by Gayle Wilson
She had intended to say that some of what he’d accused her of was true, but she couldn’t seem to bring herself to admit it. Not to him. He had been through hell, just as Kahler said, and she had wanted to stick a tape recorder under his nose and ask, if not the mocking questions the detective had suggested, others just as hurtful. Just as invasive.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For everything.”
There was no answer from the man on the other side of the car. She found the handle of the door and stepped out. The Mercedes didn’t move until after she had backed the Mazda out of its parking place and was driving across the lot. She turned south and in her rearview mirror, she watched the taillights of the big car, which had headed in the opposite direction, disappear behind her into the night.
SHE MANAGED TO UNDRESS down to her bra and panties before the phone rang. A little apprehensive, not only because of the lateness of the hour but also because of all that had happened since she’d left her desk, she let it ring a couple of times. Had Barrington called Lew at home or had Kahler thought of another sarcastic remark that couldn’t wait until he saw her again? She finally picked up just before the sixth ring, which would trigger the answering machine.
“Hello,” she said, trying to sound as normal as possible.
“I just thought you’d sleep better if you knew there won’t be any charges,” Byron Kahler said. There seemed to be no residual anger in the deep voice.
“That’s wonderful,” Kate assured him. Apparently, the judge hadn’t admitted he’d already talked to her when Kahler had, as he’d promised, asked him to drop the charges. Letting Kahler think he’d arranged for her rescue might put her back into his good graces, and she needed all the help she could get.
“Thanks, Kahler. And thanks for letting me know.”
“As much as I’d like to, I can’t take credit for the dropped charges. Barrington had a change of heart. It seems…”
When Kahler hesitated, Kate’s lips involuntarily curved into a small smile. It seemed the detective was also having a hard time admitting that he now knew her story to be true.
“There was a problem at the house. The gate and the door were open and, under the circumstances, he decided to give you the benefit of the doubt,” he finished.
She fought the urge to say “I told you so,” and awarded herself a few character points for finding the willpower.
“Whatever the reason, I’m grateful. I’d already decided to tell Lew to put somebody else on the story. I didn’t think I could be too effective having been arrested for breaking and entering one of the victim’s houses, no matter how innocently that happened.”
Kahler’s laugh expressed his disbelief. “I can’t see you giving up that easily, August. Once you’ve got hold of a story, you’re not going to let go. You’ll be there at the bitter end.”
“Which for this one is soon I hope. You going to Tucson?”
“Yes,” Kahler said.
The voice had become official, putting distance between himself and that unpleasant task. Kahler had visited all the scenes, talked to all the victims’ families, all the business associates. He had been the officer in charge on the Barrington case, and the Atlanta bombing, like all the others, was still open, the investigation ongoing.
“I hope you find something,” Kate said softly. “I hope this time he screwed up. I hope you catch him, Kahler.”
There was a silence on the other end. She knew she’d said something so obvious it didn’t require an answer. Kahler lived with that hope daily. It probably intruded even while he worked on his other cases. Then every six months—except this time, it hadn’t been six months.
“Why do you think he hit early?” she asked.
“Who knows? Who knows how he thinks or why he does what he does? I don’t have any answers for you, Kate.”
“I know It was just a thought. I’ll talk to you when you get back?” It was a question. Will our arrangement still hold despite your anger, despite what you revealed tonight about your opinion of what I do, of my profession?
Again there was a brief hesitation, and she held her breath.
“You must have made a big impression on him, August.”
It threw her. It made no sense in the context of the conversation. He couldn’t mean Jack, so that left…Barrington? He thought she’d made an impression on Barrington? Maybe, she conceded, but not the one she would have liked to make. She couldn’t even keep her mouth shut about her motives in entering his home. She just blurted that out with all the other confessions she been forced to make tonight. Too many years of Sunday school. Confession’s good for the soul. Yeah, right.
“Impression?” she said aloud.
“He sent Phillips to take care of you.”
“Barton Phillips?” she asked, remembering the hurrying figure on the stairs. Apparently, like the Atlanta police, when Barrington said, “Jump,” Phillips simply asked, “How high?”
“Esquire,” Kahler agreed. “Quite an impression,” he repeated, some nuance in his tone she had never heard before.
She wondered what she was supposed to say. Was he jealous because Barrington had come to apologize? My God, Kahler’s jealous, she thought in wonder.
“He just realized he was wrong,” she said. “Southern gentlemen always apologize. Their mamas teach them how in the cradle. You should try it sometimes,” she suggested.
“There’re only two things wrong with that plan, August.
I’m not Southern…” He paused to allow her to finish.
“And you’re not a gentleman. What a shame.”
“You’ve just known too many of both You might consider broadening your field of knowledge. That’s what an education is all about. I’ll see you when I get back from Arizona.”
He had hung up before she could think of anything witty—or even halfway witty—to say. That had definitely sounded like an invitation, and not one to continue the strictly professional relationship they had shared up to this point. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She had avoided thinking about Kahler in that light. For a lot of very good reasons.
