to pick up the picture. She stared at it from a distance, taking in the black bruises on the young woman's thighs, the bloody pulp of her face. The red burns around her feet and wrists indicated that she had been held spread-eagle, strong hands pulling back her arms and legs so that she would be open to any violation.

Ethan's last girlfriend.

She was black.

The phone stopped ringing as Lena stared at the photograph. The room turned deathly quiet. The air felt more stifling. The girl in the picture must have been lovely, her skin a soft milk chocolate. Like Lena, she wore her hair long, with curls that would have brushed her shoulders if her head had not been yanked back, her hair matted with blood.

Evelyn Marie Johnson, aged nineteen. College student. Soprano in the church choir. Lena thumbed through the file, looking for more pictures. She skipped past the pages of lurid crime scene photos and found what must have been the woman's school picture. It was a stunning 'before.'

Silky black hair, bow-tie lips, big brown eyes. She could have been a model.

Lena found the crime scene report. Tire tracks had been found near her body. The impressions had been sent to the lab, which matched the tires to Ethan's 1989 GMC truck. He was out on bail for the check kiting, awaiting sentencing. He flipped for a deal that would keep him out of jail if he testified against the killers.

According to the girl's sister, Evelyn had been taken from her house by four white men in the middle of the night. The sister had hid in the closet because she had seen the swastikas on their bald heads, knew what the tattoos meant.

According to Ethan, he had been forced at gunpoint to take the men to Evelyn's house. The year before, he had tried to leave the militant neo-Nazi group calling themselves the Church of Christ 's Chosen Soldiers, but they would not let him go. One of his former friends had stayed in the truck that night, holding Ethan at gunpoint, while the others went inside and abducted Evelyn, Ethan was then forced to drive them deep into the woods. His hands were tied with clothesline to the steering wheel, the keys to his truck thrown on the empty seat beside him. He sat there while he watched five men assault Evelyn and beat her to death.

Ethan claimed the men had then gotten into a Jeep that had been parked in the clearing and drove off. He further claimed that he had used his teeth to pick at the knots in the rope that tied his hands to the steering wheel, and that this had taken him at least an hour. Once he was free, he had not gotten out of the truck, not gone to his girlfriend, because he could already tell that she was dead.

Instead, he drove home.

The phone started to ring again and Lena 's heart stuttered. She closed the file, her hands shaking, feeling as if she had just let something evil out -something that would stalk her like a rabid animal, not resting until she was punished. This was just how Ethan had been on the outside: relentless, savage, cunning. He had told Lena that he would never let her go and she had forced him away, pried his fingers from her life and sent him back to hell where he had come from.

Was Ethan reaching out to Hank in order to get to her?

She should just leave it be. None of this had anything to do with her. The Ethan part of her life was over. Whatever reason had compelled him to make those calls to Hank was none of her business. It did not explain who had killed Lena 's father and mother. It did not explain why Hank had lied to her all of those years, or why he was pushing himself into an early grave.

Lena snatched up the phone to stop the ringing. 'What?'

'It's Rod.'

'Who?'

'Rod,' the voice repeated. 'From the desk?'

The carrot-headed idiot. 'What do you want?'

'Somebody keeps calling to see if you're in.'

Lena opened the file again, scattering pages and photographs as she looked for Ethan's prison intake sheet. 'A man or a woman?'

'Woman,' he answered. I told her you were out. Figured when you didn't answer the phone that you didn't want to be bothered. That cool with you?'

Lena found the number she was looking for. 'Can you get me an outside line?'

'I was just-'

If her stupid cell phone worked in this place, she would've already hung up. She enunciated each word clearly. 'I said I need an outside line.'