The Second Stranger

by J P Tompkins

  He’s a physical therapist at Lott’s Gym.

  The video lasts for forty-nine minutes, as he talks Hogle and Roark through each of the girls’ last hours alive.

  He talks about stalking, prowling, casing the houses. How he parked down the block or sometimes in a nearby park or shopping center, walking the rest of the way. How he slipped through the shadows and watched them. Usually for weeks, watching and planning as he got to know his unsuspecting target from just out of sight.

  He took up positions in the wooded areas, just beyond a fence. Just like I did when I tried to trace his footsteps at each scene.

  I know the sounds, the rustling of leaves, the crack of a stick, sounds that Greer knew too. I know how he felt when those sounds happened, out there in the dark, hoping no one heard.

  I know the views he had. I know what he saw when he watched Kristi’s house and where he had to have stood to see through the collection of potted plants along the railing of her porch to get a good view into her first-floor windows. I know where he probably took up position when watching Janelle and Payton, too.

  He talks about entering each house, how he got in, what he saw when he got inside. He knows the details of each house—wall and carpet colors, the furniture, everything—as if he were looking at photographs. He describes the layout of each place as if he were looking at blueprints.

  Hogle asks how he chose them.

  Greer shrugs. “Just picked one each time.”

  “Just like that?”

  Greer nods. “It wasn’t hard to get their name and address from their membership information. You can see who checks in, with their membership card. It’s all tied together, the gym and our physical therapy practice upstairs.” His chest swells as he takes a deep breath, then lets it out along with the words: “People don’t think about how easy it is, you know? I mean, how easy it is to find out about them. You can find out damn near anything you want about someone these days with the Internet. Get a name, you’re in. Don’t have a name, then follow them home and now you have an address and you can do a reverse search. Then there’s social media. People reveal all kinds of personal stuff there. And it’s not hard to keep tabs on people.”

  Hogle is watching Greer lay this all out. Roark is jotting down notes.

  Greer continues: “Some have their social media wide open. Others make their profiles private, but you know what the problem with that is? So many people are desperate for attention. They’re all about numbers. Numbers of likes, numbers of followers. So even if their account is private, a lot of times they’ll let you follow them, anyway.” He laughs. “And then you can really follow them.”

  Hogle and Roark remain silent, letting Greer go on.

  “Just like that,” Greer says. “That’s all there is to it.”

  There’s a little silence in the room, except for the faint sound of papers, as Hogle and Roark sift through documents and photos, probably deciding where to go next.

  Greer leans back. His chair creaks.

  Hogle reads the names of the victims aloud. He reads one name, then looks at Greer, who nods in acknowledgment.

  Hogle reads Erin’s name.

  “That last one.” Greer shakes his head. “I saw her on TV right here. She was roommates with that reporter who’s been writing about me.”

  A chill starts on my scalp, runs down the back of my head, down my neck, to my spine, as he references me. But that quickly gives way to something else: He had just been arrested and he had already been watching TV in jail?

  “Wasn’t me that did it,” Greer says. “But you know that.”

  Why is he denying killing Erin?

  “You saw the news report here,” Hogle says, “in the jail.”

  Something isn’t making sense. When would he have had time to see a TV in jail?

  “In the big room right before supper,” Greer says. “They had on some shit show, then the news comes on and there it is. Everyone here was talking about it. How the guy struck again. But she must have hurt him or something because it was different.”

  He looks away from them, at the wall.

  Hogle zeroes in. “She couldn’t have fought you off.”

  Greer looks back at him.

  “That’s how I knew it wasn’t you,” Hogle whispers, just barely loud enough for the video to pick it up. “I knew.”

  Why is Hogle going along with Greer’s denial?

  “The fucking losers locked up in here didn’t know that,” Greer says, and he starts a rant about how it was a copycat and the copycat wasn’t good at it and the copycat was weak and the copycat didn’t even “get to the good part” and then he stops and takes a breath.

  “That’s when you started talking,” Roark says.

  Greer says nothing more about this. Hogle and Roark say nothing more. It’s all been said: Greer talked because he couldn’t stand to hear people talking about him failing at what he did so well, when it wasn’t even him.

  But when did this all happen?

  When they’re wrapping up, Hogle asks him why he raped and killed the young women.

  Greer leans back, tilts his head way back, stares up at the ceiling for a minute, then another. Dragging it out, preparing to reveal the dark truth that led him to become a rapist and killer. Greer’s head tilts back down, then to his right, in the direction of the camera and he stares at it for a few seconds before looking back across the table at the two detectives.

  “Why? I’m no shrink,” he says. “Doesn’t really matter now, anyway, does it? Except for that fuckin’ traffic stop, we’re not sitting here right now. That’s a fact.”

  “It wasn’t so much the traffic stop,” Roark says. “That wouldn’t have you sitting here right now.” Roark speaks slowly, calmly, obviously wanting Greer to absorb every word he says, wanting to poke him: “The fact is, you put yourself in that seat. You’re so weak, you couldn’t stand having people think you botched an attack. That’s what got you here in this seat.”

