In Self Defense (3 page)

“So what?” he said.  “You’re only thirty-eight once, you know.”

She didn’t bother to remind him that, although the casts were indeed off now, and her legs technically healed, it was going to be weeks, if not months, before she would be able to drive again.  Nor, at that moment, does she think it would be kind to tell him that she really loved the Toyota Camry she had been driving for less than a year, and wasn’t nearly ready to give it up.

“Thank you, darling,” she murmured instead.  “It’s beautiful.”

“Come on,” he said.  “Let’s take it for a little spin.  I’ll drive.”  He started to help her into the car, but unaccountably, she stiffened against him.  “What’s the matter?” he asked.  “Does something hurt?”  She shook her head.  “Well then, come on.  We have plenty of time before dinner.”

“If we’re going, why don’t we take the children with us?” she suggested.  “I think they’d enjoy it, too.”

“There’ll be plenty of opportunities for that some other day,” he said, his arm tightening around her.  “Right now, I think it would be nice for just the two of us to go.”

“But it’s my birthday,” she insisted, holding him off and pressing her back against the car door for support.  “I don’t want to just up and leave them.”

He almost pouted.  “I thought it would be fun, you know, just you and me for a change,” he said.  “But if you’d rather not, then perhaps some other time.”

“Oh, Richard,” she said,
don’t be childish
on the tip of her tongue to add.

But he was already heading back toward the house, leaving her with no way to negotiate the distance by herself.  She looked after him, so many emotions churning inside of her that she could barely sort them all out.  He would realize her predicament after a moment or two, but he wouldn’t come back himself.  He would send one of the children out with her crutches.  Clare sighed and then smiled and then shook her head.  She knew her husband so well.

Two

“Hello, Clare,” the voice at the other end of the telephone said -- the voice she had come to recognize, without actually recognizing it, for the past three weeks.

With one hand holding the receiver to her ear, and the other holding a coffee mug halfway to her lips, she froze.  It was nine-thirty in the morning on the first Monday in October, and Clare, not even a month back at work, had been in her office on the third floor of Thornburgh House for less than ten minutes.

The office was much like the woman who occupied it -- warm and inviting, with exposed brick walls and soft lighting, a Persian rug that covered most of the polished wood floor, and sturdy, comfortable furniture, cluttered with books and manuscripts and potted plants, family photographs and memorabilia.  And Clare, who preferred the personal approach, liked to answer her own phone whenever she could.

“What do you want?” she asked, her usually soft and gentle voice gone so flat and cold that her secretary, bringing in the morning mail, was momentarily taken aback.

“Did you have a nice weekend?” the voice asked.

“Yes, I did,” she replied.  “Now what do you
want
?”

“You know what I want,” the voice taunted.

“No,” she cried.  “I don’t know.  You just keep saying I know, but you never tell me.”

Nina Jacobsen, a lanky, dark-eyed brunette in her early forties, stepped out of her office directly across the way.

“Is that him again?” she mouthed to the secretary she shared with Clare.  Anne-Marie Todd nodded and Nina rolled her eyes upward.  “Why doesn’t she just hang up?”

“I want
you
, of course,” the voice said.

“But don’t you understand, I don’t want
you
,” Clare declared, and both women could see that she was close to tears.  “So why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Because you’re just too beautiful,” the voice crooned.

“How would you know that?” she demanded.  “We’ve never met.  We don’t know each other.”

“Really?” the voice said.  “Well then, it must be in my dreams that I see this exceedingly attractive woman with big brown eyes and blonde hair that feathers down to her shoulders.  Oh yes, and by the way, you look quite lovely in that shade of blue.”

With a little gasp, Clare dropped the receiver, and ran out of her office, her eyes peering up and down, as though frantically searching for someone who might be playing a joke on her, someone who knew what she looked like, someone who might have noticed, when she came in ten minutes ago, that she was wearing a blue dress.

She was barely three weeks off her crutches, and still walked with an awkward little pitch to her gait that made her appear to be on the verge of falling.

“Hasn’t this been going on long enough?” Nina inquired as she and Anne-Marie stood in the corridor and watched Clare’s antics.

“I guess you could say that,” Clare agreed with a shaky breath.  “But I don’t know how to get him to stop.”

“Well, if he isn’t getting the message, why don’t you call the police?”

“The police?” Clare repeated, genuinely startled.  “Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“What would I tell them -- that some man I don’t know won’t stop calling me?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what you tell them,” Nina declared.  “It’s called harassment, and it’s against the law.”

“Oh, but I’d feel so foolish,” Clare said.  “I mean, he’s just a crank caller, after all.  He hasn’t really done anything.”

“You don’t think calling you half a dozen times a day, every day for weeks now, is doing something?”

“It isn’t really that often,” Clare corrected her, “and you know what I mean.”

Nina raised her eyebrows.  “Do we know what she means, Anne-Marie?” she asked the secretary.

The fresh-faced, red-headed secretary shook her head.  “I don’t know what she means.”

“Neither do I,” Nina said, and turned to Clare.  “But what I do know is that you’re a nervous wreck, you jump a mile every time he calls, and lately, whenever we go out, you’re looking over your shoulder a whole lot more than you’re looking ahead.  Now, this is serious.  Obviously, this guy has misplaced some of his marbles.  And he knows where you work.  What if he also knows where you live?  Have you thought about that?  You have a family.  You have a husband and two kids you care about.  Do you really want to put them at risk from this lunatic?”

