Sitting here, staring at my computer screen, reading all of that, I can barely even take in the news that he has granted me “permission” to call upon law enforcement. It’s three other things that rivet me: He mentioned my cousin Nathan. He mentioned my mother. He didn’t mention Deborah.
“Steve!”
He comes running, and then reads over my shoulder.
“He must know she stayed at Nathan’s apartment last night!” I say, feeling panicky and sick to my stomach again. “Why else would he even mention Nathan? And why didn’t he name Deborah as somebody who might identify my body? Is he saying she’ll be dead before then?”
My bodyguard says the only rational thing he can say to me at this point.
“Call the cops, Ms. Lightfoot.”
Within the hour we are on our way, driving in my car to downtown Bahia Beach to meet up with Paul Flanck and Robyn Anschutz, who are two of the best cops and investigators I know. My pet criminologist, Aileen Rasmussen, is going to meet us, too.
“Not at the station, Marie,” Robyn objected when I reached her home and asked her where she wants us to meet. She and Paul are both off duty today, she told me, which means they’re doing me an even bigger favor by agreeing to meet me now. “If we show our faces there, we’ll get put to work.”
“I’m afraid this will be work, too, Robyn.”
“That’s okay. At least we don’t have to wear suits, and we can meet you in a bar or someplace where nobody’s going to bother us. You know how it is when you’re out with Paul and me, Marie.” I hear a teasing smile in her voice. “All those autograph seekers. We can hardly eat in public anymore, after you put us in your book.” Her tone changes. “Do you know Easy Pete’s, on the river?”
“Perfect.”
So here we are, three of us, seated like tourists at a table under an umbrella at Easy Pete’s on the New River. On both banks, opposite and on either side of us, long rows of cruisers, sailboats, and houseboats are picturesquely tied up. Some are live-aboards; some are rentals; all pay the city a fee to dock here. Steve and I arrived first. When the two cops walked toward me, Steve moved out of the way before I could even attempt to introduce them. To say the least, he’s not fond of cops. Now, Steve’s perched on a stool at the bar behind us, where he can keep a better watch on the customers who come and go.
“Who’s your muscle?” Paul asks me.
I grin at Robyn. “Your partner sounds just like a TV detective.”
“I know.” She rolls her eyes. “It’s so embarrassing.”
“Which TV detective?” Paul wants to know.
“William Conrad,” his partner says, before I can even open my mouth. “Remember him, Paul? Fat. Old. You sure remind me of him.”
“I think you’re more the Bruce Willis type, myself,” I tell him.
“See?” he tells her, and then looks back at me. “Or, possibly a younger Mel Gibson.”
“Definitely,” I assure him while his partner snorts with derisive laughter. “That’s Stevie Orbach, Paul.”
Their eyes flash almost immediate recognition, and some hostility.
“No shit,” Paul says. “So that’s sue-the-bastards Orbach, huh.” There are police officers on Steve’s long list of people to sue for his wrongful imprisonment and death sentence. “I guess I can’t blame him, but I don’t have to like him, either. He did kill his own mother, for crissake. And it was a cop who finally got him off. One of the very cops he’s suing, I might add. What the hell is he doing with you, Marie?”
“I hired him to be my bodyguard.”
Robyn nods thoughtfully. “Now that’s probably not a bad idea.”
I decide this isn’t the time to remind them of the facts of Steve’s childhood with the monster he called “Mom,” or that the cop who got him off was also the cop who put him in prison for a murder he didn’t do. Instead, I just say, “It’s good to see you guys. Thanks for coming down here to meet me.”
“Aw shucks,” says Paul.
“We’re just hoping you’ll put us in another book,” Robyn says.
Across the table from me, Robyn and Paul look pretty much the same as when they starred in a book of mine, The Little Mermaid, a story that disturbed and changed all of us. But the disturbing and the changing were all inside of us. Externally, I’m still the same short blond nosy woman I was back then, nosier, if possible. Also, blonder. Robyn’s still married to her Cuban expatriate and still wears her blond hair backcombed high enough to give her a couple of imaginary inches on her police partner, Paul. And Paul’s still the single, all-man, half-redneck kind of guy he’s always been. “You’re not exactly white trash,” I once heard Robyn taunt him. “More like beige trash.” “Dammit!” was his quick retort. “My daddy told me that college degree was gonna ruin me!”
