by J P Tompkins
“She used to do that when Janelle left her with us when she went out of town,” Mrs. Morris told me. “Now she’s sitting there waiting for Janelle, waiting for something that will never happen.”
◆◆◆
On the last night Payton Donnelly was alive, she got into a stranger’s car and was discovered the next day, strangled, assaulted, facedown in her bathtub. A good bit of her hair was missing.
It didn’t take long for investigators to zero in on the Uber ride she’d taken the night before. The state lab moved quickly on the DNA, exonerating the driver. The case was no closer to being solved.
By this time, I was working eighteen hours a day, every day, hardly sleeping, running off adrenaline and fast food, fatty snacks and caffeine.
“You look…terrible,” my mom said to me. They were visiting from Wrightsville Beach for the weekend. It was the first time I’d seen them in almost five months and I had planned to take a three-day weekend.
They had planned the trip for weeks.
“We’ll get there Friday afternoon and leave Sunday evening,” my mother had said. “We know you’re working a lot and we have some other things to do when we’re in town. But we’d at least like to have dinner with you both nights.”
That didn’t happen. Payton was killed the night before they arrived. I worked all weekend.
“Kate, I’m worried about you,” my mother said as they were leaving. “I’m concerned about your health. Can’t you take a day or two off? Get some rest, eat some good food.”
I started to object, but she cut me off.
“You’re not a cop,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re not going to solve this, you know?”
We were all standing by my front door. Dad had packed the car and we were saying goodbye.
I sat down on the stairs. Rested my elbows on my knees. Clasped my hands together. Trying to stay calm, not wanting an argument over this, especially since they were leaving.
“I’m doing my job,” I said, keeping my reply simple, my voice level.
“Leave her alone, Carolyn,” my dad finally said, and I should have thanked him but didn’t. I don’t know why.
They were happy to hear that I was no longer living alone when Erin moved in. They didn’t know it wasn’t permanent, but the way things were going, I figured this case might be over by the time Erin moved out and got her own place or did whatever she was going to do.
However it worked out, I didn’t expect to be living alone again under these circumstances.
Chapter 6
My alarm goes off after six and a half hours of uninterrupted sleep. I roll over and face the window.
A sliver of morning sunlight beams into my room in the little space between the curtains. There’s a slight blur. I rub my eyes. The blur remains. My head feels heavy. The overhead fan sounds different, muffled.
I sit up and look around, trying to clear my head. I almost feel like I have a strange kind of hangover. Dr. Benson told me this might happen.
I don’t remember any dreams. I also don’t recall getting out of bed during the night. That’s another thing I’ve been struggling with for years. Sleepwalking.
Dr. Benson was concerned the first time I mentioned it, asking lots of questions, wanting to know details, but his worries subsided when I told him about the few times it had happened. Though indicative of a sleep disorder, he thinks my experience with it is rather benign. Sleepwalking always ends up with me sitting on the couch. Never anything dangerous, like getting in my car or turning on the stove and going back to bed.
It hasn’t happened in a while. At least not since Erin moved in. I can’t even remember if I told her about it.
I sit up and grab my phone off the bedside table. No alerts on the lock-screen. No texts, no missed calls.
After showering, I pick out what I’m going to wear today. It isn’t easy. My room is a mess. There’s a pile of clothes on the floor in one corner. All dirty. All the dresser drawers are open, teeming with clean underwear, socks, t-shirts, everything, but totally unorganized. The chair in my room holds the rest of my clean clothes.
This clutter started the night Erin moved in. Actually, when she was on her way over, as I moved all of my work into my room, out of sight.
Over the last several weeks, I’ve moved everything out of my closet and now all it contains is the case material. The closet, unlike my bedroom, is neat and tidy.
Boxes are lined up against the wall, around the perimeter. Each victim has her own shelf, with the most important evidence stored there. The map is on one wall, photographs on the other.
If something happened to me and someone saw this, they’d think I was crazy. But of course I’m not. It’s work.
I open the closet door, turn on the light, and glance around. Not for anything specific. I just do this sometimes before I leave for the day.
Out in the hall, I see Erin’s door is closed. I consider knocking on it to see if she’s up, but I can’t remember if she has to work this morning, so I decide against it and head to work.
◆◆◆
The divider around my desk moves a little and shakes me out of my thoughts. I look up from my notes to see Neil. I’m surprised I didn’t smell him first. Neil is a secret smoker, though it’s not very much of a secret. It’s one of those unspoken things, like Gail, one of the receptionists, who has a stash of cookies in the office supply room. If you can’t find Neil anywhere in the office, it’s a good bet that he’s gone outside, usually through the back door and around to the side of the building.
“Whatcha got?” he asks, as he always does.
What I’ve got is nothing, which is something you don’t want to tell your editor. Before the pill knocked me out and drugged me to sleep last night, something occurred to me. Something about the attack on Janelle Morris.
