The Second Stranger

by J P Tompkins

  With my hands dry now, I’m able to open the phone and dial 911.

  I sit down on the steps and wait for the sirens.

  ◆◆◆

  It takes just minutes for the street to become jammed with police cars, both marked and unmarked. There’s a fire truck and an ambulance. It’s the brightest part of the day with the sun almost directly overhead, and yet all the lights from the vehicles, the flashing of blue and white and red, are blinding.

  I haven’t looked around to see if there are neighbors gawking. I don’t care if they are. All I’ve done is move from the porch steps to an unmarked car. It was the first detective car to arrive, after two patrol cars.

  The car I’m in belongs to Detective Frank Hogle. I was expecting Hogle to show up, but he has another man with him who I’ve never seen before.

  Hogle takes off his sunglasses, recognizes me, and nods. “This is Detective John Roark.”

  He flashes his badge. “I’m new to the case, assisting Detective Hogle with the lead. New to the case,” he says again, then adds, “but not new to the department.” Like he wants to make sure I know he’s no rookie.

  I can’t tell how old he is. His voice sounds younger, but his face is one of those that could have you guessing anywhere between thirty-five and fifty. He’s short, but most people look short next to his partner.

  Hogle played basketball in college. I discovered this early on in the case when I tried to make small talk with him, an effort to loosen him up, hoping he’d see more in me than just the prying reporter. That didn’t work, but he did reveal the basketball tidbit only after I asked him. It was his height that made me ask; he stands six feet, five inches. So he’s always looking down on people and he likes it, especially when he’s talking to the press.

  I’m in the backseat. The windows are up and the car is turned off.

  “Can you turn on the AC?” I ask. I can feel my shirt sticking to my back. I don’t know how they can stand it. Their jackets are off, but they’re wearing long-sleeved shirts and ties.

  Hogle is in the driver’s seat, looking down at something. Notes maybe. He doesn’t look up, not even in the rearview mirror. He just starts the car.

  Roark reaches for the AC, turns it to the maximum setting.

  “Tell us what happened.” Hogle’s voice drifts from the front seat, almost seeming to ride the blast of air on its way back here. He still doesn’t look up.

  I recount what happened when I got home.

  “Her full name?” Roark asks.

  “Erin Leah Thorpe,” I say.

  I explain to them how we know each other and why she’s staying with me.

  “What’s Paul’s last name?” Hogle asks.

  “Daugherty.”

  As soon as I say it, I think: I need to call Paul; someone needs to call Paul.

  I lift my phone and go to the recent calls.

  “His number?” Roark asks.

  I don’t know his number off the top of my head, so I tap on his name to pull up the contact details and read his number aloud.

  “I should call him,” I say.

  “You can do that in a few minutes,” Hogle says.

  “Did you see her this morning?” Roark asks. He’s turned sideways a little, enough to look at me as we talk.

  I shake my head. “No.”

  Roark lifts his sunglasses, rests them on the top of his head. “What time did you leave your house this morning?”

  “Just before eight.” Was it? The groggy hangover from the sleeping pill has worn off now, but I was kind of out of it this morning.

  “And where’d you go?”

  “Work.”

  Hogle looks over his shoulder at me. “Why did you come home?”

  “I forgot something.”

  “What did you forget?”

  “My tablet,” I say. “There’s something on it that I needed for work.” I try to remember what it was about Janelle Morris that I was going to check on. The events of the last thirty minutes have wiped my mind clean of it. “A file,” I add.

  “Probably something we’ve seen before.” Hogle frowns and turns back around, not facing me anymore.

  His reaction stems from his frustration with the media. Me, in particular.

  When they first took over the case, Hogle and Roark had no conflict with the press. They made themselves available almost daily and even though they didn’t answer every question, they were always professional, easy to deal with.

  But now they have shut that down almost completely. They no longer take questions when they speak to reporters. They release what they want to, when they want to, how they want to. And they’re quite happy to have us run the information they need to get out to the public.

  In my years in this profession, I’ve learned that people have a somewhat similar view of reporters that they have when it comes to lawyers. Everybody hates a lawyer, until they need one. And everybody thinks the media is out to get them, determined to derail their efforts or destroy their beliefs, unless of course the story is told the way they want it told.

  Like most reporters, I suspect, I’ve had my share of complaints, accusations of bias, claims of having an agenda and telling a story to fit what I’ve already decided. Many of these come from readers, almost all of them anonymous, of course. But some have come from people I wrote about, and I always listen to their complaints.

  This shift in Hogle’s attitude toward the press began right after I published that first story that contained information they hadn’t released to the public. Once, he questioned me about my sources. I refused, telling him I’d never burn a source. I tried to smooth things over, telling him that I wouldn’t need to use that inside source if he just shared more information with me. It didn’t matter to me where the information came from. I just wanted to have it.

  Maybe it was just that he didn’t want me to have any of it, or maybe it was because he didn’t like that I was leveraging my newfound power of being the reporter who was breaking all of the big news on this case. Whatever it was, he didn’t go for it.

