The Follower (43 page)

They arrived at the house in Lenox at a little before eight o’clock. They parked in the driveway and then Katie got out of the car first and walked to the backyard, away from the porch light. Then, in pitch-darkness, she tilted her head back and looked up at the sky. She’d missed seeing so many stars. In Manhattan, on a clear night, you could see about three or four of the brightest stars, and that was it. If she ever moved back to the country, she promised herself that she’d look at the stars every night, not take little things like that for granted.

Her parents had gone into the house. Katie remained in the backyard for a while longer, enjoying the aloneness, then she strolled back to the front of the house, kicking up gravel in the driveway like a kid.

In the house, her mom, in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher, said, “There’s leftover salad and chicken from last night.”

“That’s okay, Ma. The Burger King filled me up.”

“How about some ice cream or cookies?”

Katie thought about the weight she’d put on lately—three pounds, according to the last time she’d weighed herself—and she felt like she’d put on more since then. But the idea of sitting in front of the TV at her parents’ house, stuffing her face, appealed to her in a cozy way, and after everything she’d been through lately, she deserved to treat herself. Besides, she wasn’t dating anyone and didn’t plan to for a long time, so what difference did it make if she gained a little more weight?

“Okay, I’ll have a couple of cookies, but just a couple.”

A half hour later, she was sitting cross-legged on the couch, watching some dumb movie on Lifetime, the bag of Double Stuf Oreos about one-third eaten. Sitting on the chair next to her, her mom was eating Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia straight from the container. Her dad stayed up for a while, reading on the screened-in porch, but at around ten o’clock, he went upstairs. When the Lifetime movie ended, her mom said good night, first telling her how great it was to have her home and kissing her two times on the top of her head.

Katie remained in the living room, watching TV and eating Oreos. She finally hit her nausea threshold as the calorie guilt set in. She’d have to go bike riding tomorrow to make up for it.

At around eleven, she crashed from the sugar high and was suddenly exhausted. She shut off all the lights downstairs and went upstairs to her bedroom.

John Himoto was calling Katie’s home number, still getting no answer. Her voice mail was picking up right away on her cell so she’d probably turned it off. Finally he decided to stop fucking around and got in his car and went to her apartment.

She wasn’t home—or she wasn’t answering the buzzer. He didn’t like this at all. Barasco had spoken to her around noon and she hadn’t mentioned anything to him about going to her parents’ in Massachusetts or anywhere else. John waited, hoping she was just out shopping or something.

A half hour, then forty-five minutes went by. John called Barasco again, couldn’t reach him, but got through to his partner, Martinelli.

“Any word on Peter Wells?”

“Nada,”
Martinelli said.

“Shit,” John said. “What about Katie Porter?”

“The girl? What about her?”

“Where the hell is she?”

“Home, I guess,” Martinelli said.

“Yeah, well, I’n at her home and she’s not here, so guess again.”

“Look,” Martinelli said, “I’n real busy right now and—”

“Listen to me,” John said. “I have reason to believe that Katie Porter is in serious danger, and we have to do everything we can to make sure that Peter Wells doesn’t come into contact with her.”

“We’re doing everything we can.”

“Yeah, everything except finding him.”

“I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” Martinelli said.

“Did Katie tell you anything about leaving town?”

“Nick told her to stay in the city and she said she would. Look, I gotta go. If Nick even knew I was talking to you, he’d be pissed off as all hell.”

“Yeah, like I give a shit,” John said and clicked off.

He tried Katie’s numbers again and still couldn’t get through. Okay, he had to think, put himself in her place. She was scared so she might have panicked—maybe she didn’t leave town, but she could’ve gone to stay with a friend. Taking a shot, John called Katie’s friend Amanda, the girl he’d met with the other day. Unfortunately Amanda claimed she had no idea where Katie was, and John believed her.

He decided there was nothing he could do now except stick around and wait. She could have gone to a movie or out to dinner. He had to hope anyway.

