THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW seat looked over Jared Garrett’s shoulder at the notes he had arrayed on his tray table. He had hoped she would. He had taken out his index cards because he was bored and restless, his mind churning from the events of the day. It seemed primitive to him that Amtrak didn’t provide wireless service on its trains. He would have been better off driving, after all, but he had assumed he could do e-mail en route. Now he was stuck on this wheezy old regional-only a sucker or a fool would pay extra for the Acela, which cut a mere ten minutes off the trip-with another forty minutes before he arrived back in Philadelphia. He could actually write, he supposed, but it felt odd to write without the option of the “publish” button, waiting to reward his efforts. Of course, the Bowman story was bigger than his blog. He must not waste it there, tempting as it was. He remembered when people criticized him as a cut-and-paste writer because he had managed to deliver his manuscript on Bowman within six weeks of his death sentence in the first trial. That pace seemed positively leaden by today’s standards.
“Colored index cards,” the woman said. “Are you a writer?”
“Yes,” he said. If his wife were here, she would roll her eyes or give an exaggerated sigh. She saw his writing as a hobby, one used to escape her in the evenings, when she parked herself in front of the television to watch reality shows. She wasn’t entirely wrong.
“What kind of books do you write?”
“Nonfiction,” he said. “Usually about crime.”
“True crime?”
“Nonfiction,” he repeated. “Fact crime is probably the best label. One of my books was nominated, once, for best fact crime.” He did not mention the name of the prize because it was not well known, but it was a prize, and he had been nominated for it. And fact crime might not be the most elegant construction, but it was better than true crime. Of course, fact crime was problematic, too, as it sounded almost like a criminal act driven by fact, like a so-called hate crime. But true crime had acquired a nasty taint over the years.
“Would I have read any of your books?”
The inevitable question. He wanted to turn it on her, say, “How would I know what you’ve read or not read? Are you a world-famous reader?”
Instead, he said: “My best-known book was about the Walter Bowman case, but that was over twenty years ago. I haven’t published for a while.”
“Walter Bowman?” The name clearly didn’t resonate with her. But then-Walter Bowman didn’t resonate. Jared always felt that Walter’s lack of charisma had dampened interest in his book, kept it from becoming the success it might have been. If only he could have written about someone like Charlie Manson or Ted Bundy. He had thought he lucked out, all those years ago, when the big guns didn’t come to Virginia. Turned out the big guns knew what they were doing.
But now-now the story had its long-missing climax, and it was going to be all Jared’s. Oh, other journalists might write about the execution. But no one would get to talk to Walter. He had Barbara LaFortuny’s word.
“A spree killer, back in the eighties,” he said. “Probably a serial killer, but that was never proven.”
“Is there a difference?”
He began to explain but almost immediately felt the woman’s attention drifting away from him. He interrupted himself, pointed to the cards arrayed before him: “I should get back to my work,” he said.
“Of course,” she said with apparent relief. “I’m going to go to the café car.” He couldn’t help noticing that she took her computer bag and purse. She would probably stay in the café for the rest of the trip, drinking white wine, sizing up the men. She was on the prowl, Jared decided, a lonely woman on a train. He was grateful for his thirty-year marriage, his solid life with Florence, even if she did roll her eyes at him from time to time. A woman alone-that was a sad thing. Barbara LaFortuny had seemed pathetic to him, although he had tried not to betray this. No one liked to be pitied.
He had Googled her, of course, as soon as she had e-mailed him. She had made a point of telling him that she wasn’t some sad sack, pining for Walter, but he thought she was kidding herself. Walter was good-looking, at least in photographs. Less so in person, but she had never seen him in person. She may not admit it, but LaFortuny was motivated by something more than a principled stand against the death penalty.
Still, it seemed clear, after several e-mails, that she really did have something to offer. He had taken a sick day from work, reasoning that his sick days were one of his remaining benefits in a world of shrinking benefits and he shouldn’t be penalized just because he was healthy. By not taking his sick days, he was cutting his own pay, in a sense. But the first half of the day, spent driving around sites he had long ago explored on his own, had been a big honking disappointment, and he had begun to feel that he was being taken, especially when she drove out to a large county park.
“Walter Bowman’s never been linked to this area,” he said, thinking of his own obsessive map, how he had examined every missing person case. The true-crime bloggers who followed the Bowman case fell across a wide range, from total apologists who would deny even the two obvious murders to those who basically put every missing teenage girl, 1980 to 1985, in his column. Jared was one of the more moderate, believing that Walter could be linked to at least four unsolved murders and four missing person cases in the Mid-Atlantic region. Jared had his own formula based on distance, opportunity, and victim. Distance: Walter Bowman had never been more than three hundred miles from home in his entire life and, per Elizabeth Lerner’s testimony, he seemed to rotate around a fixed point in his mind, staying in Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia. Opportunity: He had nonconsecutive days off and, before he killed Maude Parrish, had never spent a single night away from home. Finally, victims: Both were young, under sixteen, and not the least bit streetwise, so throwing in every random hooker killing was really missing the mark. Hookers didn’t fit Walter Bowman’s pattern.
But then-neither did Elizabeth Lerner, not in the looks department.
At any rate, he had known, when Barbara turned into this suburban park, that it had no connection at all to Bowman and he was beginning to get a little angry at being suckered this way. He was on a six-thirty train, and that was by Barbara LaFortuny’s instruction. She said she had tickets to a play, or something. That had been over lunch, at a vegan place called Roots, which hadn’t exactly thrilled Jared.
