XO (17 page)

His half-open mouth, the lowered lids beneath the outcropping of eyebrows … it was too much for her.

She stepped back fast and stumbled. But the tree she’d grabbed to keep from falling was a small pine sapling and bent sideways under her weight.

And caught Edwin’s eye.

The motion stopped and he gazed toward where a horrified Kayleigh now crouched on the ground.

Did he see her? Was he coming toward her now, his pants unzipped?

Panicked, Kayleigh turned and fled, sprinting all out.

Dodging trees, brush, not daring to look behind her … Then the fence surrounding her precious garden loomed. She slowed but didn’t bother with the gate. She stretched her hands out and vaulted the fence like she used to do the horse in gymnastics class—always game to take on the challenge but often, like now, landing in a sprawl on the other side.

Heart drumming, she was on her feet and scrabbling into the house, slamming the door shut and wheeling about.

She looked over her garden. It was
ruined
! Ruined forever. She could never step into it again without thinking of
him
and what
he
had been doing.

She pressed her face against the window.

The flashing continued for a moment.

Then it began to move toward the main road. She caught a glimpse of red as the car proceeded slowly to the intersection, turned right and vanished.

Kayleigh jumped as her phone rang, a steel guitar ring tone and a hum of vibration. She approached slowly. Was it Edwin, or someone else, calling with the second verse to “Your Shadow”? Announcing another killing?

She picked up the mobile. Looked down at the screen. After a moment’s hesitation, she hit
ANSWER.

LAW ENFORCEMENT BRIEFING
rooms are the same the world over: scraped, scuffed, dented, repaired with tape, filled with mismatched furniture and cryptic signage, grimy windows.

The Fresno-Madera Consolidated Sheriff’s Office was about average, though the smell of sour garlic was a unique addition, maybe from a late-shift Chinese dinner. Dance stood in front of the green-lit room with P. K. Madigan and Dennis Harutyun, whose taciturn face had offered a faint quasi-smile beneath his opulent mustache at the announcement that Dance was joining the team.

Her ruse at using him to slip into the observation room earlier was apparently forgiven.

Detectives Crystal Stanning and Miguel Lopez were here too. They, along with Detective Gabriel Fuentes, presently in the field, would be the Prescott homicide/Kayleigh Towne stalker task force, backed up by TJ Scanlon in Monterey (“You have a very bizarre idea of taking a vacation, Boss”).

Two civilians were in the room, as well. Dance had called Kayleigh Towne thirty minutes ago and asked her to join them. The woman had reluctantly agreed and Alicia Sessions had come along for moral support. Kayleigh was bleary-eyed and sallow, her impressive honey hair tied back in a taut ponytail and protruding from a burgundy sports cap without a logo as if she were trying to disguise herself.

She also, Dance noted, wore baggy jeans, not the usual closer-fitting numbers from her album covers and concerts, and a thick, long-sleeved knit shirt, which would be merciless in the heat.

The concealment would be futile, though, if that was the purpose, Dance could have told her. To Edwin Sharp she was the sexiest, most
beautiful woman in the world, whatever clothes she wore and however makeup-free her face.

Kayleigh reported that Edwin had been spying on her again, forty minutes ago, parked at a new vantage point; apparently he’d gotten tired of the police driving past and staring at him in the parking lot of the nature preserve across the road from her house. So, right after he’d been released from the lockup, he’d headed to this new observation post for his high like an addict looking for meth.

The singer’s voice wavered as she told the story, suggesting to Dance that there was more to it than her just spotting him. She wondered if there’d been an actual confrontation between the two. But whatever might have happened, it was clear Kayleigh didn’t want to talk about it.

Alicia Sessions was dressed the opposite of her boss, almost pick-a-fight defiant: tight jeans, light blue cowboy boots, a green tank top with bright orange bra straps showing. Significant muscles too. Dance wondered what the rest of the tattoo, disappearing down her back, might be. Her face was grim and angry, some of that directed, it seemed, toward the deputies themselves as if they weren’t doing enough to protect her boss.

Dance said, “Chief Madigan’s been kind enough to invite the CBI to assist in the Prescott murder case and we’re going to be focusing on the possibility that it’s linked to the stalker who’s been troubling Kayleigh. I’m not here to step on toes and if you think there’s a conflict between your department and mine, you can come to me or Chief Madigan at any time. I’m helping because I’ve got some experience with stalkers.”

“Personally?” Lopez said.

Everyone laughed.

“They’re discouraged when they see a Glock Twenty-three on your hip.”

Kayleigh was among those laughing but it was too loud. Poor thing’s terrified, Dance assessed. Alicia watched warily.

“First of all, my associate in Monterey’s found out that there are no warrants or court orders on Edwin—nothing federal or in California, Washington or Oregon. A few traffic violations, that’s it. Which is a little unusual for a stalker; normally there’s a history of complaints. But, on the other hand, he could simply be very careful. And we know he’s smart.

“Now, I’m going to tell you a little about stalking and where I think
Edwin fits into the diagnosis. There are several types of stalkers. The first type is known as simple obsessional. These are usually domestic situations. The stalker and his object have had some prior contact, usually romantic or sexual. Relationships, marriages or even one-night stands that go bad. Think of
Fatal Attraction.
”

“Now
that
was a movie to keep husbands on the straight and narrow,” Lopez said, engendering uneasy laughter.

Dance continued, “Then there are erotomanic stalkers.”

“Like sex perverts?” Madigan wondered aloud.

