“The house does have an alarm system,” Doreen acknowledged. “But this is such a safe neighborhood, I can’t remember the last time we needed to use it.”
“We may have to rethink that,” Dusty murmured.
The doctor was summoned. He arrived within the hour, and Clare was put to bed with a sedative.
“Hopefully, she’ll sleep through the night,” Ahrens told the housekeeper. “But just in case she wakes up, and she’s still agitated, she can have a second dose. Can you handle a hypodermic?”
Doreen nodded. She had had nurse’s aide training before going to work for Helen Nicolaidis.
“Don’t worry, I can take care of her,” she said.
It was Richard’s sister Elaine who collected Julie and Peter from school, a task that normally fell to Doreen. But Clare, wanting them to be safe, had already arranged for her sister-in-law to keep the children in Ravenna until Richard returned on Friday evening.
It took less than an hour for Dusty and Erin to place the wireless audio transmitters throughout the house, near all the doors and windows, up both the front and back stairways, and throughout the master bedroom. Then, even as Clare slept, they slipped the panic device gently around her neck.
“I guess we should thank our guy for giving us the perfect cover to wire the house,” Dusty suggested. “He may just have outsmarted himself.”
“We’d better put some uniforms on the dock,” Erin said as they departed.
Dusty nodded. “Agreed,” he said, although “uniform” was just a term they used for a patrolman. For this particular operation, no one would be in uniform. They would all be wearing regular clothes, driving ordinary cars, and pretending to be visiting the neighbors.
But Tuesday night came and went, and nothing happened. The police waited, Clare slept the sleep of the drugged, and Doreen barely closed her eyes.
“What does it mean,” one of the officers asked.
“It means we’ll be right back here again at six o’clock tonight,” Dusty replied, yawning.
“He’s playing with you,” Wendy Picard speculated. “And he’s enjoying himself, too. But when everything is said and done, I don’t see him letting you stop him from carrying out his plan. He’s been setting this up for far too long.”
Erin found proof of the profiler’s words sitting on her desk that afternoon. It had come through the mail in a plain white envelope that she knew without bothering to test would have no fingerprints, no DNA.
“Catch me if you can,” the note read.
***
Wednesday was a repeat of Tuesday.
“I bet he’s getting a real kick out of jerking us around,” Dusty declared when they gave it up at six o’clock on Thursday morning.
“Why are we assuming that he’s going to come for her at night?” one of the uniforms asked. “Why aren’t we on this around the clock?”
“Because we don’t have the manpower for a twenty-four hour watch, and because nighttime has always been his time of choice,” Erin replied. “The snatch and run technique seems to work best for him under cover of darkness.”
“But he knows we’re onto him,” the patrolman said reasonably. “Wouldn’t that make him change his pattern?”
“It might,” Dusty conceded. “To be honest, we don’t know, but we’re going to find out. If he doesn’t bite tonight, it’ll be back to the drawing board.”
***
Clare wore the panic device around her neck day and night, reaching up to finger it every once in a while. Not that she was expecting anyone to come jumping out of the bushes and try to grab her in broad daylight, but it made her feel better just to know it was there.
She was aware that Dusty and Erin had placed listening devices all around her house, and that helped, too. And although there was a slip-up on Tuesday, she had now confirmed that all the doors and all the windows were locked.
At eleven o’clock, Doreen came into the library. Clare was curled up on a leather sofa, reading a manuscript Nina had brought her. “I really don’t want to leave you alone here, you know,” the housekeeper said.
“It’s all right,” Clare assured her. “It’s your day off, and you deserve to have it, if only to get away from this madhouse. You’ve been stressing over this as much as the rest of us. Besides, if he thinks we’ve changed our routine, he might change his, and then everything the police have done will be for nothing. Nina’s going to come around four. Meanwhile, everything’s locked up tighter than a drum, and as soon as Nina gets here, I’ll turn on the alarm system. And if that’s not enough,” she added, reaching under the throw that covered her and drawing out the Beretta, “I also have this.”
Along with the panic device, the semiautomatic now went wherever she did.
But once Doreen was gone, Clare grew restless, and the house, as big and as empty as it was, began to close in on her. So she gathered up the manuscript, put on a light jacket, dropping the gun into one pocket and her cell phone into the other, and walked out the French doors, across the terrace, and down the broad expanse of lawn to the sturdy wooden dock that jutted out into Lake Washington. The Durants didn’t own a boat, although Richard frequently talked about getting one. So they simply used the dock as a place to sit and sun and watch their friends and neighbors in their boats out on the water.
Clare settled herself on the wooden bench that ran along one side. There was a bit of a chill in the air, which meant that, although somewhat late, perhaps, autumn was finally on the way. She sighed, always reluctant to see the warm weather go, and pulled out her cell phone. First, she called her office and asked Anne-Marie to make a copy of the manuscript she had been reading and pass it along to Glenn Thornburgh. Then she made a number of
