Stalked (45 page)

Tony hadn’t changed.

Maggie hadn’t seen him in almost two months, but his routines were always the same, no matter how much time passed. He was always in the leather armchair when she arrived, with his head down in his notes, his double chin bulging like a blowfish under his beard. He always had his black mug of coffee in one hand and a silver Cross pen in the other, which he rubbed nervously between his fingers. His eyes brooded like a sleepy dog’s stare, and his trimmed eyebrows were the only part of his face that ever moved. He was so predictably bland that he had no personality of his own. He was a watcher. A mask.

Except for Aerosmith.

That was the only clue she ever had as to who Tony was. He was always playing heavy metal when she arrived, and they usually spent the first few minutes of their hour together talking about music and bands. Sometimes Mötley Crüe. Sometimes Guns N‘ Roses. Mostly Aerosmith. She knew it was a way to relax her enough to share the wolves that were in her brain. Today, he was playing their last big single, “Jaded,” and something about the song felt nostalgic to her, as if Tony were taking a rare walk down memory lane. It was about yesterday’s child. Things that were lost and not coming back.

He clicked the song off as she sat down on the sofa, and the silence felt loud. It was night, and the wall of glass overlooking the wilderness behind him was a dark mirror. The office looked like the end of the world, and where the carpet ended at the windows, you could step off and fall into the sucking gravity of a black hole.

Maggie squirmed to get comfortable. Her feet dangled above the floor, making her feel like a teenager. Tony didn’t look up. He never looked up until she spoke. He just sat there, sipping his coffee, sometimes stirring it up in his mug as if there might be grounds resting on the bottom that could float around and flavor it.

“Long time,” Maggie said.

Tony put the black mug to his lips and took a quiet sip. “Yes.”

He deigned to look at her then, with the mug in front of his face like a muzzle.

“You heard about everything that’s happened?” she asked.

He nodded, and the overhead light danced on the smooth, high scalp of his forehead. “How is Serena?”

“She’ll be okay, but she’ll need help.”

“Of course.”

He didn’t push her, didn’t ask questions. How are you. What are you feeling. What’s on your mind. Sometimes they spent a long time not saying anything at all. He just studied her from behind his coffee mug, and she felt like a lab rat.

“I should have come to you after I was raped,” Maggie said.

“Why didn’t you?” Tony asked.

“I thought if I didn’t tell anyone, I could make it go away. Block it out. I’m good at that.”

“But not good enough.”

“No,” she admitted. “No one’s that good.”

“You caught the rapist, I hear.”

“Yeah.”

“Does that help?” he asked.

“I thought it would, but to be honest, it doesn’t. Not really. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the shithead is out of circulation. But it’s like having your house burn down and then putting out the fire.”

“I understand. So what are you going to do about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you can’t change what happened. It’s already done.”

“I was hoping I could mope around and feel sorry for myself for a while,” Maggie said. “Eat Doritos. Watch the soaps.”

Tony didn’t smile.

“Actually, I’m thinking of adopting a kid,” she admitted. She wondered why she was telling him that. Old habits died hard.

“Ah.”

“What, ah?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“You think it’s too soon?”

“What do you think?” Tony asked.

“I think it would be nice to get an answer once and a while for all the money I’m paying.”

“How did you come to this decision?” he asked.

“It’s not a decision. It’s something I’m thinking about. I feel like that’s what I’m missing in my life. Being a mother. All the bad things began to happen after the miscarriages. That’s when the universe went out of whack.”

“So if you become a mother, the stars will be aligned again.”

“Something like that.”

“You sound like you’re looking for approval or disapproval.”

“I am.”

“From me?” Tony asked.

“No, not from you,” she said. Too quickly. “I guess I’m looking for approval from myself.”

“And?”

“I’m not ready to give it yet.”

“Why is that?”

“I still haven’t found my way out.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

Maggie sighed. “Have you ever watched a spider on a screen? He gets in through a crack in the mesh, and then he’s trapped inside, and he walks around and around and around and around trying to find that same little seam where he can get out. He can do it for days. The question is, can he find it before he starves to death?”

