The Forgotten Girls (Book #1 in The Suburban Murder Series)

by Alexa Steele

  Ryan just listened.

  “Look, I didn’t call so we could do a case overview together. There is something bothering me.” Bella sighed. Her second glass of wine had arrived and she sipped it slowly. They sat quietly for a couple of minutes until she spoke.

  “For the past forty-eight hours, I have been immersed in this woman’s world, a physically beautiful world, no doubt. But so lonely and empty, heart-wrenchingly devoid of real friends and real connection, even in her marriage.”

  She stopped for a moment, as if for effect.

  “Her girlfriends are horrors. I mean, I expected rich, shallow, sheltered—all that. But with the exception of only one, they are truly the most emotionally closed off, narcissistic women I have ever met. They have not shown one ounce of sadness or grief about her murder. It’s shocking. It just does not seem that any of them genuinely care that she’s gone, and I just can’t get past the why.”

  She sounded exasperated.

  “And then I meet this shrink—it’s pretty rare for me to have chills down my spine.”

  She shook her head and Ryan listened patiently.

  “It all got me thinking,” Bella continued. “I am looking for someone who is seeking attention, organized, angry, and knows his way around town. Someone who has no problem killing three people—a real psychopath, right? Other than the possibility of her husband, I haven’t come across any men in her life who fits that profile. But these women—I mean, what if there was something going on way different than anyone would expect? It’s girl world out there—an enclosed town where they all kind of exist trapped together, whether they like it or not, no men around to break it up. Nothing to focus on but how they look, how their homes look, and how well their kids perform. It’s a warped reality in a sense—a very female-driven hamlet of competition. A breeding ground for it, really. I mean, talk about having to watch your back. I guess what I want to know is, what if I’m looking at this all wrong? What if my killer is a woman?”

  Ryan smiled.

  So this was why she needed to speak with him so badly. Now he understood.

  “So you want a recap of what you learned in class?” he teased.

  “Luckily for me, I don’t use my knowledge of female psychopaths very often in sex crimes. Thank god for small favors.”

  They laughed.

  “Touché,” Ryan answered. “But she was raped, no?”

  “Yeah, with something, but there were no fluids at the scene. So I’m broadening my list of possibilities,” she said.

  “Hmmm.” Ryan looked intrigued. “A female psychopath we can cover. No problem with that. One perverse enough for a sexual attack? We would be talking about a very rare kind of bird…” He trailed off a minute. “That’s not the way they usually operate. Although there certainly are instances…” He sipped his martini and got a faraway look in his eyes. “Well, where should I begin?”

  “With anything you think would help me,” she said seriously.

  He took her request to heart and leaned back in his chair, thinking.

  “Psychopathy means suffering of the mind, as you know, though most psychopaths would argue there is anything remotely wrong with them at all. The DSM lists many antisocial personality disorders and the differences between them can be quite small. Borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, sociopath, and psychopath can sometimes seem indistinguishable and be used interchangeably. Diagnosing can feel more like an art than a science. But there are differences, as there are overlaps.”

  Bella took notes as Ryan continued. “One of the biggest differences found in studies is that psychopaths’ brains operate differently from others; the amygdala portion simply does not light up or react when presented with gruesome photos, frightening ideas, sad visuals, or loud sounds. They don’t process emotional material the way others do. They disassociate. They don’t feel a thing.”

  Ryan looked at Bella when he said this as though even he, after all these years, couldn’t get over it.

  “Psychopaths are not created equal, nor are they all violent. Actually, and disturbingly, many of the most successful CEOs, celebrities, and entrepreneurs have psychopathic qualities which, ironically, are the very qualities that make them so successful.”

  “Like what?” Bella asked.

  “A total lack of empathy; extraordinary ability to manipulate; an intense drive to get what they want. They have a total lack of guilt, fear, or remorse. They are incredibly charming and use this to control; they read others’ weaknesses and use that as leverage; they flatter and pretend with precision. These qualities come in handy on Wall Street, in politics, in business.”

  “And in the suburbs.”

  Ryan laughed.

  “Possibly. The higher up the ladder you go the more sociopaths you will find, claims Martha Stout from Harvard Medical School. I assigned her book in my class, The Sociopath Next Door. Did you read it?”

  He and Bella smiled at one another as he reached for his martini. She waited patiently for him to continue as she thought about what he said. He cleared his throat and went on.

  “A good way to think about it is when you deal with a psychopath you are really interacting with their ‘Mask of Sanity or Normalcy,’ as it has been called. They can keep relationships up for years if the circumstances support it. But most of their relationships sour and fail because people eventually do see through the mask to their real core: which is pure selfishness and, many times, evil.”

  “How can you tell if a person is narcissistic, unaware, or truly crazy?” Bella wanted to know.

  Ryan nodded.

  “It can be hard. Patterns of behavior emerge when psychopaths are incarcerated and studied; but, as far as your everyday person living out in the world, they look and act normal enough to blend in. Robert Hare famously claimed that he wished he had studied Wall Street as much as he studied his incarcerated killers.”

