No Ordinary Man

by Suzanne Brockman

  Jess closed her eyes. This was a nightmare. “What kind of man pumps a six-year-old child for information like that?”

  “The kind of man who wants to stop a vicious serial killer,” Selma replied calmly.

  “It was just a few weeks ago,” Jess said with a sigh, answering the psychologist’s question. “The first time was just a few weeks ago.”

  Dr. Haverstein made a note on her pad. “Actually, that makes me change my theory a bit.” She looked up. “But only a bit. Tell me about before that. He moved in as your tenant…when?”

  “A few weeks before that.”

  “But you knew him from the neighborhood?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it wasn’t until he moved in as your tenant that he started making, um, shall we call them amorous advances toward you?”

  “He didn’t.”

  Selma looked up. “But…”

  “I made the advances. I invited him out to the Key. I had a gig out there and—”

  “The Key?”

  “Siesta Key.”

  “When was that exactly?”

  Jess told her the date.

  Selma reacted. “How many days were you there?”

  “We went out that evening, came back that night. But that wasn’t when we—” Jess cleared her throat “—made love. That happened a few days later.”

  “You’re aware that there was a murder on Siesta Key that same night?”

  “Yes,” Jess answered. “I read about it in the paper.”

  “I suppose this supports our theory about a copycat killer,” Selma said, more to herself than Jess. “If Rob was with you all night…”

  “He wasn’t,” Jess stated flatly.

  “Oh, dear.”

  “We…kissed goodbye in the parking lot of the Pelican Club at around one, maybe a little later. He had his own car.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “He’s not the killer.”

  “I know you think that, Jess,” Selma said in her best professional voice. “Please, try to be patient.”

  Jess sat back in the easy chair, gripping the armrests with her hands. She waited for Dr. Haverstein to continue.

  “Then, how many days later did you and he…?” Selma let her voice trail off delicately.

  “Three,” Jess replied. “The night of the storm.”

  “There was another murder that night,” Selma continued, reviewing her notes. “Did he stay with you that night?”

  “No,” Jess said shortly. “He didn’t. The only time he’s ever spent the entire night was last night.”

  “During which there wasn’t a murder,” Selma remarked. She made more notes on her paper, then looked up. “I don’t suppose you’d want to go into specifics about the sexual act…?”

  Jess put her head into her hands.

  “No, okay, I understand. It would be helpful, however, to know…well, for instance…did he have problems maintaining an erection…or achieving orgasm?”

  “No,” Jess told her in a very choked voice, her hands still covering her face.

  “Thank you, dear, I know that was very difficult for you,” Selma said soothingly. “If it’s any consolation, it’s a point in Rob’s favor. You see, serial killers often only achieve sexual release from the act of killing. But there’s no absolute rule or standard, unfortunately. I’ve seen cases where the killer has an absolutely normal home life, a wife, children even. His family doesn’t have a clue that he’s on an extremely cyclical schedule of killing.”

  In a sudden flash of memory, Jess saw Rob as she’d seen him the night of the blackout, the night they’d first made love. He’d stood in the bedroom of his apartment, lit by lightning, his knife in his hand, his face contorted in almost inhuman rage….

  “No,” she said.

  But she remembered him out on the street, the night that her car broke down. He’d flicked his wrist and his knife had appeared in his hand. He had stepped toward her, his eyes wild….

  “No,” she said again.

  “It’s important for you to realize that if Rob turns out to be Sarasota’s serial killer,” Selma added, “it’s in no way a reflection on you, on the type of person you are. Do you understand that?”

  “Rob’s not the killer,” Jess declared, but even to her own ears, her voice sounded less certain.

  “Dear, you are very stubborn.” Selma sighed. “All right, you want to hear my theory?”

  “No.” Jess clenched her teeth. “Dammit. Yes.”

  Selma Haverstein laughed. “I like your honesty, dear. Try to hear me out, okay?”

  Jess nodded.

