In Self Defense (11 page)

Nina came by just before noon, bringing two manuscripts with her, as she had been requested to do.

“I may not be able to go to the office for a while,” Clare told her, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t work.”

“God, you look awful,” Nina observed when Doreen showed her into the sunroom.

“Thanks,” Clare responded with a grin.  “That makes me feel better already.”

“All right now,” Nina said, settling down in the wicker chair across from her friend with selections from the lunch tray that the housekeeper, who had insisted on giving up her day off, had brought in.  “I want all the gory details.”

“I wish I had some to give you,” Clare said.  “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember very much about what happened.”

“Well, maybe I’ve been reading more than my share of fiction lately,” Nina said, “but if you’ll forgive me, I smell a rather big rat.”

Over the past four years that they had known each other, the two editors had grown to be more than friends.  They had become confidantes.  Clare sighed.  “The police think it may have been deliberate,” she said.

Nina’s eyes widened.  “The idiot in a hurry ran you off the road on purpose?”  Clare nodded and Nina gasped.  “Oh my God, do they think it was
him
?”

“I think so.”

“Clare, this is serious.  He wants to kill you.  Once he knows he didn’t succeed, he’ll try again.”

Clare’s glance drifted past her friend’s shoulder.  “I think the police know that,” she whispered.  “I think they want to use me to draw him out in the open.  I think they
want
him to try again, so they can catch him in the act.”

“Well, that’s all very fine and good for them,” Nina declared, “but do you have any way of protecting yourself in case they don’t happen to make it in time?  Do you at least keep a gun in the house?”

Clare frowned.  “I think Richard might have one somewhere.”

“Well, if you’re smart, you’ll keep it under your pillow.”

“What good would it do?” Clare responded with a giggle.  “I don’t know how to shoot it.”

“If you don’t know how to shoot it, get Richard to show you, for pity’s sake.  This isn’t the time to be helpless.”

Clare thought about Nina’s words for the rest of the day. The last thing she intended to be from now on was helpless.  “Do you think you could teach me how to shoot your gun?” she asked Richard when he came home that evening.

“What for?” he asked, staring at her.

“Just in case I might need to use it,” she replied.

“Okay,” he said after a long moment.  “If you think it’ll make you feel safer.”

“Well, at least on the nights when you’re out of town, it might,” she told him.

“Can it wait until the weekend?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” she replied, satisfied that he was at least willing to consider it.

***

It was shortly before nine o’clock when the telephone rang.  Dinner was over and the children were upstairs finishing their homework.  In a few minutes, they would be ready for bed and then Clare would join them for the reading hour.  Meanwhile, she and Richard were in the library, going over the pages of business-related numbers that Henry Hartstone had put together for her.

“Hello,” the voice said.  “I missed talking to you last night, and I couldn’t go another day without knowing how you were feeling.”

“I’m feeling just fine, thank you for your concern,” she said, her tone neutral.

“That’s good,” the voice crooned.  “Because I want to be sure that you’ll be strong and well for when we meet.”

“Yes, well, the thing is, you see, we aren’t going to meet,” she told him.  “Ever.”

“Of course we are,” the voice assured her, “and it’s going to happen very soon now.  I hope you’re as excited about it as I am.”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you that I’ve already called the police?” she asked.

“Of course it has,” he said with a deep chuckle.  “That’s what makes this so much fun.”

“Why?” she asked, sure that Dusty and Erin would want to know.  “Why is it such fun?”

“Because this isn’t about them, it’s about us,” he told her.  “It’s about destiny.”

“Destiny?” she repeated.

“Of course,” he said.  “You and I, we’re destined to be together.  Don’t you know that?  Can’t you feel it?  No one can keep us apart.  Really, it’s true.  No one.  Not Detective Grissom or Detective Hall out there listening in their little van, not your husband, not your housekeeper, not even your helpful editor friend.”

Inside the van, a startled Dusty and Erin looked at each other. Apparently, their stalker knew far more than they realized, and he was taking great pleasure in letting them know it.

***

Richard was as good as his word.  First thing Saturday morning, he took Clare out onto the back lawn, and showed her how all the parts of the Beretta 9mm semiautomatic worked.

“A gun is not a toy,” he told her.  “And you never point it at someone unless you intend to shoot.”  He took her hands and wrapped them around the gun.  “Get a feel for it, for how heavy it is, for where the balance point is.  Get comfortable holding it.”

It was a heavy, cold, ugly thing.  “Is it loaded?” she asked, properly intimidated.

“No, it isn’t,” he said.  “First things first.”

After she had held it for a while, he showed her how to release the hammer, and then how to curl her finger around the trigger and pull it back.  Click.  Click.  Click.

“How many times will it fire?” she asked.

“The clip holds sixteen rounds,” he told her.  Then he showed her how to aim.  “If your target is within fifteen feet of you, just point the damn thing in the general direction and fire,” he said.  “You’re sure to hit something.  Maybe not fatally, but enough to slow him down anyway.  But if the target’s farther away than that, then you’ll want to hold the gun up to eye level and look down the barrel to aim.  Each time you fire, there’ll be a recoil, so you have to try to keep it as steady as you can.”

He let her practice for a bit, while he put a metal bucket on a wooden stake, and stuck it into the ground, perhaps thirty feet away.  Then he slipped a clip into the gun, which almost doubled its weight.  “Okay now,” he said, “pretend that bucket is coming at you.”

Clare held the gun with both hands, raising it to eye level and looking down the barrel as he had showed her, and then slowly she squeezed the trigger.  Several shots exploded within a second and the bucket bounced high in the air.

“I hit it!  I hit it!” she cried.

