Valentine (5 page)

He’d just arrived back here, having run through the snow to the little bodega around the comer for the cigarettes. A calculated risk: she’d only been out of his sight for a few minutes. He sat back in the chair, inhaled the cigarette smoke, and thought about his luck.

This room—directly across the street, directly facing her apartment—had been available. He’d noticed the sign in the window of the front door that first day he’d arrived two weeks ago, when he’d located her building and studied the immediate area, looking for just such an opportunity.

And that, he reminded himself, was not his only break. She was remarkably easy to follow. He learned in the first three days of surveillance that she went almost everywhere on foot, keeping mostly to the neighborhood. And taxis, despite his initial misgivings, were relatively easy to tail. He’d followed her to two bookstore signings, her publisher, her agent’s office, Nate’s East Village apartment, and—just yesterday morning—a midtown television studio. And all the time, she’d had no idea that he was there.

Today, however, his luck had almost changed. Twice. She’d turned around, just as he thought she
was going to cross the street and enter her building, and spotted him. But that was the lesser of his two miscalculations. The first had been a few minutes earlier, when she’d emerged from her favorite coffeehouse and slipped on the ice, and he had reached out and touched her.

He had made physical contact.

Dumb, he told himself, taking a long drag on the Marlboro. If she had actually fallen, if the situation had been only slightly different, it could have been a bad mistake.

It had been all right, he supposed. But then he had watched her enter her apartment building, had seen her with the little pink envelope. Later, she and Nate had sat on the couch, studying the card and talking until Tara Summers had arrived. He would give a great deal to have heard that conversation. He knew what he would do about that. The lock on the door in her lobby would be a cinch. He was sure he could handle her apartment door as well. If not, there was always the fire escape at the back of her building, to the back window. In New York City, listening devices were amazingly easy to come by. Tomorrow, or the next day . . .

He looked back through the falling snow at the window across the way. She and Nate were definitely in for the night. He crushed out the cigarette, stood up, and took off his jacket, shirt, boots, and
jeans. He switched off the dim lamp and threw himself down on the little bed in the corner.

He would not sleep much tonight. He would lie awake, as he did every night, thinking about the three dead women. And about Jillian Talbot.

It was now Friday, January 30. Two weeks, he thought. Two weeks to go until Saturday,
February 14
.

Valentine’s Day.

“What is it, Jill?” Tara asked. “What’s wrong?”

Jill looked up from her menu. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, come on!” the actress cried, leaning forward and placing her elbows squarely on the table. “All afternoon you’ve been very nervous. I know you don’t like public appearances, but this is more than that. What’s the matter?”

Jill shook her head and smiled weakly. She didn’t know how to bring up the subject without sounding like a lunatic, or, at the very least, an alarmist. But her friend was right: she was nervous.

Yesterday had gone all right—well, almost. There had been that moment at the store. She’d written for most of the day, only going out briefly to the nearest supermarket. She’d found herself constantly looking around and behind her, all the way to the store and back. At one point, while she was debating with herself between chicken cutlets and a small roasting
chicken, she glanced over at the tall, dark-haired young man in the leather coat who seemed to have materialized a few feet away, apparently making a similar decision. She stood quite still, clutching her two choices tightly, watching surreptitiously as he began to edge toward her. He was looking down into the freezer, but she was suddenly, keenly aware of his proximity. She looked around: there was no one else in sight here at the back of the store. The man came closer, closer. She could feel the heat emanating from his body, and she realized with a swift, awful certainty that she could not will herself to move. Then, when his arm inevitably brushed against hers, she nearly gasped aloud. The young man looked up, smiled, and moved away, his attention once more dropping to the frozen food. Only then did she relax, and her grip on the two plastic-wrapped packages loosened. She’d recognized the smile immediately; she used it herself every day. Polite, but essentially empty, disinterested. When the pretty, extremely pregnant young woman arrived at his side, removed the fryer parts from his hand, and pointed down at a large roaster, he grunted with displeasure, and Jill actually giggled. The woman smiled over at her and rolled her eyes. Men, her eyes said: leave it to them, and we’d live on nothing but deep-fried foods. Jill nodded and pushed her cart away, trying to bring her inane giggling under control. Several people
glanced over at her as she strolled down the aisle, laughing all the way, toward the checkout counter.

