The Second Stranger

by J P Tompkins

  “Kind of goes with the territory, doesn’t it?” Roark asks, and there’s no shortage of sarcasm in his voice.

  I look over at Hogle now, right next to me as we watch the video and he rolls his eyes. He points back to the screen, urging me to see what comes next.

  I quickly look back to the video again and see Dr. Benson there, not acknowledging Roark’s words.

  “It never happened,” he says. “She said what we had was more than a doctor-patient relationship. She claimed we were in love. It’s called transference, when the patient transfers emotions to a therapist. In her case, when she was ten years old, her father had an affair and left her mother. She came to me seeking help for anxiety and the more we dug into her past, especially her childhood, we discovered she had a lot of unresolved anger toward her father. But she wouldn’t admit it. So she got angry with me for, as she put it, ‘accusing’ her of something that wasn’t true. That’s when she began to turn on me. I never thought it would go that far, but that’s what she did—threatened to ruin me.”

  “And you told your wife,” Roark says.

  Dr. Benson nods. “I explained it all to her. She said she believed me, but she wasn’t the same for weeks after we had that talk. She had her doubts. I never knew this about Elisabeth, she never shared this with me, but the same thing that happened to that patient of mine happened to her. Sort of the same thing, anyway. Her mother had an affair.”

  “So it wasn’t that she didn’t trust you,” Hogle says, “she didn’t trust other women around you.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How did she find out Erin was pregnant and you were the father?” Hogle asks him.

  Dr. Benson goes on to explain how Elisabeth confessed to watching the house, learning Erin’s routine, even watching my pattern of coming and going.

  “She saw me to go the house. And after that, she focused on Erin. She followed her. Found out where she worked. She went to the restaurant where Erin waited tables. Even changed her look a little, she told me, because Erin could have recognized her from the pictures in my office.” Dr. Benson pauses, shaking his head, as if it’s just now settling in how bizarre all of this is. “She overheard Erin telling one of the other employees that she was pregnant, and Elisabeth figured it was mine. Simple as that.”

  “So the night she killed Erin…” Hogle says, and he lets the prompt hang there until Dr. Benson explains what Elisabeth did that night.

  She waited until he was out of town to do it, to go into my house and kill her. She knew the trip was coming up, knew he would be staying overnight in Atlanta. She didn’t need him to be out of town in order to do it; she waited so if the cops discovered the relationship, he would have an alibi. She didn’t want him blamed for it. She just wanted the woman, and the baby, gone for good.

  “And she told you all of this, exactly as you just told us?”

  “All of it,” Dr. Benson says.

  “Why didn’t you come to us immediately?” Detective Hogle asks him.

  A long moment passes with Dr. Benson silent, staring straight ahead.

  “Doctor?” Hogle urges.

  He pauses here and the detectives let him choke back his tears. He starts to shake his head, but it must hurt, because he winces and lifts his hand as if he’s going to touch the side of his head but he stops.

  I look away from the video, my eyes meeting Hogle’s. He says nothing, just nods toward the screen, urging me to keep watching.

  “It’s what I had to do,” he says, his voice a mere whisper now.

  “Why’s that?” Roark says.

  Dr. Benson’s head falls, his chin almost to his chest, and he murmurs something.

  “We need you to speak up, Doctor,” Hogle tells him. “If you can.”

  Dr. Benson lifts his head. This is the first time he looks directly at the camera. It’s almost as if he’s looking at me. Right at me, like he’s done so many times in his office. Only now, I’m not the one on the spot, I’m not the one sitting there having someone poke and prod and looking for the end of a thread of an uncomfortable truth they can pull on. Dr. Benson is the one in that position now.

  He looks away from the camera. His eyes move back and forth between the two detectives, finally settling on one, and I’m not sure which of the two men it is. It feels like minutes stretch out as he does this, but it’s really only seconds, and then he finally speaks.

  “I would have lost everything. My whole life. My career.” And now he sounds angry. Maybe at the questioning, maybe at his wife, maybe at himself, maybe at all of it. “Once I made that decision, I realized I was an accomplice and it was too late to report it. I had already done things to cover it up.”

  “Such as?” Detective Hogle asks.

  “Kate Downey is a patient of mine.”

  My stomach sinks at the sound of my name coming from his mouth. I glance at Hogle, who is watching me for my reaction. I’m about to ask him to stop watching me, but my eyes are drawn back to the screen when I hear what Dr. Benson says next.

  “I lied to her. Tried to make her think she was right about her theory on the killer. Everyone was reading her work. She had such influence over public opinion on the case. It was…almost too easy.”

  My shock turns to anger and, because Hogle is standing right here, embarrassment. I recall all the conversations with Dr. Benson, how he urged me to stay the course, not give in to the prevailing theory that Erin had been killed by someone other than the killer I had been chasing for a year. And once that was impossible, once Nathan Greer was in custody and charged, it was Dr. Benson who turned my focus to Paul.

  I also now recall that I slipped up and revealed something to him after Erin was killed. I mentioned that the killer hadn’t cut her hair. No one outside of law enforcement, and me, knew about that. He looked surprised when I said it and I assumed then that it was because that was a detail he didn’t know, when it was really because he knew his wife wouldn’t have known that, either.