  Greer looks angry now, every facial muscle tightening, as he gives Roark a stare like he’s about to lunge toward him.

  “Your arrogance negated your cleverness,” Roark says, and this time he adds a little laugh and shakes his head.

  “I wanted to get caught,” Greer says. He starts to say something, but he stops before the first word is complete, whatever it was. He drops his chin. I can’t see his face, but it’s clear that he’s gasping. He’s crying.

  Hogle and Roark do nothing. They don’t move. They don’t say anything. I look at them on the screen and I imagine at that moment they were thinking exactly what I’m thinking right now: this is all an act.

  This goes on for two or three minutes and Hogle finally says: “Why’d you do it, Nathan?” He’s using Greer’s first name, trying to make it personal, easy-going, trying for anything.

  Nathan Greer looks up, his face blank, like he’s lost, incapable of knowing the real why, indifferent about the real why. He offers no explanation—no abuse as a child, no addiction to violent pornography, no absent father, no overbearing mother. Nothing like I read in all those true crime books.

  There’s something there, though. Something that started all of this. Maybe it will matter when he has a lawyer. It won’t matter in terms of his guilt, but it may play into his sentencing. But for now, Hogle and Roark understand they’re not getting an answer to that question. They gather their things and exit the room.

  The video continues, Greer sitting at the table, hands cuffed, looking straight ahead. I continue watching this scene—cinder block walls, gray carpet, a table with five chairs around it and nothing else, just this sparse room with a rapist serial killer in it.

  This is the guy behind it all. The guy I tried to picture for months. What would he look like? What would he sound like?

  I wasn’t expecting a mastermind with a twisted worldview and elaborate methods for carrying out his crimes. With each new victim and very little to go on, many people, some in my profession, built him up to be
a brilliant criminal. Something out of the movies.

  What happened to Amanda fifteen years ago and all the true-crime books I read afterwards prepared me for something like this. Guys like Greer exist in every town. The regular guy, working guy, a guy who blends in with the masses, nothing special about him.

  Other than the fact that there, just behind that façade, exists something dangerous, like a wolf just deep enough along the edge of the woods that if you look hard enough you might see it, but you don’t look. The wolf is lurking, able to strike at any time.

  Finally, after more than ten minutes, the deputy enters the room and leads Greer out.

  I wanted more. I wanted them to zero in on why he was denying killing Erin. None of this makes sense.

  I close my laptop and rub a hand across my face. I notice my breathing has been shallow while I was watching the video. It’s returning to normal now, as I take a few slow, deep breaths.

  I spent almost a full year of my life on this story. There are newborn babies who were conceived after I started this. New lives entering the world as others exit. Replacements for the dead.

  A year. And now the mystery is solved, the big question—Who?—finally answered.

  I could sit here all day trying to accept this, trying to make sense of this feeling. Surreal is an overused word, but this is truly it.

  I need something real. I need to do something.

  Nathan Greer has no social media accounts that I can find, but his girlfriend does, and she has them all set to public. I see pictures of her, Greer and the child. Happy pictures. Pictures of birthdays, holidays, pictures of the two of them together with their dog. They’re an average couple. Nothing remarkable about them. You could live next door to them for years, with a major crime spree going on in town, and you’d never suspect that there were just a few walls and a patch of grass separating you from the perpetrator.

  Wendy, Greer’s girlfriend, doesn’t have many updates on her Facebook page. The last one is a repost of something, a meme about motherhood that I can’t relate to. I go back to her photos page and the site returns an error message, telling me the profile is not available. I go back, same message. I click back again, same result. When I type her name into the search bar, it no longer shows her profile. She must have just deleted it as I was looking at it. Probably a good thing, for her sake.

  I watch the coverage of the arrest of Nathan Greer. Local news first, with quotes from people who are now willing to go on camera. And there’s Hogle, grandstanding, even mentioning twice that the gym was “on our radar.”

  He’s right. It was on their radar. But they virtually ignored it.

  Then I catch some national cable news, where each show for the next couple of hours covers the same information over and over, with the same guests—lawyers, psychologists, former FBI profilers—offering the same observations and opinions.

  And then my phone rings. It’s Cole. I’m expecting him to call about Greer and he does, but he starts with this: “I’ve got some bad news…”

  Chapter 33

  “Greer was booked two days before Erin was killed,” Cole tells me.

  I feel the blood draining from my face, that cold, tingling feeling when you get bad news.

  “He’s been in jail since that night,” he says. “When he got stopped—it was for a brake light, by the way—the officer thought he was acting strangely, so he asked him to step out of the car. That’s when Greer probably thought he was caught, so he tried to run, then they fought. He was being held on a fifty thousand dollar bond. He’s damn near broke, so he wasn’t going anywhere.”

  I sit here, silent. Just looking out through the window, but not really seeing anything.

  Two days before Erin was killed. I can’t stop thinking it, over and over. Two days. Caught and in jail two days before Erin was killed. This explains why Hogle accepted his denial about killing Erin.

