The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation (14 page)

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve found you now.”

I looked over at Ben, and he once again waved
his hand, indicating that I should keep Porter talking. I frowned
hard. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take before I completely
lost control.

“Maybe you just think you have,” I said.

There was a long silence at the other end,
and I thought for a moment that he might have hung up, but then his
voice issued once again from the earpiece. “You never did tell me
if you got my note.”

“You know I did.”

“I made that selection specifically for you.
What did you think?”

“I think you are a sick bastard.”

I thought I heard him actually laugh before
settling once again into his emotionless voice. “Your wife is very
lovely, Gant. For a heretic. I suppose you are aware that the
inquisitors of the fifteenth century sometimes found it necessary
to, shall we say, ‘have their way’ with the women they
interrogated?”

My fragile pane of composure shattered into
jagged shards. The heat that had earlier flushed my face now
consumed my entire body. I could feel myself shaking, and I was
gripping the handset so tight that my fingers were beginning to
numb.

“Listen to me you son-of-a-bitch,” I spoke
evenly into the mouthpiece. My voice started at a low volume, but
with each sentence it grew along an ever-increasing upward arc.
“This is between you and me. No one else, got me?! You had better
start praying to your God right now. You’d best pray that the
police get to you first, because I’m coming after you. I’m coming
after you, and I’m going to kill you! DO YOU HEAR ME GODDAMMIT?!
I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU BASTARD!”

I was holding the phone in front of my face,
screaming into it. Adrenalin was pumping through me, and I was
shaking uncontrollably. I felt a hand clamp on my shoulder, and I
wheeled about, swinging the handset like a club. My hand was
suddenly engulfed by Ben’s own. He pushed me against the wall and
held me there as he ripped the telephone away with his free hand.
He brought it up to his ear and listened then frowned before
dropping it onto the table beside the base and snatching up his
cell phone.

“It’s clicking, like maybe he hung up,” he
fired his voice into the device. “Tell me you nailed the bastard…
Yeah… Yeah… Okay, I’ll hang on…”

My friend looked at me with a mixture of
concern and what looked as though it might have been fear in his
eyes. He was still holding his cell phone to his ear, but he
twisted the mouthpiece down out of the way. “Jeezus, Row… Calm
down… ‘Kay?”

I was still shaking, but Ben had me
stiff-armed against the wall; I wasn’t going anywhere. I sucked in
a deep breath and glared back at him as I spoke, “The motherfucker
just told me he was going to rape my wife!”

I heard a gasp, and when I looked to the side
I realized that my outburst had attracted the attention of everyone
else in the household. The worst part was that the look on
Felicity’s face told me that she’d heard every word of what I’d
just said to Ben.

I stared back at her pained expression,
watching as her earlier fear visibly resurfaced. I mutely chastised
myself for losing control and tried to find something to say to her
that would quell her uneasiness but came up empty.

“Yeah, yeah I’m here,” Ben began speaking
again as he twisted the cell phone back into place. “He what?
You’ve gotta be kiddin’… Shit… Okay… Yeah…” He let out a heavy
sigh. “Yeah… I’ll be here… Thanks.”

I turned back to face him and found his
concerned gaze still locked on my face as he switched off the phone
and stuffed it into his pocket. The thick silence in the corridor
rose to a crescendo and was then replaced by his almost apologetic
voice. “You okay now, Row?”

“They didn’t get him, did they?” I asked.

“No. No, they didn’t.” He shook his head as
he spoke. “So, can I let you go now?”

I was still tensed and shaking, but the sight
of my wife behind him had forced me to calm quicker than I would
have otherwise. I nodded to him, and he tentatively relaxed his
stance, waiting a short moment before releasing me entirely.

As soon as I was free, I stepped past him and
wrapped my arms around Felicity. She laid her head against my
shoulder and held tight.

“Aye, it was him,” she whispered. “He called
here, then.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “It’s okay.”

Looking past her I could see the rest of the
group milling about in the corridor, staring at us with their own
brand of fear on their faces.

