Identity
Page 17
“You must have an opinion.” He pointed to the binders on the coffee table. “You can’t have put all that together and not have an opinion.”
“My opinion? The police have considered a lot of scenarios,” Susan said, “and I can find fault with all of them.”
“So do that for me,” Brian said.
“OK,” Susan said. “Start with the I-10 Killer: What was a serial killer doing out in that weather? Random crime actually goes down during natural disasters. And it just doesn’t feel right – it makes more sense for it to be linked to you and Missy and Cliff.”
“Did they ever find any of those women?” Brian closed his eyes, trying to remember their names. “Sabrina from Fort Stockton, and… who were the other two?”
“Sabrina Martz and Delia Fontenot have never turned up,” Susan said. “The other case, from Port Arthur, wasn’t related. It turned out to be the married boyfriend. He buried her on some land his family owned.”
Even though Brian knew almost nothing about the woman from Port Arthur, this news saddened him. He tried to imagine what the people who loved her felt when she went from “missing” to “murdered.” Were they crushed? Or was even the worst possible news better than no news at all?
“So,” Susan said, commanding his attention again. “We’ve got the I-10 scenario.” She held up one finger. “We’ve got Moreno.” She held up another finger. “When did this guy – who strikes me as someone in over his head and panicking, by the way – find time to track down Sharlah while on duty in the middle of a hurricane? Or am I supposed to believe he just ran into her? What are the odds?”
She held up a third finger. “I could make a pretty good case it was somebody else altogether, some suspect they haven’t come up with yet.”
Brian waited, but Susan seemed to have finished her recitation.
“She could be alive, couldn’t she?”
“Where could she go without her car, Brian?”
“She could have taken the bus, or…”
“Zuk followed up with Greyhound,” she said. “They suspended service because of the storm. The timeline doesn’t work – she would have missed the last bus. And even if she’d caught that bus, don’t you think she would have called?”
“She was really mad at me that day,” Brian said. “Maybe she decided she didn’t love me and so she just left.”
“I listened to the recording of your last conversation at the jail, Brian.” She pointed to the binders. “The transcript is there. She started out mad, but she wasn’t at the end. One of the last things she says is that she doesn’t want to leave you.”
“But...” Brian began.
But what? He’d asked Susan for her opinion, and she’d given it to him. And yet he waited, willing her to say something that would feed his hope, no matter how slim it was.
Susan usually radiated a restless energy, but suddenly she seemed very still to Brian.
She looked out the window for a long time and took a deep breath. “In my experience, when people go missing and never get in touch with their loved ones…”
She met Brian’s eyes. “In my experience, those people are dead.”
PART THREE
ELIZABETH
NINE
Elizabeth Ellsworth hated to fly.
And yet here she was, early on a September morning, trundling her carry-on and laptop bag through the Tallahassee airport, her boarding pass and driver’s license clutched in her free hand.
Elizabeth was traveling to a conference in San Diego, filling in at the last minute for a co-worker whose father had died. As soon as she heard about the death, Elizabeth knew she would be asked to make the trip. She knew, too, that she would not be able to refuse. It was an important conference; grant money was at stake.
She had stayed up late the night before, obsessively reading websites so she would know exactly what to expect at the airport. Elizabeth had flown only a handful of times, and she had not flown at all since Sept. 11, 2001.
Her outfit had been chosen with special care. She wore a black pantsuit and black shoes, low-heeled but still fashionable – the official uniform of professional women of a certain age. The lavender of her blouse played off her blue eyes and blonde hair, which she wore shoulder length and simply styled. Her earrings were small silver hoops, unlikely to set off the metal detector. She wore no other jewelry – no watch, no bracelets, no rings. She had skipped a belt and had decided, after much deliberation, to forgo an underwire bra.
She had purged her makeup bag of anything that might cause alarm, even the round-tipped nail scissors that everyone online agreed were permissible.
Elizabeth had arrived early at the airport, her boarding pass already printed, to give herself plenty of time to clear security. Rushing sometimes caused her face to flush, and Elizabeth wanted to project an image of serene calm, no matter how hard her heart was hammering in her chest.
Because she was filling in for a colleague, her flight had been booked in the last 24 hours. Elizabeth knew passengers ticketed at the last minute tended to raise red flags.
Elizabeth worked very hard not to raise red flags.
To casual observers, to airport security screeners, even to co-workers who saw her every day, there was nothing particularly unusual about Elizabeth Ellsworth.
She was 39 years old and in her tenth year as a librarian at the university. She had come to Tallahassee from a small college library in Tennessee, her first job out of grad school.
She’d lived in the same apartment for a decade, a one-bedroom in a 12-unit garden complex favored by retirees with modest pensions and entry-level employees of the state government. She could afford something better on her salary, and had anyone ever asked, she was prepared to say that she loved the location and hated moving.
She drove a 10-year-old Honda, purchased used in a cash transaction. Her driving record was clean.
