The Watcher (29 page)

Rising from her chair with a sigh, she started toward the office door. The ringing stopped. Through the open doors of the squad room, she could barely see the back of Sanderson’s bald head gleaming like polished mahogany while he manned the duty desk.

Silence hung in the empty room, heavier than any noise she’d heard on a busy day in the squad room. Kate’s edginess developed into a persistent, dull headache so she made her way toward the coffee maker. Better yet, she’d get a soda, doubly loaded with caffeine and sugar.

As she made her way toward the lobby vending machine, the telephone rang again. This time, Kate could see the flashing light of Slater’s desk phone. He and Bauer were interviewing the Stuckey sister in Galt and might not return to the office today. She picked up the phone to take a message. “Lieutenant Slater’s desk.”

The voice at the other end of the line was soft and shaky, and Kate had to ask the caller to repeat herself. The woman sounded as if she’d been crying. “Is Ben there?”

“He’s out of the office at the moment. May I take a message?”

A pregnant pause followed. Kate could hear the sound of someone noisily sucking in air. “Tell him – tell Ben to call me. It’s urgent.”

“Whom should he call?”

“It’s Julie. Tell him to call Julie.”

“Julie?” Kate prompted. “Will he know the last name?”

“Oh, yes, he’ll know.” Another long break. “Julie,” she repeated. “Tell him to call his wife right away.”

Kate couldn’t stop the shock from registering in her voice.
“His wife?”

The voice grew firmer. “Yes, his wife.” Pause. “Who is this anyway?”

Good question. Who was she to Slater? A friend? Girlfriend? Lover? She settled for colleague.

Upon hearing this, the woman on the other end of the line became cold and defensive. “This is Mrs. Slater, Ben’s wife.” There was a long pause. “I don’t recognize your voice. You must be new.”

“I – I’ve been here a few weeks. Uh, I’m sorry, but Ben never mentioned he was – married.”

The woman’s voice became shriller. “Are you saying you don’t believe me?”

“No – I – ”

“It’s obvious you don’t know him very well. We’ve been married a long time. We have a son, Max.”

Kate’s tongue was lead in her mouth. She didn’t know what to say, and the silence seemed to fuel the woman’s anger.

“If you don’t believe me, look in his center desk drawer. He always keeps Max’s picture there. Look!”

Kate glanced inadvertently at the desk drawer.

“Go ahead, look!” the woman screamed. “Why did you call my husband by his first name? Are you his latest girlfriend? Are you
fucking
him?”

The woman’s vehemence stunned Kate into speechlessness.

The voice acquired a calculating tone. “Well, it doesn’t matter. He always comes back to me.” The slamming of the phone onto the receiver rang hard in Kate’s ear.

She held the line long after the woman hung up and the dead air gave way to a beeping. She felt the color drain from her face, the lightheadedness and shock. Slater didn’t wear a ring, and she’d never even asked if he were married. She’d just assumed he was single, a free man with no ties or entanglements.

She hadn’t even asked if he had a girlfriend.

Wasn’t sleeping with someone a sign of exclusivity? Had the rules changed and no one told her? Her cheeks gained their color in a flush of hot embarrassment. Not in a million years would she have believed this of Ben Slater. The woman was nuts. It must be a crank call.

She glanced at the desk drawer, felt like an idiot. Okay, she knew she had trust issues. Fears of commitment. Her psychiatric training told her that. But damn it, she’d trusted Slater, confided in him. Had he violated that trust by withholding his most basic personal information? Something she had a right to know about him?

She hesitated, hating the suspicion that drove her. Slowly she eased the unlocked drawer open. Surprisingly organized, nothing there that spoke of a wife and child. The woman was lying. She had to have been. She closed the drawer and started to walk away.

But why? What did she have to gain? And how did she know Slater?

Kate reminded herself how little she knew about him. How seldom he talked of himself or his past. Despising her lack of trust in him, she opened the side drawers of the desk, one drawer at a time. In the bottom one, beneath a stack of folders, she found the picture.

A woman and a child. A fiery-haired beauty with delicate features and high cheekbones. She looked small and helpless as she held the toddler on her lap. No matter what the explanation, Slater should’ve told her about them. She turned the picture over.

Love to Daddy from Mommy and Max.

She stared blankly at the writing. Did he think she wouldn’t find out? She felt the death blow to their budding relationship. Friends with benefits, he’d said, and apparently he meant it.

She stared at the photo a long time before she replaced it and gently closed the drawer. After she composed herself, she left before someone returned and discovered her crying at Slater’s desk.

She pushed aside the pain and conjured up red-hot anger. Anger she could deal with. Hurt would be her undoing. Quickly she penned the note from Slater’s wife and left it on his desk.

Call Julie, 5:45 p.m. Myers.

Grabbing her jacket and stuffing papers inside her briefcase, she turned off her office lights. She wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. She couldn’t face anyone yet, least of all Slater. She didn’t want the raw emotion to show on her face. She wanted to feel less fragile and more in control if and when she confronted him.

A tiny part of her brain urged her to hear his side of the story. But the other part, the betrayed part, wouldn’t listen.
How could there be another side to deliberate deception?
He had a wife, a woman named Julie, who sounded young and sad, and cried when she called him. And a son, a beautiful little boy with long dark curls and eyes that looked like his father’s.

She could think of no logical explanation except that she’d been sexually involved with another woman’s husband. She’d told Slater her most painful secrets, bared her soul to him, and he’d deceived her.

There couldn’t be any misunderstanding.

All the way home, Kate let her anger build. By the time she pulled into her parking spot, she was exhausted and drained. When she entered her apartment, she took the phone off the hook, dimmed the lights, and ran a hot bath. After lighting candles around the bathroom, she eased herself into the hot, fragrant water.