“No, it’s more about love than sex. Traditionally erotomanic stalkers were women who fell in love with powerful men in higher economic or social classes. Like secretaries or shop clerks fawning over their bosses. But now, as many men fall into the category as women. The profile is that there’s been some minor, completely innocuous contact that the stalker misreads. They become convinced the subject of their obsession is in love with them but is too shy or reluctant to reciprocate.

“The third type is called love obsessional. These are the ones who go after celebrities, people they’ve worshiped from afar and come to believe they’re soul mates with. I think Edwin is a mix of erotomania and love obsessional. He honestly believes that you’re the woman for him. He wants a relationship with you and he believes that you feel the same about him.”

“That damn ‘XO,’” Kayleigh muttered. “It was just a form letter.”

Alicia said, “We send out thousands of them a week. It didn’t have anything personal about him except a name—and we’ve got an automail program that inserts that.”

“Well, you have to understand: all stalkers are more or less delusional. They range from serious neurosis to borderline personalities to truly psychotic: schizophrenic or severely bipolar. We have to assume that Edwin has a reality problem. And he doesn’t want to fix that because he gets a high out of contact with you—it’s as powerful as a drug to him.”

Crystal Stanning asked, “But what’s his motive for killing Bobby Prescott—if he’s the one who did?”

Dance said, “That’s a good question, Detective. It’s the one thing that doesn’t quite fit. Erotomanic and love obsessional stalkers are the least dangerous, statistically much less so than domestic stalkers. But they can certainly kill.”

Madigan added, “I think we should remember too that Bobby could just have been at the wrong place at the wrong time. If that song
was
an announcement it was just about the concert hall. Maybe had nothing to do with Bobby. The perp might just’ve been waiting for anybody to show up.”

“Good point, yes,” Dance said. “But what we should do is look into Bobby’s life a little more, see what he was up to, anything illegal, for instance.”

“He wasn’t,” Kayleigh said firmly. “He had a problem a few years ago, drugs and drinking, but he was clean recently.”

Skepticism is part of being an officer but Dance wasn’t going to contest the girl. It was important to her to preserve the memory of her friend and they could learn independently if Bobby had been engaged in any risky activity. From the comments by his neighbor, Tabatha, it seemed that he wasn’t.

“But that doesn’t mean somebody still wouldn’t want him dead,” Dance said. “And we have to remember some intruder—likely the killer—took some things from his trailer the morning after he was killed.”

“I could look into his personal life, his background,” Harutyun offered in his low, easy voice, silken mustache bobbing.

Dance glanced at Madigan, who nodded his agreement. “Dennis’s our librarian. Mean that in a good way. He does his homework. He knew what Google was when I thought it was a character on the Cartoon Network.”

“Good.”

“Can’t you interrogate him?” Alicia asked Dance, who didn’t offer that the first interview had not been particularly successful.

“Possibly. But I’m not sure how helpful it would be.”

In her lectures, Dance talked about the difficulty of kinesically analyzing suspects like Edwin:
People on the borderline of psychosis, like stalkers, might tell you facts that can be helpful in running a case and can lead to your uncovering their deception. But such people are often impossible to analyze kinesically. They don’t feel any stress when lying—because their goal of getting close to the object of their obsession trumps everything.

She explained this now and added that they also had no leverage to bring him in.

Alicia grimaced in frustration, then asked, “Isn’t there a stalking law here?”

“That’s right—California’s was first in the country,” Madigan said.

Dance paraphrased the statute: “You’re guilty of stalking if you willfully, maliciously and repeatedly follow or harass the victim and make a credible threat with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of the immediate family.” She added, “It doesn’t have a lot of teeth, though. Some jail time and a fine.”

“Well, it’s something; arrest him anyway,” Kayleigh said.

“It may not be that easy. Tell me about his stalking.”

“I mean, my lawyers’d know more, I left it pretty much up to them. But I know he sent me about a hundred and fifty emails and thirty or so regular letters. He’d ask me out, hint about a life together, write about what he’d done that day.”

Not nearly as bad as some, Dance noted.

“And he sent me some presents. Pictures he’d drawn, miniature instruments, old LPs. We sent everything back.”

“You said he showed up at concerts but you never saw him.”

“Right.”

Lopez asked, “Disguises, maybe?”

“Could be,” Dance said. “Stalkers have a whole arsenal they use to get close to their objects and keep them under control. They steal mail to find out who the victims know and where they might be. They threaten witnesses into lying that they’ve never been around the victims’ houses. They get to be good at hacking phones and computers and some even go to locksmith school to learn how to break and enter. These’re really desperate people. Their whole worth is tied up in their love for their object; they’re nothing without that person in their life.”

Alicia said, “We threatened him with restraining orders and everything but … he just ignored the letters and the lawyers said he was never quite across the line of legality.”

“They talked to the FBI about hacking into our computers,” Kayleigh said, “and hired a private computer security firm. But there was never any proof he did it.”

Madigan then asked the key question, “In all those letters was there any threat at all? Under the statute there has to be a credible threat.”

“Isn’t Bobby’s death enough of a threat?” Alicia asked harshly.

“We don’t have proof he did it,” Harutyun said.

“Please. Of course he did.”

Dance continued, “When we’re talking about an arrest for stalking under the statute, Detective Madigan is right; you need a threat against you or a family member. It can be implied, but if that’s the case there has to be a reasonable belief that you’re actually in danger of harm.”

“Not, you know, mental or psychic harm?” Crystal Stanning asked.

“No. Physical.”

Kayleigh was staring at a poster, a cartoon of a police officer and a contrite teenage boy.

S
CHOOL
P
ATROL
D
ETAIL:
I
F IT’S ONLY
P
OT, TALK TO THEM … A
L
OT.