He was still worried about the guy in the new Saab. Following him around like that. It was too late for the bitch to come forward with any evidence. So what was the use of following him around? The only answer was that the guy planned to kill him. Maybe he was just working up his nerve. He didn’t look like the type who’d have the balls to do it face-on. He should never have raped the Coburn woman. He hadn’t been able to control himself. Usually he stuck to the hookers. Stupid bitch that turned him in, she wasn’t going to get anywhere. A hooker challenging a sworn officer of the law? Give me a break.
But the Coburn woman. What the hell was her husband following him around for?
These were his thoughts the morning of the day the tape arrived. The mail came at one o’clock. Just after an argument with his mother. Bitch had cost him two marriages, the way she was always horning him. She’d never liked any of his girlfriends and absolutely detested his wives. His old man had dropped dead of a heart attack at forty-two. Frazier knew why, too. So he could escape. Whatever was on the other side of life — extinction or folks with wings or pitchforks — had to be preferable to life with his mother. He’d thought that moving away from her — leaving St. Louis and picking up his cop’s life here in Chicago — would help. She was very tight with a dollar. She wouldn’t let herself spend all that money on long distance. But she got in one of those cut-rate calling programs and now she was calling him all the time again. Sometimes, twice a day.
The first piece of mail he opened was a birthday card from his eight-year-old daughter. Today being his birthday. He smiled. She was his pride, his one true love. Carrie. She signed it with a big heart and a lot of XXXXs for kisses.
He knew something was wrong the moment he felt the video mailer. Just had some kind of foreboding.
Who’d be sending him a video?
He went upstairs and plugged it into the VCR.
And starting shaking immediately. Five minutes later, he was gunning down a couple drinks of bourbon and chewing on Turns. The tape — he couldn’t see himself on it particularly well... shadowy and shot from the back... but you could see what he did to the woman grabbing her wrist the way he had that night... dragging her into the copse of trees. And then the camera moved in closer for a final shot of he and the woman disappearing into the woods... and held for a moment on the back fender of the squad car. Car 93. No doubt about that at all.
Josh called Frazier from a pay phone. All the afternoon traffic made for nice ambient sound. A blackmailer probably would call from a payphone.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Frazier.” He tried to make his voice sound like a happy phone solicitor. After working with actors all these years, he had no trouble disguising his voice.
“Who’s this?”
“A friend of yours.” Pause.
“Yeah? What’s your name?”
“What’s more important is my occupation, Mr. Frazier. Or pre-occupation, I guess I should say. I spend most of my nights driving around and finding interesting things to shoot with my home video camera.”
“Yeah? What’s that got to do with me?”
“You’re too modest, Mr. Frazier. You’re the star of my last video. And my best, too, if I may say so. In fact, I think I remember sending you one.”
He said nothing.
“It’s a little out-of-focus, I’ll admit. But you can see the number of the squad car pretty clearly. And you can see the woman pretty well, too. Sorry all we could see was your back. And that was pretty close up.” They’d shot the sequence so that you could only see his shoulders and the back of his head. Jumpy, jerky shots, barely in focus. But ominous.
Silence. Then Frazier said, “We need to meet.”
“All right.”
“How about my apartment?”
“Fine.”
“And alone. Tomorrow night at ten.”
“You don’t work then?”
“I’ll worry about work. You just worry about yourself.”
It happened more and more often these days. Private citizen with a home video camera. Roaming the night. Never knew where they were gonna show up. One had shown up the night of the rape. The son-of-a-bitch. Too late for the Madison woman to do anything. And the hooker’s lawsuit wouldn’t go anywhere. But a man with a videotape.
Frazier cursed himself again for ever letting go of himself this way. Nice, respectable woman. That was not the kind to rape and push around. He must’ve been crazy.
And the longer he thought of killing the video man right here in the apartment, that sounded crazy too.
There had to be a better way. Had to.
The store sold everything from guns to tiny microphones you could hide in a tiepin. It was the world of subterfuge and intrigue and it was fascinating to both Josh and Elise.
The chunky man with the crew cut and the American flag pin on the lapel of his sport jacket led them to what they were looking for. “They always make it look real complicated on cop shows. But actually it’s pretty easy.”
Elise laughed softly. “Can an idiot operate it?”
“An idiot can operate it fine,” the salesman said.
“Then we’re in good shape,” she said.
At home, they spent two hours testing the equipment out. It operated simply, just the way the salesman had said it would.
Toward dinnertime, Elise took a nap with little Lisa. Josh used the time to go down in the basement and check over the .45 he’d bought a few days earlier. He’d known that eventually he would confront Frazier and he wanted to be ready. He was hoping the cop would force his hand. He very much wanted an excuse to kill Frazier. He took the .45 out to the Saab and put it in the glove compartment. He spent a moment looking at the decade-old black BMW Elise usually drove. It had been the first symbol of their success, of Josh moving from a small, factory-like art studio to one of the country’s major advertising agencies. He’d drive it tonight. Frazier wouldn’t recognize it.
He couldn’t relax. He kept pacing in the basement. Thinking of Frazier. The Rape. The .45.
Finally, it was time to go. He went to the den and knocked back a drink of bourbon.
Elise watched him from the doorway. “Remember, you’re not there to do anything more than we planned.”
“I remember.” But the harshness of his tone contracted his words.
She came over to him. Slid her arms around him. “This hasn’t been easy for either of us, honey. I know that. I wish I could tell you when I’ll feel like being intimate again but—”
He turned around and took her carefully in his arms. “All I care about is that you get better. That you come out of your shell. All the sleeping. Rarely leaving the house. Never calling your old friends—”