Because I'm Watching (12 page)

He studied her. She made sense. She looked normal. “Then what made you decide it wasn't someone here trying to get rid of you?”

“I saw
him.
The man who killed Easton. In my backyard. He was going out the gate to the alley.”

“How did you know it was him?”

“He wore the same hat and coat.”

“Could be anybody.”

“They never found the man who killed my fiancé.”

“So you think the guy who killed your fiancé is after you? Doesn't make sense. Why doesn't he just kill you?”

“Because he feeds on terror. Some people do, you know.”

“Yes. I know.” The way he saw it, everything revolved around the fiancé's murder.

Maybe the cops were right, and she had been so psychologically destroyed by witnessing her friends' murders that she had killed her fiancé. Maybe her fiancé's murder had nothing to do with her, but she had gone whacko and imagined someone was stalking her. Maybe someone actually was so obsessed with keeping her isolated from the human race that he—she was convinced it was a he—would kill the man she was going to marry. And chase her across the country to torment her here.

But why? Why would someone be obsessed with keeping her mentally off balance? What could be in it for them?

With a sudden leap of aggression, she leaned into his face and stared into his eyes. “I'm done talking. Now you. You tell me. What happened to you?”

He picked up his coffee cup. As he'd said, the grounds had settled. But the coffee was cold and thick and black and made him want to gag. He put it down. “I was in the military in high school. ROTC. Went to college on an ROTC scholarship, went professional as soon as I graduated. In all, I've dealt with the military for twelve years, and this Korean operation was the dumbest idea the brass ever came up with. That's saying something.”

She stopped cutting and stepped around to lean against the table and watch him. “What'd they do?”

“The U.S. Army, in its infinite wisdom, decided to place a bunch of their high-IQ recruits in a South Korean research facility with orders to think outside the box. The theory was that if these kids got a look at a place that was officially at peace but where a real shooting war could break out at any minute, they'd come up with clever ideas for weapons or defense that no one else had ever imagined.” In some remote corner of his mind, he noted that she had barely sipped her coffee. She'd made it, but she didn't like it.

“Why were
you
there?”

Obviously, it never occurred to her he was a genius, too. And he wasn't. But—“I've got a degree and a respectable IQ, so I was put in charge of them. It was like being a dorm mother with a bunch of brainiac Camp Fire kids. Six boys and two girls, all under the age of twenty-five, and bored out of their skulls.”

“They got in trouble.”

Yeah, Maddie, jump to conclusions. The right conclusions.
“They invented and built a prototype of a small hovercraft that…” She was too easy to talk to. Not that he thought she was a North Korean spy. But still. “Theoretically, this hovercraft could fly low, carry soldiers and equipment while eluding the enemy. One night the kids were drinking. Doing shots. One of the girls—Mormon, she didn't drink—woke me up at zero two hundred. Her intoxicated comrades had decided to see how well their invention worked. They went over the border, into the DMZ. They hadn't returned. The North Koreans are never amused by anything or anyone attempting to invade their country by any means. So I went over the border looking for my kids. My responsibility plus I had combat experience. I found them. They'd managed to get past the DMZ before they crashed. I didn't have a chance to get them back across the border before the North Koreans captured us. One of the kids had to spout off about who we were. Then … the enemy took us … they drove us to … this building.” Jacob had been talking like a normal person. But he was running out of steam, running out of words, running into trouble. Because pain was waiting out of sight, over his horizon, to take him and hold him hostage.

Those kids. His bright, careless, innocent, stupid brainiac kids.

“What happened?” Maddie whispered.

“By the time it was over, we knew the dead were the lucky ones.”

“I am so sorry.” She put her hand on his arm.

At her touch, the pain blasted him, blew him to pieces like a detonated grenade.