She took a quick shower and put on her nightgown. She walked back to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of milk. She stood by the refrigerator drinking it, feeling the pleasant coolness of the tile floor under her tired feet. Unbidden, under the fluorescent brightness of her kitchen light, came the remembrance of the man who had sat alone listening to music tonight in the darkness of that dead mansion.
She carried her milk with her into the living room. She set the glass down on the table beside the couch while she opened its drawer and took out her collection of pictures. She sat cross-legged on the sofa. She forced herself to finish the milk, slowly, before she would allow her fingers to open the folder and spread out the contents on the coffee table in front of her.
She knew them by heart. The dark eyes laughing down into his mother’s. In a tux at somebody’s wedding. Always taller than the people around him. Dominating. Too good-looking for his own good, her grandmother would have said. He was surrounded in one shot by smiling debutantes, who looked up into that handsome face with something approaching her own fascination. You must have made quite an impression, Kahler had said. Not exactly the one she had daydreamed about making.
She knew there was something weird about looking at pictures of some guy she didn’t know. Like a teenager putting posters of a rock star on the wall. She was thirty-two years old. Way too old for this kind of crush. Crush, she repeated. That’s exactly what this felt like, and it was so stupid. So childish. Crazy.
Tonight she had met him. Twice. She had even sat beside him in his car. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to remember. To think past the embarrassment and the fear to remember what it was like to sit beside him. To remember how he had smelled. Not cologne. Just clean. Soap. Male.
His voice had wrapped around her in the dark. Soft and very deep. Southern slow. He had been near enough that she could have reached out and touched
him. Crazy. she thought again, deliberately breaking the spell of the memories.
Finally she pushed all the pictures back on one side of the folder and closed it. She hid it again in the drawer and turned off the light on the table. The apartment was dark except for the lamp she’d turned on in her bedroom, its soft glow inviting her down the hall. Even when she crawled into bed and switched off the lamp, creating total darkness, the images from the pictures, superimposed over the reality of the man she had met today, were still there. It took her a long time to go to sleep.
Chapter Three
Kate overslept on Monday, arriving in the office a little late, feeling pressured and behind schedule. She hated to have to rush in the morning. It made her feel disorganized and out of sorts the whole day.
Lew greeted her with his usual mind-on-something-else lack of awareness, and she was relieved. Apparently no one had called him to complain about the incident on Friday night. She listened to his suggestions about the things she was working on, jotting down quick notes she’d have trouble deciphering later. A typical day, and after Friday, normality was a relief.
She worked a while on the Tucson bombing, which had pushed up the deadline for the next victim profile. Since she had started, the series had contained other types of articles: the FBI’s psychological profile of Jack, a brief overview on the other well-known mail bombers, and some carefully screened information about the technical aspects of Jack’s explosives. She was also planning to do a segment about the agencies and officers involved in the hunt. Lew had arranged to have a stringer contact each local police department which, like Atlanta, had open cases on the bomber’s victims to gather information on the officers in charge of those investigations.
Working on that would have been far more pleasant than doing a profile of another victim. They were the hardest to write, chronicling the poignant details of the seemingly ordinary lives. But it was from Kate’s profiles that the police were hoping some reader might make a connection, might provide a reason, a new direction for them to pursue. Hoping for anything.
The story on Barrington had started her obsession with him, what had become her secret collection of the newspaper’s photos at first simply a legitimate attempt to gather information about the only survivor. She had carried the pictures home after she’d finished the article, and that, of course, had been her mistake.
She cleared Thorne Barrington from her mind and tried to pull all the available information on Hall Draper together. On the surface there didn’t seem to be anything in this guy’s life that should result in his becoming a target for a killer. Too ordinary. Like the old guy in Austin. She couldn’t imagine any skeletons in those closets to attract Jack’s attention.
Maybe the cops were right. Maybe the bomber just found an address in a phone book. Maybe the victims weren’t related, and if that were true, they might never find Jack.
Most serial killers were caught only by happenstance or if they made a mistake, an action that went against the routine that had worked in the past. They were usually bright, at least the ones who succeeded for any length of time. A couple had been on the inside, knowing how the system worked. That had allowed them to escape detection longer than the guy on the street might.
Others had been “interested observers,” seemingly fascinated with the case. Why shouldn’t they be? she thought. They were at the center of it. Often that’s what gave them away—the desire to let someone know they had the starring role. The urge to take credit and to have their brilliance admired eventually became overwhelming. Or maybe it was the urge to get caught. Maybe something inside said they had caused enough carnage. Maybe those things the police labeled mistakes or happenstances were really pleas for someone to stop them.
Kate realized she’d been staring at her screen for a long time, not composing and not editing. Just thinking about Jack, wondering when he’d reach his saturation point. Distanced from the reality of what he did, would he ever give them the means to identify him, ever become overwhelmed by what he was doing?
“You got some mail, Ms. August,” Lew’s nephew announced. Trey was this summer’s office gofer. A nice kid. Polite.
“Thanks, Trey. Put it down anywhere you can find a clean spot,” she instructed, glancing up to smile at him while putting her fingers back on the keys.
