Becca said, “Adam is drinking a diet Dr Pepper since I don’t have any brandy to help him get over the shock of being wounded. Ice or lime in yours?”
Savich grinned at her. “Give me a goodly amount of lime and then Sherlock and I will go out and buy some brandy.” He then looked long at her. He wanted to tell her that her father was worried sick about her, that she looked a lot like him, that, when this was all over, he would come into her life for the very first time. But for now, Savich couldn’t say anything at all. They’d promised Thomas Matlock that they’d keep him in the shadows until the mess was all cleared up. Thomas had said, “Until I can be certain that Krimakov is really dead, I just can’t take the chance. And for me to believe that, really believe it all the way to my gut, I’ve got to see a photo of him lying on a slab in a Greek morgue.”
Sherlock had said, “But if he’s not dead, sir, and he is orchestrating all this, then he already knows about Becca and is trying to terrorize her with the ultimate goal of getting to you through her.”
Thomas had said, “I know only enough to scare myself spitless, Sherlock. I just want to keep a lid on all of this until I’m certain. In the meantime, I want to keep her hidden from all the cops and the FBI because I’m certain that they can’t protect her from this stalker.”
Becca said over her shoulder as she led them into the kitchen, “Before anyone comes over, you’ve got to tell me who you are and why you’re here. As I told you, Adam’s cover is that he’s my gay cousin.”
Adam said as he cocked the soda can at Savich, “You want to be her other gay cousin?”
“Then what would that make me?” Sherlock said. “I can’t keep my hands off him. That would blow the cover right off.”
“Maybe we’ll be your friends, Adam. I know quite a bit about you and your background. You and I went to school together, how about that?” Savich said.
“Then what the hell are you doing in Riptide, Maine?”
Sherlock took a glass of soda from Becca, sipped it, and said, “We’re here because of that skeleton that fell out of your basement wall, Becca. You guys wanted some help, and since we live in Portsmouth, it wasn’t tough for us to get up here.”
“How do you know where I went to school?” Adam said, his eyes dark and hard on Savich’s face.
“MAX gave me most of your particulars. It took him a while longer to find out about all your other activities. You went to Yale. No problem. Did we crew?”
Well, damn, Adam thought, it was a good idea. “Yeah,” he said. “We did crew. We also beat Harvard, that bunch of pissy little wimps.”
Sherlock wondered why Adam Carruthers didn’t want her or Dillon there. Didn’t he realize that they could help? The stalker was here in Riptide, he’d tried to kill them.
Sherlock gave Adam a sunny smile. “Why don’t we go look in the woods and try to uncover a trail for this guy?”
“Yeah,” Savich said, rising. “Then we need to figure out why he would want to kill Becca like this. It doesn’t make sense. He’s into terrorizing her. Why just shoot her and end it all? He’d have no more fun.”
“Good question,” Becca said. “We haven’t had time to think about anything since it happened. Me, I don’t think he wanted to kill either of us, just scare us real bad, just announce that he was here and ready to play again.”
Becca sucked in her breath. “Oh dear, we need to get the front door repaired before our neighbor, Tyler McBride, or the sheriff come to visit. I don’t want to try to explain bullet holes in the door.”
“Let’s check for a trail first,” Sherlock said. “Then, Becca, you can tell us what the stalker said to you this time while we all repair the door.”
“You’re good,” Savich said some thirty minutes later to Adam. “You said there was no trail and there isn’t.”
Adam grunted. “Let’s go out a bit farther. Maybe we’ll see some tire tracks.”
“No way,” Sherlock said. “The stalker is a pro, which means that he isn’t really a stalker. That’s just a cover. A misdirection.”
Savich nodded. “I agree. He isn’t a stalker.”
Becca said, “What do you mean, exactly?”
Adam said, as he slowly lifted leaves some ten feet away, “It doesn’t make sense, Becca. Usually stalkers are sick guys who, for whatever strange reason, latch on to someone. It’s an obsession. They’re not pros. This guy’s a pro. This was well thought out.”
And Savich thought: If Krimakov is alive, then it’s a terror campaign, and Becca’s just the means to the end. Thomas Matlock is right to be afraid. And the ending Krimakov planned wasn’t good for either father or daughter.
Becca was shaking her head. “But he sounds nuts whenever he’s called me. He called a couple of hours ago. He said much of the same things. He sounded all sorts of excited, very pleased with himself, like he couldn’t wait. I know he’s toying with me, getting a real kick out of my fear, my anger, my helplessness.” She stopped a moment, looked at Adam, and added, “The thing is, I can’t help but feel that inside, he’s just dead.”
Sherlock said, “Maybe he’s dead on the inside, but it’s the outside we’ve got to worry about. One thing we know for sure is that he’s clever; he knows what he needs to do and he does it. He found you, didn’t he? Now, could we go back to the house and Becca can tell us everything? You said he called you again. Tell us exactly what he said. Then we can put all our brainpower together and solve this mess.”
“Another thing,” Savich said as he brushed his black slacks off, “I don’t want us out in the open like this. It isn’t smart.”
And Sherlock, her brilliant red hair shining brightly in the fading afternoon light, led them back to Jacob Marley’s house.
They found caulk, an electric sander that worked, and some wood stain in the basement, on some shelves near the hole in the brick wall.
They took the front door off its hinges and brought it inside. While Savich sanded it down and Adam caulked in the bullet holes, Becca and Sherlock kept watch, their guns in their hands, watchful. Very soon, Sherlock had Becca talking and talking. “… and when he called me just a while ago, he said the same sorts of things, like I would contact the governor as soon as he was well enough again and have him come to me.”
“You know,” Adam said, “he doesn’t believe you’ve slept with the governor. It’s just part of a script. He needed something so that he could claim you needed punishment.”
“You’re right,” Sherlock said, giving Adam his first look of approval, for which he didn’t know whether to be pleased or snarl. “Yes, you’re perfectly right. Go ahead, Becca, what else did he say?”
“When I asked him about Dick McCallum, he wouldn’t admit that he killed him, but I know that he did. He said I’d gotten all pissy, that I’d gotten too confident, that he was coming for me soon. I tell you, when I hung up, I was ready to throw in the towel. He calls himself my boyfriend. It’s beyond creepy.”
“Yeah,” Adam said, raising his head to look at her, “she was ready to throw in the towel for about three minutes.” Then he said toward Savich, “Then she put her Coonan in her pocket and went out into the woods. Why’d you go out there, Becca? It wasn’t real smart, you know.”
She looked inward for a moment, all of them saw it-and the sanding and caulking stopped. Not one of them was surprised when she shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I just wanted to go there, alone, and sit under the sunlight against that tree. Jacob Marley’s house was getting to me. There are ghosts here, the air is filled with remnants of the people who lived here, residue, maybe, not all of it good.”
“Before I finally found her, I nearly croaked,” Adam said, realizing he was grinning at Savich. Well, hell, why not? He was here and he did seem competent, at least so far. Maybe he’d still fall flat on his face.