“So what’s your crack in the screen, Maggie?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Eric was murdered.”

Tony stopped twirling his pen and froze with his coffee mug halfway to his face. Their eyes met. “Of course.”

“I need to find out who did it. I can’t go on until I do.”

“I thought this rapist, this escaped prisoner, was the murderer.”

Maggie shook her head. “He has an alibi.”

“Surely no one still thinks
you
did it.”

“A lot of people do. They can’t prove it, but it will always be out there. You can’t be a cop suspected of murder.”

Tony’s upper lip disappeared under his mustache. “We both know that murders don’t always get solved, and it’s no one’s fault. You can’t take them all on.”

“No, but this one is my river, Tony. I cross this one, or I’m stuck where I am forever. I get past it, and I can get on with my life. Anything else is like drowning.”

“You seem to think I can help you.”

“You were the last person to see Eric that night,” she told him.

“I’ve already told you everything I know.”

“Humor me,” Maggie said. “Tell me again.”

Tony drank from his black coffee mug and studied her face. “Eric told me you had been raped. He thought he knew who did it. He wanted advice from me on how to figure out if he was right. He wanted to know what kinds of questions to ask to determine if someone could be a sexual predator.”

“But he didn’t give you a name.”

“No, I don’t know who he suspected,” Tony said.

“Eric didn’t talk to Blue Dog,” Maggie said. “That means he thought someone else assaulted me, and he was wrong. The trouble is, I still think whoever he suspected was the one who killed him. Crazy, huh?”

Tony frowned. “If Eric was wrong, why would anyone have a reason to kill him?”

“Maybe because that person had something else to hide.”

The words floated like dead leaves blown in the air and never touching ground.

“We’ve known each other a long time, Tony,” Maggie said softly. “Ever since the Enger Park case.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

She remembered how young they all were back then. They spent hours together—Stride, Tony, and Maggie—going over evidence, looking for a pattern, building a picture of the killer. Tony was the profiler.
You’re dealing with a serial killer
, he had told them.
He’s going to do this again. He’s a male, probably married, probably in his forties. He has a teenage daughter, and he either abuses her or fantasizes about abusing her. I don’t think cutting off the head and hands is about obscuring the victim’s identity. It’s about the killer’s anger and guilt. He needs to erase this girl
.

The profile made perfect sense, and it got them nowhere.

“The Enger Park case is back in the news,” she added.

“I know.”

“What’s your gut say, Tony? Could we be looking at the same perp?”

“After ten years? That’s a long time between crimes.”

“But it does happen. I mean, serial killers sometimes wait that long.”

Tony shrugged. “Yes, it depends on whether they can find some other way to resolve their pathology. Something that provides a similar sense of power or release.”

“How would a rapist and murderer
resolve
his pathology?” she asked. “I’ve always wondered about that.”

Tony got up and went to the mahogany bar where he kept his coffee press and poured another cup. His paunch made a bump in his sweater. He made a face as he drank. The coffee was cold. He stood in front of the glass wall, and all Maggie could see were reflections and nothing but darkness framed behind him.

“There are many ways,” he told her. “It depends on the individual. The perpetrator needs to find a substitute for his deviant behavior, something that satisfies his underlying need for power and control. The BTK killer in Wichita wound up as a leader in his church, and the social status he had in that role was apparently enough to keep him from committing more murders for many years.”

“That sounds too easy.”

“No, it’s not easy at all. Keep in mind that most of these killers
want
to control their violence. They live a constant, mortal struggle between good and evil. Some control their impulses all their lives. Others fail. The lucky ones find a way to cage the beast.”

“What about being sort of a sexual voyeur?” Maggie suggested. “You know, being involved in rape cases, working with rape victims, that sort of thing. Could that do it?”

Tony narrowed his eyes. “Maybe.”

“So being a cop could actually work, I suppose.”

“It’s possible.”

“Or working with cops. That would do it, too.”

“Like I said, anything’s possible.”

Maggie nodded. “You remember Nicole Castro, don’t you?”

Tony took a seat behind his desk on the other side of the room. He reclined backward in his Aeron chair. “Yes.”