He flung off her hand, stood up, shouted, “No! No! I don't care. I don't want to hear. I don't want to feel. I don't want to … see.”
He could see.
It wasn't fair. He could see a warm beach where palm trees waved and waves broke over warm sand … He would never forget the sight as long as he lived, and every time it lit up his mind, he wanted to kill someone.

He
had
killed someone.

But that wasn't enough.

He needed to kill himself.

He put his hands to his head, to the rough patch of cut hair and the grizzled length of matted hair. “I have to go. I have to…” He looked up at her.
“What have you done to me?”
Turning, he ran out, stumbling, through her door, down the street, over the barrier. At the edge of the cliff, he stood until dawn lit the sky.

He never noticed the slight, still figure that watched over him until he returned to his house.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

At dawn, Jacob stumbled his way back down the street, shut himself in his room, and blocked the door. He huddled in the corner, eyes wide, staring into darkness, willing back the words he had spoken.

Like all the mistakes he had made, he couldn't fix this one. Nothing he did—wishing, praying, ranting, swearing—could turn back time to a moment when he was strong, confident, and sure of himself. He knew. He had tried them all.

He sat like that, on the floor in the dark with his legs pulled up to his chest and his arms around his knees, for hours, days, an eternity of writhing in agony.

Yet life relentlessly marched on. For when the electricians fixed the power he discovered that the bedroom light switch had been flipped on. Without warning, the overhead blasted him with incandescence.

He went mad: screaming, shouting, rampaging around his room until he managed to turn it off. Then he went roaring out into the living room and screamed at the crew until the electricians fled, the framers retreated to the outside of the house, and only Moore and Web remained.

When Jacob had wound down and stood panting, Moore said, “Your refrigerator's working again, and so's your hot water heater. We're knocking off for the day, going to the bar for a beer. See you tomorrow.”

In his slow, understated tone, Web said, “You should shave your head. Because right now, you look like a breaded veal cutlet.”

Jacob stood, breathing hard, watching Moore and Web leave in separate pickups, knowing they were headed to a pleasant, normal evening the like of which he could not even remember. While he … he was going to take his razor and shave his head—and cut his own throat.

Except he didn't have the guts for that.

So instead he sat in the funky-smelling recliner and stared out into the night.

If he was lucky, Madeline Hewitson would try to walk off the cliff again.

This time he wouldn't stop her.

*   *   *

First thing in the morning, Kateri called a meeting of her law enforcement officers in the briefing room, and asked Ed Legbrandt that the city cops be there, too.

She didn't want to explain this kidnapping theory to these guys, not at all, and she definitely did not want to explain it twice. But it had to be done, so she sat on a high stool behind the podium and waited while the officers filed in, got coffee, grabbed folding chairs, and planted themselves.

Even when she added in the Virtue Falls cops, she only had thirty-one guys to cover the whole county: twenty-two guys here, nine off-shift, all males, all iffy about a girl boss. About half of them had been willing to listen to Garik Jacobsen and give her a chance, and even now with the election coming up, they were okay with her. The others … the others were like most guys in uniform, both in the Coast Guard and here. A woman was fine as long as she knew her place. Attitudes were changing. But not fast enough.

Bergen sat in the front row. Of course. The guy never said anything hostile. Never showed her less than respect. But he was always there, always watching.

Once the guys got shuffled around, Officer Bill Chippen called, “Sheriff, how's the campaign going?”

“Pretty good with you guys out there stumping for me.”

Patronizing male chuckling. Some patting of Bergen's shoulder.

“A lot of people don't think you have enough experience to be sheriff.” Officer Ernie Fitzwater had been in town and on the force his whole life. He prided himself on saying what he thought. He also wasn't offended when she answered him plainly, and that counted for a lot.

“I
am
sheriff,” she said.

“Appointed,” Officer Norm Knowles snapped back. Now
he
was easily offended.

So she answered to the whole group. “Guys, this is like being commander of the Virtue Falls Coast Guard unit. I was the only female there, too. All it required was that I prove myself twice as smart, skilled, and accomplished as the men.” She raked them with a glance. “Luckily, that was never difficult.”

