The Perfect Man

by Kristine Dexter

  That attack this morning showed him how violent Chance could be. The police’s switch to Chance’s side showed him how cunning Chance was.

  And he had to be manipulative as well. In the early days, he’d allowed Jessamyn her freedom. They’d even separated for a while: Jessamyn had her own apartment, her own life.

  But apparently she had done something to anger him. First she moved back home, and then she had disappeared—although Beebe knew she was still alive. She still answered his letters and his e-mails. And she still wrote her books.

  Beebe didn’t understand why Chance didn’t just let her go. In a divorce, Chance would have gotten half the money. Maybe Chance was obsessed with her—Beebe understood that. Only Chance was obsessed with controlling her and Beebe was obsessed with rescuing her.

  He should have gone to the police long ago, back in Chicago perhaps, before things got worse. But how could he tell them about her? About the attraction between them, about the way she had looked at him, the fear in her green eyes when she told him that something between them just wouldn’t work.

  Fear of Chance.

  Beebe had never realized that Chance would punish her for talking to him by locking her away. Her imprisonment was partly Beebe’s fault, and he could never forget that. He owed her.

  He owed her his life.

  And somehow, he would find a way to pay that debt.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  BY THE TIME she reached the precinct, Tasha’s stomach was growling. As she had driven there, Lou sullen and silent beside her, she had thought of taking the rest of the evening off, joining Rick down at the Old Multnomah Hotel and buying him dinner.

  The feelings had been there between them again, strong and powerful, and this time she knew that he shared them. He had made that very clear. But he put her in more of a difficult position than she could describe to him.

  Not only had he been a suspect just that morning, but he was now a victim too, someone that she had to think about protecting, not sleeping with. She had to keep her professionalism, especially after the way Lou had chastised her.

  Clearly her attraction to Rick was obvious, and she had to prove, to both herself and Lou, that she could do a good job despite how she felt.

  So Lou had left to get them some Burger King, and she settled at her desk to work on the Pfeiffer case.

  “Hey, Tash,” said Allen Stabos. He was one of the back-ups on the Pfeiffer case. He had been the person unlucky enough to take her place during Friday’s garbage search. During a break in the afternoon’s action, she had asked him to see if he could locate the rug.

  “Hey, Allen.” She really wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries.

  “Two neighbors say they saw the brother carrying an Oriental rug from the house.”

  Her eyes lit up. “You’re kidding!”

  “Think that’s enough to get a warrant?”

  “It might be.” With that, the photos, and the bloodstain sliding from the body to the entry. “You want to give it a try?”

  “It’s your case.”

  “I know, but I have something else I’m digging in right now.”

  Allen gave her an odd look. “What was with that guy today? The arrest that you didn’t complete.”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “I’ve been hearing it’s strange.”

  “Every case is strange,” she said, trying to sound flippant. “Didn’t they tell you that when you signed on?”

  He grinned and nodded, then disappeared down the hall.

  She let out a small sigh of relief, but she wondered how many other questions like that she’d get. She hoped not many. She didn’t want to be the one who blew Rick’s cover.

  She leaned back in her chair. She should probably follow up on the new leads in the Pfeiffer case, but now even her sense of responsibility had disappeared. Her mind was on Rick’s face, the bleak way he had looked at his home, the bitterness in his voice when he had told her all this incident with the stalker had cost him.

  She got a sense that he had lost a lot before he’d met that stalker, and she wondered what that was. A man alone in a city far away from his home, a man who hadn’t spoken to his family in years, a man whose family thought he was trouble, had more going wrong in his life than a simple stalker.

  But Brooke had also told Tasha that Rick was a deadbeat, and he wasn’t that, not if his comments about money were to be believed.

  She sighed and decided she wouldn’t get him off her mind if she didn’t do some investigating. She had his social security number from the papers he’d filled out after his arrest. She went to the department’s computer room and logged on, deciding to see what that 9-digit number told her.

  It told her that he had never been late on a credit card payment—that he had a $100,000 limit on three of them, and he had a black AmEx, usually given only to people with exceptional credit. He owned his house outright—something she found odd (she’d never seen that before on a credit report) and he had more brokerage accounts than she had ever imagined.

  The credit report also gave her bank account numbers which she decided she’d follow up on the following day.

  He didn’t have a single car payment—he hadn’t had one in the past seven years, another thing she’d never seen—and he didn’t lease. Some flicking through DMV records showed her he had five cars registered in Oregon: 2 Porsches, a Jaguar, an old VW Bug, and that horrible truck. She wondered where he stored the cars, and decided she’d wait until later to find out.

  This was not the financial profile of a deadbeat. She stayed at the computer a few minutes longer, having the system search for his criminal record—if he had one. It came up negative. She double-checked Illinois, but he came up clean.

  Then she went to an Internet search engine and punched in Jessamyn Chance to see if he’d been outed on the Internet. She got over a 100,000 matches, most of them more than 90 percent. It would take her hours to go through them. So she limited the search to Jessamyn Chance and Rick Chance and came up with nothing.

