The Second Stranger

by J P Tompkins

  But there is one place I can lay out the entire theory. I just don’t tell Neil or Cole about it.

  ◆◆◆

  It’s late. Almost three in the morning. I drank two of the sodas, as if I needed caffeine to stay awake.

  I’ve spent the last hour typing it all up—the theory about the gym, about Kristi and Payton and now Beth.

  I log onto the message board and register a username. I need something that has nothing to do with my name, my profession, or anything indicating me at all, and I end up modeling the username after some others I’ve seen. Last name or a word and then a number. Now, on this site, I am “carolinablue22,” a totally nondescript username, free to post what I want, unhindered by the newspaper’s policies.

  I scroll through the list of discussions to see if anyone has linked to my article on the paper’s site yet, and find nothing.

  So I copy my theory and post it, along with a link to my article.

  And then I wait.

  Chapter 29

  “I woke up this morning and found my laptop on the floor. Almost stepped on it.”

  Dr. Benson just looks at me, says nothing.

  “I was so groggy when I woke up, I didn’t remember that I’d been using it.”

  “Well, it could have been worse,” he says, smiling.

  This is how our session begins. I go on to tell him that what I was using the laptop for, the username, all of it. In his always gentle way, Dr. Benson reminds me that we discussed the message board, and how there were no upsides to me browsing through the opinions of random people on the Internet, that I had enough going on without that kind of negative noise.

  Dr. Benson asks me about sleep, as he always does. This part of the session is always the same. I’m getting sleep when I take the pill, but it doesn’t feel like real sleep, not the kind of sleep I remember having before all of this started. I wake up feeling hung-over.

  “I think it’s time to take the medication out of the equation here,” he says. “How do you feel about that?”

  I shrug. “If you think that’s best.”

  “I do, based on what you’re telling me. You gave it a chance. There are other ways we can address the sleep issue. I’ll have some thoughts on that next time we meet. The medication isn’t something we would want you on long-term, anyway. Wouldn’t want you to get habituated to it.”

  The relief probably shows on my face. I want sleep, but not the way I’ve been getting it.

  He brings the topic back to my posting on the message board, asking me why I think I did it.

  “I just needed an outlet,” I say.

  “Did it work? Did posting your theory help get it out of your system? I’m assuming that’s what you mean by needing an outlet.”

  I think about it for a moment. Sometimes these are the clearest moments I have, this quiet space where I can relax and consider my answers, consider what I’m doing, who I am, who I’m becoming because of this case and what happened fifteen years ago with Amanda.

  “No,” I say, and it’s the truth. “It’s not out of my system.”

  Dr. Benson shifts one leg over the other, looking at me, studying me. “There’s more. What are you thinking?”

  “There’s no getting it out of my system. I don’t even know what that means—get it out of my system. Sorry, but—”

  “Don’t apologize. Go on.”

  “It’s not as if this is some kind of phase, some kind of…I don’t know, habit? Curiosity? I don’t know if those are the right words, but this isn’t something that’s going away.” I feel the rush of adrenaline, the frustration, my face getting hot. “I’m going to be this way until it’s over. Until he’s caught.”

  “You feel like it’s up to you to catch him.”

  “Yeah. Sort of. Pretty much.”

  “Why is that?” he asks.

  “Because I think there’s a connection to that gym and the cops are missing it. They looked into it and there was nothing there, according to them, and they’ve just dropped it.”

  “I read your article this morning. Very clever way of inserting the gym. That is what you were doing, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But,” he says, “when I asked why you think it’s up to you, I didn’t mean anything specific about this case. It runs much deeper than that, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  “It goes back to what happened when you were thirteen.” He just looks at me, waiting.

  I nod again, not wanting to talk about this.

  He shifts in his chair, getting more comfortable, like he’s settling in for something and then he begins to tell me something I wasn’t expecting: “When I was sixteen, I’d just gotten my license. I didn’t have a car. Always used my mother’s. It wasn’t anything that stood out, just a car that blended in with traffic, nothing you’d notice. But I didn’t care. I was one of the first of my friends to get my license and when I did, I felt like I took on a new role. Like I was something special.” He smiles, shakes his head. “I’d been driving for just a couple of days when the accident happened. A truck barreled through a stop sign. Hit the back end of the car, spun us around.”

  He pauses, looking at me for a couple of seconds, then continues.

  “Nobody was seriously hurt, but Adam—one of my best friends—took the hardest hit. Hit his head on the window, got a concussion. I didn’t sleep for days after that. Part of it was because every time I closed my eyes, I saw the crash, heard it, felt it, everything, just like it was happening all over again. I hung around the hospital until they released Adam. Went over to his house every morning. I couldn’t look his parents in the eye. I felt responsible, like it was my fault that this happened to their son. Everyone said it wasn’t. The cops, my parents, Adam’s parents, my friends. But it didn’t matter. I felt like it was all on me, just because I was behind the wheel, and despite the fact that I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  He stops again. His eyes are trained on mine. He’s watching to see if I get it.

