Confessions on the 7:45(69)

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 told 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.