  Finally she searched for Rick’s name alone. He appeared in the society pages of the Chicago newspapers—he had been one of the city’s better-known philanthropists—and in some of the early articles, there was a tall, slim redhead on his arm.

  The woman was gorgeous. The papers identified her as Rita Colditz, one of the city’s most prominent businesswomen. She was the CFO of one of Chicago’s largest corporations, and her move to France had been big news.

  Odd that the stalker hadn’t seen any of this. Obviously, he wasn’t a newspaper reader. And maybe didn’t even get news off of television.

  Tasha was still online when Lou returned with grease-covered bags that smelled heavenly.

  Lou looked over her shoulder. “I hope this is about the Pfeiffer case.”

  “No,” she said. “Although we’ve had a break.”

  She told him what Allen had found, and how Allen was going for a warrant.

  “The Pfeiffer case just doesn’t hold you, does it?” Lou asked.

  Tasha shrugged. “I like a puzzle.”

  “So what are we working on now?” His tone told her that he already knew.

  She didn’t look at him. “I’m checking up on a few things Rick told me.”

  “Still don’t trust him?”

  “The more I learn the more I do trust him,” she said. “But this stalker of his bothers me.”

  “That’s taking empathy to an extreme.” Lou hooked a chair with his foot and brought it to the computer. Then he sat down, putting the bags on his lap. “You’ll have to get your own beverage. I spilled them in the parking lot.”

  She didn’t care. She took the Whopper he handed her, partially unwrapped it, and bit in hungrily, letting the wrapper catch the drippy sauces.

  “It’s not empathy,” she said around the food. “This is a guy who keeps everything about his job secret, right? So how did the stalker get close?”

  Lou was eating a bacon double-cheeseburger. Ta
sha would have known that without looking—it was all Lou ever ate. But this time, she could see the little pieces of well cooked bacon peeking out of the bun.

  “This is your puzzle?” he said around the food.

  “Come on, Lou. You have to admit it’s a good question.”

  Lou nodded. “Who did Chance say knew about his pen name?”

  “His agent and his editor.”

  “And they were both women, right?”

  Tasha nodded.

  “I’m sure they got assistants who probably know,” Lou said.

  “I scanned that letter,” Tasha said. “His agent is in New York. I’ll bet his editor is too.”

  “The stalker guy traveled all the way here. He might have come from New York.”

  “Yeah,” Tasha said, grabbing some fries, “but that doesn’t fit. If his stalker worked for his agent or editor, then he’d know who Rick is. And the stalker didn’t. It had to be someone else.”

  “Someone with access to Jessamyn Chance’s address, but not her identity.”

  Tasha tapped the computer. “Maybe a hacker into his e-mail accounts.”

  “You gotta think that Chance is smart enough to use a dummy address on the web.”

  “Maybe,” Tasha said. “But people are careless on the net.”

  “Tell me about it.” Lou grabbed some of her fries. His were gone.

  “It’s worth checking out,” Tasha said. “There had to be a way that this stalker zeroed in on him, and it wasn’t because of the redhead.”

  Lou paused, French fry in hand. “What redhead?”

  “The original stalkee, the woman. I found her on the net too. If our perp had just read the papers, he would have known she wasn’t Jessamyn Chance.”

  “A hacker who doesn’t read the newspapers, who has a thing for a woman who doesn’t exist.” Lou shook his head. “No wonder Chance had trouble dealing with this guy.”

  Tasha nodded. She finished the sandwich and crumpled up the wrapper, putting it back in the bag. Then she stuck her hand in the box of fries and found only the crisp ends. “Hey!”

  Lou shrugged. “I gotta punish you for not working on Pfeiffer somehow.”

  She sighed. “All right. Let’s go back to the desk and see what we can do.”

  “I suppose you’ll want your fries back.”

  “You pocketed them?” she asked, then understood what he meant and grimaced. “Ew.”

  “I’ll take that to be a no.” Lou stood, picked up the bags and tossed them in a garbage can far from their desks. Garbage service in the precinct was slow. Better to have the food remains stink up a different part of the room.

  When Tasha reached her desk, her phone was ringing. She grabbed it. It was the 911 dispatch. Tasha had had them call her if there was a hit at Rick’s house, and apparently there had been.

  The 911 dispatch spoke without preamble. “The alarm company says someone just smashed the third basement window on your house’s west side.”

  Right near the hidden door. “Get someone on it,” Tasha said.

  “Already dispatched the nearest squad. They’ll be there in five.”

  “See if they can get there in three,” Tasha said. “We have to get this guy.”

  She hung up and cursed.

  “A hit on the Chance place?”

  She nodded. “Let’s go.”

  Lou didn’t have to be told twice. He led the way out of the precinct.

  As he drove them to Rick’s house, Tasha’s heart was pounding. She could imagine herself telling Rick that they had caught his perp, breaking in. Oh, that would be beautiful. No stalking charge. They were always a bitch to prove, and in this case, it would blow Rick’s pen name wide open. Not to mention being tabloid fodder for the next six months.

  She mentally crossed her fingers the entire way there.