“Sounds like you have a nice life,” he said, just to make conversation, hoping to conceal his dismay at the menu offerings.
“I do,” she said. “Being attacked was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Not because it freed me from working, but because it showed me that my life was empty, purposeless, and that was through no one’s fault but my own.”
He pulled out his microcassette recorder, more to be polite than anything else, and let her drone on and on about her life. Perhaps this was all she had to offer, he thought. Perhaps she thought it was a great gift, the Walter Bowman story, as strained through the eyes of his greatest supporter. The thing is, she hadn’t told him a single thing about Walter that he didn’t know, and her insistence that Walter had changed-he couldn’t buy it. Barbara LaFortuny had a near-death experience through no fault of her own. She should be able to see that Walter wouldn’t be able to experience that kind of awakening until they strapped him to the gurney. And even then, even if some miracle happened and he didn’t die, he probably wouldn’t change.
She had let one tantalizing detail drift across the lunch table. “You know about the autopsies, right? What wasn’t there?”
“What wasn’t…oh, yes. I wrote about that. I thought you had read my book?”
“I did. I just wanted to remind you.”
“It doesn’t matter, not in the case of Holly Tackett.”
“No, it doesn’t. If one believes the testimony of Elizabeth Lerner. And you seem to be the one person willing to be skeptical of her.”
“I merely raised some questions. Killers have patterns. Elizabeth Lerner breaks the pattern in almost every way. She finds him, he doesn’t find her. He takes her and-if you believe her-doesn’t attempt sex with her for weeks, and then only once. She’s not a tall, shapely blonde. If she’s not actively helping him, why does he keep her around? I mean, I know the prevailing theory was that she was a witness and Walter always killed while in some sort of near-psychotic state, brought on by the other victims’ sexual rejection of him. And maybe all she did differently was submit, not fight him. Still, no, I think there’s always been something off about her testimony.”
The check came and Barbara LaFortuny picked it up, although she seemed surprised that he didn’t offer. But he had come down here on his own dime and he sure hadn’t chosen to eat vegan. What did she expect? And now she had brought him to some park. What could she possibly have for him here?
“Athletic field number nine,” she said, stopping the car.
“What about it?”
“It’s at the top of this hill. I have to stay here, because she knows my car, my face. It’s not a face people easily forget.” She laughed at her own lopsided visage, as if it were a delightful joke. “But you can probably walk up and get close enough to see her.”
“Her?”
“Elizabeth Lerner. Although, of course, that’s not the name she uses now. But go on, take a gander.”
“What name does she use now? How did you find her?”
She smiled. “We’ll save that for another day. I just wanted you to know how much we can give you, if you’re patient.”
“We?”
“Walter and I.”
“How can Walter have any influence over her?”
“As I said, they’re talking.”
“Will I be able to recognize her?”
“Look for the redhead, with the redheaded son and a rather ugly dog. Her daughter is number seventeen, I believe. Doesn’t look a thing like her. If anything-well, you’ll see.”
He felt ridiculous, trudging up the long drive in his loafers and work clothes. If he were one of these parents, he’d make him for a pedophile. Yet the parents, almost all mothers at this time of day, paid him no mind. The drive was on an incline and he was puffing and sweating by the time he arrived at field nine. A quick sweep-no one. Wait, there was the redheaded boy and dog, romping along the sidelines.
And there she was. He would not have recognized her in a crowd, or without the expectation of seeing her. She was curvy, whereas the teenage Elizabeth had been straight up and down, with no shape. (He had speculated, too, that Walter might have confused sexual leanings. Walter hadn’t liked that, but it was fair, given what Elizabeth looked like and how he had made her dress. And it was consistent with the other evidence.) But there was something else that was different about her, something that took him a moment to diagnose.
She looked happy. Wind ruffling her hair on this pleasant October afternoon, eyes trained on-which one? Oh, the little beauty, long-legged and lean, not at all like her mother, at least not like any version Jared ever saw. The daughter-the daughter looked more like Holly Tackett than she did like her mother. Not in the coloring, but in her grace, her long-limbed body, her ease with herself. Out of her soccer uniform, in street clothes, she would appear much older than she was.
Elizabeth wasn’t one of the more vocal mothers, but she was clearly proud of her daughter. And when her son came running up with the dog, his small grubby hand thrust forward to show her something, she inspected his offering with grave interest.
Jared watched her for a little while longer, hoping that her husband might arrive, or that the game might end and he could, discreetly, follow her to her car. With a license plate, he wouldn’t be dependent on Barbara LaFortuny. He could get a name, an address, a phone number. Perhaps he could ask some other parent about the team, figure out where it was based, how to get the roster. But, no, that would invite attention. If he had his camera, he could pretend to be a photographer, but photographers did not dress like auditors, as he did, being an auditor. No, better to keep his distance. For now.
He remembered the one photograph he had managed to take of Elizabeth, back in the courthouse hallway, camera held hip level. “Hey, Elizabeth,” he had called, and she had looked back, for only a split second, which was all he needed to grab the shot. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the damn school photo, which had been used on her missing posters. She looked startled, wide-eyed, even a little guilty. They had used it on the cover, with Walter’s mug shot and a heartbreaking photo of Holly Tackett between them.
His train slowed for the approach to Philadelphia. He couldn’t wait to get home, to get on the Internet. He must not write about this yet. But it would be fun tonight to sit in his study and read the other bloggers, to imagine their envy and astonishment when he broke this story. How had Walter found her again? Perhaps she had found him.