She had grown up in a house that held too many people to allow for a lot of clutter, but there had always been ample occasion for serious conversation -- around the dinner table, in front of the television set, out on the back porch. Her father took advantage of every opportunity to instill in his seven children the need for education, intellectual achievement, and success.
Native Americans didn’t always get a fair shake in this country, even after almost four hundred years of occupation, he often told them. But that didn’t mean you sat around and cried into your whiskey about it. And it didn’t mean you sat around and waited for good fortune to drop into your lap, either. It meant you got up off your butt and went out and made it happen for yourself.
He was proud of how he earned his living as a cop, but he wanted his children to do better, if they could. It took. One of Erin’s brothers was an Indian Rights attorney, two were engineers -- one computer and one mechanical, and the fourth was a veterinarian. Both of her sisters were teachers. Erin, the youngest, was the only one who had forsaken college and followed in her father’s footsteps, and she had never really been sure whether he was pleased about that or not. She didn’t ask him when she could, and now it was too late. He was killed in the line of duty six years ago next month, four months before he was scheduled to retire. But what she could do was be the best damn police officer she knew how to be, and for that, she had a great role model.
The notes in front of her included everything she had been able to lay her hands on about Clare Durant and her husband. For example, she now knew that Clare was thirty-eight years old and the only child of Gus and Helen Nicolaidis, both deceased. She also knew that Clare graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in English literature, and that she had worked as an editorial assistant at Thornburgh House from 1997 to 2000. It wasn't clear in anything Erin had read whether hiring her had been because of a personal connection to the family, but Glenn Thornburgh’s brother had worked for Gus Nicolaidis.
Clare married Richard Durant in 2000, gave birth to their first child, a girl, two years later, and to their second child, a boy, two years after that. In the spring of 2010, she went back to work at Thornburgh House, this time as an editor.
On the other side, Richard Durant was forty-eight years old, and one of five children, three surviving, born to Emma and William Durant of Lacey. He was a graduate of Washington State University, had gone to work at Nicolaidis Industries in 1995, and married the boss’s daughter six years later. In 2005, upon the retirement and subsequent death of Gus Nicolaidis, he took over the company for his wife, and had been running it quite profitably ever since.
In addition to the personal information on the Durants she had gathered, Erin had also compiled a number of facts, observations, questions, and theories relating to the man who had been harassing Clare. The detective couldn’t help but feel that there was a real sense of urgency here, in part because this was not the first case like this that she knew about.
Six years ago, about a year before she and Dusty hooked up as partners, Erin recalled, a popular Seattle singer had started receiving the same kind of phone calls that Clare was now receiving, and that less than a month after she first reported those calls to the police, she had been found in an isolated area near Green Lake, raped, mutilated, and murdered by someone who had clearly enjoyed his work. It was assumed, for lack of a better explanation at the time, that the killer was a deranged groupie, who was suffering from unrequited love. But then, three years later, there had been an eerily similar case, although the second victim was a West Seattle waitress and not a celebrity.
The first murder had been well publicized when it happened, but the second had received far less coverage. Neither Erin nor Dusty had worked either case, but they knew the details of both, and they had always assumed, just like everyone else at the time, that the second victim’s estranged husband had taken advantage of the perfect opportunity to commit a copycat crime. However, there was never enough proof to take the husband to trial, with the result that no perpetrator had been brought to justice in either instance, and Erin now began to wonder if those two cases could be linked, after all, and if Seattle might not have a serial stalker in its midst. She wished she could talk to the only detective who had worked both cases, just to pick his brain, but Frank Pulansky had died two years ago of leukemia.
At nine o’clock, she called her partner. “Sorry to bother you so late,” she said, after chatting for a few moments with Jean Grissom, Dusty’s wife of twenty-nine years. “But I’ve been doing some thinking about the Durant situation.”
“So have I,” Dusty replied. “As a matter of fact, I was just getting ready to call you. I got to thinking, somewhere between Jeannie’s pork chops and peach cobbler, about the Laughlin and Medina cases. Do you remember them?”
“I most certainly do,” Erin said, glancing down at her own forgotten dinner -- a limp wedge of leftover pizza. Linda Laughlin was the popular Seattle singer, and Grace Medina was the waitress with the estranged husband.
“Well, I started wondering if maybe we have a connection here. Two can be a coincidence, but three -- I’m thinking maybe we have a pattern.”
“That’s exactly why I was calling you,” Erin told him, a comfortable smile spreading across her face.
Dusty Grissom was a thirty-year man, having joined the Seattle Police Department a couple of years after a stint in the military. There wasn’t much he hadn’t seen in those thirty years, and he had a mind like a computer, filled with the particulars of every case he’d ever worked, and many he hadn’t, that he could access and process at a moment’s notice.
“I’m thinking maybe everyone was wrong about the waitress’s husband, and maybe those two cases are linked, after all,” he said now. “And I’m wondering if this could be the start of number three. The timing would be about right. And I sure wish Frank Pulansky was still alive.”