Guffaws. Much elbow poking. Some frowns. At least one vote lost.
But she supposed Knowles wasn't going to vote for her, anyway.

Bergen crossed his arms over his chest. “Guys, way to set her up for the punch line.”

When they were done with their ritual razzing, she got serious. “Gentlemen, I called you in because—”

“Because someone put dog poop on Mrs. Butenschoen's front walk?” Rupert Moen asked.

Kateri tried to decide if she could ignore that.

She couldn't. “Please tell me you're joking.”

Heads shook. Men grinned.

“She called the cops because someone put…?” Kateri faltered.

“Twice.” Moen held up two fingers. “She has had to remove dog poop from her front yard twice.”

“I thought the dog couldn't get in her yard anymore,” Kateri said.

“The dog next door would have to gain about one hundred pounds to produce that much poo,” Moen assured her.

Now Kateri fought a grin. “So someone is gathering up dog bombs and decorating her yard with them?”

“
Strategically
decorating her yard.” Moen managed a fair imitation of Mrs. Butenschoen's fussy indignation.

The officers guffawed.

When they had calmed and she had fought back her amusement, she gravely said, “This is an outrage. I am outraged. But sadly, the sheriff's office actually doesn't have the resources to have a patrol car sit outside her fence twenty-four hours a day.”

“Mrs. Butenschoen told me to tell you she realizes that,” Moen said.

Kateri raised her eyebrows. “Civilized of her.”

Moen continued, “She has decided to get a security camera mounted on her front porch and point it at her yard to catch the culprit.”

“Good.” Kateri nodded. “Good.” Finally. One problem fixed without her having to do a damned thing. She looked down at her notes and once again saw the texts, and her humor failed her. When she looked up, the men had sobered, too. “Guys, I have reason to believe there's a kidnapper and someone who is being kept against their will somewhere in Virtue Falls or the general vicinity.”

Bergen straightened in his chair. “Why do you think that?”

Trust him to think to ask. “Cordelia Markum has intercepted a series of texts over the past months that point to this conclusion.”

Groans.

Moen hooted. “Crazy Cordelia?”

“I know,” Kateri said. “She's odd. But I'd like to point out that the last time she reported threatening texts to law enforcement, somebody did die.”

More chatter.
“That was because—”

“As weird as that was—”

“Coldhearted and warped!”

Bergen's voice cut through the babble. “Sheriff, I assume you saw the texts. What makes you believe them?”

Kateri lifted the paper Cordelia had given her and read,
“The first night, she was cautious, checking every entrance. She doesn't realize I'm already in place.
Then,
I let her catch sight of me. She knows what's going to happen to her now
. Then,
Now I've got her. The electronics are set up. She'll never escape again.”

The talk in the room died. The guys exchanged intense
Oh, shit
glances that meant they heard the underlying menace in the words.

Kateri waved the paper. “There's more. I'd love to hear another theory about what this stuff means. But no matter what, I don't think it's good, and it's all creepy.”

“Can you send us a scan?” Bergen asked.

“I could. But if I did, someone outside of law enforcement would see it. Our little newspaper would report it. Then we'd lose whoever's doing this. The girl, whoever she is, will be hurt, moved, or murdered.”

The silence in the room was tomblike, the atmosphere wary.

Kateri continued, “I don't have to tell you this needs to be quiet and kept in the department. But I need you to look. Really look.”

Heads nodded.

Bergen asked, “In town? Out of town?”

Kateri showed her empty hands. “Cordelia doesn't know. She only knows it's in our area of responsibility. Have any of you seen anything that, looking back, made you wonder?”

Heads shook.

“Isn't what Cordelia's doing illegal?” Moen asked.

“Yes, but I'm not arresting her,” Kateri said, “and neither are you.”

“I don't like being spied on by Crazy Cordelia,” Officer Eli Weaver said.