  There I sat, in his office, trusting him, believing he was there to help me, but all that was happening was him helping himself. Using me.

  And then it gets worse:

  “Those records I gave you,” Dr. Benson says to the detectives. “Erin’s records. The part about her being afraid of Paul, about him being violent with her…that was all false.”

  Hogle reaches for his phone. I hand it to him. He turns it toward him, touches the screen, and the video stops. “That’s really all there is. He fades out right after that. Starts to drift off. Pain meds, probably.”

  I say nothing. I’m just trying to collect my thoughts, make sense of this.

  “We confirmed Dr. Benson was in St. Louis for the conference and got back late the next afternoon.”

  I nod.

  “And, if you recall,” he says, “there were some hair strands stuck to the side of Erin’s bathtub. We collected all of them. We were able to match one with a sample from Elisabeth Benson’s brush.” Hogle lowers his voice: “I need your help.”

  Chapter 49

  “It could work,” Cole says. “People are going to read this or see it on TV and she’ll turn up sooner rather than later.”

  We’re on the phone and he’s just read the draft of the story I sent to Neil. The story detailing everything I learned this afternoon. The story Hogle asked me to write because he thinks this is their best shot at finding Elisabeth Benson.

  We can ask every police department in the country to be on the lookout for her, Hogle said to me, but everyone will pay attention to this story if it comes from you.

  It has been three hours since Detective Hogle left, leaving me here with just memories of the images and sounds from Dr. Benson’s confession video. I sat on my couch for a good while, working it all over in my head. I finally decided I needed to get this all down, the whole story, and I wrote it up for the paper.

  Then I called Cole, who no longer is so sure Elisabeth Benson is dead.

  “This was someone I sat across from for mo
nths,” I say, “telling him everything, letting him talk me into taking a drug, which I’ve always hated, but I trusted him, so I did. And that’s what allowed his wife to do what she did.”

  It was one of the things I kept thinking about as I sat here in my house alone after Hogle left. There was no way Elisabeth Benson knew I was taking sleeping medication her husband prescribed for me. But she took the chance anyway. And what would she have done had I heard something? Among all the questions that remain for her, that’s the one I want answered the most.

  “And,” I go on, “in the end he was just another stranger. He was the second stranger.”

  Cole asks what I mean by that. It’s something I had never told him, something that had never come up in our conversations. It was also a major part of the last conversation I ever had with Erin.

  “It’s just something I came up with a long time ago. There are two kinds of strangers in the world. There are people you’ve never seen before or maybe you’ve seen them but you don’t know who they are, never interacted with them. That’s the first stranger. And then there are people you know—or think you know—but you really don’t, you never will because you never can really know anyone completely because we all hide the worst parts of ourselves from everyone else. That’s the second kind, the second stranger.”

  Cole is silent for a moment, then says: “That’s a pretty bleak way to look at the world.”

  ◆◆◆

  Three days later, Elisabeth Benson was caught in West Virginia.

  A couple of local cops were on a break at a truck stop when one of them noticed an SUV with an expired temporary tag. She had ditched the North Carolina license plate and taken the temporary tag off another car. It was that, combined with the make and model of the SUV, that made him suspicious.

  They waited until Elisabeth emerged from the diner and walked to her car. She didn’t try to flee when the officers approached her and she didn’t resist when they detained her, and told her she was being charged with the murder of Erin Thorpe.

  TV satellite trucks and reporters from all over the country are already setting up outside the courthouse, awaiting her arrival. I won’t be there.

  Neil has insisted that I take some time off.

  “Two weeks,” he said to me on the phone. “Go somewhere. Go see your parents. Go do anything you want to do. No bullshit this time.”

  So I’m leaving town today. Driving down to the beach, where I will see my parents. But not before a detour.

  ◆◆◆

  The signs begin about an hour out and count down the miles until I hit the town limits. I sit at the first stoplight, considering whether I really want to be here. There’s a gas station at this intersection, a strip mall just across the street. Plenty of places to turn around and head back to the highway. But when the light turns green, I hit the gas and continue with the plan.

  I drive past the house I grew up in. It looks smaller now, somehow. Maybe it’s just that the trees are bigger, fuller.

  Down the street, I coast by Amanda’s old house. It looks nothing like it did when we were kids. The driveway has been widened. The house is blue now, no longer the soft yellow I remember. They’ve added a porch to the house, spanning the entire front and wrapping around the left side, leading to the backyard.

  The front door opens. A little girl peeks out, looks at my car, looks away, then yells something. A Labrador comes running, and they both go inside. A little girl, a stranger in a strange car in front of her house, and she doesn’t even seem to think twice about it.

  I drive to the end of the street and stop, considering taking a left instead of a right. A left will take me out of the neighborhood the long way; a right will take me down the street where it happened. I take my foot off the brake.

  The car rolls forward a little, my hand turning the wheel slightly to the left. I hit the brake again, turn the wheel back to the right, and push on the gas.

