"So we may have less handle on him than we did before," I said.
"Before, we could figure he'd try for a black woman in her forties. Now if it's you he's trying to punish…"
"I don't know," Susan said.
"His symbolism is private. He could attack me, he could…" She shook her head. "… anyone," she said.
"Okay," Quirk said. "We'll start looking for him. I'm still on vacation but I can reach a lot of cops who'll look for him too."
"You have a picture?" I said.
"Yeah, got it from the security firm."
"Susan's going to stay with me," I said. "He might turn up at her place."
"We'll cover that," Quirk said. "How about the ex wife I looked at Hawk.
"Be happy to watch her," Hawk said. "
"Less you want me for backup."
"No," I said. "I'll stay close to Susan."
Hawk looked at Susan. "You be careful," he said. "You need me, you call Henry." Susan smiled. "Yes," she said. "Thank you."
Hawk went out with Belson and Quirk.
My office was quiet.
"What do we do?" Susan said.
"Zee muzzer," I said. "We stake out zee muzzer."
"You think he'll go see his mother?" Susan said.
"Hadn't he transferred a lot of his feelings for her onto you?"
"Yes."
"So maybe if he deflects his rage, he'll deflect it at her. Possible?"
I said.
"Possible," Susan said.
"Besides," I said, "I'm pretty sure he won't come here."
CHAPTER 30
I was driving a black Jeep that year, with a hard top and all sorts of accessories that would have made the one I drove in Korea blush. Susan and I parked up the street a little from Felton's mother's house on the shore drive opposite King's Beach in Swampscott. She had the first floor of a three-story house that had gone condo when everything else had.
"Gun in your purse?" I said to Susan.
"Yes," she said.
"Purse unzipped?"
"Yes."
"Good," I said. I had my gun in a shoulder holster under my Red Sox warm-up jacket. I had the jacket unsnapped. The weather was mid-fifties and sunny. I shut the motor off on the Jeep and sat with the window half open and the smell of the ocean coming in.
"Is this in the bodyguard manual?" Susan said. "Take woman you're protecting to look for the man you're protecting her from?"
"I thought you were protecting me," I said.
"From what?"
"From becoming so swollen with seed that I burst," I said.
"I do what I can," Susan said.
It was bright morning. Young women with small children, older women with small dogs, and now and then an old man with a cane walked along the ocean front, which stretched for several miles through Swampscott and Lynn and out along the causeway to Nahant. The street ran along the seawall. A sidewalk bordered the street and an iron fence bordered the sidewalk. Past the fence was a ten-foot drop to the beach and the ocean that rolled in from Portugal. An oil tanker moved imperceptibly along the horizon from Boston Harbor, not long out of Chelsea Creek.
"I can't leave you alone, and I have to find Felton. So we do it together," I said.
"I know," Susan said. "If it weren't so deadly, I'd kind of like it.
Makes me feel like Lois Lane."
"Well, you're with the right guy," I said.
In my rearview mirror I saw Felton. He turned the corner from Monument Avenue and headed along the shore drive on my side of the street, carrying a small blue gym bag. He was dressed all in black and looked like an extra in a Rambo movie.
"Felton," I said. "He'll walk right past you, lean over and kiss me."
Susan had great reflexes. She was leaning across from her seat and her face covered mine as Felton went past on the sidewalk beside the Jeep. I could see him with one eye through Susan's hair. He was watchful in the exaggerated way of a kid playing war. He walked past us and turned in at his mother's house.
"Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good," I said to Susan.
Susan sat back up in the seat, looking toward Felton. "What now?"
"I don't know," I said. "What's his mother like? If he confesses, will she help him?"
"I have only his perception of her. If it's accurate, she will be solely interested in how to prevent damage to herself. If helping him would hush it up, she'd help. If turning him in would make her safe, she'd do that. Her concern with others' opinion of her seems nearly paralyzing, in her son's report of it."
"Why would he be here?" I said.
"I don't know."
"Is he likely to be especially vulnerable in front of his mother?"
"Yes," Susan said.
"Okay," I said. "He's clearly dressed up in his battle gear. He looks like the Hollywood version of a cat burglar."
Susan was watching with me as Felton went to his mother's house and went in the front door.
"He's got his gym bag. Maybe he's got clean socks and a toothbrush in there. But maybe he's got rope and tape and a thirty-eight caliber gun," I said. "If we caught him with the murder gun, we'd have him."
"It would be good to have hard evidence," Susan said.
"It would be intensely stupid to walk around carrying the murder weapon, knowing there's people after him," I said.
"It would be a way to be caught," Susan said.
"If he wants to be," I said.
"Part of him wants to be," Susan said. "It's probably what brought him to therapy. And caused him to write and make the phone calls."
"And come here, to his mother's, in the light of the midday sun," I said. "Let's go in."
"And then what?"
"We'll see what develops," I said.
"Do we have the right, in front of his mother?"
"Suze, up to now I've played mostly your game. But now we're in my park. Now we do it my way," I said.
"Because?"
"Because I know more about this than you do. Because this is what /
I do."
Susan was silent for a moment, looking at Felton's mother's house.
"And maybe," I said, "he's come with the rope and the gun for his mother."
Susan nodded slowly and opened the door on her side.
CHAPTER 31
The front door opened into a small hallway with tan figured wallpaper.
Stairs led straight up to the second floor. To the right was a small dining room with a mahogany table, two corner cabinets. To the left was a living room that ran the depth of the house and was papered in beige with large red flowers. Felton sat toward the back in a bright red velvet wing chair. His mother sat on the sofa, which was covered with a floral throw.
"Well, who's this?" Mrs. Felton said. She was a sharp faced little woman, her hair tightly permed and colored a honey-brown. She had on a gray-green dress and green high-heeled shoes.
"My name is Spenser, Mrs. Felton. And this is Dr. Silverman."
Mrs. Felton frowned a little at the Dr. Silverman. Doctors were male.
And Silverman sounded Jewish. Felton was absolutely motionless in his chair. The gym bag was on the floor at his feet. He looked at a point in space somewhere between me and Susan.
"What do you want?" Mrs. Felton said. "You should have knocked."
"Do you know what your son's been up to, Mrs. Felton?" I said. Soaping windows? Peeking in the girls' locker room, putting a tack on the teacher's chair? Her face got hard and the lines became immobile and her eyes slitted. She turned toward Felton.
"What does he mean, Gordon? What have you done now?"
Felton remained rigid and still and not looking at any of us. "Nothing."
Felton said. "I don't know them."
"Dr. Silverman is your son's psychotherapist," I said.
The lines in her face deepened and the face got icy.
"Psych ?" she said.
"Psychotherapist," I said. "Dr. Silverman is a psychologist. She had been treating your son."
Mrs. Felton's features were so pinched that they seemed centered in her face.
"What did he say?"
"About you?" I smiled. "It's pretty long to summarize."