  “When Rob was six, his mother died, in a sense deserting him. His father, as you said, was abusive, and we can only guess what horrors the child endured. It would be quite natural for a child, any youngster in fact, to grow to resent, and maybe even hate the mother who left him to a world of pain and suffering.

  “Yet at the same time, there are feelings of guilt, for a child who loses his mother at the age of six would certainly be old enough to have vivid memories of the mother’s love and caring. So the child grows up, beaten, perhaps even sexually abused, with feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing, and a great rage, a tremendous anger toward his mother, topped off with guilt about that anger that makes him hate himself even more.

  “The child becomes a man, and his self-loathing grows. He feels inadequate, particularly in his relationships with women.

  “Which brings us to six months ago,” Dr. Haverstein said, “when Rob moves to Sarasota and meets you. You are, in a very real sense, his mother all over again. Naturally, he adores you, and even more, he despises you. Except now there’s a twist. He wants you sexually. But you represent his mother, and, because reality and fantasy are so easily confused in the mind of a serial killer, perhaps you have even become his mother to him.”

  “I can’t believe I’m sitting here listening to this,” Jess whispered. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “Every time he has strong feelings of lust for you, the cycle of self-loathing and anger starts, and he kills you.”

  Jess looked up, shocked.

  “Not exactly you, of course, though at times it might seem like that to him.”

  “All those women who were killed,” Jess said, her eyes wide with horror. “You think they were supposed to be me?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that, but, in a sense, yes.”

  Jess felt almost light-headed and dizzy. “But that’s just your theory,” she finally said. “It’s just a guess, right?”

  Selma nodded. “But it is a pattern we’ve seen before.”

  Jess was silent.

  “You need to think about all of this,” Selma concluded, putting her file back into her briefcase and gathering up the coffee cups and the donut bag. “I’ll leave you my card here on the table—call me anytime. Day or night. For any reason at all.” Selma stood up. “I’ll just let myself out.”

  As Jess watched, the older woman crossed to the door.

  “Thank you again, for your cooperation, dear—”

  “Do you really think it’s Rob? Not someone else?” Jess stood up.

  Selma turned slowly around. Her eyes looked so sympathetic and kind. “It’s too early to say for sure.”

  “Am I… Do you think that I…might be in danger?”

  “We can arrange for surveillance,” Selma replied. “We can wire your house for sound. That way the agents who are watching will hear everything that goes on inside—”

  “No,” Jess said, hugging her arms to herself. It was odd, in this heat, to feel so chilled. “I don’t want that. I don’t want people watching, either.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice about that,” Selma said apologetically. “We’ve already got a surveillance team following Rob.”

  “Oh, Lord.” Jess turned away. She felt like crying. Or finding Rob and demanding that he tell her the truth. What had he done? What was he running from? He wasn’t a killer. He could
n’t be. Could he?

  “You asked me if I think you’re in danger,” Selma said quietly. “I don’t know, Jess. But I’ll tell you one thing. If I were you, you wouldn’t find me inviting Rob Carpenter into my house—or my bed—tonight.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ian Davis.

  Jess kept on coming back to her ex-husband’s name.

  She’d spent the entire afternoon making a list of serial killer suspects.

  Because maybe Parker Elliot was right. Maybe the serial killer was someone Jess knew. But she knew many more men than Rob. Why should his be the only name on the list?

  Jess had dropped Kelsey off at Doris’s house, and now sat out on the deck filling a sheet of paper with names.

  Ian was at the top of the list, along with creepy Stanford Greene.

  All of the fathers of her twenty-seven piano and guitar students went down onto the paper. Lenny Freeman, the manager of the Pelican Club was there, along with her professor from that music theory class she took last year.

  Frank Madsen was on the list, too. He was as ridiculous a suspect as Rob. As silly as just about any of the names on this list.

  And as long as she was being absurd, why not Parker Elliot? An FBI agent would have the perfect cover. No one would ever suspect him of being a serial killer.