  Bella thought about for a moment.

  “So what am I looking for?”

  Ryan was quiet for a few seconds.

  “I should give you the Hare checklist, which is pretty standard operating procedure for how to smoke one out. FBI swears by it,” Ryan laughed. “It has twenty qualities to look for, but it doesn’t distinguish between male and female.”

  “I will take a look at it.”

  “As far as women in particular, one of the most common traits the females use is to gaslight those around them.”

  Bella raised her eyebrows. “I am familiar with that term..” she trailed off as though thinking of something.

  “Yeah you must be. So you know then that it is a term that refers to manipulating a situation so much that others begin to doubt their own perception, which is, of course, the goal,” Ryan elaborated. “Women will use whatever weakness in another they can find and twist it for leverage. They will look to socially isolate their prey, speak badly about him or her, lie and twist the truth to their advantage. They seem to crave social elevation with their peers more so than the men.”

  Bella stopped taking notes and just listened.

  “Don’t all women care what their peers think of them?”

  “Yes, but a normal, healthy woman won’t lie about what she thinks and feels, won’t pretend she is someone she is not, won’t manipulate situations constantly to ensure she gets what she wants. A psychopathic woman will. They are imitators,” he concluded.

  “What do you mean?” Bella asked.

  “They don’t feel emotions so they don’t know how they’re supposed to act when something emotional happens. They are completely disconnected from a real emotional life. There is a story about a famous scientist, Essi Viding, who showed a picture of a frightened face to a psychopath and asked him to identify the emotion. He stared at it blankly, only to reply: ‘I don’t know, but it’s the face of people right before I kill them.’”

  He paused before he went on.

  “So they watch others to learn how to act. If they see a mother comforting a chil
d when he cries, they will do the same; but, they wouldn’t have done that automatically and don’t really care that the kid is crying or whether he feels comfort. In an emotional situation with no playbook, they don’t have an innate feeling about what to say because they truly don’t feel sympathy or grief or heartache. You know they dream in black and white.”

  “They sound like aliens.” Bella shuddered.

  “In a way they are,” he answered. “They are in the physical form of a body—many are great looking and well put together—but inside there is nothing but a desire to win. The question is how well the person has learned to hide that truth.”

  Bella thought about this for a moment. It seemed to her an almost impossible feat to be able to look inside someone and see to their core.

  “Do they feel love?” she asked.

  “Love?” Ryan shook his head. “For them, love means getting what they want. Plain and simple. It is not about giving to another or caring how another feels or even recognizing how another feels. The psychopath will do for others, but only and always with his or her own selfish motives in mind, and the poor soul on the other end probably won’t have a clue what’s going on until it’s too late. They pretend like a pro, but their love is a one-sided affair.”

  Bella was fascinated.

  “Remember, psychopaths are deliberate: they know exactly what they are doing,” he continued. “They are not psychotic. They don’t hear voices. It is insanity of the most lethal kind because they do not feel remorse when they commit crime, and will do it over and over again. They cannot be cured.”

  “Why do some turn some violent?” Bella wanted to know.

  “The degree to which they are able to control their violent impulses and outbursts is the determinative factor in whether they will turn physically dangerous,” Ryan answered. “They see the world made up of predator and prey; some will deal with their prey outside the confines of violence, but others will feel the need to resort to it. Either way, they will rationalize their actions and excuse themselves from liability one hundred percent of the time. It will always be the fault of their victims. Even when they kill.”

  Bella considered his response.

  “Dr. Weber worked at Dunmore,” she said out of nowhere.

  “Really?” Ryan asked with surprise and interest. “Do you know what ward?”

  “No.”

  “Not during the years leading up to its closing?” he questioned.

  “I don’t know. Why?” she asked.

  “Do you know anything about its history?” Ryan asked her.

  “Not much,” she replied.

  “It was a brutal place. It became so inhumane toward its guests they finally shut it down,” he explained. “You know, I went to Dunmore on a few occasions to interview a woman I was studying during my graduate school days. Her name was Celeste McFadden. I will never forget her. She was the most forlorn human being I have ever met. She was one of my first case studies actually.”

  “What was she in for?”

  “She killed all four of her children. Drowned them in the bathtub at the same time. When her husband returned home they were lying one on top of the other, dead, and she was on the floor next to the tub reading them Mother Goose rhymes.”

  “Pretty chilling,” Bella responded.

  “Yeah. So was Dunmore.” Ryan looked concerned for a moment. “It was filled with women like her. And the shrinks who worked there were out of their tree as well. You’d have to be, to be able to stand it all.”

  “So there you go,” said Bella. “I am telling you, Weber is not your garden-variety doctor. She and my victim fought, she knew the murdered girls, she has access to Adderall, possibly cyanide. It’s not a far stretch. I’m going after a subpoena for her office records, although I might not get it. Wrestling with how to approach it. She’s steel—I need to know what to look for.”

  “It is hard to consider women as violent psychopaths. We tend to think of them as men.”

  “Why is that?” Bella asked.

