The Book of Cold Cases(66)

Face your fears, Shea. It’s time.

Was that Beth’s voice I heard in my head? I wiped my forehead, stood up straight. I looked up and down the quiet street. There were no cars, no one walking at this hour. The bus into Arlen Heights didn’t run this late. I’d have to walk to the bottom of the road, over a mile downhill, to catch the bus downtown.

Somewhere far off, a door slammed. The wind rustled in the trees.

Behind me, the lights went off in the Greer mansion, leaving me in even deeper darkness. I turned and looked back at the house, my sneakers crunching against the gravel of the sidewalk.

The Greer mansion was still and silent. In an upstairs window was a foggy handprint, as if someone had just pressed their palm against the glass. While watching me.

I took a step back, and then another. Then I put my phone in my pocket and started the long walk down the hill.





CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE


October 2017





SHEA


The ocean was tame at the piers, where the houseboats bobbed in the water, but it was still the ocean. When the wind kicked up and the weather got stormy on the horizon, the boats shifted and clanked, groaning as the water tried to pull them free of their moorings. Spray slapped up on the edges of the old boards that made up the piers, and the smell was deep and fishy, salty and a little rotten. On the park bench where I sat at seven thirty in the morning, I could see the houseboats rocking, the last remnants of their flower boxes moving in the wind. Some of the boats had lights on, yellow in the dark as their occupants started their mornings. I wrapped my coat and my sweater more tightly around me.

“It isn’t going to storm,” the man next to me on the bench said. “It looks like it is, but it isn’t. It’s going to blow over.”

The man next to me was in his late seventies, but he looked much older. He was tall and too thin, his clothes hanging off him. His skin was splotchy, his eyes sunken. He looked very unwell, and he was well aware of it. A cane leaned against the bench next to him. But a few feet away, in the tiny parking lot, a sleek Mercedes waited for the man, with a hired driver inside. The man was Ransom Wells.

He had phoned me over an hour ago as I lay sleepless in bed. “This is Ransom Wells,” he said when I answered, as if it weren’t six o’clock in the morning. “Beth Greer wishes for me to speak to you, and I happen to agree. I understand you work downtown, and I don’t wish to interrupt your schedule. If you meet me at the bench in Langland Park, near the piers, I will be there at seven thirty, and I’ll say all I wish to say.”

“Okay,” I said, and hung up. Then I got up, got dressed, and took the bus to the piers.

Ransom, I knew, had been a big man, florid and exciting, his presence electric. The Lady Killer case was only one of the many cases in his legendary career; he had gone on to defend celebrity clients in other high-profile cases, always making a splash in the press. But the Lady Killer case, his brilliant victory defending Beth Greer, was the one that launched him.

He had retired only ten years ago, and those years had not been kind. He had lost most of his famous bulk, as if something was eating him from the inside. He looked tired. But his posture was upright as he sat on the bench next to me, and his hands, though the veins were blue and the knuckles prominent, were large and strong, the last vital thing about him.

“I suppose I’ve shocked you with my appearance,” he said.

“A little,” I admitted. “But I’ll get used to it.”

“Then that makes one of us.” He sighed. “Shea Collins. You are a blogger, I understand, and you work at a doctor’s office. Where you need to be in just over an hour.”

“Yes.” I had my scrub top on under my sweater and my coat.

“You are also Girl A.”

A few weeks ago, I would have been beside myself with excitement to get an interview with Ransom Wells; he was my version of a rock star. Now, I only felt tired and a little sad. “So much for my hidden identity,” I said. “It seems everyone knows.”

“Actually, the secrecy was taken very seriously at the time,” Ransom said. “You were only a little girl, and no one wanted the publicity to ruin your life. I just happen to know everything and everyone. I always have.” He glanced at me. “Though you no doubt know, I did not defend Anton Anders. I didn’t work that case at all.”

“I know,” I said. If he had, I wouldn’t be talking to him now. I would never have come.

“The Anton Anders case was a very big deal in this town,” Ransom said. “I realize you can turn on the TV or surf the internet and read about murders that were even more horrible, killers that killed a hundred people. But in Claire Lake, especially among the police and the investigators, the Anders case was a lightning rod. It shaped how the police do business. As tragic as it was, it’s seen as a model of perfect police work, how an investigation can remove evil from society when it’s done right from beginning to end. It’s still discussed, still taught twenty years later. And Girl A is a part of that. That’s your legacy, like it or not.”

I thought about how scared I had been, at twenty-nine, when I’d realized I was alone in the dark outside the Greer mansion. How the simple idea of getting home had seemed insurmountable. I shook my head. I didn’t really care about police training. “I never chose that legacy. I never chose any legacy.”