The Stranger Inside

by Lisa Unger

  She took the file, held it in her lap, opened it and flipped through the pages, then closed it again and looked into the face of her husband. She knew it represented a lot of hours he didn’t have, phone calls, requests for information. She leaned in and kissed him, long and deep.

  “About the letters,” she said when she pulled away. She’d put them back in the drawer where she kept them. She didn’t want them. She couldn’t let go of them. “I shouldn’t have kept them from you.”

  “Why did you?”

  “How can I make you understand something I barely understand myself?”

  “I get that you’re connected to him,” he said. “And not in a way you chose, exactly. I get that part of you feels you owe him something. But you don’t owe him, Rain. We need you, Lily and me. We need you here with us. I already told you, long ago, I won’t share you with him.”

  Greg knew almost everything about her time with Hank. She’d told him, wanted him to know her, all her flaws, mistakes she made, the demons she wrestled. He was angry, hurt, and for a time she thought she’d lost him. But he forgave her. We are all flawed, aren’t we? We all make mistakes. He told her some things, too. A girl he’d kissed at a bar one night. A lie he told her. Small things, compared to what she’d done. She forgave him, as well. They walked into their married life together clean, mostly. Some feelings, some details she kept to herself.

  “I’m here,” she said. “With you. With her. I promise. I love you.”

  He reached in and kissed her hard, then that killer smile. “Prove it.”

  She did.

  Later that night, Gillian asleep in the guest room, Lily in her crib and Greg snoring, Rain took the file into her office, started sifting through the documents there—police reports, news articles, pictures and articles as far back as the week it all started. There was even a picture of herself she’d never seen, looking small and scared, tucked into the arm of her father as they climbed the courthouse steps so that she could deliver her in-chamber testimony. She barely remembered that time, lost in a fog of trauma and sadness. The girl in the photo looked like a stranger.

  Rain entered Greta Miller’s name into the search engine. A website was the first item.

  She was a wildlife photographer, specializing in birds. The image of a crow on a fence post, a snowy field behind, the yellow of his eye a striking brightness in the grayscale, dominated the home page. That eye, sharp and seeing, seemed to stare off the screen right at Rain.

  Something outside caught her attention—what was it? A light, a sound? Some kind of sixth sense? She moved from the desk and over to the window, staying off to the side.

  Pushing back the drapes, she saw it. There, parked across the street, down a bit, a beige Toyota Corolla. She could just make out the thick form of a man in the driver’s seat.

  Her heart jumped and started to race.

  She slipped over the hall runner and crept down the stairs. By the time she got to the door, disabled the alarm and opened it into the night, the car was pulling away, slow and easy. She watched as it disappeared into the night, breath shallow.

  Wake up Greg and cause him a fit of worry? Call the FBI agent and say what, that she thought Hank was stalking her in his spare time? And if she was wrong, cause him even more heartache than she already had. Call the police and tell them she’d spotted a suspicious vehicle? Actually, in this neighborhood—safe and wealthy and quiet—the cops would come, take her seriously, make a report, even be kind and concerned. But then what?

  She stood in the cold, watching the night, hugging herself tight, aware of a gnawing sense of dread.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Detective Harper was an old man now, with a full head of snow-white hair. He greeted them at the door to his modest house, embraced Rain as if they were old friends. He seemed smaller than Rain remembered him. In her memories, he loomed large—a towering figure with a booming voice. But he still moved lightly and easily, was healthy and fit. He still had that bright, intelligent gaze, the ready smile.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said. “We haven’t talked since—”

  “Since Eugene Kreskey was murdered.”

  He looked down at the bricks of his stoop, then back at her, his gaze intent.

  “Long time now,” he said.

  She introduced Gillian, who stood beside her. He took her hand, gave her that goofy look that men get when they like what they see.

  “I listen to your morning broadcast,” said the detective. “The station has a liberal bent that I don’t love. But I love the sound of your voice.”

  Was the old guy flirting?

  “Thank you so much,” said Gillian, amping up her high-wattage smile. She knew how to work a source.

  “Are you sure this is a good time?” Rain asked.

  “If you want to go back there, Miss Winter,” he said, “I’ll go with you.”

  She didn’t want to go back there. She had to.

  Rain and Gillian had taken Lily to the pumpkin patch, then left her with Greg. It was Gillian who pushed for the interview with Harper today, after reviewing Greg’s findings that morning over coffee. Rain felt a deep reluctance to see him again. Though he’d been the one to save her, his face was etched into the memories of the worst days of her life. And for a number of reasons, she’d have preferred to talk to him alone.

  But Gillian had a way of making things happen. She’d hassled Rain until she made the call; Harper surprised her by agreeing to see them that afternoon. She was caught in the current of the story. That’s what happened. Hadn’t she known that?

  He led them down a dim hallway, into his living room.

