We weren’t bosom friends, my coworkers and I, even though I had worked here for five years. The other women here were married with kids, which meant we had nothing much in common since my divorce. I hadn’t talked to any of them about the divorce, except to say it had happened. And I couldn’t add to the conversations about daycares and swimming programs. The doctors didn’t socialize with any of us—they came and went, expecting the mechanism of the office to work without much of their input.
I took off my jacket and put on my navy blue scrub top, shoving my phone and purse under the desk. I could probably make friends here if I tried. I was attractive enough, with long dark hair that I kept tied back, an oval face, and dark eyes. At the same time, I didn’t have the kind of good looks that threaten other women. I was standoffish—I knew that. It was an inescapable part of my personality, a tendency I couldn’t turn off no matter how much therapy I did. I didn’t like people too close, and I was terrible at small talk. My therapists called it a defense mechanism; I only knew it was me, like my height or the shape of my chin.
But my lack of gregariousness wasn’t the only reason my coworkers gave me a wide berth. Though they didn’t say anything to me, a rumor had gotten out in my first week; they all knew who I was, what I had escaped. And they all knew what I did in the evenings, the side project that consumed all of my off-hours. My obsession, really.
They probably all thought it wasn’t healthy.
But I’ve always believed that murder is the healthiest obsession of all.
* * *
—
“Don’t tell me,” my sister, Esther, said on the phone. “You’re hibernating again.”
“I’m fine,” I said. It was after work, and I was at my local grocery store, the Safeway in the plaza within walking distance to Singles Estates. I put cereal in my cart as I shoulder-pinned the phone to my ear. “I’m grabbing some groceries and going home.”
“I told you to come over for dinner. Will and I want to see you.”
“It’s raining.”
“This is Claire Lake. It’s always raining.”
I looked at a carton of almond milk, wondering what it tasted like. “I know you worry about me, but I’m fine. I just have work to do.”
“You already have a job. The website isn’t paid work.”
“It pays enough.”
My big sister sighed, and the sound gave me a twinge of sadness. I really did want to see her, along with her husband, Will, a lawyer who I liked quite a lot. Esther was one of the only people who really mattered to me, and even though she gave me grief, I knew she tried hard to understand me. She’d had her own guilt and trauma over what had happened to me. She had her own reasons to be paranoid—to hibernate, as she put it. The difference was, Esther didn’t hibernate. She had a husband and a house and a good job, a career.
“Just tell me you’re trying,” Esther said. “Trying to get out, trying to do something, trying to meet new people.”
“Sure,” I said. “Today I met a man who has a hernia and a woman who would only say she has a ‘uterus problem.’?” I put the almond milk down. “I’m not sure what a ‘uterus problem’ is, and I don’t think I’m curious.”
“If you wanted to know, you could look in her file and find out.”
“I never look in patients’ files,” I told her. “You know that. I answer phones and deal with appointment times, not diagnoses. Looking in a patient file could get me fired.”
“You make no sense, Shea. You won’t look at patients’ medical files, but you’ll talk about murders and dead bodies on the internet.”
I paused, unpinning my phone from my shoulder. “Okay, that’s actually a good point. I get that. But does it mean that in order to be consistent, I should be more nosy or less?”
“It means you live too much inside your own head, overthinking everything,” Esther said. “It means you need to meet people who aren’t patients, real people who aren’t murder victims on a page. Make friends. Find a man to date.”
“Not yet for the dating thing,” I told her. “Maybe soon.”
“The divorce was a year ago.”
“Eleven months.” I dodged a woman coming the opposite way up my aisle, then moved around a couple pondering the cracker selection. “I’m not opposed to finding someone. It’s dating itself that freaks me out. I mean, you meet a stranger, and that’s it? He could be anyone, hiding anything.”
“Shea.”
“Do you know how many serial killers dated lonely women in their everyday lives? Some divorcée who just wants companionship from a nice man? She thinks she’s won the dating lottery, and meanwhile he’s out there on a Sunday afternoon, dumping bodies. And now we’re supposed to use internet apps, where someone’s picture might not even be real. People are lying about their faces.”
“Okay, okay. No dating apps. No dating at all yet. I get it. But make some friends, Shea. Join a book club or a bowling league or something.”
My cart was full. I paused by the plate glass windows at the front of the store, letting my gaze travel over the parking lot. “I’ll think about it.”
“That means no,” Esther said.
“It means I’ll think about it.” The parking lot looked like any normal parking lot during after-work hours, with cars pulling in and out. I watched for a moment, letting my eyes scan the cars and the people. An old habit. I couldn’t have told you what I was looking for, only that I’d know it when I saw it. “Thanks, sis. I’ll talk to you later.”
I bought my groceries and put them in the cloth bags I’d brought with me. I slung the bags over my shoulders and started the walk home in the rain, my coat hood pulled up over my head, my feet trying to avoid the puddles. The walk toward Singles Estates took me down a busy road, with cars rushing by me, splashing water and giving me a face full of fumes. Not the most pleasant walk in the world, but I put my earbuds in and put one foot in front of the other. Esther had long ago given up on telling me to get a car. It would never happen.
Besides, I got home before nightfall, so I didn’t have to walk alone in the dark. I called that a win.
CHAPTER THREE
September 2017
SHEA
At home in my little condo, I changed into dry clothes, made myself a tuna salad sandwich, and powered up my laptop.
Despite the stress, the gnawing uncertainty, the expense, and—yes—the heartbreak, this was the upside of getting divorced: I had the freedom to sit in my underfurnished living room in pajama pants and a T-shirt, eating mayonnaise-drenched tuna and working uninterrupted for the rest of my evening. The project I was working on, the obsession of my off-hours, was my website, the Book of Cold Cases.
It wasn’t an actual book. It was a collection of posts and articles written by me about unsolved crimes, the famous and the not so famous. The site included a private message board where people as obsessed as I was could post their theories or the new facts they’d found. I’d started the site nearly a decade ago as a personal blog, a place where I could post in near obscurity about the things that fascinated me. But over the years, it had started to take on a life of its own, and now the site had nearly two thousand members, all of whom paid a small yearly fee. I sold ads on the site sometimes, too. The money wasn’t nearly enough to live on, but it was enough for me to pay for upgraded servers, occasional professional webmaster work, and—most importantly—research help.