In Self Defense (6 page)

Three

Erin finished checking out the last of her half of the Thornburgh employees on Tuesday afternoon.  While there was nothing that turned up in the background checks of the people on her list to suggest that any of them would engage in the kind of harassment Clare Durant was experiencing, there was nothing that definitively told her they would not.

“I may have something,” Dusty said, hanging up the telephone at his desk across from hers.  “Seems that one of Thornburgh’s own has a bit of a history.”

His partner looked up.  “What?” she asked.

“A sexual assault charge.”

“Really?” Erin said eagerly, even as she was thinking that it couldn’t possibly be this easy.             

Dusty nodded.  “Allen Pinkus, twenty-eight years old, works as a graphic designer.  Four years ago, a woman filed charges against him for attempted rape and harassing phone calls.  He pled down.  Did some counseling and some community service, but no time.”

Erin stood up.  “Well then, why don’t we go have ourselves a talk with the gentleman,” she suggested.

***

Allen Pinkus was an engaging young man in his late twenties, with a ready smile and a scar that obliterated half of his right eyebrow.  The detectives found him on the second floor of Thornburgh House.

“Despite what you think, it wasn’t rape,” he told them wearily when they inquired.  “She was my girlfriend at the time, and she caught me making out with someone else, and she was just trying to get back at me for it, that’s all it was.  But my lawyer told me I could go to jail if it went to trial, so I made a deal.  I know it’s on my record and all that, but I didn’t think it would ever come up again.”

“What about the harassing phone calls?” Dusty inquired, referring to the file in his hands.

“I wasn’t trying to harass her,” he explained.  “I was just trying to get her to tell the truth.”

“Well, would you mind if we put your story to the test?” Erin asked him.

Pinkus shrugged.  “How do you mean?”

“No big deal,” she told him.  “We’re just going to try a little experiment.”

***

The telephone rang in Clare’s office at a little after four o’clock.  He had already called twice today, not counting how many calls were among those she had let go through to voicemail rather than answer, and although he rarely bothered her this late in the day, Clare found herself hesitating a moment before picking up.

“Hello, Clare,” the caller said.

“Allen, is that you?” Clare replied with obvious relief.  “Your voice sounds funny.  What’s up?”

“Not much,” the caller said.  “I was just wondering when you were going to need the new layout for Bowman.”

Clare frowned.  “Not until next week.  Didn’t we already talk about that?”

“Oh that’s right, I’m sorry, I guess I forgot,” the caller said and hung up.

“I guess we can eliminate him,” Erin concluded, as Clare replaced the receiver.

“Allen Pinkus?” Clare questioned.

“On a voice changer,” Erin admitted.

“Good heavens, you didn’t have to go through all that nonsense.  I talk to Allen at least once a day.  I know his voice, changed or not.  He isn’t the one.”

Erin shrugged.  “Well, we had to check.”

“You know, if you’re going to be checking out all the people I work with, this could get awfully complicated,” Clare said thoughtfully, and with more than just a little concern.  “And if anything happens that reflects badly on the company, it could also cost me my job.”

“We’ll try not to let that happen,” Erin assured her easily.  “But now I need to ask if you would have any problem with our putting a tap on your phone?”

“Can you do that here?”

“Yes, I think we can.  There’s a main number listed for the company, but as you pointed out, many of the sub-lines go directly to individual phones, so we ought to be able to isolate yours without having to interfere with any of the others.”

Clare sighed.  “If you can do that, and not bother anyone else, I don’t suppose I’d have a problem with it.  But I think you should talk to Mr. Thornburgh first.”

“My partner is doing that as we speak,” Erin told her.

The telephone rang again, and without hesitating this time, Clare picked it up.

“Hello, Clare,” the voice said.  “I must have missed you earlier.  Or are you letting my calls go to voicemail now?”

Clare stifled a gasp.  “I’ve been busy,” she managed to say, motioning to Erin to come closer, and then moving the receiver out just a bit so that the detective could listen in.

“Yes, I’m sure, but don’t do that again,” the voice advised flatly.  “I have no interest in talking to a machine.  When I call, it’s because I want to talk to
you
, and it’s going to make me very unhappy if you try to brush me off, do you understand?”

Clare did not respond.

“Do you understand?” the voice repeated.

“Yes,” Clare whispered.  “I’m sorry.”

“Good,” the voice crooned.  “Because all I wanted was to say goodnight to you before you left work for the day.”

Erin gestured at her to keep talking, and Clare tried frantically to think of something she could say.  “That’s very nice of you,” was the best she can do.

“Why Clare, I think that’s the first kind word you’ve ever spoken to me,” the voice declared with just a hint of mockery.  “Dare I hope it means you’re starting to like me just a little?”

Without even hesitating, Clare slammed down the receiver.  “What did you have to make me do that for?” she demanded of the detective, an unmistakable shiver running the whole length of her body.  “My God, now he thinks I’m encouraging him.  Don’t you understand -- I don’t want to encourage him?”

“It’s all right, take it easy,” Erin reassured her calmly.  “I just wanted to listen to him for a minute.”

Clare hit the button that accessed her voicemail.  “You want to listen to him?” she said with a shudder.  “Here, be my guest, listen to your heart’s content.”

Among the dozen or so messages left for Clare this day were three from the caller.