She was at the cash register when she realized that she’d dropped both packages of chicken in the cart. Too disconcerted to explain her mistake to the girl who was already ringing them up, she ended up with both. Oh, well, she told herself as she hurried home, I can freeze one. . . .

She ate dinner, spoke briefly with Nate on the phone, and went back into her office. For a long time she sat staring at the computer screen. Then, on an impulse, she began to type, her fingers moving swiftly across the keyboard: When she was finished, she read back over what she’d written. It was a vivid, paranoid scene in which her heroine—the stalking victim—silently freaked out in the frozen-food section of her local supermarket, certain that the innocent stranger beside her was her anonymous tormentor.

This afternoon Tara had accompanied Jill to Murder Ink, the mystery bookstore on Broadway. The publisher sent a limousine for them, and they picked up Mary Daley on the way. Jill spent much of the ride rigid on the backseat between her agent and her other friend, staring at the back of the driver’s head, wondering if he was a legitimate chauffeur. She briefly imagined a scenario of the real driver on some hazy warehouse floor, bound and gagged in his undershirt and shorts, while this man, in stolen livery,
savored his closeness to his prey. The three women alighted in front of the bookstore, and Jill practically ran inside.

The crowd waiting for her was predominantly female, but she noticed quite a few men as well. Her male readership had been growing with each successive title. This should have cheered her, the all-important crossing of the gender line that most writers would cherish. But she found herself glancing sharply up from the little table at the back of the shop, searching the face of every man who arrived before her with a book to be autographed.

Mary and Tara stood at either side of her behind the table, and the actress caused almost as much of a stir as the author. The proprietor of the store was pleased: two celebrities for the price of one. The crowd remained steady for longer than the allotted hour, and afterward Jill lingered to sign the contents of several cartons of
The Mind of Alice Lanyon
, to be shipped to fans and collectors all over America. A very pleasant afternoon, really. But all the while she smiled at everyone, the fans and the bookstore staff and her two friends, she wondered how they would react if they knew how she was feeling, and why.

Now she and Tara were here at Carmine’s, the enormous, popular Italian restaurant on Broadway and Ninety-first Street, two blocks south of the bookstore. Mary had rushed off to another engagement
after the signing, and Jill had dismissed the chauffeur and asked the people in the bookstore to recommend a nice place in the neighborhood for dinner. The cleaning woman, Mrs. Price, was in Jill’s apartment on Saturdays from five to seven, and she didn’t like having people underfoot while she worked, so Jill always dined in restaurants on Saturday. She looked around the cavernous interior of the dining room, realizing that she now felt more comfortable in large crowds than she ever had before.

Tara was still studying her closely, she noticed.

“You tell me what’s going on with you,” the actress warned, “or no dessert!”

They laughed together as the waiter arrived with their dinner. Seeing the size of the platter of ravioli he lowered between them, Jill wondered if no dessert was really a punishment. Her smile faded as she looked up to meet her friend’s penetrating gaze. She took a long, deep breath, preparing herself.

Then she told Tara about the valentine.

He’d been in luck: the deadbolt on her apartment door was unlocked. The little lock in the doorknob had been easier than the main entrance downstairs. The elevator had been a risk, but here he was, actually inside the apartment he’d been observing from across the street for the last two weeks.

