Confessions on the 7:45

by Lisa Unger

  Upstairs in his office, he climbed the shaky stepladder to reach the high shelf where he kept cold case files and reached for the heavy box, nearly losing his balance. That would be all he needed, to take a fall. That was always the beginning of the end for old guys, wasn’t it? Not that he was so old.

  He put the box on the desk that had belonged to his father, a career cop who’d gone all the way to chief before he retired. Hunter was never into politics. He liked the work, wanted to do the job, not sit behind the desk in a fancy uniform, sending other people out into the streets. He and his dad, they didn’t see eye to eye on most things, never really had the chemistry that Hunter had effortlessly with his own children. That was the way of it sometimes. He knew the old man did his best.

  The box, beige and sagging, was covered in a thin layer of dust. The particles lifted into the light as he removed the lid, causing him to sneeze. He hadn’t put any attention on Pearl and Stella in a while. He sat in his leather chair and started sifting through the files.

  A photo, grainy and fading, of a strawberry-blonde woman smiling tentatively at the camera. High cheekbones, a full mouth, inviting eyes.

  Stella Behr, single mother, bookstore owner, was thirty-five years old when she was strangled in her own bed. Hunter didn’t love how, in death, a few details came to define you. But so it was. Young, a bombshell beauty with a string of boyfriends, on the brink of financial ruin. Several of the men in her life questioned and released.

  Another photo, a girl with Stella’s eyes but dark, a stillness to her face, a sadness there. Her smile seemed strained. There was a cool prettiness, something reserved.

  Stella’s daughter, Pearl, was fifteen. A very smart young woman, according to teachers, grades and test scores. A loner, though. Odd, said more than one of her instructors. A flat affect to her, unemotional. Quiet. Never in trouble, but no teacher’s pet. There was no information about who Pearl’s father might be—nothing in the public records or in the house.

  The neighbor, an older woman who was nearly a recluse, saw Pearl leave with Charles Finch, the bookstore manager, the night Stella was murdered. It appeared that she left of her own free will, quietly, neither of them appearing rushed or upset.

  Charles Finch was a ghost. That was not his real name; all his employment records had been falsified. Even the car he’d been driving, a restored GTO, was registered to a man who’d been dead for ten years. Stella had apparently been paying him in cash. All her bank accounts were empty. She had a pile of personal debt, owed taxes on the store and on the house. She was months from losing everything.

  When the department called in Hunter as part of an initiative to clear cold cases, there was very little—nothing really—to go on. They had a DNA sample and some prints that did not match anything in the system. The neighbor who saw Charles Finch and Pearl leave that night, she couldn’t provide many details, except that Finch was a regular at the house. That he was one of a string of men who came and went. That Pearl was a nice girl, who took out the trash, didn’t run around, and could be seen at her desk doing her homework most nights.

  In the movies, there is always one thing that leads the detective to the truth. Even the documentaries and podcasts usually focus on crimes that were somehow, against all odds, solved. A witness comes forward. Technology catches up with evidence left behind. The DNA sample finally hits a match in the system because of another crime.

  But the real world was impossibly vast with lots of back alleys and unexplored places. Some crimes went unsolved forever; some people disappeared without a trace.

  Almost.

  Hunter found the file he was looking for and opened it.

  About two years after Stella was killed, and Pearl went missing, another woman was murdered, her teenage daughter disappeared. This was about fifty miles from the Behr home.

  Maggie Stevenson, thirty-six, a nurse and a single mother, was strangled in her home, her teenage daughter disappearing the same night. An ex-boyfriend was questioned and released. Very little physical evidence at the scene. A coworker said there was a new man in her life, someone she was excited about. She’d been using a dating site, but there was no evidence that she’d ever met with anyone.

  There was a single text on her phone, from a number that was traced to a burner phone.

  Can’t wait to finally meet you.

  He stared at the pictures in the file. Maggie was another bombshell beauty—same thick, wavy hair and bedroom eyes, darker than Stella but with the same wild vulnerability to her gaze. Her daughter, Grace, cool and slim, long tresses of golden hair, a doll-like sweetness to her face. Another hardworking single mother, murdered, her child disappearing. Maggie had no family, loose friend connections. She had, on the day of her murder, cashed out the meager contents of her accounts—a grand total of about $5000. There were several large unusual charges on her credit card—from Best Buy. From Macy’s. Their case went colder faster than even Stella and Pearl’s.

  There were patterns, things that matched.

  And then a piece of luck. DNA evidence at the Stevenson home matched evidence at the Behr home. Unfortunately, that DNA evidence did not match anything in the database of known criminals. Another dead end.

  But new data was added every day; every six months or so, Hunter would request a new search to find a match. He was past due for a request to the department. He’d have to call in a favor; he wasn’t on the payroll for this case. There was no budget for a ten-year-old case. It had become his personal thing, a grudge match that he could not let go.

  He opened his computer and searched out the news story he’d seen earlier today and pulled up the picture of the missing woman.

  Looking back and forth between the image of Grace Stevenson from his file and his screen, he couldn’t be sure. People change—especially kids. Especially people who want to change. So many years. The young woman on the screen had a narrower face, her hair was darker. Some of the sweetness was gone. But around the mouth and the eyes, it could be. It might be Grace.