Trey surveyed the clutter on her desk. Finally he grinned at her, handing a package and some letters over her computer. Automatically, Kate reached up to take them.
“I don’t think you’ve got a clean spot,” he said truthfully.
“I think you’re right,” she acknowledged, smiling at him.
“You working on the bomber?” he asked, watching her pile the mail he’d given her on top of the wire releases.
“Trying to. I think I’ve run out of things to write”
“Cops don’t have anything, do they?”
“So they say,” Kate agreed. She sometimes wondered if Kahler knew as little as he said he did. Occasionally there was something at the back of his eyes that made her question his claim to have come clean on everything they had. People like Kahler always knew more than they told you.
“You think they’ll catch him?” Trey asked, his face serious.
The public’s right to know, Kate thought again. “Eventually. He’ll make a mistake or somebody will remember something. Or somebody will see a link between the victims that will trace back to Jack. They’ll catch him.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said, sounding relieved.
After he’d moved on to deliver the rest of the morning’s mail, Kate allowed herself a small smile. She supposed she was some kind of authority figure to Trey, someone in the know. If she thought they’d catch Jack, that was good enough for him.
Fingers still resting on the keys, she glanced at the package he’d given her. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with white twine. She turned it around to be sure that the return address said what she thought it did. Thorne Barrington.
What in the world would Thorne Barrington be sending her? she wondered. Even as she thought it, she knew. He was a man who had been reared in the old school. Well brought up was the phrase. A Southern gentleman, as she had thought Friday night, and there was a code that went along with that training.
She would have thought he’d send flowers—roses, maybe. But he didn’t have to be caught in the Dark Ages. Just because he lived in that mausoleum didn’t mean he wouldn’t know something beyond the traditional dozen roses. Maybe candy. Godiva chocolates. In a box this size that would be a hell of a gesture.
Which he could well afford, she thought, opening her center drawer to take out to her scissors. She couldn’t find them, so she pushed her chair backwards on its plastic pad, putting the package in her lap. That gave her more room to open the drawer, and she found her scissors at the very back. She snipped the cord and put it on her desk. She turned the box over and slid her fingers under the taped, triangular flaps, lifting them free. The paper had not been taped together where it met at the center back, so it slipped off easily. The box was not the distinctive gold foil she’d half expected. It was plain white cardboard, a little heavier than the kind you bought at Christmas from Wal-Mart, five for a dollar ninety-nine. She turned it over and eased the top off.
The explosion wasn’t that loud. No more startling than a backfire or a distant gunshot, she thought later—when she was capable again of coherent thought. Only it had gone off in her lap, literally under her nose. Whatever exploded had enough force to propel the hd out of her hands and across the room. And enough force to carry the metallic red confetti the box had contained almost ceiling high, so that it rained down on her desk, showering her hair and the surrounding area like some kind of crimson fallout.
Kate didn’t realize she had moved, but the chair she’d been sitting in banged into the desk behind her, and suddenly she was standing, knees trembling, the remains of the package scattered over her feet and the plastic square she was standing on.
&n
bsp; “What the hell was that!”
She was aware that the comment came from Trey. She even knew when someone pulled the chair back and helped her sit down in it. She thought she responded to the questions about whether she was all right. Someone handed her a small cup of water from the cooler, but she couldn’t hold it. She was embarrassed by how much her hand was shaking. Finally Lew was there to take the paper cup away, to stop the icy drops from sloshing out to mark the pink linen dress she was wearing.
She wanted to put her head down on her desk and cry, to scream, to do something. Instead she kept saying to the gathering crowd that she was all right. “I’m all right,” she said over and over, wondering if she would ever really be again.
“It was with the other mail. I couldn’t remember where I’d heard the name before. I didn’t make the connection.”
Trey’s voice, explaining. Some part of her mind was still working, still functioning on a rational level. The other part was looking for a cave to hide in. A hole to crawl into. Who could know how they’d react, Lew had asked. Now she knew what it felt like. At least on some minimal level she knew.
“I didn’t recognize the name,” Trey went on, enjoying the limelight, maybe, now that it was obvious no one was hurt. When he’d come charging up to her desk, his face had been as blanched as Kate supposed hers was. “Thorne Barrington. I knew I’d heard it, you know, but I couldn’t exactly remember where.”
I didn’t put it together either, Kate thought, and I had a lot more reason to than you, Trey. Only I never suspected…
What did she suspect? she wondered suddenly. That Jack had sent her a fake bomb? A warning because her insightful series had hit too near home? Yeah, right. She and about a thousand other journalists who were cooking up stories based on the bits and pieces which were all they had on Jack.
The bomber was real worried about what she was revealing in her articles, which, when you got down to it was nada, nothing, zilch. Jack the Tripper wasn’t worried about Kate August. Which meant, of course, that he hadn’t sent the package. She knew who had filled a box with red confetti and some kind of explosive and had it delivered to her office. You want to know how it feels to have a bomb go off in your hands, Ms. August?