Normally in situations like that, I would reach for my phone or the little notepad on my bedside table and jot something down. But not last night. One second I was thinking about something, the next I was waking up this morning.
“Just working on some notes,” I say.
He sits on the edge of my desk, grabs a paperclip and starts twisting it in his hands. I smell the cigarette smoke.
Neil is in his mid-forties, thick red hair, and the kind of deep voice that would have been good on the radio. A former crime reporter, he burned out in his thirties after writing about death for more than a decade. I didn’t know this until we had the talk that day, when he gave me the ultimatum about my job.
He’d been with a big city paper up North, in Pittsburgh, before landing a job here. He covered high school sports and the minor league baseball team, then worked his way up to editor and he’s been here ever since. The climb didn’t take long, not at a paper like this where everybody sees it as a stepping-stone and nobody stays very long. Nobody except Neil, anyway. He once told me the money sucks, but he loves the work and the peace of mind is worth it.
He’s twice divorced, never had any kids, and it seems to me he works at least sixty hours per week. Any personal conversations are always of the one-way variety. Other than the basic biographical details, Neil doesn’t talk about his life outside of the office.
“Notes are better than nothing.” He taps his knuckles on my desk twice. “Keep at it. It’ll come.”
It’s Neil’s way, always encouraging, talking like you’re having trouble even if you’re not. Keep at it. His constant motivational pep-phrase. It bothered me sometimes, once even making me doubt for a while whether he really did have confidence in me as a reporter. But that was in the beginning, when I started here. After the talk we had, when he told me about burning out on crime reporting, I knew he knew what I was headed for and he didn’t want to see it happen to me.
“All right. I’m out of here.” He slides off my desk and drops the mangled paperclip into the trashcan. “Keep at it,” he says again, rounding the corner out of sight. He’s leaving early, as he often does this time of the year. He goes to as man
y minor league baseball games as he can. From what I’ve been able to gather, he goes alone. Sometimes I see myself getting to that point.
I go back to my notes. This is what I do a lot of now. Looking at notes. Re-reading everything. Reviewing evidence.
I have to be missing something. The cops are. Obviously, we all are. Some kind of clue, even a small detail that can be grasped, pulled on a little bit, a little bit more, a little bit more, and the tangled ball of information that is this case will begin to unravel, slowly, revealing its center and the ultimate answer: This is the guy who’s doing it. The answer will come to me.
Or maybe not, I find myself thinking when I’m unable to defeat the feeling of discouragement. That’s not how these things work in real-life.
They work like that on one-hour TV crime dramas, where each episode follows the same formula and the crime is solved because—surprise—the investigator characters are geniuses who can solve complicated crimes with little (or no) evidence. Poof. Like magic. And only because their allotted network time is coming to a close and the episode must wrap up.
That’s just on TV. In the real world, these things can take weeks, sometimes months to even begin to make sense.
I glance at what we call the “leader board,” a large TV screen on the wall that’s visible from everywhere in the newsroom. It tracks the articles that are currently on our website—story titles, ranked by the number of clicks each is receiving, and the writer’s name next to it.
The first time my name made it to number one was for a story about a young man, age twenty-three, who got off work around 11 p.m. and stopped at a fast-food drive-through on the way home. Instead of eating while he drove, he parked in a far corner of the parking lot.
When the cops showed up, his food was in his lap, barely unwrapped. He still had his seatbelt on, so he wasn’t completely slumped over, but his body tilted toward the passenger seat.
Security camera video showed someone approaching his car from the rear, a figure cloaked in black clothing, the hood of his sweatshirt cinched tightly around his head. He pulled the door open, lunged toward the driver, there was a short scuffle—maybe five seconds—and then he backed up, just far enough to extend his right arm and pull the trigger one time.
That was three years ago.
I didn’t hit the top spot again until eight months ago, when we ran the story linking Kristi Stroup’s murder to the attack on Beth Callahan. Since then, my name has been a regular on the board.
The rankings aren’t just there to track popularity for advertising purposes. They’re there to motivate. Something I don’t need with this case.
I no longer take pride in seeing my name up there. I’d just as soon see it up there one last time, next to the story I write when I can put a name and face to this killer.
I want to know who he is. I have to know who he is.
That’s all the motivation I need.
◆◆◆
I’m about to leave the office and go for a short walk, get some fresh air and pick up another coffee.
It’s mid-morning, but I still feel half asleep. If I were to put my head down on my desk and close my eyes, I’m sure I’d fall asleep. This is a different kind of tired than I’m used to.
Despite the fatigue, I’ve managed to recall what it was about the attack on Janelle Morris I was trying to remember when Neil came over to my cubicle a few minutes ago and broke my train of thought.
Looking around my desk, I don’t see my tablet. I check my bag, but it’s not there, either.
My tablet is a constant companion, almost never more than an arm’s reach away. It contains copies of everything that now occupies my bedroom closet—it’s a virtual, mobile case file. When I’m not home, when I don’t have access to my closet, I can’t work without that tablet. I can picture exactly where it is right now: At home, in my room, on my nightstand. It’s just a ten minute drive home. I have to go get it before I lose this train of thought about Janelle, and I won’t be able to focus on anything else.
