The Truth Hurts (9 page)

“I don’t care about that!”

“Well, your roommates will when the rent comes due. Besides, Deb, just think how embarrassing it would be for me to have to tell your parents that I let you get killed. They’d be so annoyed at me.”

“Yeah.” She laughs nervously. “They’re picky like that.”

“Give me time to find this guy, Deb. Let me make sure that he is already locked away somewhere and that he won’t be getting out anytime soon.”

“You really think he’s a convict?”

“I don’t know. I suspect so. That probably makes the most sense, because who else has time to cook up stupid threats like this? And even convicts can arrange for packages to get delivered. Anyway, I’ll find out. Or, what’s the point of dating a prosecutor?” I squeeze her wrist, to take the edge off what I must say next. “Listen, I don’t want to frighten you unnecessarily, but I’ve got to tell you that he sounds nasty. And smart, if you can judge intelligence by the way somebody writes.” I smile, mocking myself, which makes her smile back at me instinctively. “His threat is pretty clear. I’m to follow his instructions perfectly, or he’ll hurt you in order to prove to me that he means this. He doesn’t say what he would do, just that he’d hurt you. The thing that bothers me, the thing that convinces me that we have to take this seriously for a while, is that he knows anything about you at all, Deb. He knows your name. That you work for me.”

What I don’t tell her is that in the letter he referred to her as “your girl with the ridiculous clothes and the hair that looks as if she stuck her finger in an electrical outlet.” He knows that much about us. About her. And that’s way too much, to my way of thinking. If it’s an empty threat, it’s a frightening one. It has definitely got my attention with its convincing details, with its promise to harm Deborah, Franklin, the children.

“Come on,” I urge Deborah, taking her hand and tugging her up out of the chair. “We’re getting you out of here.”

“Now?”

“I’m afraid so. We’re not messing around with this nut. He may even be watching the house.” She flinches and then stares around with wide eyes. I could bite my own tongue. I hope that she won’t think to ask, How can he be watching us if he’s in prison? Trying to reassure her, I put an arm around her in big-sister fashion. “It’s probably all a bluff. But if he’s watching to see what I’ll do, let’s make a show of looking upset—”

“That’s easy,” Deb whispers.

“—and of following his directions.”

“I don’t want to!”

“I don’t, either. But for the time being, if he says jump, we’ll hold our noses and do it.” I keep her moving, urging her off the patio, into my home. I am not about to take chances with her life. I’d much rather take the chance of looking like an idiot. “I’m sorry, but I think you’re going to have to tell your friends and your family that I’ve fired you.”

“No!” It’s a wail.
“Why?
I’ll feel humiliated! And they’ll hate you!”

“But he may check up on it, Deb, and it will be better if everyone around you thinks it’s true.”

I usher her around my living room, picking up her belongings, stacking them in her arms, hanging her purse over her shoulder and then prodding her toward my front door. I’m in a hurry to get her out of here, because I don’t want her involved in this at all.

Once outside, with Deb standing with her arms loaded and her eyes brimming with tears, I touch her face. “I’m so sorry about this. I hope I’m just overreacting. Tell you what—when it’s all over, and we know there’s no danger, I’ll personally apologize to everybody you had to tell you were fired, okay? Deb, I really don’t think you have a thing to worry about so long as you stay away from me.”

In a frantic, tearful whisper, she pleads, “But how will I know what’s going on?”

“I’ll figure out a way to let you know.”

She nods, looking miserable. Then, obediently, she turns and starts to walk off toward her little white VW bug that’s parked on the street. But then she turns around and runs back to me.

“This is
crazy!
Isn’t it, Marie?”

“Yes, it is. But maybe he’s crazy, too.”

“What kind of book?” she asks, looking stubborn again. “What does he want you to write a book about anyway?”

I was hoping she’d forget that.

I let out a breath.
Dammit.
“He says he’s . . . oh, this is so stupid! He claims that I’m going to write a book about . . .”

“What?
What ?”

I say it in a rush. “About my own murder.”

“Oh, my God!” Even with her arms full of stuff, she manages to clutch at me. Gently, I back away before things start falling out of her arms.

“Yeah, but it’s nonsense. He claims he’s going to murder me and I’m going to write about it. But that’s not going to happen, Deb. It is
not
going to happen. In the first place, this is not real. He can’t do it. And even if he could, we’ll find him first. But you can see why I say he’s nasty, and why I don’t want to mess around about this. You need to go. I’ll be all right. Truly, I will. But I will worry myself to death if you don’t leave right now.”

She looks disconsolate, young, and vulnerable as she walks away a second time. But this time she gets into her little white VW Beetle and drives away.

“Damn you,” I whisper to a stranger named Paulie Barnes.

8
Marie

There was one more page to his last communiqué, an autobiography of sorts, though it is impossible to know if any of it is true. I pull it out of the pocket of my shorts, where I stuffed it, and stand on my front stoop and read it over again.