  “There is a bias in the psychiatric world, and in our culture, that still views women through the traditional lens of caregiver and nurturer. The literature feels a need to explain away female violent behavior. It is simply too uncomfortable for many.”

  Bella thought about this.

  Ryan continued, “If it’s a woman who poisoned and sexually assaulted your victim you are looking for someone extremely agitated and angry. Something must have happened recently to trigger her. But it sounds like she has remained methodically in control, managing her image and her self. The sexual attack points to major skeletons in her closet sexually. Her intimate relationships would be a front.”

  He stopped, considered something, then spoke. “I’ll send you the Hare Checklist. And any other info I think will help,” Ryan added. “But if your instincts are pointing to a woman, trust them. They are always right.”

  He smiled.

  “Well, not always…” And he reached out to hold her hand. She gave it to him and he lifted it to his lips and kissed it.

  “I miss you,” he said quietly.

  “I miss you too,” she said sadly. She felt profound tiredness all of a sudden and wanted nothing more than to fall into his arms and stay there.

  “Placing the crests at the scene is an attempt to communicate. It’s brash. It’s letting you know not only of the connection between the three murders, but that he or she is out there and could strike again. There’s an element of excitement for the killer—an implicit challenge to find him. Or her. He or she is taunting, not overly concerned with being caught, may even want to be on some level. The question is why?”

  He posited this question, but Bella had nothing to say.

  “If you are right about her and she gets wise to it, there’s no telling what she might do,” he said quietly. “She would perceive you as an enormous threat. You working this alone?” he asked with concern in his voice.

  She paused, reluctant to mention Mack, but she never lied to Ryan. “Billy jacked me up with a guy. A has-been. Pulled him out of exile to keep me company. It’s ridiculous.”

  “I am glad you are not up there alone,” Ryan said.

  They stood, and she gave him a long, comfortable hug as he whispered in her ear the same parting refrain he always gave her: “Be careful, my Bella, Bella. Be careful.”

  CHAPTER 26

  She peered out behind her big black Chanel sunglasses and watched the two detectives as they stood at a respectful distance from the crowd at the cemetery. The big guy’s face barely hid his boredom as he baked in the sun, but his partner was another story—she canvassed the crowd, serious and intense. She hadn’t anticipated a woman working the case—certainly not one so good-looking—and it made her feel small. She didn’t like that feeling. Hadn’t felt that way in a long time.

  It was a scorcher —ninety-three degrees and only 11 a.m. The memorial service had started promptly at 9 o’clock and was standing room only. The turnout had been enormous, as she had suspected, but she was displeased to see how much of the crowd chose to follow the hearse to the cemetery. An unnecessary gesture, surely, especially in this heat.

  Now she stood there, mixed in with the massive crowd, perspiring. She looked back over at the pair from the Bronx—not what she had expected after watching Dennis and his bevy of soldiers regally bungle the double hanging. Twiddle dee doo and twiddle dee dum had botched it big time. More of a three-ring circus than an investigation, from what she heard from her friends in the know. She had assumed this investigation would be no different.

  How these two landed in Greenvale she did not know, but clearly they were the real deal. She felt she should be nervous but simply couldn’t muster that feeling. She had executed meticulously and her prints, literally and figuratively, were nowhere in sight. No, she wasn’t nervous. She was annoyed at their milling around her town.

  She screwed her lips into a sinister smile as she imagined what was on its way, the connection she had carved
between her bucolic little gem of a town and that terrifyingly dangerous warehouse for the criminally insane. She breathed deeply, closed her eyes, and enjoyed thoughts of the early days, in the dungeon, as memories flashed unsolicited through her mind.

  That’s what they called it: the dank, wet, dark group of rooms in the basement at Dunmore where screams filled the hallways and rooms. Crazy place to hold therapy sessions, one would think, but then, crazy was what Dunmore specialized in. Crazy was a shared experience for all, doctor and patient, white coat or jumpsuit. She thought about the dungeon lately, more and more. She found it soothed her.

  When she first arrived they assigned her mostly upstairs, in a room filled with light and a view of the grounds. Then it changed. For the next few years she was ordered to the floor below, to the cavernous, creepy, lonely lower floor. So it was that when love came her way, unexpected, unadulterated love, she grabbed on tightly. She had never been flattered, sung to, danced with, or treated with deference before. It felt good. And then, on the right day, at the right moment, in the right way, she confidently made a move. Afterwards, there was no turning back, for either of them.

  In the beginning it was easy. They hid in the darkened rooms off the long, low narrow hallways. They locked the door during sessions and spent their time in the windowless, airless room alone, together. Not like anyone was checking. It felt so good—real human contact, the only time of day she had any. It took her mind off the screeching all around her. She had wanted it and, on some deep, twisted level, needed it. There was leverage involved, though, and demands: later curfew, more TV privileges, extra meds, good progress reports. But it was well worth it.

  Looking back, it was naive to think the affair could go on forever, but she couldn’t let go. The deep, dark, twisted addiction had grown so fierce that, when rejection came her way—and it did—she used what had always worked: force. She knew no one was going to believe the word of a criminally insane woman. And she was right.