  They sat on a sectional with built-in recliners and cup holders, across from a huge television, a flat screen that took up most of the wall over an ancient credenza. The walls and the surfaces around were populated by pictures—grandkids, she guessed, Harper with the town mayor, a wedding portrait where he looked impossibly young and virile, his bride an angel in white. Harper with his platoon. Vietnam, was it? She seemed to remember that. Sports memorabilia, pennants on the wall, medals of accommodation, his detective’s shield in a shadow box, all the detritus of a life someone enjoyed living. The window looked out onto a big backyard shaded by old-growth trees, a swing set and sandbox sat waiting for play.

  “Mind if I record?” asked Rain, placing the device on the coffee table.

  There was a definite beat as he held her with that gaze again. The wary cop. “Where is this going to air?”

  “We’re not sure yet,” said Gillian. “This will be part of a larger feature, a history of the Tess Barker murder, and an exploration of how it might tie in with the vigilante killings of Eugene Kreskey, Wayne Garret Smith and Steve Markham.”

  “Vigilante?” he said, leaning back. “Have there been developments on those cases?”

  “No,” she said. “No yet. As I say, we’re just exploring connections, possibilities.”

  “In my experience, when the media starts looking for connections, people get hurt,” he said. “And when it comes to cold cases, it’s usually a postmortem of the investigation where the local cops wind up looking like idiots.”

  “It’s not that kind of story,” she said. Gillian leaned in, smiled this particular brand of smile she had—polite, so sweet. Those big eyes, the intimate way she touched his arm. Rain watched the old guy melt.

  “And you’ll get a chance to hear the final product before it goes live. If it ever does.”

  Which is not to say that you’ll be able to change a word of it, of course. But she wasn’t obligated to say that. You talk, we report. Those were the rules, and everyone knows it, even if they don’t like it in the end.

  Text from Greg, the third one in an hour: Where’s Moon Bear?

  Look under her crib?

  Got it!

  Detective Harper gave Rain a nod, and s
he pressed Record.

  “Let’s begin at the beginning. Tell me about the first time you saw me.”

  He closed his eyes a moment, as if accessing the memories. Rain remembered, too, seeing his face, clean-shaven, kind eyes.

  Hey, Lara Winter, is that you? Everything’s okay now, kid. You’re okay.

  “We got the call around noon,” he said. “Your mother, she’d called over to your friend Hank Reams’s house. When there was no answer, she went looking. When you weren’t there, she started driving around the neighborhood. It was Hank’s bike. She saw it fallen by the path to the bridge. She went to the nearest house and called the police.”

  Rain nodded. It jibed with everything she knew, had heard or read a hundred times.

  “We mobilized very quickly,” he said. “Missing kids, a small town. We had most of our people, some guys from other area departments, about a hundred volunteers, as well as some of the fire department out in those woods within an hour or so.”

  He shook his head. “The clock starts ticking right away, as I’m sure you know. You have five hours to bring them home alive, they say. We created a circle, started talking to everyone we could find.”

  Outside, the sun moved behind a cloud and the room dimmed.

  “But it was nearly dark by the time we found you. You were right there. How did we miss you?”

  He stared into the middle distance.

  “I still think about that, you know, those hours, that ticking clock. How could we have been faster? What difference would have been made in two hours, one?”

  Rain felt the familiar rise of emotion; she bit it back.

  Indeed, what difference would there have been if Rain had managed to run, to even answer the voices she heard calling for her? An hour earlier, according to Hank, and Tess would have survived. He would have escaped the worst of his ordeal.

  But she was frozen, deep in shock, her voice encased in ice inside her chest. The Winter Girl.

  “It was just luck that I found you, you were buried so deep in that tree. I saw this flash of something, the last light of the day came out from behind the clouds and there you were. Huddled. I won’t forget the way you looked.”

  “The way I looked?”

  “Your eyes,” he said. “I’ve seen that look on men after combat—men much bigger and stronger than you were. They’ve seen and experienced horrors that changed them. They check out, go blank. It’s almost like a brain reboot, you know? When they come back online, they’re someone else. I wanted to cry—I remember that. You were so young. That look didn’t have any place on you.”

  “PTSD.”

  He gave an assenting nod. “Yeah, that’s what they call it now. After Vietnam, they gave it a name, a list of symptoms, ways to treat. And that’s all good, a way for people to get help. But some of those guys, it was too much. Meds, therapy. But some things you can’t unsee. Some things just stay with you. You either live with it. Or it haunts you. Or you let it kill you.”

  He leaned back, the chair creaking under his weight.

  “It’s like you didn’t die there on the battlefield, but you did. You just didn’t know it.”

  He went quiet; Rain and Gillian waited. Outside there was shouting. Kids she’d seen playing in the street. Laughter. Then, distantly, a siren. Her mind drifted briefly to Greg and Lily. What if there was an accident? A fire? Stop it, she told herself. Focus.

  “It took us a couple more hours to coax you back, to find out what you’d seen, what you knew. Honestly? I wasn’t sure you’d come back. You were hurt—badly, drifting in and out of consciousness. You shook, like you were the worst kind of cold. I thought, she’ll never get over this.”

  He looked at her, his gaze level, seeing.

  “But look at you,” he said with a fatherly smile. “You’re all grown up. Family, good job. That’s the one good thing from all that. That he didn’t get all of you.”