  “So that’s not exactly survivor’s guilt,” he says. “Nobody died. But it’s close. So I have some idea how you’re feeling. How you felt back then. How you’re looking at all of this. So when we talk about the guilt you’re feeling, I’m not coming at you with something I read in a textbook. I want you to know that.”

  “Thanks. How did you get past it?”

  “Adam’s parents got a lawyer. They sued the trucking company and Adam got a check about a year later. It was a few thousand dollars, but at the time, at our age, it seemed like a million dollars.” He looks down, like he’s remembering it, and laughs. “So when he started buying pretty much anything he wanted and when he didn’t have to get a summer job like the rest of us, I thought, okay, that’s enough guilt for me.”

  I laugh.

  “I’m not saying it’s always that simple,” he says. “But it’s good to see you laugh. That’s the first time.” He flips through his pad of notes. “Enough about that for now. Any dreams about that day, lately? About Amanda?”

  “No, not lately.”

  He just looks at me for a moment. “What’s on your mind right this second?”

  For some reason, my thoughts had drifted to Cole and what he said about Paul, that I shouldn’t rule him out as a suspect. I don’t go into the details with Dr. Benson, but I say, “It’s not just the cops who don’t believe me. My source says I shouldn’t rule out other suspects. That maybe someone did it to make it look like it was this killer. Someone in Erin’s life.”

  “Like her fiancée.”

  “Right.”

  “What if they’re right?”

  “They’re not,” I say, my words coming out fast and sharp.

  He does this slow-blinking thing and nods his head. “I know how you feel about that. But just consider for a moment, if they’re right, how you might react to that.”

  “Honestly, I don’t care. I’ll deal with that if it happens. But it won’t. I just want him caught.”

>   “And then what?” Dr. Benson asks, after a brief period of silence.

  “Then what?”

  “What happens when this is over? What do you do?”

  I take a deep breath. I didn’t plan to. It’s as if my body demanded it, needed it to keep living. It immediately feels good, taking this air into my body, letting it out. This is why the breathing exercises are so important. I forget sometimes.

  “I haven’t even thought about it,” I tell him.

  “And that’s okay. But it might be something we’ll want to start considering next time you’re here.”

  Chapter 30

  I drive for a while, at first unsure of where I’m going, but then I end up going by the crime scenes.

  Each house, each apartment. The first few times I did this over the course of the last year, as each murder was added to the case, I followed GPS to the addresses. I no longer need to do that. Driving to these places has become as automatic as driving to a friend’s house.

  I thought they’d look different during the day than they do at night. Less ominous, maybe, the darkness around the houses absent, all of them brightly lit by the summer sun. But the darkness isn’t about appearance if you know what happened on the other side of these walls. The darkness is a presence. And it’s there now, in the middle of the day, as menacing as it ever was.

  Someone has moved into Kristi Stroup’s apartment. There are drapes covering the windows. There’s a decorative concrete pelican, unpainted, stark white, next to the sidewalk near the front door. I wonder if these people know what happened in there. Have the neighbors told them? Welcome to the neighborhood. We weren’t sure anyone would ever move into that murder house.

  The place where Janelle Morris lived still has a For Sale sign outside, just as it did the last time I drove by. Now, though, there’s a smaller sign next to it: For Rent.

  Payton Donnelly’s little Cape Cod style house has some new occupants. They’ve added a white picket fence. It wraps around the side of the house and meets up with the six-foot fence in the backyard that provided no protection for Payton and her boyfriend Brad.

  I drive on after the houses, this time without a destination in mind. I don’t feel like going home. There’s no reason to go to the office. I stop and grab a bite at a sandwich shop, ordering soda at first but changing my mind and opting for water instead. Enough caffeine.

  Eating in my car, windows rolled up and air conditioner on full blast, the session with Dr. Benson comes to mind, especially the questions he asked right near the end.

  What will I do when this is all over? Move on to another case? It’s hard to imagine doing all of this again with this same kind of intensity, not only because I don’t think I could handle that, but also because I can’t imagine another case grabbing me like this one has. Maybe that’s just because I’m in the middle of this one now.

  What will I do when this is all over, when there are no more stories to write about it? Go back to covering convenience store robberies? Mailbox vandalism? Shoplifting?

  What will I do if this starts to feel like it will never be over? I’ve been in that position before, at least for a few years when it felt like Amanda’s kidnapping and murder would never be solved. But it was. So I only have an idea what that would be like for a fixed amount of time. If this case is never solved, then what?

  My phone rings, yanking me out of my thoughts. I pull it out of my pocket and see Cole’s name on the screen. I look at it for a few seconds…third ring, fourth ring, next one goes to voicemail. Not sure I want to talk.

  But I answer.

  “Where are you?” he asks, his voice urgent, unlike I’ve heard before.

  “In my car.”

  “Pull over,” he says.

  “I’m sitting in a parking lot, eating. What’s going on?”

  He takes a deep breath, then speaks rapidly: “They got him. The killer. They got him.”