  The Naughty Nanny.

  He opened his file on Charles Finch. It held a single photograph, taken from among Stella Behr’s possessions. Heavily lashed blue eyes, defined cheekbones, clean-shaven, a wide, smiling mouth. Not just handsome. Beautiful in that way that some men were. Even other men saw it. A pretty boy, they’d call him on the playground or in the joint. Smallish, angular. Even the photograph radiated charm. The number one most important quality every con must have—the ability to charm and disarm. And this man was a con if Hunter ever saw one.

  Hunter had his theory. That he was a guy who worked his way into the lives of vulnerable women. Maybe he wanted their money; and maybe sometimes that’s all he took. But sometimes maybe he wanted something more. And sometimes he took that, too.

  He opened another file, this one filled with articles printed from the internet. He regularly scoured the web for cold cases that matched the pattern. There was a case in Tucson, where a woman was dating a man who tried to strangle her, but she was saved by a neighbor who heard her screams. She had a teenage daughter who was out for the evening. Her assailant got away. She only had a single picture of him. It might have been the man Hunter knew as Finch, but the picture was grainy and indistinct. The man looked heavier, wore glasses and a full beard. There was a slew of sweetheart scams, online predators convincing wealthy widows and widowers to wire money for this emergency or that. It happened a lot. There were a lot of grifters out there, lots of victims. More than anyone knew.

  There was one in Phoenix, a woman named Bridget Pine who said she was nearly scammed by a man and his daughter. She and the man—who she knew as Bill Jackson—had been having an online relationship when he claimed his daughter had been in an accident and he needed money. She’d been suspicious, she said. Then she ran a few checks, checking up on details like where he supposedly lived and worked, quickly realizing almost everything he t
old her was a lie. She reported him to the authorities—local police and the FBI. She alerted the media. But, like Charles Finch, he was a ghost; disappeared without a trace. The picture she had of him from his online profile did not resemble Finch; there was no image of the girl.

  Most people who were victims of the sweetheart scam just slunk away; it was a humiliation, the death of a dream. But Bridget Pine raised a fuss and when Hunter called her, she detailed for him everything that had transpired. The passionate emails, the late-night phone calls, the delicious tension of awaiting their first meeting. She wasn’t a beautiful woman; so, the ability to get to really know someone before meeting—she thought that it was a truer connection.

  “The physical shell doesn’t matter,” she told him. “It’s what’s inside that counts, isn’t it?”

  “Of course,” said Hunter. But intimacy was about more than late-night conversations and promises. He thought of his own marriage—imperfect, enduring, how you had to accept every facet of each other, even the things you didn’t like.

  “On some level,” she said, “I guess I knew. I’d given up on love and romance. But something about the online dating. It felt safer. I didn’t think it would hurt as much if it didn’t work out.”

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “This happens a lot. More than you know.”

  “How do I find him?” she asked. “Can you help me? I can pay you.”

  “I’ve been looking for him—or someone like him—for years. You don’t have to pay me. If I find him, you’ll be my first call.”

  “How have you been looking for him?” she asked.

  He told her his techniques of scanning news sites, following up with similar stories, cold calling. Sometimes taking a road trip.

  “All it takes is one detail that leads you somewhere new,” he said. “But my advice? Just let it go, move on.”

  She laughed a little. “I don’t have anything to move on to. Bill—I think he was my last chance for love.”

  Bill. Charlie. Whoever. He wasn’t even real.

  “If you get a lead,” he said, “don’t follow it up on your own, call me. Let me help. No charge.”

  She promised that she would. This was a couple of months before Maggie Stevenson was murdered, her daughter Grace disappeared.

  Later, Bridget Pine walked off the face of the earth. She bought a new car, quit her job, cashed out some accounts, packed a bag and slipped away from her life. When he couldn’t reach her—email bounced, phone disconnected—Hunter called around, finally finding a former coworker who knew her a little.

  “She was an odd duck,” he said. “She kept to herself. Then, one day, she just quit. She said she’d made enough money to retire and she wanted to travel. It was—odd.”

  No one had ever heard from her again.

  Hunter kept reading through his old notes. Then scanned the various news sources for all the information he could get on the Naughty Nanny, and then he scanned through the cold case websites he liked. He was looking for it, the one thing, that connected all of them. The one piece of information that would lead him on a fresh trail.

  The sun set and the lamps came on outside. Hunter knew there was about an hour before his wife came home. Until she did, he’d spend a little time on Stella and Pearl Behr, Maggie and Grace Stevenson. He’d keep looking. Because everybody counts.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Selena

  She pulled the blinds and pretended there was no one out on her lawn, on her driveway, on the street. As the detective left, a handful of reporters, a couple of news vans, a few other unmarked vehicles had come to gather around her house. Neighbors were at their windows and on their porches. It wasn’t a mob. But the sight of the strangers filled her with dread. Now, Selena was one of those people, the ones you saw on the news, their lives in a shamble because of scandal or a crime.