“They had the number to the pay phone from
the caller ID.” I spoke aloud to Ben without turning; my tone was
just short of an accusation. “It’s not like they had to trace it.
What went wrong?”

“That wasn’t the problem, Row,” he answered.
“They pinpointed the location right away and dropped every copper
in the area on it like the friggin’ sky was fallin’.”

“So what happened?”

“Jeezus, Row, this bastard is a piece of
work…”

“What?”

“He had two pay phones stuck together with
duct tape, white man.”

“Awww, Gods…” I brought one hand up to
massage my forehead as I closed my eyes. “That’s why it sounded so
hollow. He relayed it.”

“Yeah. Not exactly the most high tech. All
you gotta do is call one pay phone, tape it to the one next to it,
and then dial here with that pay phone…”

“Doesn’t really matter, it worked, didn’t
it?” I spat.

“Yeah. Unfortunately it did. They’re lookin’
at the computers now, tryin’ to trace it back, but since he was
nowhere around, odds are he was talkin’ to ya’ on a cell. He was
hell and gone from the scene the minute he dialed the fuckin’
number.”

“I really don’t want to monopolize your
time,” I said as I leaned against the deck rail and looked out
across the back yard.

“You are not monopolizing anything, Rowan,”
Helen Storm answered in the clear and carefully worded fashion I’d
grown accustomed to since our first meeting less than one month
ago. “Besides, I was ready for a cigarette.”

Ben’s sister was a self-described chain
smoker, and she supported her claim easily. To me it seemed like an
odd habit for a psychiatrist, but then, she was also human. We all
had our vices—for instance, with me, it was cigars—so I was not
about to make a judgment.

In the physical features department, Helen
bore more than a passing family resemblance to her brother; the
obvious exception being that she stood just shy of a foot shorter
than he was. Other than that, they shared the same mysteriously
dark eyes and characteristic profiles. Her thick, black hair hung
in a straight fall that pleasantly contrasted her softly angular
features. It was streaked here and there with strands of grey,
which was the only visual indicator that she was the older of the
two siblings.

I shrugged inside my coat, giving a slight
shiver against a random gust of wind that managed to infiltrate its
folds and then tugged the zipper up another pair of inches in
self-defense.

Yellow-brown stands of decorative grasses
ringed the inside of the yard, each clump angling upward in shallow
arcs to peek just inches over the top of the privacy fence. Snow
was now falling in heavy waves, drifting downward, slipstreaming
sideways on the wind and then tumbling to rest on the dormant
carpet of Zoysia.

“Nancy probably needs you more than me,” I
said while looking down and absently inspecting the burning cigar I
was twisting between my thumb and forefinger. “She’s the one who
just lost her husband to a psychopath.”

Helen exhaled a stream of smoke and tapped
the ash from the end of her cigarette before gesturing. “Look
there, Rowan.”

I looked up then swiveled my head and
followed her finger with my eyes. A sturdily-caged bird feeder sat
atop a post in a nearby section of the yard with a pair of
black-capped chickadees flitting in and out of it. A much larger
bird, speckled along its brown back, hung from the side where a
suet cake had been affixed.

“That is a northern flicker,” she
announced.

“Avoiding my question?” I asked, looking back
at her with a slight smile.

She shrugged as she spoke. “No, not really,
Rowan. I am simply fascinated by birds. Besides, you did not ask a
question. You made a comment.” She returned the smile as she paused
and took a drag on her cigarette. “Now, if I were to treat your
comment as a question, first I would point out that Eldon Porter is
a sociopath not a psychopath.”

“Touché,” I answered.

“Secondly, I would tell you that Nancy has
exactly what she needs, given the circumstances. Family. As she
advances through the stages of grief, her family will be the most
effective support system she could ever need. She will talk to me
when and if she feels ready to do so. Perhaps she will never need
me. I cannot say one way or the other at this stage. That is
something that is peculiar to the individual. You can rest assured,
however, that she is not yet ready.”

