The Second Stranger

by J P Tompkins

  When he opens the front door, he’s surprised to see me.

  “Dr. Benson killed Erin,” I blurt out, before he can speak. “He killed her. He was the father.” And as soon as I say it, something feels wrong, something about this isn’t right, like it doesn’t quite fit. But I force that feeling aside.

  I push past him, into his house. I’m soaking wet.

  “Kate, Kate, slow down,” he says.

  I’m breathing heavily. Quick, short breaths in, bigger breaths out. I’m hyperventilating. A delayed reaction, held off until I was somewhere I felt safe. I can feel it begin to affect my vision and my balance. Cole steps toward me, guides me to the stairs and tells me to sit down.

  “Try to breathe slower,” he says, and it reminds me of Dr. Benson’s breathing instructions. He goes into the hall bathroom.

  It takes just a minute for me to regain control. Cole comes out of the bathroom holding a large white towel. He wraps it around my shoulders. “You’re soaked,” he says, and I feel myself shivering in the air conditioning.

  “Who’s Dr. Benson?” he asks, his eyes narrowed, a look of pure confusion on his face.

  “My doctor.” And I realize I’ve never told Cole I was seeing a therapist. Why would I? But now there’s no escaping it. “My therapist.”

  He doesn’t react to that revelation. He just kneels before me. “Tell me what happened.”

  I tell him everything, starting with what I found at Erin’s parents’ house, how I came back to town and went straight to Dr. Benson’s office, followed him home—

  “He lives here? In this neighborhood?” Cole asks.

  “Three minutes from here.”

  I recount the events in the garage, how Elisabeth was angry, out of control, grabbing the shovel and raising it above her head. I tell him I called 911 and that I was waiting for the cops to arrive before going back.

  “It happened so fast,” I say.

  “Was he alert?”

  I shake my head.

  “Bleeding?”

  “Everywhere,” I say. “He set this all up. This is why he gave me those sleeping pills, the ones that knocked me out. There was no way I would be waking up.” And then I remember something. “I had an appointment with him the day Erin was killed. I told him I hadn’t been taking it every night like he prescribed. He was adamant that I take it that night.”

  Cole stares back at me, shaking his head.

  My phone rings. It’s a local number, but one I don’t recognize. I show it to Cole.

  “Dispatch,” he says, and motions for me to answer it, so I do.

  ◆◆◆

  The woman—the same dispatcher I spoke to earlier—told me the police had arrived at the Benson house and needed to know my friend’s address so an officer could come by and get a statement. I had my phone on speaker, so Cole heard all of it, silently urging me to comply. But I didn’t. There was no way I was going to put him at risk of being outed as my source.

  So I lied and told her I hadn’t gone to my friend’s house, after all, and that I was still in my car, just a few blocks from the Benson’s.

  “Can you tell me the cross streets?” she asked.

  Cole took my phone, touched the mute button, and told me what to tell her.

  “Stay there, ma’am,” she said, “you should see one of our patrol cars in a few minutes.”

  “I’m going with you,” Cole says after the call ends.

  “For what?” I say, and I know immediately that my tone sounds ungrateful for his offer. “I appreciate it, but it’s not worth it. There’s nothing you can do there. Really.”

  He says nothing.

  “I’ll let you know when I’m done,” I say, and move toward the front door. He doesn’t stop me.

  I find the cross streets Cole told me to tell the dispatcher. There’s a cop car already there, an officer waiting in it. I pull up next to him and he rolls down his window, squinting as the rain pelts his face.

  “Sorry,” I say, “I didn’t feel comfortable waiting here so I went around the block a few times.”

  He tells me the scene is under control and asks me to follow him back to the Bensons.

  I park just behind him on the side of the road and wait. I watch the house, especially the garage, expecting to see Elisabeth Benson. Maybe cuffed and being led to a patrol car.

  The street is wet, blue and red flashes from emergency vehicles reflecting off the puddles. There’s an ambulance in the driveway, pulled up close to the garage. I have the urge to look away when I see movement. A stretcher. I’m expecting a body bag, zipped up, containing the dead body of Erin’s killer, but instead, I see an EMS tech holding an IV bag as they roll Dr. Benson to the back of the ambulance.

  I jump as a knock on the passenger’s side window startles me. I didn’t even see him get out of his car, as I was transfixed on the scene at the garage, but the officer I followed back here is getting into my car.

  “He’s alive?” I say.

  “Barely. Took a serious blow to the head, but they think he’ll make it.”

  “What about his wife?” I ask.

  He’s pulling out a notepad, clicking his pen. “That’s one of the things we’d like to find out. She’s not here.”

  Chapter 47

  Four days have passed since that afternoon and Elisabeth Benson is still missing. The search for her began, the theory being that she lost it after assaulting her husband, feared she may have killed him and went somewhere to do herself in. But there was no sign of her.

  Dr. Benson is in critical condition. Doctors induced a coma while they deal with the brain swelling.

  Neil wasn’t happy when I called and told him what had happened. He let me get the whole story out first, but then he let me have it about not being on vacation.

  “I want to write it,” I insisted.

  “You’re too involved now. You’ve been part of this story for a while, but it’s too much now.”

