'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.'
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.