  Yeah, right.

  But there was Ian.

  Seven years ago, when she’d first met him, Jess would have been wildly amused at the outlandish idea that the concert violinist might be a killer. Charming, mercurial, creative, handsome Ian Davis might have been temperamental and intense, but he was no killer. A lady-killer, perhaps, but that was very different. It was only after they were married that Jess started to see Ian’s darker side, his depression, his jealousy, his deep fear of failure, his barely controllable anger. Such powerful anger. What she had always thought was creative intensity, artistic fire, was in truth a deeply burning rage. He was angry at the world. Mad at his domineering parents, furious at the conductors who held him back, disgruntled at the rules and laws that restricted him as if he were some ordinary, normal, mundane person, angry at Jess—always and forever angry at Jess.

  He’d been angry at her for marrying him, for tying him down with a wife and a child despite the fact that he had courted her mercilessly, almost desperately, for months. And he’d been livid at Jess for divorcing him, for leaving him alone again. He claimed he still wanted her, but she knew it was far more likely that he only wanted what he could not have.

  Ian’s anger had moved closer to the surface over the past several years. He drank more and more often. His social facade and charm seemed almost brittle when Jess saw him, his trademark sarcasm more biting. He looked unhealthy and pale, as if he spent far too little time in the sun.

  Was it possible that Ian had finally snapped? Had he lost all reason and turned to murder for his relief?

  Jess had called the number on the card Parker Elliot had given her and told him about Ian. The FBI agent had listened politely. He’d said they’d look into it after they followed up on their current lead, but Jess had come away from the phone call with the idea that Elliot hadn’t really taken her seriously.

  What if it was Ian? Was she in danger? Was Kelsey in danger…?

  “Jess.”

  She looked up, startled, to see Rob standing at the top of the stairs. “Hi.” She quickly, guiltily, closed her notebook. “I didn’t hear your car,” she said.

  He crossed to the table and sat down across from her. “That’s because I didn’t drive.”

  “Don’t tell me you lent your car to Ian again.”

  “No.” His voice was quiet, his face serious. “I gave notice at work and they asked me to turn my car in immediately. It was company owned.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Jess said. Did this mean he was free to leave? Panic made her heart start to pound. Had he only come back here to tell her goodbye?

  “I still have to go in to the office for the next few days,” Rob told her, “to make sure the files are up-to-date on the projects I was working on.”

  Jess nodded with relief. He’d stay at least another few days.

  “But I’ll be done by Friday at the latest,” Rob told her. “And then…”

  He fell silent, just gazing across the table at her.

  What had he done, that he felt he had to leave like this?

  But Jess couldn’t ask. As much as she wanted to, as badly as she needed to ask, she couldn’t. She’d promised Rob she wouldn’t. No questions.

  He couldn’t be a serial killer, could he? She would somehow know if he was, wouldn’t she?

  Was it possible that these average brown eyes she was staring into belonged to a cold-blooded murderer? Was it possible that a man who could make love to her so impossibly tenderly could turn around and cut another woman’s throat?

  No.

  Jess wanted to think not.

  But everything that Parker Elliot and Selma Haverstein had told her undermined her confidence.

  If I were you, you wouldn’t find me inviting Rob Carpenter into my house—or my bed—tonight.

  Was Rob a killer? The truth was, Jess wasn’t one hundred percent certain that he wasn’t.

  “I can give you a ride to work tomorrow,” Jess said, breaking the silence, “if you want.”

  Rob shook his head. “I can get a cab.”

  He knew something was different. He suspected that something was wrong. Jess could see questions in Rob’s eyes.

  “Where’s Bug?” he asked.

  “She’s at Doris’s for the afternoon,” Jess said. “I have to pick her up in a few hours. Before seven.”

  He nodded down at the notebook that rested on the table in front of her. “What are you doing?”

  Jess stared back at him. What was she doing? What could she tell him? “Nothing, really…”

  “Are you writing a song?”