I returned to staring out into the yard as
she spoke. The seasonally barren branches of trees twisted in the
air, their grey-black bark collecting cottony traces of the falling
precipitation. As I stared at them, they began to look as though
they were spindly arms reaching out in some agonized death
throe—all in all, a visual metaphor for my own tortured mood.

I took a hard drag on the end of my cigar. I
normally reveled in the spicy taste of a good, Maduro-wrapped
smoke, but at the moment it wasn’t bringing the pleasure I hoped. I
allowed the blue-white smoke to stream out slowly between my teeth,
making a futile grab for some modicum of enjoyment and finding
none.

“Ben asked you to come here for my sake,
didn’t he?” I asked.

My matter-of-fact tone didn’t faze her. “Of
course, Rowan, but you knew that already.”

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

“I am certainly willing to be here for all of
your friends as well,” she added.

“I’m sure they would appreciate that.”

“Under the circumstances, however, you are
the primary concern.”

“I’m okay,” I told her.

“I am certain that you are,” she replied.
“However, I sense that you have concerns of your own.”

“Don’t we all?” I asked the question in an
easy, rhetorical sense. I wasn’t looking to be difficult, and I
didn’t want to come across to her that way.

“Of course,” she answered in her own
comfortable tone. “Your concerns, however, are far less… shall we
say ‘mundane’, than most.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Guess so.”

“Benjamin told me you had some type of
seizure earlier.”

“You could call it that.”

“Do you think that it was something
else?”

I looked over at her. “What do you mean?”

“Your comment.” She shrugged. “It implies
that you think of the episode as something other than a
seizure.”

“Oh, that.” I nodded then shrugged. “I’m not
really sure what it was. I know it wasn’t very pleasant, but other
than that…” I allowed my voice to trail off as I pondered the
event.

“Do you feel that it might have something to
do with Eldon Porter?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

She shuffled for a moment and then looked up
at the grey sky. “I love snow. It carries with it such a simple
purity.”

“It’s frozen water crystallized around any
number of impurities it picks up in our polluted atmosphere.” I
stated the fact. “Not sure how that qualifies in the purity
department.”

She regarded me with a slight chuckle. “I see
that you are not in the mood for philosophical metaphors today,
Rowan.”

“Guess not.”

She nodded as she fished out a fresh
cigarette and lit it from the smoldering butt of the first. After
discarding the spent smoke in the sand bucket, she cocked her head
to the side and watched me for a moment.

“How has Felicity been holding up?” she
finally asked, shedding her initially adopted clinical air.

“Okay I guess. But, you probably know more
about that than me.”

I based my observation on the fact that my
wife had recently taken advantage of Helen’s offer of therapy in
the wake of the kidnapping and attempted rape she’d
experienced.

She clarified the question. “I meant in light
of what has happened today.”

“She’s frightened,” I offered with a shrug.
“Natural reaction if you ask me.”

“I should think so.” She nodded. “Porter’s
threats are coming on the heels of a very traumatic experience for
her. She is feeling terribly vulnerable right now.”

“How deep does that vulnerability go is the
question,” I said aloud.

“Meaning?”

“I don’t know,” I sighed. “I guess I’m
lamenting my own feelings.”

“Would you like to share those feelings,
Rowan?”

“Like? No. But, to be honest, standing here
talking with you, I have to say that I feel compelled to, yes.”

She let out a small, musical laugh.
“Compelled? Oh my, Rowan, I truly wish that all of my patients were
as easy to work with as you.”

“You mean you don’t have this effect on
everyone?” I smiled.

“Believe me, my life would be much easier if
I did,” she returned.

“Probably be boring though,” I offered.

“Perhaps, however, you are certainly not
boring in any sense of the word, Mister Gant.” She puffed on her
cigarette and watched the large woodpecker as it continued drilling
away at the suet cake. “So, you were saying?”

Her casual attitude had put me at ease as
usual, and suddenly my emotional baggage seemed much easier to
unpack in front of her.

“I can’t help but wonder if part of the
vulnerability she is feeling might stem from a lack of confidence
in my ability to protect her.” I offered the thought to her and
waited patiently for her analysis. The wait was short.