In Self Defense (8 page)

“It’s terrible sometimes, isn’t it, how we tend to take people for granted?” he murmured, perhaps more to himself than to the two detectives.  “Clare’s just always been there . . . not just for me and the kids, but for everyone.  I’ve never thought of her not being there.”

“Well, we’ll do our best to make sure she doesn’t go anywhere,” Erin said gently.

“A few months ago, she had a terrible accident.  I was afraid we were going to lose her then.  I couldn’t go through that again.”

“What kind of accident was that, sir?” Dusty inquired, curious to hear his version.

“We were hiking up in the Olympics, on a trail we apparently should never have been on.  It was Father’s Day, of all things.  Clare slipped and fell off the side of the mountain.  God, she must have tumbled at least a hundred and fifty feet straight down.  I was sure she was gone, but by some miracle, a rock broke her fall.  And that amazing woman hung onto that rock for over an hour until I could get help.”

“Sounds truly frightening,” Erin murmured.

“It was,” Richard said, turning to face them.  “Tell me what to do,” he cried.  “I’ve got to do something.  I can’t just stand around with my hands in my pockets.  How do I help?  How do I protect her?  Please, I’ll do anything.  Just tell me what it is.  We have to stop this bastard before he . . . before he does whatever it is he’s planning to do.”

“We’d like to put a tap on your home phone, if you’d be okay with that,” Dusty said.

“Of course,” Richard agreed.  “What else?”

“If you don’t mind, we’d also like to have a complete list of your employees.”

Richard was clearly stunned at that.  “Our employees?” he echoed.  “Most of our employees have been with us for years.  Do you seriously think your stalker could be one of
our
people?”

“I don’t know, Erin told him.  “But you have to understand -- we need to be thorough.  And we’d be derelict in our duty if we didn’t cover all the bases.”

Richard went over to his desk and pushed a button on his telephone console.  An instant later, a slender young man of slightly more than medium height, with steel-rimmed spectacles and a shock of sandy hair, slipped into the office.

“This is James Lilly, my personal assistant,” Richard said by way of introduction.  “James, this is Detective Grissom and Detective Hall from the Seattle Police Department.  They’re going to need to have a comprehensive list -- names, addresses, and telephone numbers -- of all of our employees.”

“And social security numbers, too, if it isn’t too much trouble,” Dusty put in.

The assistant’s pale eyes blinked rapidly behind his glasses.  “Is there a problem, sir?” he inquired, with a breathlessness that tended to get more pronounced under stressful circumstances.  “Is there something I should know about?”

“No, no problem,” Richard assured him.  “Just a little checking they need to do.”

“Is this for the entire company?” James asked.  “Or just local employees?”

Richard considered that for a moment.  “We have over eighteen thousand employees in eleven different states,” he explained to the detectives.

“I think just the personnel here in Washington will do for now,” Dusty said.

“I’ll get right on it,” the assistant said, departing as unobtrusively as he had arrived.

“What else?” Richard asked.

“Well, actually, we’d like you to go about your business the same as always,” Erin told him.  “We don’t know how much he knows, but we don’t want to do anything that might alert our guy and put him on his guard.  We want to get him.”

“But going about my business means being in some other state half the time,” Richard argued.  “How can I leave town knowing Clare’s in danger?”

“We’ll be protecting her,” Dusty assured him.  “She won’t see us, and he won’t see us, but we’ll be there.  If he’s checked you out as thoroughly as we think he has, and then you suddenly change your schedule, he’ll know something’s up.”

“I hope you realize just what you’re asking of me,” Richard declared.  “You’re putting me in a completely untenable position here.  You’re as good as telling me that the only way I can help my wife is by running out on her.”

“Would it surprise you to know that your wife didn’t want you to know anything about this?” Erin inquired.  “She knows how busy you are and how much you have on your mind, especially now, apparently, and she didn’t want you having to worry about her, too.”

Richard turned away, but not before Erin caught the glint of tears in his eyes.  “No, it wouldn’t surprise me,” he whispered.  “You see . . . that’s Clare.”

***

“You should have told me,” Richard said that night, as they were getting ready for bed.

“I really didn’t think it was that important,” Clare said, shrugging.

“Some guy’s going around stalking you, and you didn’t think it was important enough to tell me?”

“I thought I could handle it,” she said.  “I didn’t think you needed to be bothered with anything else right now.”

Richard gave her a long look.  “Do you really think it wouldn’t matter to me that some freak is after my wife?”

“Well, I suppose, when you put it that way.”

The telephone rang sharply.  “Who the hell would be calling at this hour?” Richard snapped.

Clare exhaled sharply.  “You know who it is,” she said.

“I’ll get it,” he said.

“No, let me,” she told him, raising her hand to stop him.  “He won’t talk, if you answer, he’ll only hang up, and Detective Grissom and Detective Hall want to get as much of him on tape as they can.”  She reached for the receiver.