I’ll tell you about myself.

Since part of what follows is fiction, it seems appropriate to speak of myself in the third person.

Paulie Barnes (what I’m calling myself) loves to read about true crime, the deaths and rapes and burglaries that really happen. None of that made-up stuff for him, no mystery novels, no fictional detectives, or make-believe cops. Give him the truth any day over fantasy; he is tough enough to take it. Give him real blood and guts. Make him feel as if he is actually there on the scene with the victims, the killers, the cops.

He loves it. Pour it on.

Until recently, his favorite true crime author was Ann Rule. His favorite book of hers was
The Stranger Beside Me.
You remember that one, of course. It was the incredibly bizarre true story about how she was writing a book about a serial killer when she discovered he was a friend of hers. His name was Ted Bundy.

(Don’t you love the chills that story gives you, Marie ?)

Stranger than fiction, that’s how Paulie likes it.

Now, however, his favorite true crime author is: you, Marie.

And then he wrote:

How’s that for a bang-up start ? I’m good, aren’t I ? I should be, I’ve studied your books enough to pick up your style of writing. It’s a little sensational for my taste—you can see that I possess a more elevated style—but I have seen for myself that it is fun to write your way, and it certainly is a thrill to read, I’ll be the first to admit that.

Why, I can hardly put it down!

One thing that is true, however, is that my new favorite book is going to be the one we will write together, Marie. I even have a working title for us. We’ll call it
Last Words,
with a subtitle,
Best-selling Author Marie Lightfoot Tells the Horrifying, Tragic Story of Her Own Murder, Right Up to the Moment of Her Death.

Please do believe me when I promise you that ours will not be one of those omnipresent serial killer books. Yawn. Aren’t you sick to death of serial killers ? Couldn’t you just line them all up and shoot them ? That’s an amusing thought, a mass murder of serial killers.

No, I am not one of them.

Rest assured, I am something different. I am something new.

And you alone will have the privilege of discovering me.

I stick it back down in my pocket.

How could my life turn upside down so quickly? Yesterday morning I was standing in a grocery store line enjoying being anonymous, and now some anonymous creep has disturbed my peace of mind, my work, my employee. He has even managed to dredge up my past—the last thing I want to happen. But not the worst thing.
This
might be one of the worst things that could happen, this awful feeling of being invaded by an insidious, invisible virus. I feel as if I’ve been “hacked,” like a computer.

Is this what victims of stalkers feel like?

It’s ninety degrees, but I am frozen to my front stoop.

When Deb’s Volkswagen disappeared from my view, it looked filthy brown instead of white, but that was merely proof of her good citizenship. We’re in a prolonged drought in south Florida. It’s so bad that we’d almost rather hear that dreaded word
hurricane
than endure much more of this. God, what we wouldn’t give for a decent tropical storm. Winds of forty, even sixty miles an hour would be fine; a little four-foot storm surge, we can live with that. Just give us rain! Here in Bahia Beach—our city of 100,000 souls in between Fort Lauderdale and Pompano—water restrictions are tight enough to squeeze tears from a shark. Our street addresses dictate the days we may dampen our seared yards, and even then we’re limited to such odd hours that only the most dedicated lawn jockeys still do it. Washing cars and boats is completely verboten, except at commercial outfits that are exempted so they won’t go out of business.

As my cousin Nathan would say, it’s drier than a witch’s wit.

I glance around at my neighbor’s sad brown yards, putting an anxious expression on my face. If somebody is watching, let him think I’m frightened. I was a little scared, I’ll admit that. But now, what I am increasingly feeling is—pissed. If this jerk is watching me, then let him get a damned good look at his prey.

Let him think I’m doing exactly as he says to do.

“Like hell.” That instantaneous, rebellious thought is followed in my mind by another one, a cliché right out of a pulp western. “You son of a bitch, I’ll get you for this.” That sentiment makes me want to laugh at myself, but I restrain the impulse to show any amusement to anybody who’s watching me.

My righteous indignation gets me moving again.

As I finally turn around and head back inside, I feel an urge to close all of my sliding glass doors, pull down my windows, shut my drapes, and flip the thermostat to “cool.” My hand is reaching for the switch when I suddenly stop myself. Is it really the heat that’s bothering me? Or am I still more scared than I want to admit? Is it cooler I want to feel, or safer?

“Which is it?” I demand of myself.

The inner answer, disturbing and surprising me, is
safer.

With some effort, I resist the strong impulse to lock myself in. In a symbolic sense, it’s too late anyway. He has already penetrated my space. A shiver—a premonition? —raises gooseflesh on my arms. I rub them vigorously, angrily, to make them go away.