  The sun is out, the sky a solid sheet of blue, not a cloud anywhere. And yet, this street, the street where Amanda was taken, still feels like it did that day.

  Like my own street, everything here is different now, changed—the houses updated and upgraded, there are more shady spots from aged trees. But I can still see it all as it was that rainy afternoon.

  I look around at the houses, a few people outside. I wonder how many of them know what happened here all those years ago, how many of them have stood where I stood that day, how many of them have stood right where Amanda was before he grabbed her and stole her life.

  I could sit here for hours, maybe all day, replaying the events in my mind. I tell myself it’s okay to take as much time as I need, but I know what I’m really doing. I’m avoiding the next stop, the one that is perhaps the most important. So I drive again, leaving this street for the last time.

  It doesn’t take long to reach my next destination. Less than twenty minutes. When we were kids, it was closer to ten. But with the city changing and growing as much as it has, with new streets and new traffic lights, the ride is longer now.

  I pull up to the little white building near the entrance. There are no cars here. There’s a sign on the door: At lunch. We will re-open at 1 p.m.

  It’s 12:10, and it looks like I’ve just missed them. It would be easier if they were here to tell me where to find Amanda’s gravesite, but I can probably find it before they get back.

  After about twenty minutes of walking through the cemetery, I find it. I find her.

  Something I had never known, never even thought about, was if investigators knew exactly which day Amanda had been killed.

  So as I look at her headstone now, I see her birthdate, and just a year for the date of her death. Not knowing which day was her last somehow makes it all worse. The loneliness, the isolation she must have felt along with the fear.

  This is what makes me drop to my knees and cry for the first time in as long as I can remember. It’s a flood of emotion. For Amanda, for Erin, for all the girls whose murders I’ve been focused on for the last year.

  I stay with Amanda for almost an hour. There are thoughts that make me laugh, some that make me cry a little more, all the memories I’ve been repressing for so many years. Years that Amanda didn’t have.

  “I’m sorry,” I say aloud, the words heard by no one, fading into the air.

  Epilogue

  I didn’t take off the two weeks Neil ordered me to take. I took three.

  I spent the first two weeks at my parents’ house at the beach. I was there when they returned from the cruise, but it wasn’t a surprise.

  When they were headed back, my mother checked the news. They had done as I asked and avoided it during their trip, but now that it was over, she figured it was okay to look. She called from the car. I told her where I was and that I’d fill them in when they got to their house.

  They were upset at first, insisting that I should have told them.

  “What if something had happened to you?” my mother said more than once.

  I didn’t have a good answer for it, so I didn’t attempt one.

  Erin’s parents called me during the second week, just to check up on me. I felt guilty throughout the entire conversation. They were the ones who had suffered the loss of their daughter. I should have been the one checking on them.

  They told me some teachers at the school where Erin worked had organized a memorial for her. They invited students to meet at a local park not far from the school, where Erin liked to run sometimes. The kids held candles as the school choir sang a couple of songs. Her mom emailed me some pictures of the memorial, along with a note about a fundraiser some kids set up to have a plaque made and displayed on the wall just outside the door to Erin’s old classroom.

  The third week off from work was spent back at my house, moving. I put the house on the market and rented a little condo while figuring out what I want to do next. Still no final decision, but I had to get out of the house, had to give myself a break, clear my mind of the entire
case, Erin, all of it.

  I’m back at work now, covering stories that aren’t anything like the one I reported on for the last year. How could they be? I’m grateful for the peace.

  Nathan Greer has all but disappeared from the news. Aside from some interviews with victims’ family members, there’s not much to report. His live-in girlfriend and the child went back to Indiana where she grew up. As to his motive, it’s still a mystery.

  The North Carolina Medical Board announced it was beginning proceedings to revoke Dr. Benson’s license, and the last I heard that process was fast-tracked because he didn’t intend to contest it.

  The cable channels all had “BREAKING NEWS” on the bottom of the screen when they talked about the case, even days later, when there was nothing breaking or new about it. Just a rehash of what anyone paying even a little attention would have known from the first day or so.

  I promised myself I would stop checking the TV, but I gave in about a week later and…nothing. No mention of it. Everyone had moved on to the next shiny object.

  Paul called about a week after Dr. Benson and his wife were charged. He called three times, actually, all in one day. The first two times, when I saw his name pop up on my phone’s screen, I let him go to voicemail. He didn’t leave a message either time. When he called the third time, about an hour after his last try, I answered.

  “I’m suing,” he announced.

  “Suing who?”

  He reminded me about that cable TV show that ran the allegations against him from various women. He said they defamed him and he was going to get a lawyer. “I’m gonna sue them, and the women too.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Defamation. Those were all lies, just women trying to get famous, get their faces on TV.”

  “So none of it was true?”

  He raised his voice: “Hell no, it wasn’t.”

  I sort of half-listened to him go on about how he was going to ruin their lives, get the host fired, take everyone for everything he could get, but my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about that night after I closed on my house, when Paul and I were alone at the restaurant waiting for Erin. His awkward attempt to get me talking about sex was all the convincing I needed—Paul had done those things the women accused him of. So when he finally wrapped up his rant, I just told him I need to go and ended the call.