She had one credit card, which she used sparingly and paid off each month. Her credit rating was excellent, in part because she had no debts.
She lived frugally, bringing her lunch to work every day. She ate at her desk, working the New York Times crossword between bites.
Elizabeth’s colleagues liked her well enough. She was enthusiastic about her work and generous with her time and expertise. She had an aura of reserve that they found a bit puzzling, though. She never socialized outside the office. If asked about her weekend or vacation, she’d say where she’d gone and what she’d done, but there never seemed to be any people in Elizabeth’s stories.
Her boss, Naomi Tate, had seen Elizabeth’s résumé and knew that she had a GED rather than a high school diploma. From this, and from Elizabeth’s vagueness about her family, Naomi surmised that Elizabeth came from a hardscrabble background and yet had managed to propel herself to a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s.
Naomi admired this presumed triumph over adversity. That, combined with Elizabeth’s excellent work and willingness to take on unpopular tasks, made Naomi more forgiving of Elizabeth’s social deficits.
Bronwyn Rubio, whose desk was nearest Elizabeth’s and who was secretly writing a novel set in a university library, had her own theories. She observed Elizabeth’s frugality and evasiveness and concluded that Elizabeth was hiding a gambling addiction, or a heroin habit, or a lesbian lover who liked to be kept in high style.
In truth, Elizabeth Ellsworth’s co-workers knew very little about her.
They didn’t even know her real name.
As a drenched 19-year-old standing in a convenience store parking lot, Sharlah Webb had only dimly perceived the law of unintended consequences.
Elizabeth Ellsworth understood the concept all too well. It had ruled her life for 20 years.
She could not vote or apply for a mortgage without committing a federal crime. She cringed every time she was asked to show ID. She read newspaper stories about identity theft and couldn’t sleep afterward, dreading the knock on the door.
It was pointless, she k
new, to look back and wonder “what if?” And yet, when she was depressed about the narrow confines of her world and all the things she’d unwittingly given up, she often rewound her life to that convenience store and thought about what she would change, if she had the chance.
As she waited to use the pay phone that day, she’d made up her mind to call the diner and ask one of the girls to come get her. She would ride out the storm at home.
Then a police car rolled by, and she thought about Brian’s panic when she told him about the cop who kept turning up.
The girl monopolizing the phone was Vicky, and she’d driven down with her friends to spend a week at her grandparents’ condo before starting the fall semester at Iowa. For the price of a tank of gas, she was willing to provide a ride to Houston.
Vicky introduced the hitchhiker to the other girls as Sharon, and Sharlah didn’t bother to correct her. The three Iowa girls immediately plunged back into an argument that had clearly been running awhile, something about a boy.
The new passenger wasn’t expected to contribute to the conversation. Sharlah, still suffering the effects of a gunshot wound and a painkiller, leaned back against the seat and went to sleep.
When she woke up, they were barely a quarter of the way over the causeway, and the chatter in the car had died away. Vicky was completely focused on the road. The other girls were looking nervously at the roiling bay. They were Midwesterners, unfazed by blizzards and tornadoes, but a hurricane was something else altogether.
For hours, they rode in silence, the car creeping forward 5 or 10 feet at a time, then coming to a standstill.
It was past 8 when they finally reached Houston. Vicky took the first exit off the highway and dropped Sharlah at a chain motel, the first open business they saw.
Inside, Sharlah had to fight her way past a group of 20 or so people all demanding information from one beleaguered clerk. She found another long line at the pay phone.
She waited her turn, eavesdropping on the conversations around her. The motel had no more rooms. The clerk had called places nearby but hadn’t found any vacancies. People were getting nervous. The weather was worsening, and it was too late to drive to San Antonio or Austin or other points farther inland.
When it was her turn at the phone, Sharlah dialed Kevin Lowry’s home number and waited, dismayed, as it rang and rang and rang. Where could Kevin and Lynn be?
She let it ring while she contemplated her options. She did not want to give up the phone until she had a plan.
Should she call Brian’s parents? Renee had told her not to call the house again, but it was an emergency. Mitch would be home from the office, and Sharlah believed he would not leave her stranded. Still, her pride balked at the idea of appealing to Brian’s parents.
While she was debating, a man poked his head into the corridor and announced, “The Red Cross has a shelter open at a school around the corner.”
Her decision made, Sharlah hung up the phone.
She rode out the storm perched on a cot in a dank gym, drinking bad coffee and keeping a nervous watch on her suitcase.
While the hurricane roared, she thought about what to do next. Her arm was throbbing, a sobering reminder of the danger she faced.
The scene at the motel had given her an idea. She had money. She could keep herself safe, just like Brian said, without any help from his family. They wanted nothing to do with her? Fine. She’d have nothing to do with them.
In the morning, when the storm had passed, she asked a volunteer for a ride to the bus station.
Elizabeth Ellsworth apparently sounded no alarms with airport security, because the screener waved her through after only a cursory look at her ID.