That’s how I work: hyper-focused on something, a badgering need for an answer, an explanation. It serves me well in my profession.
When I pull into my driveway, I stop suddenly and stare at my house. It looks different to me now and it takes me a few seconds to realize what’s wrong.
Chapter 7
Erin’s car is in the driveway when I arrive home. I can’t remember if she mentioned her schedule, whether she’s working later today or she’s off.
It’s not until I park and get out that a sick feeling washes through me, a clenching in my stomach, a tightening of my throat.
I stand in the driveway looking at my own house the way I looked at the houses where the four young women were murdered.
I was at each of them on the days the crimes were discovered, standing among other reporters and neighbors and other onlookers. I’ve been back to each several times, by myself. I’ve parked my car down the street, walked past the houses, trying to get a feel for the surroundings. But it was never right. Not during the day.
So I started going at night—late nights—and doing things I shouldn’t: creeping through the yards into patches of bushes and trees and stood there, trying to see what he saw, feel what he felt; imagining him standing or crouched right where I was, before he chose his path to the house.
A door closes, snapping me out of what is almost a trance as I stand here in my driveway. My head swivels toward the sound. It’s coming from next door. One of the many neighbors I don’t know.
I’ve been here a year and I barely know my neighbors. That’s one of the things law enforcement has been advising people since this case started: Know your neighbors, report anything unusual going on around your neighborhood, look out for each other. I know several by name, but little more than that about any of them.
I start toward my house, walking up to the front door, opening it, calling Erin’s name as I enter my home. No response.
I move down the hallway toward the bedrooms. Both doors are closed. Erin must be sleeping, or getting ready for work.
I go into my room and get my tablet off the nightstand. Before this thought about Janelle fades, I swipe the screen and open the document.
My phone rings as I’m scrolling. I slide it out of my pocket and see who’s calling.
Paul.
He’s in my contacts only because of Erin. He hasn’t called or texted me in at least a year.
I answer it.
“Do you know where Erin is?” he says before I finish answering.
“I think she’s here.”
“She’s supposed to be at work,” he says. I can hear the echo of people talking around him. He’s at work, inside a house. “They called me.”
“What time was she supposed to be there?” I ask, still scrolling through Janelle’s file, looking for that one detail, also thinking that it makes sense that Erin’s work would call Paul. He’s still technically her fiancée, I guess. The closest thing to next of kin she has anywhere nearby. Maybe they don’t know she’s moved out. I glance at the clock at the top of my tablet and see the time.
“Two hours ago,” he says.
I put the tablet down and turn back toward my bedroom door. It’s open. Across the hall, I see the door to Erin’s room. Closed. And that sick feeling I had in the driveway returns.
“I’ll call you back,” I say to Paul, and hang up.
I don’t hesitate. I can’t. It’s just a few steps to her bedroom door.
I knock. Nothing.
“Erin?” Nothing.
Knocking again, louder this time, I call out: “Erin?” I do it again, louder. Nothing.
The door is locked, but these aren’t locks you’d have to pick. They’re what Paul called privacy locks. “They’re just to prevent someone from barging in,” Paul had said when he was showing me the house. He also showed me how you can unlock them from the outside, just a little pressure and turn.
I open the door, just a little, enough to look
into her room. She’s not in her bed. I step inside and look toward the bathroom. That door is closed too.
“Erin?” I say again.
I hear nothing. No reply from her. No water running. No hair-dryer going.
I stand at the bathroom door and notice my breathing. Or lack of it. I’m not doing my usual shallow-breathing now. I’ve been holding my breath. I suck in air and let it out slowly.
When I open the bathroom door, I see Erin.
In the bathtub. Floating facedown.
Chapter 8
I lunge toward the bathtub, toward Erin.
This isn’t normal for me, but for a second I have a sliver of hope that she might be alive. Somehow. It makes no sense, but I have to check.
With my palms on her shoulders, my fingers curl around them. The nonsensical hope that there would be life in her body vanishes. Beneath her skin, slick from the water, there’s nothing soft. Her body is stiff.
But still I lift her. Just a little.
She slips from my grasp, falling back into the water, enough to make a wave of it wash over the edge of the tub and onto my shoes.
I’m out of the bathroom in seconds, out of Erin’s room, back to my own. I decide to get out of the house. I grab my tablet on the way out of the bedroom.
Out on the front porch, I slide my phone from a pocket. My hands are still wet from the bathwater and whatever mixed with it from Erin’s lifeless body. I fumble with the phone, luckily without dropping it. My fingers are too wet, though. I can’t swipe the screen and unlock it. I place the phone on the porch railing, frantically rubbing my hands on my clothes.
Everything is in sharp focus, but jittery, as if my eyes are twitching.
Breathe. Remember to breathe.