  I tried, but nothing changed, and that makes this much stranger now: sitting here in his car, no longer an observer and reporter of events in the case, but suddenly right in the middle of it. Part of the story. Maybe even a witness to something.

  “Notice anything different when you woke up this morning?” Roark asks.

  “No.”

  “Didn’t notice the damp carpet in the hallway between your rooms?”

  I pause. I’m sure I would have noticed that. There’s no way there was water on the carpet this morning.

  “It was dry,” I say.

  Roark nods. “And how about when you got home?”

  “Dry.”

  Yes, dry. It had to have been dry. I would have noticed, would have picked up on the squishing sound and what it felt like when I stepped on it. The hall was dry.

  “The carpet in your room is damp as well.” Hogle turns once again in his seat to face me. “Right next to your bed.”

  “I went back in there after I found her. Just for a second.”

  “Why?”

  I shrug. “Habit, I guess. It’s my room. It was right there. But then I decided to get out of the house.”

  “Why?” He presses.

  “Because there’s a dead body in my house,” I say flatly.

  “And that?” He nods at my lap, where my tablet is.

  “This was on my nightstand,” I say. “I grabbed it on the way out.”

  “That’s what you came home for, right?”

  “Right.”

  Roark looks at Hogle and smirks.

  Hogle turns again. I can only see the back of his head.

  “Congratulations,” he says. “Biggest story of your career.”

  I suppress the urge to tell him to fuck off. My mind moves to something else.

  He was in my house. The killer I’ve been writing about, tracking for almost a year, was in my house.

  Chapter 9

&nbs
p; I try calling Paul after getting out of the car. No answer, so I text him: You need to come to my house.

  I consider telling him more, but I deliberately leave it vague so he’ll have to respond.

  But he doesn’t.

  He just shows up ten minutes later. I see his truck turn onto my street. It’s the truck Erin always hated, saying it was too big. They argued over this, like so many other things. Erin always complained that she felt like she was climbing into a tank every time they went somewhere. She drove the truck one time, she said, just a quick trip to the grocery store, and she joked that she had to do a three-point turn just to guide the enormous vehicle into a spot.

  I’m surprised to see him in the truck. When he’s working, he always drives his car because it’s more business-oriented and he’s frequently driving clients around to view houses.

  Paul drives slowly up the street, the loud engine drawing attention from my neighbors. He double-parks next to two police cars.

  I’ve been sitting in my own car, after backing it out of the driveway and onto the street. I stay in here because I don’t want to be a spectacle. Not for the neighbors, not for the TV cameras that are set up on the sidewalk five doors down from my house.

  Paul walks up the street quickly, all the way to the yellow crime scene tape that’s wrapped around trees, marking off the perimeter of my yard.

  Two uniformed cops approach him and stop him as he lifts the tape over his head. They exchange a few words, which probably aren’t necessary. In this town, over the last year, if there’s a house taped off with a dozen or so police cars, crime scene trucks, and the coroner’s van, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.

  One of the officers points in my direction.

  Paul moves quickly toward me, his face slack, mouth open. He gets to my car and sits in the passenger’s seat.

  “What the fuck happened?”

  I look at him. His eyes are wide, pupils tiny in the bright afternoon sun. Sweat borders his hairline. His shirt, a polo with the real estate company logo on the left breast, is also damp with sweat. I recall him saying he hated the summer because the heat and humidity limited his clothing selection.

  Paul likes to wear suits when he’s working. Expensive suits, or ones that looked expensive, anyway. Erin told me they were all knock-offs. Not that she cared. She had laughed it off, chalking it up to one of Paul’s quirks and saying she liked helping him pick them out.

  “I found her in the tub,” I say, looking forward again, out through the windshield as crime scene techs and police search my yard. “Just like the other girls.”

  “Jesus Christ.” He leans forward and I think he’s going to throw up in my car. He puts his head in his hands. “This is my fault.” He sits upright, takes in a deep breath.

  Out of my peripheral vision, I see him look at me. I keep looking straight ahead.

  “She shouldn’t have been here,” he says, his voice shaky. “She should have been with me. Has anyone called her parents?”

  “I gave the cops her mom’s number.”

  Hogle and Roark mentioned it as I was getting out of their car. They asked for her next of kin so they could do the official notification.

  “I don’t have either number,” Paul says. “Used to, but I removed them from my contacts a while back.”

  And just now, as we sit here, as I stare at my house, which is now a crime scene, I wonder if Paul is more concerned about having to talk to Erin’s parents than he is about Erin being dead. If that’s the case, it might be justified.

  Erin began dating Paul during that year I was away after graduation. She talked about him quite a bit and I finally met him when I came up to look at places to live. It was obvious—to me, anyway—that something was off.

  There were times when I saw them together looking like the happiest people I’d ever known. There was a way he looked at her sometimes, admiringly, lovingly, and a way she looked back in response, that I didn’t quite get. There was something about Paul, something I couldn’t put words to, something that just didn’t seem right to me.