“We’ve been together too long, partner,” Erin said with a chuckle in her voice.
“Why?” he asked. “Am I reading your mind?”
“Either that, or I’m reading yours.”
“Mrs. Durant said the calls to her office started about three weeks ago, isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” Erin confirmed.
“Well then, if I remember correctly, and this is our guy,” Dusty observes, “he’s going to start calling her at home pretty soon. And after that, there won’t be very much time.”
***
Clare was getting a very slow start on Wednesday morning. She and James Lilly had lingered on at the Children’s Hospital benefit until well after one o’clock when it finally ended, and she had paid for it by oversleeping, so soundly, in fact, that she never even heard Richard when he got up.
For some reason, it took longer than usual to get the children out of bed and ready for school. And then she misplaced a manuscript she had been evaluating, and she and Doreen had to ransack the house to find it. Otherwise, she would not have been standing with the housekeeper in the middle of the library at nine-fifteen in the morning when the telephone rang.
“Hello, Clare,” the voice said when she picked up the receiver.
Clare froze. “How did you get this number?” she gasped.
“Well, you don’t seem to want to talk to me when you’re at the office anymore,” the voice taunted. “So I thought I’d try you here. Since you were out so late last night, having such a good time with someone other than your husband, I had a feeling you might still be home.”
The receiver slipped out of her hands and clattered onto the hardwood floor of the library.
“What’s the matter?” Doreen asked, startled by the expression on her employer’s face.
“It’s nothing, nothing at all,” Clare assured her, getting hold of herself and calmly picking up the receiver and replacing it in its cradle. “I just dropped the telephone, that’s all.”
It was only two days since Detective Grissom and Detective Hall had first come to her o
ffice in response to Nina’s report, and one day since they put the tap on her line to record her incoming telephone calls. They hadn’t said anything much, but she could tell from their demeanor that they were taking this all quite seriously. And it also seemed to her that the two detectives were continuing to spend a lot of time at Thornburgh House, on such a minor issue, really, talking to co-workers, asking endless questions about everyone she knew. In an odd sort of way, it was almost as though they were standing guard over her.
But that was there, and this was here, and just maybe the caller was much smarter and knew a whole lot more than anyone realized.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Doreen asked.
“Yes, I’m perfectly all right,” Clare replied with a quick shake of her head. “It was just one of those dumb crank calls.” As if on cue, the phone rang again. “Doreen, get that, will you? If it’s for me, tell whoever it is that I’ve already left for work.”
The heavyset Irishwoman nodded. “Hello?” she said into the receiver. “This is the Durant residence. How may I help you?” She turned to Clare. “There’s no one there,” she whispered.
“Never mind,” her employer said. “Just hang up.”
***
“He called her at home,” Erin told her partner an hour later.
Dusty nodded. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “If this is our guy, what’s going on here is that he’s following a set pattern. He’s thought the whole thing out and he knows exactly what he’s doing, because he’s doing it just like he did it before.”
“How do you know?”
“I checked back through all the old records. He called Laughlin for three weeks at the club where she was working, and then he started calling her at home. It was the same thing with Medina. According to her roommate, he called her for three weeks at the restaurant, and then he switched over to her apartment.”
“If this is the same guy, he certainly takes his time, doesn’t he?” Erin said thoughtfully. “Three years between targets.”
“I have to tell you, I don’t see another option at the moment,” Dusty insisted. “The Durant family has no skeletons.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve gone over the list of everyone Clare Durant knows through Thornburgh House, including both her current and past clients,” Dusty said with a nod. “Even the writers she rejected said they appreciated that she actually took the time to sit down and talk with them about their work. Socially, the Durants are major supporters of just about every charitable cause around here you can name. Their friends and relatives, even their acquaintances, adore them. And in an age of corporate double-dealing, so far as I can tell, Richard Durant is running an honest ship.”
“Well, that’s nice to know, anyway,” Erin said.
“I haven’t come across any unhappy shareholders, either. The buzz is that Nicolaidis Industries has a very exciting new product making its way through the testing phase, and the stock has been rock solid. What’s more, I can’t even find any disgruntled ex-employees. In fact, there aren’t many ex-employees at all, other than from relocation or retirement, in the past ten years. It’s just a very quiet, profitable, well-run company that’s been managing to hold its own during an up and down economy without having to lay people off or ask anyone to take a cut in pay.”
“Well, if that’s the case, then I guess we need to tell her,” Erin said with a sigh.
***
“A serial stalker?” Clare echoed in disbelief. “What on earth would a serial stalker want with me?”
“I’m afraid there’s no way to answer that,” Dusty told her. “But the pattern that’s beginning to emerge here is unmistakable.”
“Maybe not,” Nina said, overhearing, and stepping out of her office across the way.
“Maybe not what?” Erin asked.
“If this guy has a set pattern he follows, that starts with phone calls, then it may not be him,” Nina replied. “Because it could have started before that.”
The two detectives looked at Clare.