  It would be easiest just to say yes. “Yeah,” Jess said. It was easier, but it was also a lie. How had she ever become involved in this? How had she let herself become a part of this deceit?

  She should demand answers from Rob. And if he couldn’t give her those answers, she should let him go and be glad that he was leaving. There was no room for secrets and lies and deception in her life.

  She’d had enough of that with Ian.

  Ian.

  Unless Ian had changed the lock on his condo door in the past few weeks, Jess still had the key to his place. At this time of year, her ex-husband had orchestra performances every evening. She could use the key, sneak into his apartment and search for… what? Something that would make Parker Elliot sit up and take notice. Some kind of incriminating evidence. A murder weapon. Bloodstains on his clothes. Lord knows Ian hated to do laundry. If he’d gotten blood on his clothes, it would be there still, in a pile on his bedroom floor.

  Whatever the evidence was, when Jess found it, she’d know for sure that Ian was the serial killer. It was an awful idea— Kelsey’s father a killer. But if he was, he had to be stopped.

  ROB STARED AT JESS in disbelief as she rummaged through a junk drawer in her kitchen. “This is nuts,” he told her.

  “I’m not asking for your help.” She paused from her search to glance up at him. “Although you’re welcome to come along.”

  “To break and enter your ex-husband’s condo to prove that he’s a serial killer,” Rob said flatly. “Jess, you’ve got to admit that the idea is a little out there—”

  “It’s not breaking and entering,” Jess argued, finally unearthing a key on a Betty Boop key chain and holding it up for Rob to see. “Ian gave me his key.”

  “I don’t think he meant for you to use it like this, with me tagging along as you search for evidence that will send him to the electric chair,” Rob said. He followed her down the hall to her bedroom, and watched as she gathered up her purse and sat on her bed to slip a pair of sandals on her feet. “I think he probably had something else in mind.”

  Jess looked
up at him then. Her brown eyes were so dark and so determined. “What if he’s the killer, Rob?”

  “Call the police,” Rob replied without hesitation. He crossed toward her and lifted the receiver from the phone on her bedside table, holding it out to her. “Call them and tell them what you think. Let them check Ian out. That’s their job. It’s what they get paid to do.”

  Jess stubbornly crossed her arms. “I already called them,” she said. “They don’t believe me.” With her chin, she gestured to the telephone receiver that Rob was still holding. “You call them. Maybe they’ll believe you.”

  Call the police? No way. He couldn’t. It would be too risky. Too dangerous. Rob’s contact with the law was always from a distance, and it was going to stay that way.

  With a muttered curse, he hung up the phone.

  Jess stood up and started toward the door. “I’ll be back soon—”

  Rob swore again, louder this time as he reached out and caught her arm, swinging her around to face him. “What, really, do you expect to find?”

  She gazed up at him, her expression unreadable, her eyes guarded. “Answers,” she told him. “I want some answers.”

  Something was going on here. Why did Jess suddenly think that Ian was a killer? She knew something. “What’s this about, Jess?” he said softly. “This is about more than just Ian, isn’t it?”

  “Please come with me,” she whispered. “Please help me?”

  She looked so worried now, so…scared. But of what?

  “Of course,” Rob found himself saying. “You know I’ll help you.”

  JESS PARKED her car around the corner from Ian’s condo—in front of the convenience store. Rob had been silent on the way over, and he was still quiet now. If he was having second thoughts about going with her into Ian’s home, he wasn’t voicing them. And, thankfully, he hadn’t pressed the issue of why coming out here was so important to her. Because what could she tell him? I want to prove that you’re not a serial killer?

  Together they walked up the sidewalk that led to the front door of Ian’s condo. The door was closed, but Jess could see into the living room through the little window on the top half. The only obvious sign of Ian was a half-eaten and probably fossilizing pizza lying out on the coffee table—and a half a ton of junk cluttering up the living room.