She breathed a little easier after clearing that hurdle, but she knew it was only the first one. She still had to make a connection in Dallas. Elizabeth had successfully avoided Texas for 20 years, and the thought of going back, even to change planes, made her queasy.
She found a seat in the terminal and got out her laptop to work on the presentation for the conference. Her co-worker had put it together, and although it was good, Elizabeth thought it could be improved.
Soon she was engrossed in rearranging pages and tweaking copy. Some good statistics were buried, and Elizabeth wanted to make sure they got the attention they deserved.
As she fiddled with the presentation, her anxiety began to ebb. Her work was the one thing that always made her feel centered and in control.
Sometimes when Elizabeth told people what she did for a living, she detected pity in their reactions, and she could tell what they were thinking: “What a dull job.” Men, in particular, were prone to make jokes about boring librarians, and they seemed especially likely to do so when they were trying to pick her up.
Despite all that had gone wrong in her life, Elizabeth believed she had the best job in the world.
Yes, there were days when her co-workers’ personal questions put her on edge, but she could always immerse herself in a research project or wander out onto the library floor and find someone to help.
Some colleagues were perplexed that Elizabeth voluntarily looked for people who needed assistance. The younger librarians spent as much time at their computers as possible. Bronwyn made no secret of the fact that she hated interacting with people, and she often told mean-spirited (but funny, Elizabeth had to admit) stories about clueless students on wildly misguided hunts for information.
Elizabeth enjoyed the students, even the clueless ones – maybe even especially the clueless ones. She volunteered to lead the orientation tours each semester, long considered a thankless task, and she lobbied hard to take over the training of the students who worked part-time in the library.
Naomi had talked to her once or twice about pursuing her doctorate so she could teach library science, but Elizabeth had no interest in that.
She had found her niche, and it made her happy.
As the plane began its descent into DFW Airport, Elizabeth stared out her window at a skyline, trying to decide whether she was looking at Dallas or Fort Worth.
She’d seen Dallas only once before, from the window of a Greyhound bus rolling north on Interstate 35.
When the Red Cross volunteer dropped her off, two buses were leaving Houston within the next 15 minutes. One was headed to Memphis, the other to Kansas City.
Without giving it much thought, she’d chosen Kansas City. She had the vague idea that Kansas City was closer – it wasn’t – and that the people there would be nice, because she’d waited on a family from Kansas once who’d over-tipped her.
The trip took 16 hours, during which Sharlah slept and read and tried to keep her arm from being jostled.
It ended at a bus station in a rough neighborhood. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure of her plan. She hadn’t expected to arrive in the middle of the night, and she didn’t know how to find a motel.
She tried the phone book, but it was huge – three times the size of the one back home, even with the white and yellow pages in separate volumes.
Finally, she approached the lone bus company employee onsite, a matronly woman whose name tag said “Deena.”
“Excuse me, is there someplace around here I can get a room, someplace clean and safe and not too expensive?”
Deena looked her over. “You got money for cab fare?”
Sharlah nodded.
“You want Johnson County, on the Kansas side,” Deena said.
After a long cab ride to the suburbs, Sharlah checked into a motel along a busy commercial strip lined with restaurants and shopping centers.
For the first few days, she stayed in the room, reading and watching TV, leaving only to grab fast food. She felt trapped by the money – afraid to leave it in the room for any length of time, afraid she’d be conspicuous walking around with her suitcase.
Once she’d finished Sophie’s Choice, she started to get restless. She and Brian hadn’t talked about how long she should stay away, but she’d settled on three weeks.
Once she’d moved up the road to the new place, she ventured out to a discount store and bought a big shoulder bag so she could take the money with her when she left the room. She stocked the fridge with bread and milk and peanut butter.
The next day, she walked up to a big mall and saw a Tom Cruise movie to kill an afternoon. When she left the mall, she got turned around and walked the wrong direction, which was how she discovered she was staying less than a mile from a library.
She started going there every day. At first she just read magazines and newspapers. But then she felt bold one afternoon and looked for Cinnamon Skin, the John D. MacDonald book that had always been checked out back home. When she found it on the shelf, she carried it back to a table and read it in one sitting.
Another day, she noticed a summer reading list for high school students taped to the end of a shelf. From it, she chose An American Tragedy. That was more book than she could finish in an afternoon, so she wrote down her page number at the end of each day and put the book back, hoping that no one would check it out.
Sharlah felt guilty sometimes, like she’d gone on vacation with Brian’s money while he sat in jail. She worried about him all the time, but especially at night, alone in her motel room. She couldn’t wait to go back to him.
She knew, though, that she shouldn’t show up until she’d checked with Brian first to make sure she’d be safe. The trouble was, she wasn’t sure how to do that.
She couldn’t call him at the jail – no incoming calls were allowed. She considered sending him a letter, but she thought the police might read the mail.
What she needed to do, she decided, was get a message to Brian. She spent several days formulating a plan.
To make the call, she used the pay phone at the library, which was tucked down a hallway by the restrooms. It was quiet there.