Chapter 5 - The Trap
"He used the bathtub," Miller said, his voice flat and hard as steel. "It was controlled. Quiet. No noise to attract the neighbors down the lake. Then he carried him outside to the wash station to flush the lungs with well water so the autopsy wouldn't show pool or tap chemicals, then threw him off the dock into the lake."
"Why did the morgue report say tap water?" I asked, clutching Owen's notebook against my ribs.
"Because well water from an underground spring lacks the algae and diatoms present in open lake water," Miller explained. "The deputy coroner noticed the absence of lake diatoms, but Sheriff Arlen forced him to alter the final summary to 'accidental drowning' before the toxicology was completed."
"We have him," I said, my teeth chattering from a cold that had nothing to do with the weather. "We have the notebook. We have the wristband in the drain. We have the morgue report."
"It's not enough yet," Miller warned, standing up and replacing the plastic panel over the bathtub. "A good defense lawyer will say the wristband fell off while Owen was taking a bath. They'll say the drawing is just a child's imagination. And Arlen will claim the morgue report was a preliminary draft written by an inexperienced technician."
"Then what do we need?" I demanded.
"A confession," Miller said. "Or a direct link between Ethan, Vanessa, and the destruction of evidence."
He looked at me intently. "Ethan thinks you're defeated, Claire. He thinks you're a broken woman sitting alone in an empty house. If he knows you're looking into the insurance policy, he'll panic. And when a covert murderer panics, he makes sloppy moves."
"What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to call his lawyer," Miller said. "Tell them you agree to the divorce terms, but you want to meet Ethan in person at your house tonight to sign the papers. Just the two of you."
"He won't come alone," I said. "He'll bring Vanessa or his attorney."
"He'll come if you tell him you found something in Owen's room that belongs to him," Miller said smoothly. "Something that isn't mentioned in the police report."
I looked at the former investigator. "You want me to bait him."
"I'll be inside the house, Claire," Miller said, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a small black recording device and a wire harness. "Wearing a receiver. Every word spoken in that room will be transmitted directly to an encrypted server and saved on a cloud drive that Sheriff Arlen can't touch."
He stepped closer, his voice dropping. "It's dangerous. If he realizes what you're doing, he could become violent."
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I looked down at the small blue backpack in my hands, feeling the weight of my son's crayons and his plastic dinosaur.
"He took my child, Mr. Miller," I said, looking him straight in the eyes. "There is nothing he can do to me that is worse than what he has already done."