  All I can manage is a “What?” and it comes out in a shout, but not the loud kind, it’s that whisper-shout, the kind you do when your reaction is pure shock and your brain forces the word out with just air, not even sending a signal to make your voice work.

  I hear noise in the background, people talking, the sounds of a busy police department.

  “Give me a second,” Cole says. “I can’t even hear myself think in here.”

  My mind races with Cole’s words: They got him, the killer, they got him.

  “Okay, I’m outside,” Cole says. “Damn, it’s humid out here.”

  I don’t need a weather report from him. My voice tense, I say, “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “We got him. There’s no question it’s him.”

  I let out a deep sigh. My stomach is in a tight knot, but the rest of my body feels like it’s relaxing for the first time in months.

  “His name is Nathan Greer.” He pauses, letting the name sink in, a name we’ve all waited for months to learn.

  “How did they get him?” I ask.

  “Traffic stop, believe it or not.”

  I could believe it. It wouldn’t be the first time. That’s how police arrested Ted Bundy.

  I was expecting something else—cops caught him prowling, victim shot him, something like that, but I had never considered he’d be caught on something so simple, even though I should have.

  “When was this?” I say. “Last night or this morning?”

  He lowers his voice a little. “I’m not sure. I don’t have the details on the arrest. I’m still trying to check on that.”

  I sit here and look across the street at the people at the gas station, filling up their cars, going inside and coming out with drinks and snacks. People who are oblivious, for now, to the bombshell that’s about to rock the city any minute now.

  “What do you know about him?” I ask. “How did they connect him? What—”

  “I don’t know much of anything about him. They talked to him last night for three hours. I’ll send you the video. I need to get back to work but I’ll send over anything I find when I find it.”

  “Wait,” I say. “Where does he live?”

  ◆◆◆

  Greer’s house is on a street that runs between two main roads. I’ve used it countless times as a cut-through. So have most people in this town, and just within the last year the city installed two speed bumps to slow down the through-traffic.

  Now, only residents are getting through, because each end of the street is blocked off with police checkpoints. I drive over to the side where people have gathered. Onlookers, but also TV news crews.

  I get out of my car and join them, blending in, seeing what I can see.

  Among the patrol cars parked in front of the house, there’s also a white van with the police insignia on the back doors. I’m here for less than a minute when I see a single-file line of investigators exit the house, each one holding a large paper bag, moving toward the van like ants marching to the hill.

  “That’s my house,” a voice next to me says.

  I look over at him. An elderly man, standing there with his mouth open a little, breathing through it, holding a leash while a little white dog sits dutifully by his side.

  “You live there?” I ask.

  He turns to look at me. “Aw, no. I own it, though. I rent it out. I live two streets over.”

  “How long has he lived there?”

  The old guy doesn’t hesitate: “Three years. Never a problem. Never a peep out of him. No complaints from neighbors. Nothing.”

  “Did he live there alone?”

  The man shakes his head. “Girlfriend. And a kid, too.”

  “They have a kid?”

  “He doesn’t,” another voice says behind me and when I look, there’s a woman about the same age as the man I’ve been talking with. “The kid is hers.”

  I notice just about everyone standing around here is older. It makes sense. This is an old neighborhood, with old houses. People have lived here for decades. Some of the houses have sold on other
streets in this neighborhood, only to be torn down, with brand new and much bigger houses built in their place. This street, though, is one of the holdouts—people are waiting for the biggest offer they can get, while also wondering if they do sell, where do they go at this point in their lives? And now they live on the street where a serial killer lived.

  “Did you ever speak with them? With him?” I ask.

  The woman says, “Only in passing. You know, in the driveway. Hello. That kind of thing. Or at the mailbox. Always the girlfriend, though. Her name’s Wendy. She works at a salon downtown. I used to go there. And he works at a gym.”

  I’d been looking at the house as she was speaking, but when she says he works at a gym, I turn to her. “Where?”

  “A gym, but I don’t know what he does there.”

  I feel a surge of adrenaline now and my stomach clenches. “Do you know which one?”

  “You know Lott’s Gym?”

  I nod, trying to regain my focus. “I’m Kate Downey with the City Herald. Would you mind if I got your name for a quote?”

  She hesitates, then tells me she’s not sure she wants to be identified.

  “I get it. No problem. How old is the kid?”

  “Six? Maybe seven? Not a baby but not much older than that.”

  “Just unbelievable,” the other woman says.

  I want to get into that house, but it’s not going to happen. Not today, probably not for a long while. But it’s a rental. I take my phone out of my bag, Google the address, and up come all the listings for the house, complete with pictures.

  I move to the other side of the street, in the shade, so I can see the screen better. I tap the first picture and begin to scroll through. This is the inside of the house. The house where he lived. The house where he went about his normal life, while secretly planning his next attack. The house where he returned after each attack.

  A picture of the kitchen. This is where they made dinner and ate together. I see him standing at the sink, washing dishes like a helpful boyfriend, looking out the window at the backyard, the fence that surrounds it, thinking about scaling someone else’s fence that night.