  She sank onto the couch, not sure of what to do. Pack. That was it. She needed to gather her things and more clothes and toys for the boys. She needed to leave this house and go home to her mother. Because—what else? Where else?

  When there was an aggressive knocking on the door, she sat frozen. The detective again? The police coming to take her in? Her heart thumped. She waited. Maybe they’d go away.

  “It’s me.” A familiar voice through the door. “Selena, it’s Beth. Let me in.”

  Relief was a flood as she ran for the door, let her friend inside. There were shouts from the lawn.

  What happened to Geneva Markson, Selena?

  Did you know your husband was sleeping with the nanny?

  Beth, blond hair tousled, clutching her tote tight to her body, moved inside quickly and pressed her back against the closed door.

  “Is this happening?” she asked Selena, eyes wide. “Is this really happening?”

  “It is,” said Selena. “This is my life right now.”

  They stared at each other. They’d been in dark places together before, watching their dear friend die. Her grim funeral. The implosion of Beth’s marriage, the ugly, contentious divorce—luckily or unluckily without kids. A miscarriage Selena had before Oliver was born. The time Beth broke her leg while they were hiking, and Selena had to practically drag her five miles because they’d both decided to “unplug” and left their phones in the car.

  “Shit,” said Beth. “Shit. What time is it? Can we drink?”

  It was after three. “I have a bottle of cab.”

  Selena didn’t want to drink, but Beth made her way to the kitchen, dropping her bag at the table. She poured them each a glass from the bottle on the counter, and Selena took a tentative sip, then another. She felt that familiar warmth, a softening of edges. Her shoulders relaxed a bit.

  “Tell me everything, Selena,” said Beth. They sat at the kitchen table, the heart of any house. “Start from the beginning. All of it.”

  She told her friend about the first time, the sexting, the Vegas incident, then how she’d moved the camera and caught Graham with Geneva. She told her about the woman on the train, about the late-night meeting, the texts she’d been receiving, all the things Detective Crowe had told her about why Graham really lost his job, about Geneva blackmailing the Tuckers. The dirty texts. About Will coming in for the rescue, her spending the night at his place. It all came out in a stream, Beth nodding, making all the right noises, reaching for her hand, giving Selena her unbroken attention.

  “So, yeah,” said Selena when she was done. “That’s what’s been going on with me.”

  “Why am I just hearing about all of this?” she said, incredulous. “Where were you keeping it?”

  “Deep, deep inside,” she said. “Where we keep everything ugly, all the things we don’t want to broadcast, don’t want to deal with.”

  Beth drained her wine, refilled both their glasses, gave a knowing nod. “I’ve been there. I know how much energy it takes to keep up a facade. How many years did I keep waiting for things to get better, rather than do what I needed to do? Get away from someone who was hurting me.”

  Selena never once suspected that Beth and Scott weren’t happy—or happy enough. You learn pretty early in your adult life that few marriages are perfect. There are almost always secrets, negotiations between couples that no one outside the marriage would understand. Her sister, Marisol, endured her husband’s porn addiction, until he also developed a gambling addiction that almost ruined them financially. Only after she’d asked him to leave did she reveal the truth to Selena and their mother, Cora. Selena always thought the Tuckers looked so perfect, so happy and in love.

  “Is it them or is it us?”

  Selena looked at her friend, who was rubbing at her temples. She cocked her head in question.

  “I mean—are some men just flawed by nature? Or do we enable their bad behavior, make it worse in a way because we hide it, and don’t demand better from them?”

  “May
be it’s some combination of both.”

  “Because the women I know, they’re not creating damage in the lives of the people they’re supposed to love and protect. They’re not cheating, abusing, lying. Or worse.”

  Or worse. Was it worse than she imagined? Was her husband a monster?

  The wine was going down too fast. She couldn’t afford to get drunk, to not have a clear head going into the rest of the night. Selena pushed the glass away.

  “What happened with you and Will?” asked Beth.

  “Nothing,” she said. “He slept on the couch. The perfect gentleman.”

  Beth circled a manicured fingertip around the rim of her glass.

  “He still loves you.”

  “No,” said Selena. “That’s ancient history.”

  Beth gave her a look, and Selena offered an assenting nod. “Well, then, it’s ancient history for me.”

  “But you went to him last night,” said Beth. “You could have come to my place.”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t have to tell him why I was there. He already knew everything.”

  “He must have loved it. Being the one to ride in to the rescue.”

  Beth hadn’t much liked Will either.

  “Remind me why you left him?”

  That was a thing Beth did, made you say the thing she was thinking. But Selena wasn’t going to give it to her, though she knew what Beth was driving at.

  “Because I met Graham, realized that I wanted different things from life than Will did.”

  “So, you were perfectly happy until the night you met Graham.”

  “No one’s perfectly happy.”

  Beth leaned forward, tapped a finger on the table.

  “He was possessive. Controlling,” she reminded Selena. “He always wanted to know where you were, who you were with. He monitored you, didn’t he? Bedtime. Exercise.”

  “He helped me to be more disciplined. He—pushed me to be my best self.”

  Beth smiled, shook her head. “He wanted to be your daddy.”