In Self Defense (12 page)

“Like it or not, we’re a part of his game now,” Dusty told them.   “He knows we’re onto him, and he can’t shake us loose, so he’s going to try to outsmart us.  According to our profiler, that would be his crowning glory -- getting her out right under our noses.   But his eagerness to show us up just might make him careless.”

“I know it’s our job to get the bad guys,” a third officer commented, “but isn’t it also to protect people like Clare Durant?”

“Yes, of course it is,” Erin replied.

“Well, it seems to me you’re putting her at great risk.”

“That’s not our intention,” Dusty told him.

“Sure it is,” another officer said.  “You’re using her as bait, aren’t you?”

The two detectives exchanged glances.

“We’re going to get this guy,” Erin said flatly.  “And we believe we can do that without any harm coming to Clare Durant.”

Five

As abruptly as they had begun, the telephone calls stopped.  There were no calls on Sunday, nor were there any on Monday.

“What’s going on?” Dusty wondered aloud.  “Is he on to us?  Did we screw up somehow?” 

“Let’s check back on Laughlin,” Erin suggested.  “Did the calls stop at any time before he snatched her?”

They went back over the files.  Sure enough, the stalker’s phone calls had stopped three days before Linda Laughlin had been abducted from her home.

“If we’re figuring right, this means we should be good for tomorrow,” Dusty told the team.

***

Richard’s suitcase was packed and he was ready to go at six-thirty on Tuesday morning.  His Mercedes was waiting out front.  He would park it in a special garage at Seatac Airport before taking the cross-country flight to Burlington, Vermont, where a whole new concept in X-ray technology, the most exciting and innovative product that Nicolaidis Industries had developed in decades, was in the process of being tested.

“I don’t have to go,” Richard said, sitting down on the bed beside his wife.

“Yes, you do,” Clare told him.  “Now don’t worry about me.”

Richard sighed, looking torn.  “If anything happens to you while I’m gone, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself, you know that,” he said.

Clare smiled.  “I promise to still be here when you get back,” she said.  “Now get out of here, before you miss your plane.”

He kissed her gently on the cheek and left.  Clare heard him go down the stairs and out of the house.  When she heard the front door close behind him, she took the loaded Beretta from the drawer in the nightstand next to her side of the bed and slipped it under her pillow.

***

It was her first day out of the house since the hospital, and it felt so good to sit beside Doreen in the Plymouth Voyager and watch the driveway slip away beneath them, and then the house grow smaller and finally disappear behind the hedges as they turned onto Lakeview Way.  It didn’t look like a prison, but, over the past week, her home had begun to feel a lot like one.

Clare was more than content to have Doreen drive.  Unlike what Julie was being taught during her riding lessons about getting right back on the horse if you fell off, she had no interest in getting back behind the wheel herself. Her little brush with death had scared her far more than she was willing to acknowledge.

But it was wonderful to be free.  Even just to be going to Ballard for a checkup with her doctor was enough to make her feel euphoric.  Clare opened the window, leaned back against the seat, and sucked the mild October air deep into her lungs.

Doreen, glancing over, smiled.  Neither of them paid any attention to the nondescript brown car that passed them, driving in the opposite direction.

***

Clare had known Dr. Robert Ahrens her entire life.  He was a kindly man, older and more stooped now than he used to be, of course, with a short grizzled beard and thick eyeglasses.  After he finished his examination, he straddled a stool in front of her.

“Well, the good news is, you don’t need to wear the collar fulltime anymore,” he said.  “Just when you feel the need for a little extra support.”

“That
is
good news,” Clare told him with a smile.

“The bad news is, I guess I don’t have to tell you what a lucky young lady you are.”

“No, you don’t,” she agreed.

“Fine.  Then you’ll do exactly as I say, and continue to take things easy.  I don’t mean that you have to stay in bed, but I don’t want you even thinking about going back to work, not for at least another month.”  Clare sighed deeply at that, but Ahrens pretended not to notice.  “Nor are you even to consider getting behind the wheel of a car any time soon.”

“Trust me, you don’t have to worry about that,” she assured him with a grimace.

“You’re still experiencing headaches and dizziness, which means that the swelling from the concussion hasn’t completely resolved itself yet,” he continued.  “And although you’ve regained your mobility and your spine seems to have stabilized nicely, any unexpected tweaks could reactivate the trauma.”

“I promise I’ll behave, Doctor,” she said the way she used to as a little girl.

“Stay home, rest, relax,” he advised wisely.  “Take some time to smell the roses.  Give your body, and your mind, the chance to heal.  This is the third close call you’ve had in less than a year, you know.  That’s got to have cost you something, not just physically, but emotionally.  Give yourself time to deal with it, to come to terms with it.” 

“Does it seem to you that I’ve been putting myself in harm’s way a lot lately?” she asked suddenly.

“Well, I don’t know as I’d put it exactly that way,” Ahrens responded.  “But you do seem to have a lot on your plate these days, and I think some time set aside for a bit of quiet contemplation may do you more good than any medicine I could prescribe.”

She didn’t tell him about the stalker.  She just smiled, gave him her customary hug, and departed.

***

Clare was quiet on the way home.  She leaned her head back against her seat and closed her eyes.