  We went back and forth on it, Neil repeatedly telling me it wasn’t up for debate, but continuing to debate me on it anyway. I argued there was no one better suited to write about it, and that I would minimize my own involvement as much as I could, without leaving out the important parts.

  “Plus, people have been reading my work on this case for a year now,” I added. “This is the ending. Don’t you think they’ll want to hear it from me?”

  There was, at best, only a little truth to that. People who were interested in the story were going to follow it to its conclusion no matter who had the byline. But I made it sound convincing enough and Neil gave in.

  The first story ran overnight, detailing the events at Dr. Benson’s house. The next day, my article was about the disappearance of his wife. Neither article mentioned any connection to Erin’s murder.

  But later that night, after many hours of writing and rewriting, I tied it all together in the third and final story in the twenty-four hours since it all happened.

  After several phone calls with Neil, and one with the paper’s attorney, we decided to refer to Dr. Benson as a “suspect in the murder of Erin Thorpe,” something Detectives Hogle and Roark would confirm later that evening on the eleven o’clock local news. They wouldn’t give me anything close to that, of course, but once it was out there, a “no comment” wasn’t good enough. Yet again, just as I had felt when I reached Cole’s house, something about Dr. Benson being Erin’s killer doesn’t sit right with me. And again, I push that feeling aside, chalking it up to fatigue and doubt and confusion and stress.

  There’s been lots of coverage in both the national and local media. I don’t recall how many requests I’ve turned down for interviews, my reason being the fact that I am a witness in an ongoing investigation, but the truth is that I just want to be left alone.

  ◆◆◆

  “I pictured you with the electrical cord,” I say one evening, as Cole leans back from the table, fortune cookie in hand.

  We’re sitting on his couch. The coffee table is litt
ered with Chinese takeout containers and a half dozen beer bottles.

  On the TV, there’s a movie, a comedy we tuned into about halfway through. I’ve barely been paying any attention to it. I’ve been thinking, the thoughts interrupted a few times by Cole’s laughter, and I’ve just smiled and gone along with it like I get the joke, whatever it was.

  Cole picks up the remote and mutes the TV. “You did what?”

  This was probably a mistake. I shouldn’t have said anything. But I did and it’s out there now and here we are, so I have to deal with it.

  “The day I came over here and wrote the story after Erin was killed, I saw that electrical cord in your office. And then when I was leaving, you were standing on the front porch...”

  “And?”

  “And I pictured you holding the cord.”

  He puts the TV remote down. “Jesus, you thought—“

  “No,” I say, cutting him off before he can say it out loud. “I didn’t think you did it.” I pause, waiting to see if he says something. He doesn’t. He just looks at me, waiting, I guess, for me to elaborate. “You weren’t the only one. It happened with Neil, too. And a neighbor.”

  Now his face takes on an expression of sympathy as he realizes that it all happened out of fear and paranoia, not distrust toward him. But still he says nothing. The only noise in the room is the crinkling of the plastic wrapper on the fortune cookie.

  “And Dr. Benson, too,” I say.

  “At least you were right about one of us.”

  That gets a smile and a little laugh out of me. A feeling of relief, too, as I realize Cole isn’t offended by what I did.

  “Maybe I was right…maybe I wasn’t.”

  He looks at me, curious. “How so?”

  I shake my head, look away from him, over to the TV where the movie continues to play, sound off. “Something’s not right about all of this.”

  Cole unwraps the fortune cookie, breaks it in half and crumples up the little slip of paper without reading it. “Like what?” he asks, then crunches the cookie.

  “If she’s not dead—”

  He stops me right there: “And we don’t know if she is or isn’t.”

  “Right. But if she’s not, if she’s out there, on the run, why doesn’t she come back? She has to be following the news. She has to know her husband isn’t dead. And if she knew all along that he killed Erin, what does she have to lose by coming back? She’d be the star witness. They’re not going to prosecute her for what she did to him in the garage, if she tells them everything. Don’t you think they’d give her some kind of immunity?”

  Cole thinks about it for a moment as he eats the rest of the cookie. He crumples the plastic in his hands, working it as he considers what I’ve just said.

  “She’s dead,” he says with the confidence of someone who has seen this type of thing before.

  I let it go. I don’t press the issue. I’m not even sure what my theory is, just that there’s something missing here. Something big. Something important. Something I’m not seeing, something Cole isn’t seeing and, presumably, something the cops aren’t seeing.

  But late the next morning, it all comes together when I’m out in my garage, cleaning just to be doing something.

  “May I come in?” a voice calls out.

  I turn to see who it is and find Detective Hogle standing on my driveway, a few feet from the garage.

  He tries a lame joke: “I come in peace.”

  Chapter 48

  Rather than let him enter my garage, I walk to the open door.

  Hogle looks worn down—light purplish bags under his bloodshot eyes, the rest of the skin on his face a little gray between the stubble.

  “I’ve got some news for you,” he says.

  I say nothing.