“You don’t know that, and neither do I,” Clare said, glowering at her friend before turning back to the detectives. “Which is the reason why I didn’t say anything before.”
“Well, suppose you tell us now whatever it is you didn’t tell us before,” Erin suggested.
“She was being poisoned,” Nina said before Clare could even open her mouth.
“Poisoned?” Dusty echoed.
“Please, just wait before you jump to the wrong conclusion, like Nina did,” Clare exclaimed.
“We’re waiting,” Erin said.
Exasperated, but outmaneuvered, Clare gave up. “All right, it started last March,” she explained. “I began having these really bad headaches, and I was tired all the time. And my mind would suddenly go blurry for no reason and I’d get all confused about things. Of course, the first thing I thought of was a brain tumor, so I went to the doctor, and he sent me for all the usual tests, but it wasn’t a brain tumor and no one could find anything else wrong with me, so he sent me on my way with some advice about stress and some over-the-counter remedies.”
“Which didn’t work,” Nina put in.
“No, as a matter of fact, they didn’t,” Clare conceded. “And then a few weeks after that, the stomachaches and the vomiting began, and my hands and feet started going numb, you know how it is, like when you get pins and needles?”
Dusty and Erin nodded.
“When I told that to the doctor, he insisted I come back in for more tests. And this time, he didn’t just take my blood, he took samples of my hair and my fingernails, too. And a few days after that, he told me he knew what was wrong.”
“You had arsenic poisoning,” Dusty said.
Clare looked up at him. “Yes.”
“What did you do?” Erin asked.
“Well, the first thing I did was take my children to be tested, of course,” Clare told her. “Thank God they were all right. Then I went home and cleaned out my house. I mean I threw out everything that wasn’t nailed down, not just any pesticides we had around, but anything that could even remotely have become contaminated. I cleaned out the kitchen, the bathrooms, the garage, the shed. I even got rid of things the doctor said wouldn’t have arsenic in them, just to be sure, and then I had the whole house scrubbed from floor to ceiling and fumigated.”
“What about your husband?”
“He was fine,” Clare said. “And so was our housekeeper. They were both tested.”
“And were you treated?”
“Of course,” Clare confirmed. “I had to go in for a whole series of injections. It was the middle of June before my doctor was satisfied I was poison-free.”
“Chelation therapy,” Dusty murmured. “Did you ever find out what was contaminated?”
Clare reached into the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out a bottle of spring water. “We think this was the culprit,” she said. “I must go through half a dozen of them a day, and I’m the only one in my family who does, which is probably why nobody else in the house got sick. I have three or four cases delivered every week, and I guess I just must have gotten a bad run of it. I didn’t know, but apparently it’s not uncommon to find arsenic in water, and I must be hypersensitive to it. Of course, I switched brands immediately, and I’ve had no problems since.”
“You wouldn’t still happen to have one of those bottles lying around, would you?” Dusty inquired, knowing it was probably too much to hope for.
“Good heavens, no,” Clare replied with a shudder. “Like I said, I got rid of everything. So you see, Nina brought it all up for nothing. It didn’t have anything to do with your stalker.” She stared at the detectives for a moment. “That is, I mean . . . it couldn’t have . . . could it?”
***
“I think we should check with the water bottler, just to make sure,” Dusty said as he and Erin stepped into the antiquated elevator and waited for it to make its excruciatingly slow descent to the first floor. “
Cross the t’s and dot the i’s.”
Erin nodded. “And if we can rule out any suspicious arsenic connection, then I think we should assume that these are two unrelated incidents and we really are dealing with the stalker. Which means, if he’s sticking to the same pattern he’s used before, he’s going to be calling her at home for a couple of weeks or so, and then I think he’s going to try to grab her.”
“We should ask for a tap on her home phone,” Dusty said. “After that, I think we should talk to the captain about getting enough people on her.”
“This is the first real chance we’ve had in six years to get this guy,” Erin said thoughtfully. “And with those two other cases still sitting on the shelf, somehow I don’t think we’ll have much of a problem getting all the backup we need.”
“And another thing,” Dusty said as they exited the building and headed for their car, “She didn’t want us do it, but we’re going to have to talk to her husband.”
Erin nodded. “I know.”
***
At three o’clock that afternoon, the detectives were shown into Richard Durant’s private office. It was the same spacious corner of the seventeenth floor that once belonged to Gus Nicolaidis. In Gus’s time, however, the place was filled with plain, serviceable furniture. Now, it boasted an impressive collection of antiques.
It was Dusty who took note of the Elizabethan armoire and the Louis IV desk, while Erin focused on the man behind it. He appeared somewhat younger than his forty-eight years, with perhaps only the slightest suggestion of a middle-aged paunch beginning to set in. He was not exactly what she would consider handsome, at least not in the traditional sense of the word, but he did have a striking look, with angular features, dark hair that was only lightly frosted with gray, and intense blue eyes. And those eyes were now staring at the two police officers from a face that had gone suddenly quite pale.
“What are you saying?” he gasped. “That someone is stalking my wife?”
In Self Defense Page 5