“Hello, Clare,” the voice said.

“Hello,” she responded, unable, despite her brave attitude, to contain a shiver.

“It’s late, and I know you’ve probably had a long day.  Are you getting ready for bed?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” she told him.

“Is he there?”

“Is who there?”

“Come now, you don’t want to play games with me, Clare.  Is your husband there?”

“Yes, of course he is.”

“I wish it was me, instead of him.”

“No, you don’t,” she said, seeming to take courage in the fact that Richard was indeed there and that the police would be listening.  “You don’t want me.  At least, not for who I am.  All you want is to live in your own sick little fantasy.”

“Now why would you say a thing like that?” the voice asked, sounding hurt.

“Because it’s true,” she said boldly.  “Because, if you were a real man, you’d come out in the open instead of always hiding in the shadows like a sneak thief, like a coward.”

“You’ve been talking to someone about me, haven’t you?” he asked slowly.

“Why?” Clare retorted.  “Is that what you want me to do -- talk about you?  Is that what turns you on?”

There was a pause.  “I guess you’re not afraid of me anymore,” he said softly.

“No,” she said, her voice steady, but her hands visibly shaking as she spoke.  “I’m not.”

“Then perhaps it’s time for us to meet, you and I,” he said.  “Yes, I do believe it is.  And sometime soon, I think.  Sometime when your husband is away on one of his frequent business trips, and you can see how real I really am.”

“I have absolutely no interest in meeting you, not now, not ever,” she declared, smothering her surprise at his knowing anything about Richard’s travel schedule.  “Why can’t you understand that you mean nothing to me?”

“But I could,” the voice cooed.  “I could mean everything to you.  There are so many things I want to do to you.  Would you like me to tell you some of them?  Would you like me to tell you how much I want you, right now, naked and writhing in my bed?  Would you like to know how easily I could have you screaming with pleasure?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she cried.  “The only thing I’d like is for you to go away and leave me alone.”

It was at that moment that Richard snatched the receiver from her hand.  “Look, you sick sonofabitch,” he barked, “you come anywhere near my wife, and I’ll personally see to it that the state hangs a eunuch!”

***

Dusty and Erin came up with nothing on the background checks of the Nicolaidis employees.  They learned that Douglas Potter, vice president of research and development, was a deadbeat dad and that the company paid his court-ordered child support directly out of his salary, but that didn’t mean he was a stalker.  They learned that this was James Lilly’s third job in ten years, but they couldn’t very well hold that against him.  They learned that Henry Hartstone had an illegitimate child tucked away somewhere in Oregon, but that didn’t make him suspect.

Similarly, they got nowhere with a rundown on every sex offender registered in the state.  And as expected, the bottling company who sold the water allegedly tainted with arsenic stonewalled them, insisting that their testing procedures were in full compliance with all FDA regulations, and that if there were higher than normal levels of arsenic present in the water that Clare happened to drink -- and they weren’t saying that there were -- the matter had been taken care of, and the proof is that there have been no further complaints.

The detectives asked for permission to bring in the FBI.  “We need a profiler,” Dusty explained.  “The thing is, we don’t have a very good handle on this guy, and we have to find out all we can, as quickly as we can.”

Agent Wendy Picard came to their aid.  A slender, bespectacled brunette in her late forties, she spent two days poring over the files of both the Laughlin and Medina cases, and then comparing them to the Durant case.

“In my opinion, they match,” she reported.  She listened to the tapes of the phone calls to Durant.  “You can’t trace him, can you?” she seemed to know.

“No,” Dusty confirmed.  “He’s using throwaway cells.”

“He knows you’re onto him,” Wendy declared.

“How can you tell?” Erin asked.

“Because of some of the things he says, or maybe more from the way he’s saying them, especially in these later tapes from the house.  It’s like he knows he has an audience beyond Mrs. Durant.  But he thinks he’s smarter than you, and he’s willing to put his life on the line to prove it to you, or more importantly, to himself.  True, he’s using a rather sophisticated voice changer to disguise his voice, but that’s all.”

“He either knows that we can’t match it,” Dusty said, “or he doesn’t care.”

“There’s no match in the other two cases?”

“There were tapes made from Laughlin’s home phone tap, but they’ve somehow gone missing, and we haven’t been able to find them yet,” Dusty told her with a sigh.  “There were never any tapes made of the calls to Medina, because the department didn’t get involved in that case until after the fact.”

“Too bad,” Wendy said.  “They could have been very helpful.”

“I know,” Dusty agreed.

“DNA?”

Erin shook her head.  “Nothing,” she said.  “No semen, no blood, no skin cells, not even a stray hair.  Both bodies were naked, and no clothing was ever found.  It’s almost like he washed them clean first.”