  “Preliminary DNA tests show he’s a match with all the other attacks. And they found freezer bags with the victims’ hair in them with his fishing gear in his garage. I’m trying to get everything I can,” Cole says.

  I say nothing.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. I just…I need to think.”

  Cole says he has another call coming in and then he’s gone.

  I call Neil and tell him what I’ve just learned from my source.

  “Goddamn,” he says, and I know it’s genuine surprise I’m hearing because Neil is rarely surprised by anything. “We need to get this story up quickly. How fast can you get it to me?”

  When we hang up, I write the article. It’s short, not only because Neil wants it quickly, but because it takes all I have to focus, to not let the shock distract me, and I can only do it for so long. I send the article to him, texting to let him know it’s there, and then I lie down on the couch, eyes to the ceiling. Minutes pass. How many, I don’t know. I’m just staring, thinking, trying to process all of this. I know if I don’t move I could stay here for hours and I have to keep moving, so I sit up.

  I can’t resist turning on the TV to see what they’re saying. Erin’s murder receives barely any mention.

  What was once believed to be another victim…

  She isn’t part of the story anymore. She’ll be forgotten by national news and shelved by local news until there’s further development.

  And that further development will be how the attention is turning to Paul. Because that’s what always happens. It’s always the boyfriend, always the husband. In this case, the fiancée.

  Paul. Why haven’t I heard from him yet today? It’s the first time I’ve thought about him and it strikes me as strange that he hasn’t called to find out what I might know. I pick up my phone to make sure there are no missed calls or texts. There’s nothing from him. Whatever the reason for his silence, I’m grateful for it. I have enough to deal with, enough to sort out.

  After months of immersing myself in this string of murders, it’s as if my brain is hard-wired to view everything through the lens of this case. The news shows pictures of Greer, grainy still photos taken from the interrogation video, and I recall pictures from the crime scenes, the autopsies, and old photos of the girls he’d killed.

  None of this seems real. At certain points, as I watch the coverage on TV, I find myself not blinking, wide-eyed, not even hearing the words on the screen. Just watching and noting how this feels like I’m watching from a distance, then feeling like it’s not real at all, that any moment I’m going to gasp and wake up and realize I’ve been asleep and all of this is a dream.

  But it’s not. It’s real. All of it. This is over.

  Then I flash back to seeing Erin’s body being loaded into the coroner’s van. I have to remind myself that none of this is connected and it isn’t all over yet.

  So I turn off the TV and go do what I’ve been thinking about for the last hour.

  ◆◆◆

  The closet door is closed. I open it and turn on the light, taking a moment before stepping inside.

  I look at the boxes lined up against the walls. Then at the shelves, each belonging to one of the victims. And finally, I look at the map on the wall to my left and the photographs on the wall to my right.

  I remember thinking, when I put all of this stuff in here, that it was something that had to be hidden. That’s why I moved it out of the living room, out of Erin’s sight. I recall thinking if anyone saw this, they’d assume I was crazy. Which is exactly what Hogle implied after Erin was murdered and investigators were going in and out and throughout my house, the activity resembling an overly productive anthill.

  Now I think of Hogle and Roark, here in my bedroom, here in my closet.

  All of this means nothing now. These were once clues to be sifted through with the outlandish idea that it all would, at some point, somehow, lead me to the killer.

  I reach for the map, slip my fingers under the edge and pull. It tears down the middle and I grab each piece, pulling
harder, tossing the shreds of paper onto the floor.

  I turn to the wall with the pictures—the crime scenes, the victims when they were alive and then dead, photos of the streets where each of the murders happened. I yank each one off the wall and they join the remains of the map on the floor.

  I clear each shelf with the sweep of a hand. All of this stuff was so orderly, laid out for easy access. Now it’s all mixed together, no order or reason to it, in piles on the floor.

  I stop and lean against the wall. I did all of this so fast I need to catch my breath. I suck in gulps of air as I slide down to a sitting position and look at the mess.

  After a few minutes, I get myself together. Getting a garbage bag from the kitchen, I pick up the mess from the closet floor, then take the bag outside to the trashcan, followed by each of the boxes, then roll the can out to the sidewalk. Garbage pickup is tomorrow. Soon, all of this will be in a landfill, soggy and rancid, baking in the hot sun, flies buzzing around it.

  “I’m so glad they caught him.”

  I stop, startled, and turn toward the voice. It came from my right. I see my neighbor, Roger Wilkes, just on the other side of the hedge that separates our driveway. My heart hammers in my chest.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” he says.

  “It’s okay,” I say, my voice thin from the dry mouth and throat that happened so fast after being surprised.

  The adrenaline rush wears off quickly, too, leaving my body feeling warm but with an odd chill at the same time.

  Roger is standing next to his car, holding a bag. He closes the trunk. It sounds like he slams it, but he doesn’t, it’s just louder this time of night with the neighborhood so quiet.

  “You doing okay?” he asks.

  I can barely see him as he takes a step back from the car. There’s a streetlight behind him now and he’s just a silhouette.

  “I am. Thanks.”

  I’m just glad we aren’t having this discussion just before dawn on his patio like last time.