The Stranger (14 page)

A
dam sat on the couch
across from Suzanne Hope. Her apartment had white walls and white furniture and yet somehow it still seemed dark and depressing. There were windows, but little natural light seeped in. There were no visible stains or dirt and yet the apartment felt grimy. The artwork, if that was what one would call it, would be considered too generic for a Motel 6.

“Is that how you found out about the fake pregnancy?” Suzanne Hope asked. “Did that guy visit you too?”

He sat there, still feeling that chill. Suzanne Hope had her hair piled high in what might have started as a bun. A tortoiseshell hair clip kept what was left in place. A ton of bracelets adorned her right wrist, gypsy style, and whenever she moved, they jingled. Her
eyes were big and wide and blinked a lot, the kind of eyes that had probably made her appear eager and animated in her youth, though now they looked as though she were awaiting a blow.

Adam leaned forward. “You said you didn’t pay the money.”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me what happened.”

Suzanne Hope stood. “Would you like some wine?”

“No.”

“I probably shouldn’t have any either.”

“What happened, Suzanne?”

She looked longingly toward the kitchen. Adam remembered another rule of interrogation, if not life: Alcohol lowers inhibitions. It makes people talk, and while scientists debate this, Adam was convinced that it was also a truth serum. Either way, if he accepted her hospitality, she would probably be more apt to talk.

“Maybe a small glass,” he said.

“White or red?”

“Either.”

She headed toward the kitchen with a bounce in her step that felt out of place in this depressing apartment. As she reached into the refrigerator, Suzanne said, “I work part-time as a cashier at Kohl’s. I like it. I get an employee discount, and the people there are nice.”

She took out two glasses and started to pour.

“So one day I go outside for my lunch break. They have these picnic tables in the back. I go out there and this guy in a baseball cap is waiting for me.”

Baseball cap. He swallowed. “What did he look like?”

“Young, white, skinny. Kind of a geek. I know this sounds odd, especially with what happened next, but he had a nice way about
him. Like he was my friend. He had this smile that made me relax a little.”

She poured the wine.

“So what happened?” Adam asked.

“Out of nowhere he just says, does your husband know? I stop and say, excuse me, something like that. And he says, does your husband know you faked your pregnancy?”

Suzanne picked up one of the glasses and took a deep sip. Adam stood and walked toward her. She handed him the glass and then made a motion to clink glasses. He did so.

“Go on,” Adam said.

“He asked me if my husband knew about my lie. I asked him who he was. He didn’t say. He just said something about the stranger who reveals truth, something like that. He says he has proof I’ve been lying about being pregnant. At first I figured that he had seen me at Bookends or Starbucks, you know, like Corinne. But I hadn’t seen him before and something in the way he spoke . . . it just didn’t add up to that.”

Suzanne Hope took another sip. He took one too. The wine tasted like fish ass.

“So the guy says that he wants five thousand dollars. He says if I pay it, he’ll go away and I’ll never see him again, though—and this was really odd—he said that I couldn’t lie again.”

“What did he mean?”

“That’s what he said. He said, here’s the deal. You pay me five thousand dollars and stop faking the pregnancy, and I’ll go away for good. But if I kept up the deception—that was the word he used,
deception
—he would tell my husband the truth. He also promised it was a one-time payment.”

“What did you say?”

“First, I asked him how I knew I could trust him. If I gave him the money, how did I know he wouldn’t ask for more?”

“How did he respond to that?”

“He gave me that smile again and said that’s not what we do, that’s not how we operate. And you know, this is weird, I believed him. Maybe it was the smile, maybe not, I don’t know. But I think he was being straight with me.”

“But you didn’t pay, did you?”

“How did you know? Oh, wait, I already told you. Funny. At first, I started thinking, how am I going to get that kind of money? And then, when I stopped and thought about it, I thought, wait, what did I do wrong here? I lied to a bunch of strangers. It’s not like I lied to Harold, right?”

Adam took another sip, taste be damned. “Right.”

“Maybe, I don’t know, maybe I was calling the guy’s bluff. Maybe I didn’t care. Or heck, maybe I wanted him to tell Harold. The truth will set you free, right? Maybe that’s what I wanted in the end. Harold would see this as a cry for help. He’d show me more attention.”

“But that wasn’t what happened,” Adam said.

“Not even close,” she said. “I don’t know when or how the guy told Harold. But he did. He gave Harold some web link so he could see all the stuff I ordered from that pregnancy-faking website. Harold went ballistic. I thought it would open his eyes to my pain, but really, it did the opposite. It played into all his insecurities. All that stuff about not being a real man—it all came roaring to a head. It’s complicated, you know. A man is supposed to spread his seed and if the seed isn’t any good, well, it goes right to his core. Stupid.”

She took another sip and looked him straight in the eye.

“I’m surprised,” Suzanne said.

“Surprised about what?”

“That Corinne made the same choice. I would have figured that she’d pay the money.”

“What makes you say that?”

Suzanne shrugged. “Because she loved you. Because she had so much to lose.”