“You sure you don’t want a real drink?” Paul asks me now, nodding at my coffee cup. Although he’s offering, neither of them is drinking alcohol, either. It’s iced tea all the way for Robyn and a diet root beer for Paul.
“I’m sure. I feel as if I need to keep my wits about me, the few I have left after the last couple of days.”
As always, Robyn gets to the point. “What’s up, Marie?”
I hand the E-mails to Paul and then give them a chance to read and to trade with each other. Halfway through, Paul looks up, points to the first E-mail, and says, “He told you not to contact us.”
“He changed his mind.” I point out a later E-mail. “Apparently he’s not worried about you anymore.”
“I’m insulted,” Paul says.
“Crushed,” Robyn agrees, without even looking up from her reading. “What about the FBI?”
“He says he doesn’t care who I bring in to this. He seems to like the idea of a chase.”
“Good.” Robyn casts a glance at her partner beside her. “He’s arrogant, Paul, just like you. That’ll help us catch him.” To me, she says, “What else you got?”
I tell them all the rest of it, every damned thing that has happened.
“Marie,” Paul says, when I’ve finished my recital, “you’ve kept the other evidence, right? The cassette tape, the advertising flyer?”
I give him a look of mock disbelief. “Who do you think you’re dealing with here? Those aren’t romance novels I write, you know.”
Robyn half turns in her seat to chastise him. “Did she keep the evidence? No, she flushed it. Of course she kept the evidence, you numbskull!”
“Just asking.” He grins, showing his palms in conciliation.
Robyn and I smile briefly at each other, acknowledging that she has taken this good old boy and trained him pretty well. But both cops look as if they had to severely restrain their facial expressions when Franklin DeWeese’s name cropped up.
“I saw that article about you in People magazine,” Robyn says as she dumps more sugar into her iced tea. There’s more than a hint of laughter in her eyes. “How long’s that been going on?”
“I think they’ve been publishing for several decades now,” I reply, with a straight face.
“Yeah, right, that’s what I meant.” Robyn waggles her eyebrows. “Of course, I hate to pry.”
This time, it’s her partner who snorts.
“I do!” she protests, all injured innocence. “You know I can hardly stand to interrogate suspects, Paul! I’m sooo conscientious of their First Amendment right to privacy.”
I grin at them. “So do I have a right to privacy here, or am I going to have to indulge your prurient curiosity?”
“It is not prurient.” Robyn grins, but then quickly sobers up. “I’m sorry, Marie. Ordinarily, what you do with our state attorney would be none of my business, but he’s involved, so I guess it is. And his kids are involved, too. So one thing we’ll have to do is look to see if there’s any connection between DeWeese and this nut who’s after you. Like, it could be that he’s really wanting to hurt the prosecutor, but he’s covering his tracks by making it look as if he’s coming at you.”
Pa
ul and I stare at her, and then he says, “Much as I hate to say it, that may have been a brilliant deduction, Partner.”
“I never once thought of that,” I admit.
Modestly, she shrugs. “If it’s the prosecutor he’s after, he might even think he will hurt DeWeese more by aiming at you.”
“No, Robyn, nothing could hurt him as much as threatening his kids.”
“Yeah,” she has to agree. “Are they the cutest little bugs you ever saw, or what?”
“He could be hiding his real reasons for doing this,” Paul interrupts. “Maybe it’s about writing a book, maybe it’s not.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, either,” I admit. “I haven’t had time to think, or to get perspective! I guess I’ve been assuming that he wants to be famous, and that I’m his means of doing that. You know”—I produce a small grin for them—“apparently, there’s something to be said for bringing in the experts. So what else can you do for me that I can’t do on my own?”
“Check out the cassette tape, and how it got into your car,” Paul says, “check everything for prints, the usual—”
“We won’t find any prints,” Robyn predicts.
Her partner turns to her. “Well, aren’t you Little Mary Sunshine.”