He sat on the stoop, waiting for her to come home, occasionally calling her numbers and not getting through. It was frustrating, but he didn’t know what else to do. He kept thinking about what he’d told Katie when he’d seen her last—
I promise you, everything’s going to be okay
. If something happened to her, he knew those words would haunt him for the rest of his life.

At ten o’clock, there was still no sign of her. He called Barasco again—the fuck wouldn’t pick up—and he couldn’t get through to Martinelli, either. At eleven thirty, John was still sitting on the stoop when Katie’s roommate and a guy, probably her boyfriend, arrived.

John stood right away and said, “Excuse me, you live with Katie Porter, right? Your name’s Sharon, right?”

“Susan. What happened? What’s wrong?”

“Is Katie okay?” the guy asked.

“I don’t know,” John said.

“What do you mean?” Susan said. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know, and it’s extremely important that I find her right away. Did she tell you she was going anywhere?”

“No, but why is—”

“I don’t have time to explain. Can we go upstairs? Maybe she left a note or something.”

John went up with them to the apartment. Sure enough, there was a note on the dining table.

“Goddammit,” John said, feeling like he’d wasted the past three hours. Hoping it wasn’t too late, he said to Susan, “Where do her parents live?”

“Katie’s parents?” Susan asked.

“Yes.” John wanted to grab her, shake the words out of her.

“They live in, urn, Massachusetts.”

“I know that. But where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think.”

“I am thinking. I don’t know. She never told me.”

“Does she have an address book?”

“I’n not sure.”

John went into Katie’s room, started looking around, checking drawers, but couldn’t find an address book. Maybe she had the address or phone number on her computer somewhere, or maybe he could find the info online, or by contacting her work or college, but that could take hours and he didn’t have hours. Hell, he might not even have minutes.

Then he had an idea.

He went out to the living room and said to Susan, “Does your phone have a log?”

“A what?”

“Does it log calls? Does it keep a list of last calls, calls made…”

“Oh, yeah, of course.”

“Check it right now.”

Susan checked the incoming numbers and saw there was a recent call from a 413 area code. John dialed the number. It rang four times, then a woman answered.

“Mrs. Porter?”

“Yes?” She sounded suspicious.

“Himoto, NYPD. Is your daughter Katie with you?”

“Yes, she’s here.”

“Thank God,” John said.

“What’s this about? What’s going on?”

“Just listen to me,” John said. “Call the police right now, dial nine-one-one. Tell them that you think someone’s breaking into your house.”

“But no one’s breaking in.”

“Doesn’t matter—that’ll get ’em over there immediately. Then have them stay with you until you hear from me. Or, even better, have them call me, or you call me as soon as they arrive. I’ll give you my number, okay?”

“It’s the police,” Mrs. Porter said to someone.

Then John heard a man’s muffled voice, probably Katie’s father’s, but he couldn’t make out what the guy was saying.

“The New York police,” Mrs. Porter said to the guy. “He won’t say.”

“Mrs. Porter, are you there?” John said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Don’t waste any more time. Call nine-one-one immediately, okay? Or have your husband call from another line.”

“Oh, okay,” she said, sounding frazzled. “But maybe I should wake Katie up and tell her.”

“I thought Katie was with you,” John said.

“She’s with us in the house, but she’s sleeping,” Mrs. Porter said. “We were sleeping, too, till you called.”

“Go wake her up right now,” John said. “Then all of you stay together until the police get there and make sure the doors are locked.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Just go,” John said, nearly screaming.

It got quiet on the line for ten, twenty seconds, maybe longer. Then he heard Mrs. Porter calling, “Katie?…Katie?” Then louder, “Katie?…Katie?!”

A few seconds later she got back on and said, “She’s not here!”

“Are you sure?” John said. “Did you—”

“She’s not in her room, she’s not anywhere. Oh my God, she’s gone!”

Katie washed up, then went
into her bedroom, closed the door, and put on her comfy PJs. Her room was still decorated the way it had been in high school, with the same pink girly furniture and, of course, a big Backstreet Boys poster above her bed.