C
ould it be
that simple?

Could it all be a blackmail scam that went south? The stranger had gone to Suzanne Hope and asked for money in exchange for silence. She refused to pay. The stranger then told her husband about her faking the pregnancy.

Was that what happened with Corinne and Adam?

On the one hand, it made perfect sense. The Hopes had been blackmailed. Why couldn’t it have happened to Corinne and him? You ask for money, you don’t get it, you tell. That’s how blackmail works. But as Adam started on his way back home, as he let the reality of what he just heard roll around in his head, something about it all didn’t feel right. He couldn’t put his finger on it. For
some reason, something about the obvious blackmail theory didn’t quite pass the smell test.

Corinne was driven and smart. She was a worrier and a planner. If the stranger had threatened her with blackmail and if she had made the decision not to pay up, Corinne, ever the perfect student, would have been prepared. Yet when Adam confronted her after the stranger’s visit, Corinne had been at a loss. She had no ready answer. She weakly tried to stall. There was no doubt in his mind that Corinne had been surprised.

Why? If she’d been blackmailed, wouldn’t she have at least suspected that the stranger would tell Adam?

She had also reacted by, what, running away? Did that make sense? She had run so quickly and haphazardly, barely contacting him and the school and, most surprising of all, just leaving the boys in the lurch.

That wasn’t Corinne.

Something else was going on here.

He did a mental rewind to the night at the American Legion Hall. He thought about the stranger. He thought about the young blond woman with him. He thought about how calm and concerned the stranger seemed. The stranger took no joy in telling Adam what Corinne had done—nothing about him indicated psycho or even socio—but then again, he hadn’t seemed businesslike, either.

For the hundredth time that day, Adam checked the phone-locator app, hoping that Corinne had charged her phone back up since her visit to Pittsburgh. He wondered again whether she had chosen to stay there or was just traveling through. He bet traveling through. He also bet that she had realized somewhere along the
way that one of the boys would put together that they could find her on the phone locator, so she had simply turned off the power or maybe found a way to turn off the app.

Okay, so if Corinne were traveling from Cedarfield through Pittsburgh, where would she be going?

He didn’t have a clue. But something was really,
really
wrong. Duh, thank you, Captain Obvious. Still, Corinne had told him to stay away. Shouldn’t he listen to that? Should he sit back and see how it all played out? Or was the threat too real to be idle?

Should he get help? Should he contact the police or just let it be?

Adam couldn’t say which side of the fence he would have fallen on—both options were fraught with problems—but suddenly, as he made the turn onto his street, that didn’t seem like an issue anymore. As he pulled up to his house, Adam noticed three men standing on the curb in front of his lawn. One was his neighbor, Cal Gottesman, who was pushing those glasses up his nose. The other two were Tripp Evans and Bob “Gaston” Baime.

What the . . . ?

For a moment, just a split second, Adam expected the worst: Something horrible had happened to Corinne. But no, these guys wouldn’t be the ones to tell him. Len Gilman, the town cop who also had two kids in the lax program, would be the one.

As if someone had heard his thoughts, a squad car with the words
CEDARFIELD POLICE DEPAR
TMENT
emblazoned across the sides turned onto the road and slid into the spot where the three men were standing. Len Gilman was in the driver’s seat.

Adam felt his heart drop.

He quickly put the car in park and swung the car door open.
Gilman was doing the same. When Adam stood, his knees almost gave way. On teetering legs, he sprinted toward where the four men had congregated, on the curb right in front of Adam’s house.

All four men looked at him solemnly.

“We need to talk,” Len Gilman said.

B
eachwood, Ohio,
Police Chief Johanna Griffin had never been to a homicide scene.

She had seen her share of dead bodies, of course. Plenty of people called the police when they found that a loved one had died of natural causes. Same with a drug overdose or a suicide, so, yeah, Johanna had been around death and then some. There’d also been a fair number of gory car crashes over the years. Two months ago, a semi cut across the divider line, and when it slammed into a Ford Fiesta, the car’s driver had been decapitated and his wife’s skull had been crushed like a Styrofoam cup.

Bloody and gross and even dead didn’t bother Johanna. But boy, this did.

Why? First off: murder. It was just hard to get around the word.
Murder
. Just say it out loud and feel the chill. Nothing compared, really. It was one thing to lose your life to illness or accident. But to have your life snatched away from you intentionally, to have a fellow human being actually decide to snuff out your very existence—that just offended on so many levels. It was an obscenity. It was something beyond a crime. It was playing God in the most ungodly way possible.

But even that, Johanna might have been able to live with.

Johanna tried to keep her breath steady, but she could feel it coming in hurried gulps. She stared down at the corpse. Heidi Dann stared back up out of unblinking eyes. There was a bullet hole in Heidi’s forehead. A second bullet—or maybe the first bullet, come to think of it—had blown away her kneecap. Heidi had bled out on the Oriental carpet she’d bought for a song from a guy named Ravi, who sold them out of a truck in front of the Whole Foods. Johanna had halfheartedly chased Ravi off more than once, but Ravi, who gave his customers great value and a ready smile, always came back.