“Marie wants to know the truth, Paul.”
“I do,” I agree. “Even when I don’t like it.”
“We’ll run his MO through our databases,” Paul promises me, “to see if anything similar turns up—”
“Something similar to this? An MO?” I have to laugh at the idea of a “modus operandi” at work here. My laughter comes out sounding pretty cynical. “Yeah, you’re sure going to find a whole lot of cases like this one, Paul. He’s probably a serial killer who only murders true crime writers like me. You’ll find bloody manuscripts scattered all over the country.” I feel my control slipping, but I can’t stop it. “Quick, call Ann Rule! Better warn her to watch out! And I’ll give you Joe McGinnis’s phone number, and you’d better call Linda Wolfe. They’re all true crime writers, why I can give you a long list. You’d better let them know that a serial killer of true crime writers is on the loose.” I put my head in my hands. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”
They’re tolerant.
“Sorry,” I repeat. “I got a little carried away there.”
“Sarcasm beats panic,” Robyn observes sagely.
“Yeah, well, I’ve had some of that, too. When I heard that tape, I thought I was going to run straight off the road. But I’m trying very hard not to panic and to remember that supposedly he isn’t going to hurt anybody as long as I follow his instructions.”
“Which brings us to your assistant—” Robyn says.
“And the DeWeese kids,” Paul adds. “Look, don’t worry about your assistant, Marie. She’s a long way away, and you’ve got her covered about as well as anybody can. And as far as the kids are concerned, that’s out of your hands, too. DeWeese is a big boy—”
“I’ll say he is,” Robyn interjects, waggling her eyebrows.
Paul gives her a disgusted glance. “As I was saying, if anybody has the means to protect his family, DeWeese does.”
“But Paul, now this guy has something to prove!”
“Like what?”
“Like what’s in those E-mails! He threatened certain things—general things—if I didn’t follow his rules. Deb broke one of them. Franklin offended him. Now he’ll have to show me that he means business, or he won’t have any leverage over me.”
“Or,” Paul says, “this may be the end of him.”
“You think he won’t do anything, and it’ll all be over?”
“Sure, it’s possible.”
“Probable,” Robyn corrects.
“I don’t agree,” says another voice, and we all look up to find a motherly-looking woman staring prissily down at us, as if we had spilled our milk. “I agree with Marie that he has to do something now, and I feel convinced that he will do it.” Her glance stops at me. “That is the bad news, Marie. I’m afraid I don’t have any good news. Move over, please, so I can order a cup of coffee.” As she sits down, she sticks out a hand for either one of the cops to shake, and announces, “Dr. Aileen Rasmussen. Who’re you?”
22
Marie
With a draft beer at one hand and a basket of fried clams at the other, seventy-three-year-old Aileen lectures us as if these two cops seated across from her have never handled a homicide case before, and as if I’ve never written about them. “It’s easier to do a profile when there’s a crime scene—”
“We’re kinda glad there isn’t one in this case,” Paul cracks.
Aileen ignores that, pops a clam into her mouth, and gazes coolly at me while she chews and swallows. “When I’m analyzing homicides, I generally start with the closest circle of people around the victim and then work outward. You’re not dead, Marie—”
“Yet,” I murmur, and Robyn kicks me lightly under the table.
“But you’re still the place we should start, first by looking at the people closest to you and then working out in ever-widening circles from there. You probably think it’s some crazy stranger who’s doing this, but I would say that he has a closer connection to you than that.”
“Like somebody I’ve written about?”
Instead of directly answering me, she takes us all in with a glance. “Have the three of you discussed The Executioners yet?”
Paul, Robyn, and I exchange glances, trying not to look dumb.
“No.” I speak for all of us. “Should we have?”
“I would think that might seem obvious.”
The cops across the table are behaving suspiciously well in the face of her superior attitude.
When neither speaks up, I ask, “Why, Aileen?”
“Marie, just look at his emphasis on it!”
“But that’s just a—” Paul begins.