  And, anyway, what did it matter that I didn’t get it? They got it. They got each other. Was it all jealousy on my part? Perhaps.

  Paul is a realtor and he sold me my home. It was Erin’s idea, citing the fact that Paul was trying to get all the clients he could get. He was her boyfriend, soon to be her fiancée, and I needed a realtor anyway, so why not?

  When I closed on the house, Paul said we should celebrate and asked me to meet him and Erin for dinner. “We’ll all go out, the three of us, and have a good time. A celebration for both of us,” he said. “Me for selling a house, you for buying one.”

  Erin ended up working later than she had planned, which left me at the restaurant’s bar with Paul for much longer than I had hoped. Paul had a few too many drinks and started asking me about Erin. He wanted to know what she was like when we were in college; what kinds of guys she dated; how many guys she dated; how many guys she slept with. That’s when I cut him off, telling him I didn’t know anything about that.

  Paul must have sensed my disgust with his line of questioning, because he tried to defend himself. He said he was only asking because Erin seemed really inexperienced and not very adventurous in bed.

  “How about you?” he said.

  “How about me, what?” I can still recall feeling my eyebrows rise high up on my forehead, waiting for him to elaborate.

  “You know,” he said, cracking a little smile, tilting his head, like he was urging me: Come on, loosen up, she’s not here.

  “I really don’t. Why don’t you just ask me directly?”

  That’s when Erin appeared, almost as if out of nowhere. Part of me felt like she’d saved me from an uncomfortable situation with Paul, but a bigger part of me knew she had really saved him. He’s the one who should have been feeling thankful for her timing.

  I brought it up with Erin the next day, working it into the conversation, approaching it gently without trying to sound overly concerned. Erin brushed it off, saying I probably misunderstood what he was saying and she said it was obvious to her that Paul had consumed more than his usual amount of alcohol by the time she got there. I dropped the subject.

  I didn’t go out of my way to be negative about him, but I’m also not good at hiding how I feel about something or someone. So it was obvious. But I did my best, as her best friend, to be supportive, convinced early on and all along that something would end their relationship.

  There’s a knock on the passenger window, pulling me out of those memories. Paul rolls it down and I hear Hogle’s voice. “Mr. Daugherty?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you come with me, sir? We’d like to ask just a few questions.”

  Paul looks back at me, as if he’s searching my face for something, but I’m not sure what. Worry and fear are in his eyes.

  I do nothing. My face remains blank, the memories of that night at the bar lingering in the front of my mind.

  Paul looks away, opens the door, and gets out.

  I watch as he walks with Hogle to the same car I sat in earlier. Roark gets out and they all stand there, talking.

  With the car doors closed and the windows up, I can hear nothing. I’ve been in this car too long now. It’s starting to feel smaller the longer I sit here.

  I open the door, get out, and my phone rings. I lean against my car and look at my phone’s screen. Another couple of rings and it will go to voicemail. I can’t let them worry like that, though. So I answer it.

  Chapter 10

  “Kate, can you hear me?” My mother sounds happy, maybe even a little drunk. There’s an echo, and then some music starts.

  They’re on a cruise, something they do a few times a year now. This time, they’re going to Greece with some neighbor friends of theirs. Before they left, I urged them—practically begged them—not to pay attention to the news. Especially the news about this case. They read all of my stories, no matter what I’m covering, so they�
��ve been following this case along with everyone else who reads them.

  It got to the point where they were getting worried about me. Worried about my eating and sleeping, worried about, well, everything, as parents will do. So I talked them into enjoying the cruise, enjoying time with their friends and if anything really important happened I would let them know. Obviously, based on the timing, they’ve heard the news about what happened in my house overnight.

  “I can hear you,” I say. There’s a party on the ship, or maybe they’re at one of the ports of call. Either way, I’m sure they’ve seen the news and they’re trying to contact me to find out what’s going on and how I’m doing.

  “We just wanted to check in,” Mom says. “We’re having some drinks and waiting for Russell and Mary to come down from their room.”

  “Oh, that sounds good.” It comes out flat because I was obviously wrong. They have no idea what’s happened here. Good.

  “Yesterday, they almost made us all late for a tour of Mykonos. Anyway, are you doing okay?”

  I keep the conversation short, which isn’t a problem because it doesn’t take my dad long to remind my mom that the call is expensive.

  That, and I hear the call-waiting sound. I look at the screen.

  “Hey, it’s my editor. I have to go.”

  “Wish you were here with us,” Mom says.

  “Have a great time.”

  She’s saying goodbye, but I switch over to Neil’s call before she can finish.

  “I guess you know what’s going on,” I say.

  “What the hell is going on, Kate? We had the TV on in the conference room and someone said that looked like your house and then you’re right there on the screen. What the hell happened?”

  As I catch him up on all the details, I notice it’s the first time this morning that my head is clear and my emotions are in check. Talking to Neil has made this feel like work. Almost like any other story. Not completely, but close enough. I have just enough detachment to organize the facts in my mind and start analyzing them.

  “Someone else is going to have to write this,” he says.