  “Because of you,” said Gillian. “You saved her, and Hank.”

  “Like I say, it was luck,” he said. “The luck of the way light moved in just that moment. Mind if I ask, why now? Why do you want to go back?”

  She opted for a bit of honesty. You couldn’t get people to open up to you if you weren’t open yourself. She’d give him as much as she could.

  “The murders of Steve Markham, and also the Boston Boogeyman. They have me thinking about Kreskey. It’s brought me back to that time and place—a time and place I’ve buried deep. It has me asking questions about justice, and what makes men like Kreskey, and what unmakes them. And…”

  She let the sentence trail off.

  “No matter how many times we go back, we can’t change what happened,” he said. “Sucks, right?”

  “I still have a lot of guilt about that day,” she said, though she hadn’t intended to. She felt Gillian’s eyes settle on her.

  Harper regarded her, his eyes full of facets and layers. He knew things about her that no one else did, not even Gillian.

  “There’s no shame in survival, Miss Winter. It’s what we’re all doing, every day. The brain—they didn’t get this for a long time—it does what it needs to do to keep the rest of you living. It’s not about will or bravery or any of that. You were a tiny slip of a kid. You hadn’t run, you’d be dead, too. Where’s the justice in that?”

  The grandfather clock in his foyer chimed the hour.

  “So, at a certain point,” she said, moving on, “I remembered where I’d seen Eugene Kreskey before, who he was. And then—”

  He sat up from his reclined position. “As soon as you mentioned the garage, along with your description of him, we knew. Kreskey had been on our radar since his release. We all remembered him. Then it was five of us like bats out of hell, racing for that house. I remember feeling like it was a hundred miles away, that the car couldn’t go fast enough even pedal to the metal. The road just seemed to get longer, and longer.

  “Then we got there. We knocked, identified ourselves, but then we just blazed in through that front door, breaking about a million rules. We didn’t care—we were just thinking about those two little kids.”

  Rain sat breathless, listening.

  “What a place, I swear you can still feel the energy there—all that pain and death. It’s like it radiates out of the ground.”

  She was a pragmatist—didn’t believe in ghosts or hauntings. When people talked about energies, she kind of glazed over a little. But she knew what he meant; she’d felt it, too. The malevolence of that place; it was still on her skin.

  When she looked back at Detective Harper, his eyes had filled.

  “What he did to that girl. What he did to her. She wasn’t even a person to him. She was a doll. And Hank Reams. Man, just an hour sooner.”

  Rain felt her eyes fill, too, with the rush of just wishing that one thing had been different that day.

  That Tess’s mom hadn’t had to work.

  That they’d listened to Rain’s mom about not crossing through the woods. That one of them had a phone. That Hank had run instead of trying to save them. She bowed her head into her hand, felt Gillian’s arm on her shoulders. Maybe this was a mistake. How could she tell this story well when it still hurt so much? When the memories still burned.

  Gillian took over, asking questions about the arrest, the trial.

  “So,” she asked finally. “What was Kreskey like?”

  “He was a child, you know that,” Harper said. “Kreskey. I mean, he was a monster—huge.” He lifted his arms wide to signal Kreskey’s girth.

  “He had the glazed stare of a sadist, a sickness deep, deep inside. But he could barely read or write, he had zero education before the age of twelve, not even a television in that house. He didn’t know who the president was. When he was left in the interrogation room, he asked for crayons and paper. Soft-spoken, shy, very polite—‘please’ and ‘th
ank you.’”

  “Did you give it to him?” asked Gillian. “The paper and crayons.”

  “We did,” said the detective. “We wondered, what would someone who just murdered a child and tortured two others, what in the goddamn world would someone like that draw with crayons?”

  “What did he draw?” asked Rain, even though she already knew the answer.

  He looked at Rain, lowered his eyes. “He drew pictures of Lara Winter. Over and over and over. Sweet pictures—playing with him, making cookies with him, walking through the woods.”

  Rain had seen them, most of them. She’d asked Henry to show her after he told her about them; reluctantly he sent her instructions on how to access the dark web, find the images. Harper was right; they were the drawings of a toddler, two-dimensional, facile. He was a child, a deranged murderous child.

  “It was—sad, I guess. Unsettling. Kreskey was a sick fuck—pardon my language. There was no helping that guy, his hardware was damaged—irreparably.”

  “So, when he was murdered ten years later,” said Rain. “How did you feel?”

  Harper shrugged, his features hardened a little. He cast Rain a look and she averted her eyes.

  “I guess I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t some sense of relief,” he said after a moment in thought. “I fought against his release from the psychiatric prison, even into that controlled work release facility. That was a minimum-security situation. I think they figured that he was so docile, so heavily medicated, that he wasn’t much of a threat.”

  “But you didn’t feel that way.”

  “I thought it was only a matter of time before he hurt someone else. We were aware of him, let’s put it that way.”

  “You had someone watching him.”

  Harper looked uncomfortable. “Well, there wasn’t manpower for that. And even if there was, we wouldn’t have had the overtime hours in our budget. But some of us watched him in our spare time. We organized a group—it wasn’t enough. But it was something.”