  This is what he tells me: Dr. Benson is out of his medically induced coma. Hogle and Roark spent hours in the waiting area when they got the news, waiting for word that it was okay to talk to Dr. Benson about what happened that afternoon. When the two detectives entered his room, the first thing he said was that he was exhausted from the lies, he was willing to tell it all and he didn’t want a lawyer.

  Hogle takes a long sip of water from a bottle he’s holding.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I ask him.

  “You don’t want the scoop?”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Look, Kate. I first want to apologize. This was a stressful case, a lot was going on, and—”

  I cut him off: “You came to my house and pretty much accused me of murdering Erin. Drop the apology act and get to the point.”

  “We need help,” he says. He takes another drink and swallows. “I need your help.”

  I study his face. There’s genuine contrition all over it. There’s also desperation in his eyes. Whatever he’s up to, this is no ploy.

  “Help with what?”

  He looks directly at me and raises his brows. “Finding Elisabeth Benson.” He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out his phone. “I brought this because I wanted you to see for yourself, not have to take my word for it.” He taps the screen, swipes a couple of times, then hands the phone to me. “Press play.”

  It’s a video of Dr. Benson in his hospital bed. This is the first time I’ve seen him since that afternoon in the garage. Eyes heavily lidded, he looks barely awake. Most of his head is wrapped in gauze, only his face and the edges of his hairline showing. He’s still on oxygen.

  He smacks his lips weakly and starts to reach for something. From off-screen, I hear a female voice: “I’ll get it.” The nurse appears and holds a cup close to his face, guiding the bent straw to his lips and he sips. A thin trickle of water runs down his chin, but she doesn’t wipe it. He probably doesn’t know it’s there, can’t feel it. “Press the button if you need me.” He nods once and she moves off-screen again. A few seconds later, I hear the door close.

  Hogle announces his name, Roark’s name, the date and time, and then introduces Dr. Benson. They start off by asking Dr. Benson some basic questions to establish his state of mind and he answers them in a thin, fragile voice, but the answers are correct and clear.

  The questioning begins and this is the story that emerges:

  Dr. Benson says the physical relationship with Erin began during their fifth session, but the intimate relationship began during the third session. At first, when he says this, I’m confused and I think he’s not making sense because he’s on painkillers. But he clarifies by telling the detectives that during the third session, there was an obvious connection. He says he could see it in Erin’s eyes and hear it in her tone of voice.

  When the fourth session ended, he walked her to the door and before he could open it, Erin hugged him. At the end of the fifth session, she did it again, but this time he wasn’t caught off guard, wasn’t frozen with surprise. He returned the hug, she looked up at him, and he kissed her.

  He says if it wasn’t his last appointment of the day, it might have never happened. But it was his last one of the day. So rather than open the door to let her out, he locked it, and they moved to the sofa.

  He had been to my house twice to see her. A risky and rather stupid move, he admitted.

  When Erin told him she was pregnant, he demanded to know if it could have been Paul’s and whether she’d been sleeping with anyone else. She assured him the baby was his.

  Hogle and Roark zero in on the murder, wanting every detail that Dr. Benson can give them.

  The night Erin was killed, he wasn’t even in town. He was in St. Louis, delivering a speech at a medical conference. He’d flown out that afternoon, just a couple of hours after I had seen him, and he had planned to return that night. Severe weather delayed his flight, and then delayed the next one, as several strong squall lines moved across the region. He wound up staying overnight, returning late the next afternoon.

  Dr. Benson is quiet, his eyes blinking rapidly as if he’s about to cry. But he chokes it back and continues.
<
br />   When he returned home that afternoon, he found Elisabeth in the master bath, sitting in a tub of cold water. He thought she was slipping again, back down the dark hole of depression she’d been so many times. But this was different. She wasn’t sad, she wasn’t despondent. She was in shock, catatonic, wide-awake but unresponsive.

  He pulled her from the tub, dried her off, and told her he was taking her to the ER. And that’s when she spoke. “I killed her.” That’s all she said. A full minute went by. “I killed her,” she said again, and then again, and kept saying it until he managed to calm her down.

  By then, he knew who she was talking about. The news of Erin’s death had already broken. They hadn’t released the name yet, but, Dr. Benson tells the detectives, when he saw the pictures from the crime scene, he knew it was my street, knew it was my house. He even thought I was the victim, that I was the next one to go.

  He had seen this at the airport, followed it on the radio on his drive home. He says he considered driving over to my house to find out what was going on, but didn’t want to place himself that close to the scene.

  So as Elisabeth blurted out her confession, he knew. Erin was dead and Elisabeth had killed her.

  And for the next several minutes—maybe five, maybe more, feels like a lot more—I watch and listen to Dr. Benson tell the detectives everything Elisabeth told him. How she became suspicious of his time away from home. How she followed him on several occasions and how one day, right in the middle of an otherwise normal weekday, she followed him to a house, my house, and that’s when she saw Erin.

  “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Dr. Benson tells the detectives. “I had no idea she thought I was being unfaithful again.”

  “Again?” Hogle asks.

  “It was a couple of years ago. The first one. I told Elisabeth about it.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  On the video, I see what appears to be a small smile forming on Dr. Benson’s face. Just a little curl on the left side of his mouth. And then he shakes his head. “The woman was crazy.”