  When they arrived on his street, it was ablaze with lights. Porch lights were on, living room lights were on, and people stood in the lawns, watching Rick’s house. In front were two squad cars, their blue and red lights swirling, making an eerie glow in the neighborhood. Rick’s front door was open and the interior lights were on.

  Tasha got out of the car before it had completely stopped moving. She walked up to one of the patrol officers. “What’ve we got?”

  He was young, but had experience lines in his square-jawed face. “Not a goddamn thing.”

  “What?” Part of her had expected this, but she hadn’t believed it. She had wanted the perp to be inside, easily catchable. She’d wanted to end Rick’s nightmare the same day she discovered it.

  “This is how we found the place. Front door open, lights on.”

  “What about the basement?”

  “Oh, that’s a sight,” the patrol officer said. “See for yourself.”

  She felt a chill. “You checked everywhere? All over the interior?”

  “And two of our guys are walking the lawn. Nothing. Nobody running from the house when we arrived, either.”

  “They got him?” Lou asked, getting out of the car.

  Tasha shook her head. “Have one of these squads check the parked cars on nearby streets. He can’t be far from here.”

  “Beg pardon, detective, but he could be long gone.”

  “Oh?” she asked. “How long did it take you to get here?”

  “Four and a half minutes from the time we logged the call,” he said. “A lot can go down in four and a half minutes.”

  Didn’t she know it. “What took you so long?”

  “Driving from the Rose Garden. Personally, I think four and a half minutes is a fucking miracle. We’re lucky there wasn’t much traffic or our response would’ve been a lot longer.”

  He was right, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. Instead, she walked up the sidewalk toward Rick’s house. Even though she knew the stalker wasn’t inside, she could feel her heart pounding. She didn’t want to see what he’d done to the interior of the place.

  Lou was beside her, looking grim. They went up the porch steps and inside.

  The damage was a surprise. The patrol officer was right: it was amazing what could happen in less than five minutes. The end tables were knocked over, their contents spilled all over the room. The pictures had been pulled off the wall and shattered glass was everywhere. Amazing that only the alarm company called 911. Couldn’t the neighbors hear this?

  The basement door was open just like she’d left it, but the lights were on. She went down the stairs quicker than she had that afternoon—this time she didn’t need her gun out.

  When she reached the bottom of the steps and turned the corner, she stopped in stunned surprise. The door at the far end of the basement was gone—well, not gone exactly, but chopped to bits. Someone had gone after it with an axe, then reached inside and pulled it open.

  And then he had destroyed Rick’s office. The computer, the desks, but—strangely—not the artwork or the books.

  “Looks like he lost it when he figured out she wasn’t in there,” Lou said.

  Tasha nodded. All the damage spoke of extreme rage. “We’re going to have to call the forensic team back out.”

  “They’re going to love this.”

  She walked toward the door. Rick wasn’t going to be happy either. He’d been so proud of this place. And she had told him that this would work.

  When she reached the door, she peered inside. Even the old computers in the back were ruined, thrown to the floor in a fit of rage. Their cases had shattered. Or perhaps they had been axed too. Even the couch bore slash marks.

  “What’s amazing to me is that he did all this and got out very fast,” Lou said.

  “You don’t think he figured out a way to bypass the alarm, do you?” Tasha asked.

  “And then reset it, and go out a broken window?” Lou shook his head. “Too much rage here. That’s a finesse move, and at this point, he was beyond finesse.”

  Lou was right.

  “It amazes me that he did all of this so fast,” Tasha said.
“He had to know that we were coming.”

  “Or he factored in the alarm.”

  “What do you think he would have done if he had found a woman in here?”

  Lou gave her an odd look. “If she wasn’t the woman he’d expected, he would have taken out his rage on her.”

  She suddenly understood the reason for the look. “I wasn’t thinking of me. I wouldn’t have considered staying here.”

  “Then I don’t know what you’re driving at,” Lou said.

  “What do you think his plan was? He broke down the door—he obviously thought she was in here, maybe even imprisoned in here—did he think he could get her out fast?”

  “Sure,” Lou said. “If our imaginary woman had been imprisoned against her will, then it would be logical that she’d want to run the minute she had freedom.”

  “You know that’s not what would have happened,” Tasha said. “She would have been scared by the axe, and scared of her captor’s rage, and she wouldn’t believe she could get out. She would take some convincing.”

  “It’s all hypothetical, Tash. What’s your point?”

  “My point is,” she said, “that he either hadn’t thought that through, or he didn’t know.”

  “I don’t expect a stalker to understand human psychology,” Lou said.

  “I’m just trying to get a handle on his fantasy.” She took a step deeper in the room. “I’ll wager he thought she’d be happy to see him. I’ll bet he even thought she’d run into his arms, and then they’d escape, to live happily ever after.”

  “So what if he did?”

  “He’s living a romantic fantasy,” Tasha said. “Playing into that fantasy might be the best way to catch him.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Nothing yet,” she said. “But I’ll have something soon.”

  “You’d better.” Lou sniffed. “Because we have one angry perp.”

  Tasha sniffed too. Urine. “Oh, god. He peed on everything.”

  Lou nodded. “It wasn’t enough to destroy it. He had to show just how damn disgusted he was.”