“Clue,” she pronounces, leaning forward and saying it as if to a small child. Paul sucks in his cheeks as if he’s holding tightly on to words in his mouth, but I notice a gleam of mischief in his eyes. Oblivious as always to the effect she produces on people around her, Aileen sails on to say, “I believe it holds some kind of key for us, so I went and bought a copy of the book and I’ve been reading it. I also picked up videos of both of the movies that were made from it, and I’ve watched both of them. I don’t suppose you have?”
Three heads shake, but I feel compelled to defend us.
“Aileen, give us a break! Paul and Robyn only just heard about all this a couple of hours ago, and I haven’t exactly had time to watch movies.”
I don’t see that it’s necessary to mention The Lion King.
It’s Robyn who cuts to the chase, of course. “So what have you figured out?”
“Surely you’ve read the book?” Aileen counters. “Some time?”
This time, three heads nod. The late John D. MacDonald is still one of Florida’s favorite writers, so it’s never remarkable to find three out of three Floridians who’ve read him.
“But I don’t remember much except that somebody was chasing somebody,” Robyn confesses. “I think there was a family that was frightened, wasn’t there?”
“Yes. In the story, there is a terrible man named Max Cady who is clearly a sociopath. He’s the villain. When the story opens, he has been released from prison, where he served time for brutally raping a girl. The hero of the book is a witness against him. Cady wants revenge. So he launches a campaign of terror against the hero’s family, which includes the man, his wife, three children, and a dog— What? Why are you all looking at one another like that?”
“It’s your theory, Robyn!” I say.
“What theory?” the criminologist asks impatiently.
“That the real target is Franklin, not me.”
“It fits the story,” Paul says. “Somebody that DeWeese has put away wants revenge now, and so he’s persecuting DeWeese’s family—”
“Which,” Robyn eagerly breaks in, �
��sort of includes you, Marie.”
I turn to Aileen. “What do you think about that ?”
But the damn woman ignores us again. “One of Cady’s first acts against them is to kill their dog. It was an Irish setter, I believe. Do you have a dog, Marie?”
“No!” I feel shocked and chilled at the thought of this. I’d completely forgotten that part of the book. “Neither does Deborah. And Franklin’s children don’t either.”
A small frown appears on the criminologist’s forehead. God forbid she should be wrong. “Well, the dog itself may not be an exact parallel, then. But I think what’s important is that the man who is after you may commit some kind of act that is a kind of equivalent to that, by which I mean he may do something vicious and hurtful to show he can, but he won’t kill anybody yet. He seems to move by increments, drawing you in, just as in the book.”
“Okay, but what about Robyn’s theory?” I insist. “Could it be Franklin he’s really after?”
Paul interrupts. “Wait a minute. Yet ? What did you mean by ‘yet,’ Doctor?”
Aileen looks over at him. “I read Marie’s correspondent as being capable of murder, although”—the frown deepens—“there’s something finicky about the way he writes to you, Marie, in his use of language, for instance, and his vocabulary. There’s no cursing, no dirty language. He’s actually quite a different kind of person than the villain in MacDonald’s novel. That man was coarse and brutal. This one strikes me as rather old-fashioned. It’s possible that he’s an older man. Alternatively, he may be a young man who’s stuck in a time warp—reads the classics, hates contemporary culture, that kind of thing. He’s a snob. Definitely, a snob. He feels himself to be superior to the run-of-the-mill person.” She glances back at me. “And superior to you, Marie. I think that on the one hand he wants to feed off your fame, but on the other hand, he resents your great success, probably feels you don’t deserve it compared to a man of his vast intelligence and talent.” Her inflection is ironic. “I think our man is well educated. I think he is neat in his personal habits. Very clean, very presentable. Maybe not compulsively hygienic, but a bit on the fastidious side. You might find him wearing a dark suit with a crisp white shirt and a tie and well-shined, possibly expensive shoes. If not that, then at least dressed quite neatly. Certainly, history is replete with murderers who could have fit that description, but my point here is that men like that don’t necessarily want to get their own hands dirty. They arrange for clean ‘accidents’ to happen, or even for other people—minions, if you will—to do their killing for them.” She smiles. Her first. “That’s an excellent description of some battlefield generals, actually.”
The Truth Hurts Page 19