In a suddenly nostalgic mood, she started searching the CD rack for her
Backstreet’s Back
CD. She stopped searching when she thought she heard something behind her, in the closet. She stared at the closet door, then half smiled, remembering the times she and Heather would be home alone and scare the crap out of each other with ghost stories. Knowing the noise she’d heard was either the house settling or something shifting by itself, she resumed searching for the CD. Finally she found it—it had been misplaced in a Creed CD case—and put it in the stereo.

As the Backstreet Boys started crooning, she was instantly transported back to ninth grade, when she was convinced that she was going to marry Nick Carter someday and have his babies. She wanted to crank the song, but didn’t want to wake her parents, so she put on a headset and then upped the volume. She lay in bed with her eyes closed, singing along, but not too loud.

When the song ended, she lowered the volume and dimmed the light.

The next time she opened her eyes, Peter Wells was looking down at her. Before she could process what was happening,
his hand came down over her face and he said something. She couldn’t hear what he’d said with the music going. Then she saw that in his other hand he was holding a large knife.

She tried to scream, but he was pressing his hand down over her mouth so hard it hurt. Then, with the hand holding the knife, he managed to lift the headset off her ears and he whispered, “I won’t hurt you. I swear to God, I won’t hurt you.”

She was trembling, thinking,
This can’t possibly be happening. This has to be a fucking nightmare
.

“Just relax,” he said. “Calm down. It’ll be okay, I promise. I didn’t want to do it this way, I really didn’t. But what choice did I have? You wouldn’t take my calls, you wouldn’t answer the door, and then you ran away up here. This isn’t the way it was supposed to happen. You were supposed to stay in New York and fall in love with me there. But you know what? I’n not angry at you.”

Katie was looking at the knife, only an inch or two away from her throat. She recognized it; it was from the kitchen downstairs. Then she thought about her parents. She was pretty sure that the TV had been on in their room before, but maybe Peter had tied them up or even killed them.

Warm tears were dripping down the sides of her face.

“Remember that day in the park,” Peter said, “when we were watching the ducks? I was thinking about that before, how beautiful you looked that day. I knew right then that what we had was real, that it would last. When did you know?” He stared at her, as if waiting for her to answer. Then, realizing his hand was still covering her mouth, he said, “It’s okay, we’ll have plenty of time to discuss all of that stuff. But I wanted to ask you about our first kiss. Wasn’t it perfect? Not the one on the blanket, the one in the carriage in the park. I consider that our first kiss, don’t you?”

God, Katie couldn’t believe that she’d actually kissed this fucking lunatic.

“Okay, this is what’s going to happen next,” he said. “We’re going to leave the house. I’n going to take you someplace. I can’t tell you where yet, but trust me, it’ll be very romantic, I know you’ll love it. I have a car parked across the road. We’ll
leave the house together, quietly, and walk to the car. I can trust you, right? I mean, you won’t panic and scream or anything, right?”

Katie nodded weakly.

“Good,” Peter said. “Because I know I’ve done some things lately that made you panic and I’n really sorry for that. I came on too strong. I think I almost blew it when I showed you the apartment. I should’ve built up to it gradually, maybe waited another week or two before I unveiled it. And the ring and the proposal—that was too much, too fast, too. Damn, I hate it when I get impulsive like that. Oh well, can’t undo the past, right? But it’s okay now because we’re together, that’s the important thing. As long as we have each other, we don’t need anything else. Besides, I’n going to propose to you again—in the right way, at the right time. But we’ll work out all the details, let’s just get out of here, okay? The thing is, we don’t want to wake up your parents. That’s why I have to keep the knife on you, just in case you panic. I know you don’t want to panic, that you want to leave here with me calmly, but you might freak out and not be able to control yourself, and I can’t have your parents waking up and causing a whole scene, right?”

She knew he was lying. He’d already killed her parents like he’d killed Andy and Will and Heather’s boyfriend. He’d probably hacked them to death in bed with the knife.

“Right?” he said again.

Katie managed to nod, but couldn’t hold back the tears.