This time I do what I should have done earlier: protect the “evidence” from my own fingerprints. After I fix myself a glass of iced tea, I fetch a roll of plastic wrap and a plastic grocery bag from my kitchen and carry them out to my patio. There I carefully spread the plastic sheeting over the front of the letter, smoothing it out some more as I do so, and then turn it over and cover the back, too. Now I can handle it without destroying any remaining fingerprints, not that I expect there to be any on it. Surely he has been more careful than that. But even the smartest felons make stupid mistakes, so maybe I can be more careful than he from now on. Next, I slip the FedEx envelope and the book into the grocery bag without touching them.

On my way into my office, I open the bag and give the envelope a good look for the first time. On the FedEx routing sheet, there’s a name, address, and phone number for the “sender,” but I’m guessing that’s all as phony as his E-mail addresses. But there’s a credit card number under “method of payment,” and so maybe we can trace him that way.

Back in my office, and seated in my swivel chair behind my desk, I study this new E-mail more closely. The glass of iced tea is sweating at my elbow. I pick it up to sip, concentrating for a long moment on the cool wet feel of it in my hand, the scent of mint, the tang of the lime juice I squeezed over the ice. I take a long drink, prolonging this last moment of relative peace. Finally, I set down the drink and pick up the printout. It captures my total attention, as if it held a gun to my head, which in a maddening way, it does.

I’m supposed to write a chapter and e-mail it to him by two?

I look at my watch: it’s already almost noon.

There’s not much time,
if
I’m going to do this.

I hate it that everything’s moving so fast, that he is giving me so little time to stop and think before I have to act, or not act. Hamlet had more time than this! No doubt Paulie Barnes wants it that way, because it makes it more likely that I’ll do what he wants.

“But you
will
stop,” I instruct myself. “And you
will
think hard about it first, even if it means writing like a madwoman after that.”

Okay, then. How paranoid do I want to be about this?

Should I hesitate to use my house phones, for fear he has somehow managed to tap them? Tapping’s not hard to do or hide, so it’s better to be safe than sorry, I believe, until I can get my house “swept.” As for my cell phone and portable phones, I never think of them as being “secure,” anyway, even on normal days. What if he has some kind of high-tech listening device directed toward my home? Well, if that’s the case, he overheard Deb and me this morning, and so he already knows that I only pretended to fire her, so that damage would already be done.

I tell myself: let’s assume that worrying about a distant listening device is
too
paranoid, but that worrying about the security of my telephones is not. Therefore, I will take the chance of saying what I want to on my own property, but I will refrain from using the telephone to talk about this problem.

This is ridiculous! my ego protests.

Never mind, walk through this process anyway,
I tell it.

Okay, next . . . what about E-mail and my computer? How secure?

Can I use E-mail to contact anybody I want to?

I think so. I have firewalls to deflect hackers from trying to steal data. I never download anything unless it’s from somebody I know and trust, and even then, I’m careful, so I don’t believe that any Trojan horse has trotted into my computer to dump a nasty load of spy ware. I’m hooked up to the Internet through my local cable system, which makes me less vulnerable to attack or infiltration than I would be if I had a dial-up system. I know that there are viruses and “worms” capable of squirming into a computer—any computer—and taking control of it, even down to recording every single keystroke and reporting them back to the “master.” A hacker could even steal one of my books in progress that way, although why would anybody want to? But overall—thanks to my computer consultants—I believe I am as protected as I can be from all but the most brilliant and determined of hackers. Which might be your average sixteen-year-old, but never mind.

All right then. Phones, no. Computer, yes.

That means I can e-mail for advice from experts who are not officially in “law enforcement,” and I will.

But am I really going to do any of the rest of it, just because he says so?

Yes, I am, because of what he threatens in the letter.

If you disobey, first I will hurt Deborah Dancer, your girl with the ridiculous clothes and the hair that looks as if she stuck her finger in an electrical outlet.

Do I have your full attention now ?

“Yes, you nasty son of a bitch, you do.”

Good, because you need to know that after I hurt her, I will turn my attention to your boyfriend and his children.

When I read that the first time, outside on the patio, my heart nearly stopped. Hurt Franklin? His children? Even now, reading those words again, my palms go damp and my mouth goes dry.

. . . And speaking of him, by “law enforcement” I don’t mean him. Do tell him everything. You have my permission to do that. Then, we won’t have to force him to leave you. He will abandon you in order to save himself and his family.

Then you and I will be on our own, writing partners to The End.

It gives a whole new meaning to those two words, doesn’t it ?

“I’ll give you a whole new meaning,” I mutter, hoping bravado trumps fear.

It’s clear that I have to play along, at least for a little while longer.

But I don’t have to do it alone.

That would be a mistake.

I will forward these messages—right now—to two people who are not officially “law enforcement.” One is a private investigator I employ now and then. The other is a freelance criminologist. I’ll let those experts tell me if they think we should take this guy seriously.

Until I hear back from my experts, and just to continue on the safe side, I’ll follow “Paulie’s” directions to the letter.

I sit down with my computer. I raise my hands until they hover over the keyboard. Now or never. My fingers make the first keystrokes as I begin to write the strangest chapter of—quite literally—my life.