“No,” Clare admitted, as tears began to press against the corners of her eyes.

“Then stop being such a ninny and get some help.”  Nina Jacobsen was nobody’s fool.  She had been around the block a few times and had two ex-husbands to prove it.  She had known Clare for four years, and now she leveled a probing glance at the frightened woman.  “Unless, of course, you’re afraid of what will happen if Richard finds out?”

Clare looked away.  “You know he never wanted me to take this job,” she said.  “I had to kick and scream and cry real tears to get him to let me go back to work after Peter started school.  But he’s never been happy about it.  He sees it as an affront to his manhood.  Bless his mother’s heart, he’s hopelessly old-fashioned, and he thinks that any wife of his should be content just to grace his home and raise his children and do good works in the community.  I know him.  If he finds out about this, he’ll make a big fuss, and try to make me quit.”

Nina sighed.  “We’ve known each other for oure years now,” she said.  “And in all that time, I’ve never once known you not to be able to get around Richard.  Nor do I think you should have to give up a job you love just because some sicko out there wants to get his jollies at your expense.”

The instant the word “sicko” came out of Nina’s mouth, the telephone on the desk in Clare’s office rang again.

“You don’t want to hang up on me like that, you know,” the voice said.

“Don’t I?” Nina replied, having beaten Clare to the receiver.

The line went dead.

***

From the time she was six years old, anyone who asked Erin Hall what she was going to be when she grew up would have gotten the same answer.  “I’m going to be a woman policeman,” she always replied.  “I’m going to catch bad people and make good people safe.”

Of course it helped that both her father and her uncle were police officers in her hometown of Yakima, some hundred and forty miles over the mountains to the east of Seattle.  But Erin had no intention of staying in Yakima, and beat a path out of there just as soon as she graduated from high school.

Half Irish and half Native American, Erin had a tall, lean, athletic body, high cheekbones, angular features, and a freckled complexion that didn’t fare too well in the sun.  Her brown eyes danced with flecks of gold, and her hair, which she liked to wear in a thick braid down her back, was the color of clay.  At the age of thirty-four, she had risen higher and faster in the ranks than many of the men who had graduated from the police academy in the same class she had.

Now entering her fourteenth year with the Seattle Police Department, she had the respect of both her peers and her superiors.  She earned it by being smart, working hard, and oftener than not, carrying more than her share of the load without complaining and without allowing anyone to take advantage of her good nature.  No man in the department had ever had cause to worry about his back when she was out there covering it.  And none had ever attempted to take unwelcome liberties.

One reason Erin was so successful was that she truly loved her work, even the nitty-gritty stuff that drove others up a wall.  That didn’t mean it was easy.  Some of it wasn’t easy at all, but she loved it anyway.  Especially the best part, when they caught the bad guy and developed enough evidence to put him away for a very long time.

Of course, there was also the hard part, when she had to look a victim in the eye and knew that nothing she could say or do would ever take away the fear, or when she had to tell a family the worst news about a loved one and knew that nothing she could say or do would ever take away the pain.

Good or bad, however, the job more than filled her life.  She didn’t grumble over doing the paperwork and it was always finished and turned in on time.  She did her share of overtime without protest, much of it off the clock.  And frequently, it was a full load of work that accompanied her home at night.

Somehow, she had never found the right time to get married and start a family.  Or maybe it was that she had never found the right man.  Ninety percent of the men she knew were cops, and she knew she could never marry a cop.

“It’s enough that I have to put my life on the line as much as I do,” she told her partner.  “I could never deal with having the man I love do that.”

Her partner for the past five years was a seasoned fifty-two year old named Dennis Grissom, known as Dusty, a no-nonsense guy who made up for a lack of humor with a keen mind.

Dusty and Erin were the Mutt and Jeff of the Seattle Police Department, with Erin standing at a full five-foot-eleven inches tall, and Dusty barely managing to make it to the five-foot-eight mark.  They clicked with each other almost the moment they met.  Erin was by nature intuitive, while Dusty was contemplative.  Erin tended to get right in there and mix it up with the trees, while Dusty preferred to keep his distance while observing the forest.  They didn’t always agree with each other, but their differences helped more than hindered them in their work, and they respected and trusted each other implicitly.

***

The address Erin and Dusty were heading for on this particular Monday morning proved to be a modest building on Jackson Street, in the middle of a block of similar structures, in the heart of Pioneer Square -- the section of Seattle that had been erected right over the original city, and had a whole underground excavation to prove it.  The building had a plain brass plaque with a number affixed to it, but no name.  Like its neighbors, it stood four stories high, and was built, circa 1896, of red brick.

The two detectives parked half a block to the south of the building, shortly after eleven o’clock, and entered through a pair of solid wood doors that looked, to Erin’s eye, anyway, as though they had been cut out of a slab of rosewood.

A pretty blonde receptionist sat behind a curved wooden counter that was definitely made of rosewood, beneath a sign mounted on exposed brick that said simply: THORNBURGH HOUSE.  When they inquired about Clare Durant, they were directed to an antiquated but operative elevator, and told what office to look for when they reached the right floor.