The Book of Cold Cases(13)

Beth Greer, as far as I knew, had never been diagnosed as a sociopath. She had never been examined by a psychiatrist at all.

Sociopaths were good liars because they were empty of true human emotion. They knew how to mimic it, but they did so because they never felt it. Anger, grief, fear, empathy—the research suggested that a true sociopath couldn’t feel any of them.

When Ransom Wells, Beth’s lawyer, was asked about Beth in an interview in 1989, his only comment was, “I know pure evil when I see it.”

I clicked open my browser and played the video clip of Beth getting out of her car in the rain. For the hundredth time, the reporter in the plaid pants and trench coat pursued her, microphone in hand. For the hundredth time, Beth put her hands in the pockets of her coat and faced him.

“I’m just a girl who minds her own business,” she said.

Was she just tired?

Or deep down, was she trying not to smile?



* * *



—

When I looked out my window after my morning of research, there was a man I didn’t recognize reading in a car in the parking lot. The weather was unsettled, the last of summer giving in to the chill of fall, and clouds moved quickly past the sun, making its dim light dapple on and off. The man was in the small lot nearest my building, sitting in a black Jeep SUV. His face was obscured by a baseball cap. The car was off, and he was reading a book.

I wanted to mind my own business, but who sits and reads a book in a parked car? Parents waiting to pick their kids up from school, maybe. That was all I could think of. If he just wanted to read his book, there was a clearing with a park bench twenty feet away. I waited a minute, then two, then five, but the man didn’t leave.

Jesus, Shea. I heard my sister Esther’s voice in my head. You just answered your own question. He’s waiting to pick someone up. It’s Saturday morning, and people are living their lives. Mind your own business.

I knew I should. But in my mind’s eye, I still saw a car pull up next to me as I walked home from school, the tires crunching gently in the snow as the window rolled down. I heard a voice say, Hi there, are you cold? I heard my mother’s voice say, Always be polite to grown-ups, Shea.

That had been a lie—the worst lie I’d ever been told, that children should always be polite to adults. It was a lie that haunted me to this day. I picked up my phone and raised it, thinking to take a picture of the man, his car, and his license plate. Just in case.

As my finger hovered over the button, I heard Esther’s voice again, so calm and rational. Shea, have you seen your therapist lately?

I hadn’t. The last time was just before the divorce, over a year ago. Despite the fact that I had “lingering trauma issues,” as my therapist called them, she felt that I’d made tremendous progress. I was off the medication—her idea. At the time I quit, I had a stable career and a stable marriage, and was living a productive life. You can put this in the past, Shea, my therapist had said. You’re already doing it. It isn’t easy, but people do it all the time.

So I stopped going. A month later, my husband, Van, moved out. He had a new girlfriend now. The thought of that made me feel nothing.

Hi there, are you cold?

Now I lived alone, and a woman alone could never be too careful.

I snapped the photo and put my phone away.



* * *



—

When I left to pick up food for lunch, I smelled smoke. I opened the door of the stairwell to find a woman quickly putting a cigarette out. She was my neighbor from across the hall. We’d met once, briefly, on the day she moved in.

“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I’m trying to quit. I felt like if I snuck one in the stairwell it wouldn’t count, you know?”

“It’s okay,” I said, though it wasn’t. I didn’t have the heart to give her any grief. She was wearing stretched-out yoga pants and a tee, her graying brown hair scraped back into a ponytail. It was the uniform of the recently broken up, yet for some reason she had taken the trouble to put on mascara and line her eyes with dark, precise eyeliner. I’d been in that place, spinning hopelessly between I should do something and I don’t care.

“It’s Alison, right?” I said.

She nodded. “And you’re Shea.” We both smiled. “I won’t smoke anymore, I promise. It’s just been a hard week.”

“I get it.” I took a chance. “Your hard week doesn’t have to do with the man sitting in his car in the parking lot, does it?”

She looked surprised, then dismayed. “Is he still there?” She dropped her gaze to the floor. “Yeah, that’s my ex. We made plans, but then we had a fight and I changed my mind. Now he’s here and he says he’s waiting for me to come to my senses.” She looked back up at me. “Don’t tell me you’re divorced, too.”

“I am.”

She gave an awkward laugh. “You’re too pretty to be divorced.”

It was an odd comment, but again, I understood. She was feeling self-conscious about her yoga pants, her messy hair. I wasn’t looking very glamorous myself—I had on jeans, a tee, a fitted cargo jacket, my long hair in its ponytail, almost no makeup—but I was further along this rough road than she was.

“My ex thinks his new girlfriend is prettier,” I said, even though I had no resentment that Van had moved on. I watched Alison’s shoulders relax a little, the crinkles around her eyes ease as she nodded.