He stood in the center of the large, beautifully furnished
living room, gazing slowly around him, taking in every detail. A big, enclosed, hollow space with an opening on the room: that is what he was seeking. He’d already placed the tiny chip inside the receiver of the phone in the office. Now it was a matter of concealing the little unidirectional microphone and its attendant activating mechanism somewhere in this room. He dropped his gaze to the equipment that fit so easily in the palm of his right hand, marveling yet again at the progress of modern science. The two bugs and the listening devices—the sound-activated tape recorder and headphones that now waited in his room across the street—had been remarkably simple to obtain. A reasonably intelligent, motivated fifteen-year-old could purchase all of this from any one of hundreds of establishments in Manhattan alone.

A big, hollow space . . . not the breakfront: the glass cabinets on top and wood shelves below were completely enclosed, soundproof. That was the problem with the drawers in the room as well. This left the furniture . . . the couch. There was a gap, perhaps three inches, between the bottom of the seat and the floor. Yes . . .

Carefully, he tilted the couch until it was lying on its back, the four short legs sticking out toward him. The underside, viewed from this angle, was hollow, the stuffed undercushion and solid-looking metal rib
frame several inches above the opening at the bottom. The side and front panels just above the legs were wood. Perfect. He reached in the inside pocket of his leather coat and produced a roll of thick plastic tape.

Three minutes later, all was in place. He set the couch back in its original upright position, careful to match the feet to the indentations in the carpet. He spent the next five minutes moving swiftly through the apartment, searching, his sneakered feet making no sound on the floor. Not that it mattered: he knew she was signing at a bookstore uptown this afternoon, and that Tara Summers was with her. He’d watched from his window as the two women had been handed into the big black limousine nearly an hour ago. His search was a luxury he felt he could afford: she’d be out at least a couple of hours. And he had to ascertain one thing, to know beyond a doubt one particular detail of her life.

No, he decided at last. She didn’t have a weapon. No gun, no Mace, no alarm system worth a damn, either on the doors or the windows. Perhaps she kept Mace, or even a gun, in her purse, but he doubted it. And what was the point of the deadbolt on the front door if she wasn’t going to use it? She was completely vulnerable.

Getting to her would be a snap.

He took one more quick look around, to assure
himself that everything, every single thing, was as he had found it. As she had left it. He was about to leave as he had come—he’d use the stairs this time—when he gave in to the final pang of curiosity. With a quick glance at his watch, he moved silently over to the little end table. He’d seen it there, in his first search for places to conceal the microphone.

He reached down into the drawer and picked up the bright pink envelope. He pulled out the card and opened it. Yes, he thought, nodding his head slowly. Yes . . .

He had just put the envelope back where he’d found it and pushed the drawer closed when he suddenly became aware of the sounds from outside, from the other side of the apartment door. He reached swiftly up with his left hand to pull the black ski mask down over his face, the right hand dropping automatically into his coat pocket and closing around the switchblade.

As he listened, the elevator door rumbled open. This sound was followed by the slap of solid, flat shoes on the uncarpeted foyer and the sudden, loud jingle of keys at the lock.

“My God, Jill, that is just Creep City!”

“You’re telling
me?
” Jill pushed her plate away, the ravioli barely touched, and reached for her water glass. She watched in faint amusement as Tara continued
to shovel in the rich food while she talked. Tara could eat under any circumstances, even these. Excitement, anger, fear; they had the odd effect of whetting, rather than dulling, her appetite. Actors, Jill thought.

“Two things,” Tara muttered, scooping up a ravioli. “First, weapons. Second, police. Definitely. Now, wait a minute”—she held up her hand, cutting off Jill’s automatic protest—“I know what you’re going to say. You have a can of Mace in your purse, and you don’t want to bother the cops with anything so trivial, yadda yadda. Sure.” She finally put down her busy fork and leaned forward, looking directly into Jill’s eyes. “You’ve seen me on
Tomorrow’s Children
, right? You know the gal who plays Clarissa, Betty Hanes—with the big boobs and all that red hair? Well, this happened to her!” She nodded once, as if that explained everything, and reached for the fork. Jill’s hand beat her to it.