seemed embarrassed. Ready to flee again. He touched her arm as he moved past to fill the kettle. “I really could use your thoughts on this.”
Rosten’s psyche — the contradictions and inconsistencies — had always confounded him. As a young detective, he had shrugged off his doubts. He was not a shrink, he’d told himself. It was not his job to analyze or to explain, merely to follow the trail of evidence.
Yet the psyche was at the core of it all.
Hannah said nothing as they prepared two cups of tea and headed into the living room. “I don’t really know too much,” she muttered, fussing with the cushions as she prepared to settle in. “It’s just a first-year paper. Short.”
“All the same, you’ve researched the theory of amnesia. I know Rosten and the circumstances of the murder. Maybe we can tease it out.”
She twirled her cup. “I know Rosten too. I used him as a case study.”
His eyes widened, prompting her to scowl. “I’d have to be living under a rock in this house not to hear you and Sharon talking these past few months.”
His jaw dropped in dismay, but she cut him off. “Calm down, I didn’t report any of that stuff. I just read the court transcripts.”
“Okay,” he said carefully. “What’s your take on him?”
She fidgeted. Blew on her tea. “I keep coming back to why he would have killed her in the first place? He could have slept with her; lots of profs sleep with their students without a bit of trouble.”
“I always figured she was going to blow the whistle on him. Even back then, universities disapproved of faculty seducing students. He would have faced not only gossip and scandal but also disciplinary action. Possibly the denial of tenure when it came up. Not to mention repercussions with his wife. She might have left him and taken his children away. As indeed she did.”
He could see Hannah weighing his words. Rejecting them. “But did you have any evidence that this girl, Jackie, was threatening to rat him out?”
“No. We never even had proof they were having a private relationship, other than the tutoring.”
“So she didn’t talk to girlfriends? Her mom? Even just hinting at it?”
He shook his head.
“See, that’s the thing, that’s not normal. Girls talk about stuff like that. Unless we’re really ashamed or afraid, we’d be sounding out what we should do. She didn’t even mention this to her sister? Weren’t they almost the same age?”
Green rifled through long-forgotten memories. Julia and Jackie were four years apart but had never been close. Their temperaments were too different, and because Julia wasn’t attending university, they had few experiences in common. But more than that, after the murder no one had wanted to push Julia to talk about her sister. At first she’d been convinced Jackie had run away to avoid dealing with her stepfather when he was drunk, and she’d been inconsolable when Jackie’s body was found. She had blamed Lucas and become hysterical the moment anyone questioned her reasons.
“I don’t think her sister had any idea that a relationship was going on,” he said finally.
Hannah looked unconvinced. “That’s a massive secret to keep from your friends and your sister. Maybe there was no relationship. Maybe Rosten hit on her that one time, she freaked out and threatened to tell, so he killed her.”
That had always been Green’s most likely scenario, but he was still dissatisfied with how the facts fit. “Murder is not as easy to pull off in real life as it appears in fiction,” he began. “Even a desperate, spur-of-the-moment killing. It takes a lot of strength, nerve, and persistence to pin down and strangle a victim who’s fighting for her life. She would have lashed out, scratched, or bruised him. Plus, most people would be agitated if they’d just killed someone, no matter how hard they tried to cover up. According to his wife, he hadn’t a mark on him, except for a scratch on his forehead and some dirt on the knees of his jeans.”
“Where did he get those?”
“He claims he went out to the cottage that day to close it up for the winter, and bumped his head crawling around underneath disconnecting the water. When we checked, it was in fact disconnected.”
“Pretty feeble story,” Hannah said. “And convenient too, picking that very same day to go out to his cottage.”
“His wife corroborated his statement. She said he’d been looking for a spare afternoon to get out there before the pipes froze.”
“She could have been lying.”
He shook his head. “Maybe in her initial statement, but by the end she would have put the nails in his coffin herself if she could.”
“So he’s a killer who’s so calm, cool, and collected that he can strangle a girl and act like he’s been for a walk in the park.”
“It happens,” he replied, thinking of the killers he’d known. The predators and psychopaths for whom extinguishing a life that had become an impediment or a threat was akin to squishing a bug.
She was leaning forward intently. “But wouldn’t someone know? His wife? Can you sleep beside someone every night and not sense something is wrong with them?”
“If you’re really smart, good at acting, and good at compartmentalizing your life, maybe. And if your wife isn’t looking too closely. She might have thought, He’s under pressure, he needs his own space, he needs to feel in control. We don’t usually think, Gee, maybe my husband is a killer. And the wife did say he was under stress. Everybody attributed it to the birth of the twins.”
She shook her head, still skeptical. “But he’d show his true colours sometime. Surely! A guy doesn’t just wake up at the age of thirty and become a psychopathic sex murderer!”
He grinned. “No, but if they’re smart and careful, these guys can operate undetected for decades. And it escalates. He might have started off with just fantasies. Then stalking, then a few bouts of rough sex.”
There had been a few hints of that. Rosten had married his lab assistant while he was doing a post-doctorate at Dalhousie University, suggesting that he was inclined toward relationships with those he could control. One former girlfriend had surfaced to report that he was an ambitious, unfeeling bastard who put women on a par with invertebrates in a Petri dish. A few coeds had testified to flirtatious remarks. But how many men would emerge with their reputations untarnished from their interactions with women over the years? Certainly not me, Green acknowledged ruefully.
“So maybe something pushed him over the edge?” Hannah said.
He reached over to tousle her soft curls, now red with turquoise tips that shimmered when she tossed her head. “You’ve learned a lot for this short paper of yours.”
She jerked away. “Dad, I do know something about being pushed over the edge.”
Shame stole over him. The previous summer she had barely escaped with her life from people pushed to the edge. “Of course you do.” Despite his best efforts, he could hear the gravel in his voice.
“So could it have been the twins? His new responsibilities?”
“Certainly that factored into the various psychiatric theories. Who knows what it triggered deep in his psyche that drove him to a bigger, more dangerous thrill.”
Hannah was silent, perhaps caught up in her own memories of danger and death. He sat quietly at her side, sipping his now lukewarm tea and letting her follow her thoughts. He heard Sharon’s footsteps first in the kitchen and then in the hallway to the living room. Pausing there. Perhaps wondering whether she should interrupt this rare moment of father-daughter intimacy.
Hannah broke the silence finally. Her voice was hard. “So let’s assume he’s a cold-blooded psychopath pushed to a new thrill. Is it possible he’d block out the whole thing afterwards?”