Wendy nodded.  “He may well have.  A last parting gesture.  That would be consistent.  What else do you know about him?”

“Unfortunately, not much,” Dusty replied.  “He dumped both victims at the same isolated area near Green Lake.  Both were raped and mutilated before they were killed.  Both cases started with phone calls.  Just like Clare Durant.”

“Tell us who we’re looking for,” Erin urged.  “If he’s playing us, then give us what we need to play him right back, and beat him at his own game.”

“Well, I would say that he’s somewhere in his mid twenties to mid thirties, and he feels comfortable around Green Lake,” the profiler offered.  “He’s almost certainly white and quite bright, but he’s a chronic under-achiever, and a true sociopath.  This is his way of getting back at the world for not treating him with the love or the respect he believes he deserves.”

“I bet that narrows it down to only ten or twenty thousand in the Greater Seattle area,” Dusty said with more than a hint of cynicism.

“He’s likely to be in the technological field, computers, maybe, but he’s at staff level, he’s never been given any management responsibility -- the leadership role he believes he deserves,” Wendy continued.  “And he’s a loner.  He lives alone, probably has no close family ties, no pets, and few if any friends.  In fact, I would say that he has enormous difficulty with interpersonal relationships and intimacy.  He could have lost his mother at an early age, or she might have abandoned him, or she could have been emotionally detached from him, and this is the way he has chosen, symbolically at least, to get back at her for not loving him as much as he thinks she should have.  The rapes may even have been simulated, which is why you found no semen.  It’s one thing to fantasize about raping your mother -- but it’s altogether another to actually do it.  In any case, he’s very patient, very methodical, your stalker, and he takes great care in formulating a plan.  What he doesn’t realize is that it’s the plan that will trap him in the end.”

“You mean because he keeps repeating himself?” Erin asked.

Wendy nodded.  “It’s part of his personality,” she replied  “He considers himself to be superior to everyone around him.  And while he
is
bright -- he’s not as bright as he thinks he is.  What he’s done here is he’s created a plan he believes to be flawless, the way an artist would paint his finest portrait or a composer would write his greatest symphony.  It’s his masterpiece, that can’t be improved on, by him or by anyone.  His proof?  So far, it’s worked perfectly each time he’s used it.  There’s no reason why he wouldn’t assume it would continue to work, again and again.”

“And what?” Dusty wondered aloud.  “He thinks we’re too stupid to catch on?”

“I suspect it’s more that he thinks he’s smart enough to outwit you,” the profiler replied.

***

“Doreen, we’re leaving now,” Clare called up the back stairway.

“All right,” the housekeeper responded from the second floor landing.  “Do you know when you’ll be back?”

It was just before nine o’clock on Saturday morning.  “Let’s see, I’m going to drop Julie off at her class, run a few errands in town, and then swing around and pick Julie up,” Clare replied, thinking aloud.  “So we’ll probably be back about one o’clock.”

“What do I tell Mr. Durant if he calls?”

Whenever Richard’s travel plans included being out of town for more than one night, he always made a point of calling home at least once, to talk to Clare and the children.  Especially on this trip, the first he had taken since the stalker had come into their lives.  And in fact, he had called three times yesterday, once after his plane landed in Birmingham, Alabama, again after he had checked into his hotel, and finally just before going to bed.

Clare was halfway out the door. “Tell him I’ll call him when I get home,” she said.

Although Julie Durant and her brother Peter looked a great deal alike, they couldn’t have been more different.  While Peter was currently into baseball and video games, Julie was into horseback riding and art.  On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, she took riding lessons at a nearby stable, and on Saturday mornings, Clare drove her over to the home of a woman on Mercer Island who taught art classes.

“I’ll pick you up around noon,” she said turning off the road and pulling into the driveway of a picturesque little cottage that sat at the edge of Lake Washington.  She gave her daughter a goodbye hug, pleased to feel, through her clothing, that at least some of the meat was coming back on the girl’s bones.

As time had gone by, and Clare had recovered from her injuries, and nothing else bad had happened, Julie had begun to come out of her self-imposed shell.  She was allowing herself to smile again and pick up her life where she left off.  Her appetite was returning, and best of all, she no longer felt the need to hover over her mother every minute of the day.  Of course, neither Clare nor Richard had said anything to the children about the stalker.

Now, the girl scrambled out of the car, and Clare watched her trot up the front path and into the house before she very carefully turned the red BMW around and headed back down the driveway.  She couldn’t help it, she always felt self-conscious when she drove the car, which was as little as possible.  It wasn’t just because the BMW was so ridiculously expensive, but because it was such an in-your-face color that it fairly shouted ostentation.  She longed to have her Camry back.

The trip to and from Mercer Island took the better part of an hour each way, but Clare didn’t mind the Saturday ritual.  It gave her some extra one-on-one time with her daughter.