“Yes, you did,” Richard conceded, a bit surprised.  He retrieved the bucket, noting there were two punctures in its exterior before he put it back on the stake, and stuck it back in the ground, this time about fifteen feet away.  “Okay, now try it.”

Clare dropped the Beretta to her side for a moment, thinking how odd she must look in bathrobe and neck brace, shooting a pistol at a defenseless bucket.  Then she swung the gun up, pointed it in the general direction of the bucket, and started firing.  This time, several of the bullets punctured the metal.

“I did it -- I hit it again!” she cried, delighted.

“I don’t think you need any more instruction,” Richard told her with a little chuckle, trying to pry the gun from her fingers.  “I think you can defend yourself just fine.”

“I hope I never need to us this,” Clare said, giving the Beretta up.  “But it’s nice to know that it’s there.”

***

“Hello, Clare,” the voice said.

It was late, after eleven o’clock.  Clare was in bed and almost asleep, and Richard was sprawled on the loveseat in the alcove, rereading a report from the plant in Burlington.  They were supposed to have attended a major fundraising event for the Seattle Repertory Theater that evening, being, as it was, one of Clare’s special projects.  But because of the accident, they had begged off.

“Hello,” she said.

“You didn’t go out tonight,” the voice observed.  “And it was such an important affair that I was worried about you.”

“You needn’t have been worried,” she said.  “I was just tired, that’s all.”

“I’m glad to hear that.  You see, I didn’t want you to have a setback.  Because it’s almost time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time for us, of course.”

“Is that why you called?”

“Yes, I wanted to tell you not to worry, it won’t be much longer.  I’ll be coming for you very soon.  Do you know how I picture our first meeting?”

“How could I?” she asked.

“I picture our coming together as an unexpected delight.  You’ll be lying naked in a field of orange poppies, with your hair spread out over the petals.  And when I come upon you, almost by accident, I’ll take one of those petals and draw it slowly over your creamy body.”  There was a sound of sucking breath from the other end of the line.  “I get really excited dreaming about that.”

“And that’s exactly where it will stay,” she said as she hung up.  “In your dreams.”

“Okay, that’s it,” Richard declared.  “I’m canceling my trip on Tuesday.”

“Don’t be silly,” Clare told him.  “You have to go to Burlington and evaluate those tests for yourself.  Didn’t you tell me that was the only way you’d know whether the new design was really working or not?”

“So that’s the plan -- I go off to Vermont, while you sit here and wait for this lunatic to show up?”

“I’m not afraid of him anymore,” she said, and meant it.  “I promise I won’t leave the house unless it’s for a good reason, and even then, I won’t go alone.  Doreen will be here.  And if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll keep the gun under my pillow.”

“What about Thursday?”

Doreen regularly had off from one o’clock on Thursday afternoons to one o’clock on Friday afternoons, as well as every other Sunday.  “I’ve already taken care of that,” Clare said.  “I can’t ask Doreen to give up her day off again.  It wouldn’t be fair, and besides, she needs it.  So I’ve asked Nina to spend the night with me.”

Richard sighed.  “And the police -- they really think this is a good idea?”

“They want to catch him, and I want him out of our lives,” Clare said reasonably.  “I have no idea whether it fits his plan or not, but it sounds like your being out of town next week may be just what he’s waiting for.  And if it is, I know that Detective Hall and Detective Grissom are going to be ready.”

***

As it turned out, Dusty, Erin, and a good part of the West and North Precincts were going to be ready for the stalker when he made his move.

“We can’t be visible anywhere near the house,” Dusty told a task force of sixteen officers.  “Make no mistake, our guy is sharp.  He’ll smell a stakeout a mile away.  But his downfall may be thinking he can outsmart us.”

“If we can’t be visible, where are we going to be?” one of the officers wanted to know.

“We’ve gotten permission from the neighbors on either side of the Durant home,” Erin told him.

“Permission for what?”

“To use their property,” she explained.  “For the next three nights, the Bennetts and the Corcorans are going to be entertaining.  We’ll drive right in, in unmarked cars and plain clothes, just as though we were invited, and park in their driveways.  And then we’re going to wait and we’re going to listen, from inside and out.”

“Listen to what?”

“We’re going to wire the house,” Dusty said, “and the minute we either see or hear him, we’ll block both ends of the street to cut off his escape, and then we’ve got him.”

“But what if he gets into the house before we can stop him and kills her right on the spot?”

“That hasn’t been his MO,” Erin said.  “He took his first two victims out of their homes, to an isolated area by Green Lake.  He likes to spend time with them, tormenting them and torturing them, before he rapes and mutilates them, and then kills them.  It’s part of his need to be in complete control.  And our profiler thinks it’s not the kind of control he can exert in someone else’s house.”  The detective sighed.  “But again, anything we see or hear that’s not what it should be, we can be in the house in less than two minutes.”

“He could do one hell of a lot of damage in less than two minutes,” someone remarked.

“We’re also going to equip Mrs. Durant with a panic device,” Dusty added.  “On the off-chance that she might know he’s there before we do, all she has to do is press the button.”

“Sounds a bit risky, if you don’t mind my saying so,” someone else observed.

“If you’ve got a better suggestion, let’s hear it,” Dusty urged.

“What if we put a couple of us inside the house?” the officer suggested.  “We’d have transmitters, so we could communicate.  We could be on him before he takes a step.”

“We thought of that,” Erin said.  “But we have reason to believe that he’ll know about it, and then we don’t think he’ll bite.  He may be certifiable, but he’s not stupid.  He wants to beat us, but he’s not going to play against a stacked deck.  Based on his history, and on some of the things he’s said in his recent calls, we believe the timing is right, but only if he thinks he has a level playing field.”