“I didn’t realize you treated her,” Maggie said.

“I work with lots of cops, but I can’t talk about patients.”

“Right, privilege, I know.”

Tony sipped his cold coffee.

“Stride came to see me this evening,” Maggie went on. “Abel Teitscher was in the Cities this afternoon talking to Nicole about the Enger Park case.”

“Oh?”

“It turns out Nicole thought she was close to a breakthrough on the case right before she was arrested. She said you were a big help.”

“Me? I don’t recall.”

“She says you pointed her in the right direction. Told her to
walk this way
. Get it? Aerosmith? Pretty funny, huh?”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Well, you helped her find out a lot about Aerosmith fan sites and chat rooms, and wouldn’t you know, she thinks she found out who the Enger Park Girl was. She thinks it was a girl who got picked up by a bad, bad guy at an Aerosmith concert in Kansas City in 1997. That was a couple days before we found the body in the park. So Nicole figures the murderer was at the concert, too.”

“Sounds like a pretty big haystack in which to find a needle,” Tony said.

Maggie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s for sure. Nicole was optimistic. Those concerts are zoos, right? Tens of thousands of people there. But I don’t need to tell
you
that.”

“No.”

Maggie turned around and squinted up at the diplomas hung on the wall behind her. “I need glasses. It kills me. Say, I’m right, you went to the University of Minnesota, didn’t you? You were there in the early ‘90s?”

“Yes. I got my B.A. and then did my graduate work there, too.”

“We were probably both there around the same time, but we never ran into each other.”

“The U is like a city,” Tony said.

“It sure is. Thousands of students, and you never meet more than a fraction of them. You never hear their stories. Like Helen Danning, she went to the U at the same time we did, but she dropped out and never went back to school. Too bad.”

“Who’s Helen Danning?” Tony asked blandly.

“She’s the second Enger Park Girl,” Maggie told him. “The woman we just found yesterday.”

Tony stroked his beard and briefly closed his eyes. When they opened again, Maggie stared at him without blinking. Her eyes were bright and cold. She was talking to him silently. Telling him the truth. Daring him. It was as if they were connected by an invisible tether, a waxy string tied to the bottom of two foam cups, and she was whispering in his ear.

“I didn’t hear that you had identified the body,” Tony said.

“No, they haven’t released that to the press, but it’s her. The killer made a big mistake. He missed a small tattoo on her ankle.”

“Oh?”

“The tattoo said TLIM. Helen kept a blog. The Lady in Me. The blog was how Eric traced her to the Ordway in St. Paul.”

“Eric?”

“That’s right. Eric went to see Helen Danning just before he was killed. Helen disappeared the next day. You see, we’re still putting the pieces together, but we think Eric found her because of a story she posted on the Web about being sexually assaulted while she was at the U.”

Tony shrugged. “Why would Eric want to talk to her about that?”

“Yeah, that’s the real question, isn’t it? What would lead Eric to believe that a girl named Helen Danning getting raped in college would have anything to do with
me
being raped fifteen years later?”

“I assume you’re going to tell me.”

Maggie reached inside the pocket of her jacket and slipped out a single sheet of paper. “Here’s the part of the blog that Stride and I found really interesting,” she said. “This is what Helen wrote. ‘The real kicker is that the bastard who did this to me is now in the business of counseling rape victims! He’s some shrink up in Duluth!’ ”

Tony stared at the glossy surface of his desk as if it were a mirror.

“So let me know where I go wrong on this, Tony,” Maggie said. “Eric was trying to find out who assaulted me and Tanjy, and he wound up on this Web site for rape victims. He saw what Helen wrote, and alarm bells started going off in his head, because he knew that Tanjy and I had one thing in common. Our shrink. So Eric went to see Helen Danning to confirm exactly who she meant, exactly who this Duluth psychiatrist was who raped her back in college. But he knew what she was going to say. She told him it was you, Tony. That’s why Eric came to see you the night he was killed. He wasn’t there to find out how someone ordinary could be a rapist. He didn’t tell you he was going to see someone else after he left. He was there to accuse
you
of raping me and Tanjy.”