“I’ve had some experience in the criminal justice system with stalkers. If you feel up to talking about it, I might be able to help.”
She had, I thought, a certain refinement, some imprimatur of class, that made her hesitant to share personal details of her life with a stranger, even a professional. But the strain she was under overrode her reluctance, and she nodded through the film of tears.
We spent a good part of the afternoon together, drinking tea under an umbrella at a table in the sun. She’d appeared on national TV and now enjoyed a minor celebrity on the nightclub circuit. The odd part was, I’d talked to one of the conference speakers who had caught her act in the lounge. He said the show was funny, but spiked with graphic jokes. For some reason I couldn’t picture her on stage using four-letter words to get a laugh. Against the honey sheen of her skin, the blue eyes were deceptively innocent, and as the afternoon slipped away in the splash of swimmers and the lazy swell of voices, I began to sense a shadow of fragility in her on the other side of the well-bred manner. Several times during our conversation she stopped talking and turned her head sharply, and I caught a darting reflex of fear in the pupils, as if they had picked up some danger lurking out of sight beyond the archipelago of tables and deck chairs packed with hotel guests.
“Do you have any of the notes this guy sent you?” I said.
“I got one two days ago. It was left at the desk.”
She fished the folded scrap from her purse and held it out to me. The handwriting had a manic slant, as if some angry violence were backed up in the fingers squeezing the pencil.
DON’T TRY TO HIDE
FROM ME. I ALWAYS
KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.
“If you want the truth,” she said, “I’m terrified. I think what he did to Sara Jane was a message that he plans to do the same to me. I can feel him out there now, watching us...”
“You did a show last night, didn’t you?”
“At midnight.”
“If he was the one who mutilated your doll, how did he get his hands on it?”
“I suppose he could have got into my room with a duplicate key.”
“Didn’t you have the safety latch on?”
“I don’t know. I’m always worn out after a late show. When I got back to my room, I just took off my clothes and crashed.”
“I guess you can get the doll repaired.”
It was the wrong thing to say. The grief twisted across her face again.
“You don’t understand. She wasn’t just some inanimate thing. She had a piece of my soul. That’s the part that was murdered last night. I’m the target. He’s coming after me.”
By evening she was calm enough to go to dinner with me at a beachfront restaurant. After the meal, she wanted to walk on the beach. The last hemorrhage of twilight lay off the horizon, and screeching gulls soared on the currents of salt air blowing off the surf in the cool dusk. Karen had already slipped off her heels, and now she unpinned the gleaming coil of blond hair behind her neck and shook it loose.
We strolled in the windy silence, lulled by the beat of the surf. A few low dunes, planted in sea oats, vaulted back from the beach. Later, Karen stopped walking, her head bent so that shadows blotted out her features. Then she glanced up in the blue darkness, eyes ablaze, and a domineering smile curled into her lips. Wordlessly, she slid her arms around my neck and ground her mouth viciously against mine. The kiss overheated swiftly on some erotic compulsion. I dragged her arms away, staring at her upturned face in the shadows. It was a stranger’s face, and I said, “Karen?”
“Don’t call me Karen,” she cried. “Karen’s a weak, inhibited fool who plays with dolls. I only let her come out when I feel like it. I’m Eva.”
The combustible heat in the violent eyes was as turbulent as the Atlantic swells flaring in against the coast behind her, and at that moment I had the whole psychiatric picture.
“Why did you attack Sara Jane?”
She twisted her wrists out of my grasp and flung back an antagonistic laugh.
“I warned her. She’s been interfering in our lives for a long time. Trying to come alive. Trying to take my place. Karen would have let her. So I cut her throat and let her drown.”
The contorted smile on her mouth was crazy enough for three people, maybe more. Probably the nightclub performer with the bawdy act was one of them. In my practice, I’d diagnosed only one patient with dissociative identity disorder — multiple personality — though it was a condition criminals often tried to fake. I knew she wasn’t faking.
It took some doing to coax her back to the car, and by the time we returned to the hotel, she’d let Karen come out to say goodnight.
“Thank you for staying with me today,” she murmured, holding out a chaste hand. “I’ll be all right.”
But walking back to my room, I knew she wouldn’t be all right. There was some suicidal ideation in her fragmented personality, along with a lot of anger, and quiet terror in the form of a stalker trapped in her mind.
In the suite, I called the desk and asked for the nearest crisis intervention center.
Desert and Swamp
by James H. Cobb
James H. Cobb’s latest novel (from Grand Central Publishing, January 2009) forms part of a series that several thriller writers have contributed to, based on a concept of the late Robert Ludlum’s. Entitled Robert Ludlum’s (TM) The Infinity Affair, the novel centers on a crashed Soviet aircraft from the 1950s, discovered in the Arctic. For EQMM, Mr. Cobb puts on a very different hat, continuing his series of hot-rodder puzzle mysteries featuring the likeable Kevin Pulaski.
I was wandering around a swap meet with my friend and hot-rodding sage, Kevin Pulaski. As we poked around the displays of intriguing, obsolescent automotive junk, the topic turned to things that aren’t there anymore.
“There’s some things from the Fifties that I wish were still around,” the former L.A. County deputy said, “like Exner body designs and real chrome. But there’s a bunch of other stuff, like bias-ply tires, that’re no great loss to anybody.”
He paused before a tarp spread with old car parts. Among them was an odd-looking rusty cylinder with a set of mounting brackets and a louvered vent on its side. He tapped it with the toe of his boot and a reminiscent gleam came to his eye. “Yeah, my man, there are some things I definitely don’t miss.”
At night in the Mojave, everything changes. A cease-fire is declared until the next day’s dawn and the desert stops trying to kill you. All the little creepers and crawlers that hide from the sun come out and go about their business and the coyotes sing their praises to the coming of the cool and the ten million stars overhead.
Looking across the huddled shape in the sagging bed, I could see a little patch of those bright, bright stars through the far window of the tourist cabin. I was forted up in the bathroom, sitting on what was available. It wasn’t elegant, but it was the only hidey-hole that kept me out of sight. It was kind of stuffy too because I’d shut down the cabin’s swamp cooler. I wanted to hear them coming.
Idly, I hefted the stumpy Colt automatic in my hand, wondering about how long I’d have to wait. I didn’t think it would be for long. I could feel them thinking over in the main building. They’d want to finish the old guy off fast, while it would still sell at the coroner’s inquest.
It was a race my bad-news ’57 Chevy hadn’t been able to win. Car, the Princess, and I had left Kingman, Arizona, at first light, intending to blast across Route 66 to El Cajon in the narrow band of cool that lingers between dawn and hell in the California high desert. What we hadn’t figured on was getting pinned behind a convoy of heavy earth-moving machinery lowboying in to the potash mines south of Barstow.