She turned out onto the main road and headed north toward the floating bridge that would take her back to Seattle.  Another reason she didn’t mind the weekly excursion was that she really liked coming to Mercer Island.  She especially liked the fact that, despite being a conduit for I-90, one of the major cross-country arteries, the island had managed to retain much of its pastoral charm.  It wasn’t yet overbuilt, and lush foliage screened most of the homes that did exist from public view.  The area was crisscrossed with narrow roads, like the one she was on right now, that either followed the curve of the water, or wound around wooded areas rather than plowed right through them, and no one seemed in any particular hurry to get anywhere.

Which was why she was not prepared for the black truck that suddenly loomed up behind her as she reached a particularly hairy series of curves in the road that wiggled around a magnificent stand of first growth cypress trees.  Nor was she prepared for the truck to pull out into the opposite lane as if it intended to pass her on a part of the road that was clearly marked as a no-passing zone.

Thinking perhaps the driver was drunk, Clare slowed the BMW and waited for him to pass.

“Come on, there’s room, you can go by me,” she muttered.

Only he didn’t pass her, he didn’t even attempt to.  In fact, he slowed down, too, apparently intent on staying in the oncoming lane and riding along beside her.  Clare could see a car coming toward them around the curve up ahead, and she knew he had to have seen it, too, and yet he continued to pace her until they reached a spot in the road where the shoulder fell off sharply and the other car was almost upon him.

“What are you doing?” she shouted, leaning hard on the horn to alert him.

But he looked right at her, as if to suggest that he had no choice in the matter, and he shrugged.  Then, without warning, he gunned his engine and cut her off, missing the oncoming car by a matter of feet, and sideswiping the BMW as he shot past.

Clare did the only thing she could do.  She hit the brakes and swerved in an attempt to avoid him.  But there was no room to maneuver.  The BMW’s wheels spun out of control and lost contact with the road, and the car hurtled down the embankment and slammed into the trees.

Four

“Clare?  Clare, can you hear me?”

She heard a woman’s voice calling to her, but it was coming from so far away that she didn’t think it was necessary to reply.  If the woman really wanted her, she reasoned, she would come closer, so that Clare wouldn’t have to raise her voice in return.

“Clare?” the woman said again, this time sounding as though she was right beside her.  “Open your eyes, Clare.  I want you to open your eyes for me.”

Clare thought about doing that, but it seemed like just too much trouble.  She was so tired and her head ached so badly that all she wanted to do was go to sleep.  She decided, if she kept still, the woman would eventually go away.

But the woman didn’t go away.  She kept calling and calling to her until Clare’s head began to throb even more and she finally had enough and opened her eyes.  Annoyance turned to alarm.  She was in a place she didn’t recognize, lying on something hard and unforgiving, and the light was so bright that it hurt to focus on anything.

“Well, there you are,” a woman she was quite positive she had never seen before said.  The woman was dressed in white.  “You had us worried there for a minute.”

As Clare wondered who she was, a man she was also sure she had never seen before loomed up beside the woman.  He, too, was dressed in white.  She wondered who these people were, and what they wanted with her.  She wondered where she was, and what she was doing here.  She tried to sit up, but she couldn’t seem to move.

“No, no, you don’t want to do that,” the man said quickly.

It was then Clare realized that, aside from her pounding head, she couldn’t feel the rest of her body.  Her eyes widened fearfully.  “Am I dead?” she whispered.

“My goodness, no,” the woman chirped.  “Although I don’t mind telling you how lucky you are that you’re not.”

“Am I in an asylum?” Clare asked.

“No, you’re not in an asylum,” the man told her.  “You’re at Harborview Medical Center.”

Clare was confused.  “If I’m in a hospital, then why am I in a straightjacket?”

“You’re not in a straightjacket.”

“Then why can’t I move?” she said, beginning to whimper.

At that, the man and woman in white seem to vanish and Dusty Grissom and Erin Hall appeared in their places.  Only now it wasn’t light in the room anymore, it was dark.

“You were injured in an accident, Mrs. Durant,” Erin said gently.  “Do you remember?”

Clare thought for a moment.  “Yes, I remember,” she said finally.  “I fell off the mountain.”

“No, you were driving on Mercer Island and your car went off the road.”

“Mercer Island?” Clare repeated vaguely.

“Yes,” Erin said.

“What was I doing there?”

“You took Julie to her art class.”

There was confusion in Clare’s eyes.  “Julie?  Where is Julie?  Did something happen to Julie?”

“No, no, no,” Erin assured her.  “She’s safe at home.”  The detective had called the house in Laurelhurst the moment the accident report came in, and Doreen had immediately driven down to collect the girl.

“Why can’t I move?”

“You injured your spine and apparently there’s some temporary paralysis.  You’re wearing a cervical collar until the doctors can fully evaluate your condition.”