The rookie working with her, a kid named Norbert Pendergast, was trying not to look too excited. He sidled up to Johanna and said, “The county guys are on their way. They’re going to take this away from us, aren’t they?”

They would, Johanna knew. Local cops in this area spent most of their days dealing with traffic violations and bicycle licenses and maybe a domestic dispute. Major crimes, like murder, were handled by the county police. So yep, in a few minutes, the big boys would come in, swinging their little dicks to make sure everyone knew they were in charge now. They would cast her aside, and not to sound overly melodramatic, but this was her town. Johanna had
grown up here. She knew the lay of the land. And she knew the people. She knew, for example, that Heidi loved to dance and played a great game of bridge and had a naughty, contagious laugh. She knew that Heidi enjoyed experimenting with weird-color nail polish, that her favorite TV shows of all time were
The
Mary Tyler Moore
and
Breaking Bad
(yep, that was Heidi), and that she had bought the Oriental rug on which she had bled out from Ravi in front of the Whole Foods for $400.

“Norbert?”

“Yeah?”

“Where’s Marty?” Johanna asked.

“Who?”

“The husband.”

Norbert pointed behind him. “He’s in the kitchen.”

Johanna hoisted up her pants—no matter how hard she tried, the pants waist on the police uniform never quite fit right—and started toward the kitchen. Marty’s pale face tilted up when she entered as though pulled on a string. His eyes were shattered marbles.

“Johanna?”

The voice was hollow and ghostlike.

“I’m so sorry, Marty.”

“I don’t understand. . . .”

“Let’s take it a step at a time.” Johanna pulled out the kitchen chair across from him—yes, that had been Heidi’s chair—and sat down. “I need to ask you some questions, Marty. That okay with you?”

The county swinging dicks would spend a long time looking at Marty as the perp. He hadn’t done it. Johanna knew that, but
there’d be no point in trying to explain, because the truth was, she knew because, well, she knew. The county dicks would laugh that off and talk about the percentage of murders like this being committed by the husband. Fine with her. And who knew? Maybe they were right (they weren’t), but either way, the county dicks could go in that direction. She’d try others.

Marty nodded numbly. “Yeah, okay.”

“So you just got home, right?”

“Yeah. I was at a convention in Columbus.”

No reason to ask for confirmation. The county dicks could chase that down. “So what happened?”

“I parked in the driveway.” His voice was flat and very far away somehow, beyond detached. “I opened the door with my key. I called out to Heidi—I knew she was home because her car was there. I walked into the den and . . .” Marty’s face twisted into something barely human and then collapsed into something all too human.

Normally, Johanna would give a grieving spouse time to recover, but the county dicks would be here soon. “Marty?”

He tried to regain his composure.

“Is anything missing?”

“What?”

“Like in a robbery.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t see anything missing. But I didn’t really look.”

A robbery, she knew, was unlikely. The contents of the house didn’t have a lot of value, for one thing. For another, Heidi’s engagement ring, which Johanna knew had been her grandmother’s and was the most expensive thing she owned, was still on her finger. A thief would have taken that for certain.

“Marty?”

“Yeah?”

“Who’s the first person to pop into your head?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who might have done this?”

Marty stopped and thought about it. Then his face twisted up again. “You know my Heidi, Johanna.”

Know. Still using the present tense.

“She doesn’t have an enemy in the world.”

Johanna took out her notepad. She opened it to an empty page and stared at it and hoped that no one would see her eyes well up. “Think, Marty.”

“I am.” He let out a moan. “Oh my God, I have to tell Kimberly and the boys. How am I going to tell them?”

“I can help with that, if you’d like.”

Marty leapt on that like onto a lifeboat. “Would you?” He was a nice guy, Johanna thought, but no way had he ever been good enough for someone like Heidi. Heidi was special. Heidi was the kind of person who always made everyone around her feel special. Simply put, Heidi was magic.

“The kids adore you, you know. So did Heidi. She’d want you to be the one.”

Johanna kept her eyes on the blank page. “Has anything happened lately?”

“What? You mean, anything like this?”

“I mean, anything like anything. Have you gotten any frightening calls? Did Heidi get in an argument with someone at Macy’s? Did someone cut her off in traffic on 271? Did she give someone the finger when they cut the line at Jack’s? Anything.”

He slowly shook his head.

“Come on, Marty. Think.”

“Nothing,” he said. He looked up at her, his face lined with anguish. “I got nothing.”

“What’s going on here?”

The authoritative voice came from behind her, and Johanna knew that her time was up. She stood and faced two county dicks. She introduced herself. They eyed her as though she might steal silverware, and then they told her that they would take over now.

And so they would. Johanna would let them. They had experience at this, and Heidi deserved the best. Johanna headed out, content to let the homicide detectives do their thing.

But she’d be damned if that meant she wasn’t going to do her thing too.