***

Erin sat at her kitchen table, going through her notes on the Durant case.  It wasn’t a kitchen, exactly, as kitchens were usually defined, but rather a kitchenette, a corner of the studio apartment on Capitol Hill she had called home for the past fifteen years that housed a small refrigerator, a two-burner stove, a sink, a counter, an upper cabinet, a lower cabinet, and a microwave oven.

Given her circumstances, she knew she could have afforded a considerably bigger and better place to live, but this one was familiar and comfortable, the neighbors were quiet and minded their own business, and it was certainly easy to keep clean and neat.  There was a minimum amount of furniture -- a sofa, a chair, an end table, a coffee table, a bed, a nightstand, a bureau -- but an overabundance of books that filled a floor-to-ceiling bookcase.  Material things had never been very important to Erin.  Ideas were.

She had grown up in a house that held too many people to allow for a lot of clutter, but there had always been ample occasion for serious conversation -- around the dinner table, in front of the television set, out on the back porch.  Her father took advantage of every opportunity to instill in his seven children the need for education, intellectual achievement, and success.

Native Americans didn’t always get a fair shake in this country, even after almost four hundred years of occupation, he often told them.  But that didn’t mean you sat around and cried into your whiskey about it.  And it didn’t mean you sat around and waited for good fortune to drop into your lap, either.  It meant you got up off your butt and went out and made it happen for yourself.

He was proud of how he earned his living as a cop, but he wanted his children to do better, if they could.  It took.  One of Erin’s brothers was an Indian Rights attorney, two were engineers -- one computer and one mechanical, and the fourth was a veterinarian.  Both of her sisters were teachers.  Erin, the youngest, was the only one who had forsaken college and followed in her father’s footsteps, and she had never really been sure whether he was pleased about that or not.  She didn’t ask him when she could, and now it was too late.  He was killed in the line of duty six years ago next month, four months before he was scheduled to retire.  But what she could do was be the best damn police officer she knew how to be, and for that, she had a great role model.

The notes in front of her included everything she had been able to lay her hands on about Clare Durant and her husband.  For example, she now knew that Clare was thirty-eight years old and the only child of Gus and Helen Nicolaidis, both deceased.  She also knew that Clare graduated from the University of Washington with a degree
in English literature, and that she had worked as an editorial assistant at Thornburgh House from 1997 to 2000.  It wasn't clear in anything Erin had read whether hiring her had been because of a personal connection to the family, but Glenn Thornburgh’s brother had worked for Gus Nicolaidis.

Clare married Richard Durant in 2000, gave birth to their first child, a girl, two years later, and to their second child, a boy, two years after that.  In the spring of 2010, she went back to work at Thornburgh House, this time as an editor.

On the other side, Richard Durant was forty-eight years old, and one of five children, three surviving, born to Emma and William Durant of Lacey.  He was a graduate of Washington State University, had gone to work at Nicolaidis Industries in 1995, and married the boss’s daughter six years later.  In 2005, upon the retirement and subsequent death of Gus Nicolaidis, he took over the company for his wife, and had been running it quite profitably ever since.

In addition to the personal information on the Durants she had gathered, Erin had also compiled a number of facts, observations, questions, and theories relating to the man who had been harassing Clare.  The detective couldn’t help but feel that there was a real sense of urgency here, in part because this was not the first case like this that she knew about.

Six years ago, about a year before she and Dusty hooked up as partners, Erin recalled, a popular Seattle singer had started receiving the same kind of phone calls that Clare was now receiving, and that less than a month after she first reported those calls to the police, she had been found in an isolated area near Green Lake, raped, mutilated, and murdered by someone who had clearly enjoyed his work.  It was assumed, for lack of a better explanation at the time, that the killer was a deranged groupie, who was suffering from unrequited love.  But then, three years later, there had been an eerily similar case, although the second victim was a West Seattle waitress and not a celebrity.

The first murder had been well publicized when it happened, but the second had received far less coverage.  Neither Erin nor Dusty had worked either case, but they knew the details of both, and they had always assumed, just like everyone else at the time, that the second victim’s estranged husband had taken advantage of the perfect opportunity to commit a copycat crime.  However, there was never enough proof to take the husband to trial, with the result that no perpetrator had been brought to justice in either instance, and Erin now began to wonder if those two cases could be linked, after all, and if Seattle might not have a serial stalker in its midst.  She wished she could talk to the only detective who had worked both cases, just to pick his brain, but Frank Pulansky had died two years ago of leukemia.

At nine o’clock, she called her partner.  “Sorry to bother you so late,” she said, after chatting for a few moments with Jean Grissom, Dusty’s wife of twenty-nine years.  “But I’ve been doing some thinking about the Durant situation.”

“So have I,” Dusty replied.  “As a matter of fact, I was just getting ready to call you.  I got to thinking, somewhere between Jeannie’s pork chops and peach cobbler, about the Laughlin and Medina cases.  Do you remember them?”

“I most certainly do,” Erin said, glancing down at her own forgotten dinner -- a limp wedge of leftover pizza.  Linda Laughlin was the popular Seattle singer, and Grace Medina was the waitress with the estranged husband.

“Well, I started wondering if maybe we have a connection here.  Two can be a coincidence, but three -- I’m thinking maybe we have a pattern.”

“That’s exactly why I was calling you,” Erin told him, a comfortable smile spreading across her face.