Dating a married man was unthinkable. She’d been naïve on occasion, been involved with men who’d just wanted sex, or wanted men who hadn’t offered sex, but her bottom line had always been no interference with a couple.

Marriage was a covenant that shouldn’t be broken easily, and she had no intention of being a chip in the mortar of a family unit. She’d never allowed herself to become romantic with someone already involved.

Not that she’d ever been deluded that a relationship was more than sexual pleasure. Any passion for romance had been muted by her fierce desire to capture her sister’s killer. She’d never fallen for the trap of sex disguised as love. Why start with Slater? But in her heart she knew that was why she was so hurt and angry. She’d believed in him. She’d been unable to resist him and hoped he could balance her life, free her from the obsession with her sister’s killer.

Friends with benefits, she thought grimly, and not even that. His duplicity was a heavy boulder crushing her chest. How could he be such a bastard?

#

The watcher saw the woman leave the courthouse in a hurry, looking agitated as she scanned the parking lot before getting into the yellow convertible. He ducked down in the car seat, thinking she’d seen him.

What put her in such a rush?

Now that he knew where she worked and lived, he could keep track of her movements and wait for the right opportunity to make a move. The stupid bitch made it so easy for him. He followed her home, careful to maintain several car lengths’ distance between them.

He parked in a different spot from the last time, locked the van, and strolled toward the parking lot behind her building. On the lookout for other people, he came up on it from the rear alley. Behind the parking lot was a waist-high concrete divider and then the alley, which was lined with a thick patch of bougainvillea that divided the duplex from the trees and houses behind it.

There Smith found the perfect hiding place to watch the rear of the woman’s apartment. He made himself comfortable in a small bower that held an oversized rock and opened his pack of cigarettes. His binoculars dangled from a thick lanyard around his neck.

He’d already discovered that the woman didn’t close her blinds all the way. What she pretended was carelessness was really a calculated lure, a taunting invitation for peeping toms. She
wanted
someone to look in her window, to watch her as she dressed and undressed.

She was clearly asking for it.

He sat and smoked and kept watch for a long time. A flickering light glowed from what he guessed was the bathroom because of the high, frosted window pane. He liked the peace and quiet here, so different from the noisy, crowded places he’d lived over the years. Places teeming with the sweaty smells and desperate noises of hordes of people jammed together.

Chicago had been the worst of the worst.

Downtown Chicago was a nightmare of hustlers, hawkers, and riff-raff – exactly the kind of place he despised – but he’d succumbed to the need to satisfy his demanding urges there. The traffic noises and shrill voices rang at an ear-splitting volume. Sometimes he wondered if the voices were just screaming in his head.

Often he had to pop one of the pills he’d confiscated from the old lady he last worked for, mowing lawns and running errands in exchange for room and board. That was a comfortable little town, just outside Des Moines, Iowa, exactly the kind of place he liked. But game had been sparse there, and he’d had to move on.

Too many people began to know his business.

The only thing he’d liked about Chicago was getting lost in its vastness, the bustle of the ports, the bus stations, the dirty underbelly of the city. Knowing his game was weaker, easier to find. Young prostitutes roamed the streets, and runaways slept in flimsy cardboard boxes strewn along the alleyways and railroad tracks.

He preferred the small-town girls, of course, the fresh-faced and innocent-eyed farm girls, but they were difficult to track. In a pinch, he settled for the other kind of girl.

Over the years he’d developed a pattern of living in a community, working at menial jobs, and hiding the bodies well enough that his disappearance and their discovery weren’t linked in the minds of the authorities. And he’d never, ever, left anything of himself behind. In fact, he hadn’t wanted to
leave
anything behind. He’d wanted to
take
something.

Something particular and special and exciting.

Sitting among the bushes, lazily inhaling the acrid smoke of his cigarette, Smith glanced at his backpack resting on the ground at his feet. Inside, a small zippered bag was filled with his treasures.
His pretties.

That was what his grandmother had called the ribbons and bows she’d put in his hair. His pretties.

“Hold still,” she muttered, tugging on the long sandy-colored hair. “Where you get these rats’ nests from, I’ll never know.” His grandmother yanked and pulled on the long curls until his eyes watered and he struggled to keep his chin from quivering. Her impatient fingers began to braid.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

“Don’t make it harder for your old granny,” she warned. She finished adjusting the barrette in his hair and tied a ribbon around the plaits.

When she heard the sound of the vehicle pulling onto the gravel driveway, she looked furtively out the kitchen window. “Grandfather’s here,” she said, gripping his arm and pushing him toward the door.

“I don’t want to,” he whined, but stopped abruptly when he saw the look on her face.

Then the old man swung open the front door, crashing it against the wall. “Humph. Ready, then?” The man raked his rheumy eyes over the boy. “Let’s go, make it quick.”

No argument was allowed, and the boy climbed reluctantly into the truck, and as it pulled away, he turned to press his hand against the window. He watched his grandmother as she stared after them until she disappeared from his sight.

When they rounded the bend, headed up the mountain towards the thickening forest, he turned around in his seat and consigned himself to his fate. Why did she make him go with the old man? Didn’t she know what he wanted?

The memories rustled in his head, impinging on his surveillance, disturbing the tranquil moment of staring at K. Myers’ bathroom window with its dim glow of light. He liked his current pretties much better.

He fidgeted, overwhelmed by the urge to remove one of his treasures, one of his true
pretties,
from his pack. Rub it against his face, inhale deeply, and remember the sounds and smells and taste of the day he’d taken that particular girl. He felt the distinctive shift in his pants and felt the blood lust on him again.