Chapter 7 - The Brother's Debt
By 2:00 AM, Detective Miller had arranged for me to speak to Mark again in an interview room at the police headquarters downtown.
He sat across the steel table, his wrists unmanacled now, but his expression crushed and defeated. The white bandage on his head looked gray under the harsh fluorescent lights.
I sat across from him, the width of the metal table feeling like a mountain range between us.
"Why didn't you tell me, Mark?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
Mark looked down at his hands, his knuckles raw and red.
"Because I was terrified you'd leave me," he whispered. "If you knew where I came from... if you knew what my family was... you never would have let me near Ethan."
"Tell me what happened that night in Rockford," I commanded softly.
Mark drew a long, shuddering breath, his shoulders trembling.
"My brother, Donald... he was a monster, Laura. He spent his whole life taking things that didn't belong to him, and my father spent his whole life covering for him. That night, I was following Donald because I knew he was drunk and driving around the college campus."
"You saw him take her?"
"I was fifty yards behind them," Mark cried, tears finally spilling over his eyelids. "I saw him pull her into the car. I chased him for three miles down Route 20, but I lost him near the old brickyard. By the time I found his car parked behind my father's barn... she was gone."
"Did you call the police?"
"I tried!" Mark sobbed, slamming his fist gently against the metal table. "I picked up the phone to dial 911, and my father pulled a gun on me! He told me if I turned Donald in, he’d kill himself and make sure I was blamed for the whole thing!"
"So you just ran away?" I asked, horror cold in my veins. "You changed your name and let that poor girl's family search for four years?!"
"I didn't just run!" Mark protested, looking up at me desperately. "I spent every single night for four years trying to find where Donald hid her body! That binder... those drives... I was gathering evidence so I could send the location to the police anonymously once Donald was dead!"
"And Arthur Pendelton?" I asked. "How did he find our house?"
Mark closed his eyes, his head dropping toward his chest. "Because... because three weeks ago, I finally found where Donald buried her. In an abandoned limestone quarry outside Rockford. I sent an anonymous package to the police department with the GPS coordinates."
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"And Arthur?"
"I sent Arthur a letter too," Mark confessed softly. "I wanted him to know his daughter was finally coming home. But I was stupid, Laura. I used a private courier service that required a sender verification code. Arthur used that code to trace the package back to my personal account."