“Even a little trip like this was too much for you,” Doreen observed, as she turned the Voyager onto Lakeview Way and then into the circular drive that fronted the sprawling Tudor house.  “I’ll fix you some lunch and then you’re going down for a nap.”

“You sound just like my mother,” Clare remarked with a tired little smile.

“That’s because she keeps talking in my ear,” the housekeeper declared with a chuckle.

Doreen Mulcahy had taken care of Helen Nicolaidis for the last four years of her life, when Clare’s mother no longer had any desire to do for herself.  After her death, Clare had coaxed Doreen into making the move from Ballard to Laurelhurst.  Once she agreed, the Durants became her responsibility.  And it was a responsibility she took very seriously.

She had three grown children of her own, one who lived in Spokane, one who lived in Portland, and the third who had recently relocated to San Francisco.  And right up front, before she would even take the job, she insisted on having three weeks of vacation time, because, as she said, she liked to visit each child once a year.

“She drives a harder bargain than some of my customers,” Richard remarked.

Doreen’s husband, a womanizer from the get-go, had gone out to the store one night, just after their youngest child turned two, and never come back.  Nor had any of them heard so much as a word from him since.  Richard offered to hire someone to track the deadbeat down for her, but Doreen shook her head.

“I might have taken you up on that a while back, when times were tough, and I needed some help,” she told him.  “But now that my kids are all grown and out on their own, I have no use for him.  So if it’s all the same to you, let’s just leave him under whatever rock he calls home.”

Now, as she pulled the Voyager to a halt in the driveway and assisted Clare out of the vehicle, she made a mental note to suggest to Mr. Durant that his wife might benefit enormously from a stay at the beach house they owned on Maui.

They walked up the broad stone steps, and Clare inserted her key and unlocked the front door.  In the foyer, propped up against the curved wooden stair railing, was a huge mass of orange poppies.

Clare let out a scream.

Doreen gasped.  “How did anyone get in here?” she cried.  “The house was locked.”  But she didn’t hesitate.  She ran to the telephone and called the police.

***

“I know how he got in,” Erin declared after she had done her own thorough examination of the house.  “One of the back windows was unlocked.”

“I don't know how I could have overlooked it,” Doreen said, shaking her head.  “I was sure I checked everything.”

“He’s sending a message, that’s for sure,” Dusty remarked.

“But walking into the house in broad daylight,” Erin mused.  “That’s pretty brazen.  How did he know there wasn’t an alarm system on?”

“The house does have an alarm system,” Doreen acknowledged.  “But this is such a safe neighborhood, I can’t remember the last time we needed to use it.”

“We may have to rethink that,” Dusty murmured.

The doctor was summoned.  He arrived within the hour, and Clare was put to bed with a sedative.

“Hopefully, she’ll sleep through the night,” Ahrens told the housekeeper.  “But just in case she wakes up, and she’s still agitated, she can have a second dose.  Can you handle a hypodermic?”

Doreen nodded.  She had had nurse’s aide training before going to work for Helen Nicolaidis.

“Don’t worry, I can take care of her,” she said.

It was Richard’s sister Elaine who collected Julie and Peter from school, a task that normally fell to Doreen.  But Clare, wanting them to be safe, had already arranged for her sister-in-law to keep the children in Ravenna until Richard returned on Friday evening.

It took less than an hour for Dusty and Erin to place the wireless audio transmitters throughout the house, near all the doors and windows, up both the front and back stairways, and throughout the master bedroom.  Then, even as Clare slept, they slipped the panic device gently around her neck.

“I guess we should thank our guy for giving us the perfect cover to wire the house,” Dusty suggested.  “He may just have outsmarted himself.”

“We’d better put some uniforms on the dock,” Erin said as they departed.

Dusty nodded.  “Agreed,” he said, although “uniform” was just a term they used for a patrolman.  For this particular operation, no one would be in uniform.  They would all be wearing regular clothes, driving ordinary cars, and pretending to be visiting the neighbors.

But Tuesday night came and went, and nothing happened.  The police waited, Clare slept the sleep of the drugged, and Doreen barely closed her eyes.

“What does it mean,” one of the officers asked.

“It means we’ll be right back here again at six o’clock tonight,” Dusty replied, yawning.

“He’s playing with you,” Wendy Picard speculated.  “And he’s enjoying himself, too.  But when everything is said and done, I don’t see him letting you stop him from carrying out his plan.  He’s been setting this up for far too long.”

Erin found proof of the profiler’s words sitting on her desk that afternoon.  It had come through the mail in a plain white envelope that she knew without bothering to test would have no fingerprints, no DNA.

“Catch me if you can,” the note read.

***

Wednesday was a repeat of Tuesday.

“I bet he’s getting a real kick out of jerking us around,” Dusty declared when they gave it up at six o’clock on Thursday morning.

“Why are we assuming that he’s going to come for her at night?” one of the uniforms asked.  “Why aren’t we on this around the clock?”

“Because we don’t have the manpower for a twenty-four hour watch, and because nighttime has always been his time of choice,” Erin replied.  “The snatch and run technique seems to work best for him under cover of darkness.”

“But he knows we’re onto him,” the patrolman said reasonably.  “Wouldn’t that make him change his pattern?”