There was a pause. “I guess you’re not afraid of me anymore,” he said softly.
“No,” she said, her voice steady, but her hands visibly shaking as she spoke. “I’m not.”
“Then perhaps it’s time for us to meet, you and I,” he said. “Yes, I do believe it is. And sometime soon, I think. Sometime when your husband is away on one of his frequent business trips, and you can see how real I really am.”
“I have absolutely no interest in meeting you, not now, not ever,” she declared, smothering her surprise at his knowing anything about Richard’s travel schedule. “Why can’t you understand that you mean nothing to me?”
“But I could,” the voice cooed. “I could mean everything to you. There are so many things I want to do to you. Would you like me to tell you some of them? Would you like me to tell you how much I want you, right now, naked and writhing in my bed? Would you like to know how easily I could have you screaming with pleasure?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” she cried. “The only thing I’d like is for you to go away and leave me alone.”
It was at that moment that Richard snatched the receiver from her hand. “Look, you sick sonofabitch,” he barked, “you come anywhere near my wife, and I’ll personally see to it that the state hangs a eunuch!”
***
Dusty and Erin came up with nothing on the background checks of the Nicolaidis employees. They learned that Douglas Potter, vice president of research and development, was a deadbeat dad and that the company paid his court-ordered child support directly out of his salary, but that didn’t mean he was a stalker. They learned that this was James Lilly’s third job in ten years, but they couldn’t very well hold that against him. They learned that Henry Hartstone had an illegitimate child tucked away somewhere in Oregon, but that didn’t make him suspect.
Similarly, they got nowhere with a rundown on every sex offender registered in the state. And as expected, the bottling company who sold the water allegedly tainted with arsenic stonewalled them, insisting that their testing procedures were in full compliance with all FDA regulations, and that if there were higher than normal levels of arsenic present in the water that Clare happened to drink -- and they weren’t saying that there were -- the matter had been taken care of, and the proof is that there have been no further complaints.
The detectives asked for permission to bring in the FBI. “We need a profiler,” Dusty explained. “The thing is, we don’t have a very good handle on this guy, and we have to find out all we can, as quickly as we can.”
Agent Wendy Picard came to their aid. A slender, bespectacled brunette in her late forties, she spent two days poring over the files of both the Laughlin and Medina cases, and then comparing them to the Durant case.
“In my opinion, they match,” she reported. She listened to the tapes of the phone calls to Durant. “You can’t trace him, can you?” she seemed to know.
“No,” Dusty confirmed. “He’s using throwaway cells.”
“He knows you’re onto him,” Wendy declared.
“How can you tell?” Erin asked.
“Because of some of the things he says, or maybe more from the way he’s saying them, especially in these later tapes from the house. It’s like he knows he has an audience beyond Mrs. Durant. But he thinks he’s smarter than you, and he’s willing to put his life on the line to prove it to you, or more importantly, to himself. True, he’s using a rather sophisticated voice changer to disguise his voice, but that’s all.”
“He either knows that we can’t match it,” Dusty said, “or he doesn’t care.”
“There’s no match in the other two cases?”
“There were tapes made from Laughlin’s home phone tap, but they’ve somehow gone missing, and we haven’t been able to find them yet,” Dusty told her with a sigh. “There were never any tapes made of the calls to Medina, because the department didn’t get involved in that case until after the fact.”
“Too bad,” Wendy said. “They could have been very helpful.”
“I know,” Dusty agreed.
“DNA?”
Erin shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “No semen, no blood, no skin cells, not even a stray hair. Both bodies were naked, and no clothing was ever found. It’s almost like he washed them clean first.”
Wendy nodded. “He may well have. A last parting gesture. That would be consistent. What else do you know about him?”
“Unfortunately, not much,” Dusty replied. “He dumped both victims at the same isolated area near Green Lake. Both were raped and mutilated before they were killed. Both cases started with phone calls. Just like Clare Durant.”
“Tell us who we’re looking for,” Erin urged. “If he’s playing us, then give us what we need to play him right back, and beat him at his own game.”
“Well, I would say that he’s somewhere in his mid twenties to mid thirties, and he feels comfortable around Green Lake,” the profiler offered. “He’s almost certainly white and quite bright, but he’s a chronic under-achiever, and a true sociopath. This is his way of getting back at the world for not treating him with the love or the respect he believes he deserves.”
“I bet that narrows it down to only ten or twenty thousand in the Greater Seattle area,” Dusty said with more than a hint of cynicism.
“He’s likely to be in the technological field, computers, maybe, but he’s at staff level, he’s never been given any management responsibility -- the leadership role he believes he deserves,” Wendy continued. “And he’s a loner. He lives alone, probably has no close family ties, no pets, and few if any friends. In fact, I would say that he has enormous difficulty with interpersonal relationships and intimacy. He could have lost his mother at an early age, or she might have abandoned him, or she could have been emotionally detached from
