But even as she catapulted herself forward, a muffled shout came from her house, followed by what appeared to be the sounds of a scuffle. Had a well-intentioned neighbor seen the open door and gone to confront the stranger? Tess only knew that she heard objects falling, something shattering on the floor.
Then a terrible scream, a man’s scream but high-pitched, as shrill and pain-filled as anything Tess had ever heard.
She surged up from the ground and sprinted toward the door, still prepared to lock the intruders inside and let them sort it out. Then she saw Carl Dewitt writhing on the floor just inside the foyer, holding his left knee and moaning. Another man stood over him, his back to her, a baseball bat in hand. Unsteadily, he began to raise it over his head, as if to bring it down on Carl’s ginger-orange head.
“Stop it!” Tess screamed.
The man with the baseball bat froze for a second, then shrugged, almost as if he could not help himself, as if the bat were alive and had a will of its own. She aimed her gun at the small of his back, but she could no longer find her voice, could not tell him what she needed to say. It was like one of those nightmares where you cannot find your voice to scream or call 911. Only she wasn’t going to die. This man was.
Carl caught the bat in both hands as the man swung it toward him. The swing was weak, halfhearted, easily stopped, but the man pulled the bat out of Carl’s hands as if he meant to swing again. He stepped back, stumbling a bit. Tess thought about how her shots at the range tended to end up high and right. She adjusted her hold, so her gun was level with the man’s hamstring, slightly to the left. She had never fired a gun this close to her target before. It was only a .38, it probably wouldn’t kill him if she didn’t jerk up the way she often did—
“Jesus Christ, put down the fucking bat and put your hands above your head or you’re going to lose most of your large intestine. There’s a gun on you.”
But it was Carl who had spoken, not Tess. Surprisingly, the man did as he was told. But he still didn’t step away from Carl, and his weaving posture made him seem more dangerous, not less. Was he on drugs? Psychotic? Tess had expected to find a calm stone-cold killer in her house. This confused, shambling man was much more terrifying. It was impossible to judge what he might do next.
So she ran straight at him. Ran at him as if she were one of the defensive stars on the Ravens and he was one of the hapless quarterbacks they intimidated. She threw her shoulders at his knees, wanting to hear them crack, wanting the tendons to shred and pull from the bone.
All she accomplished, however, was to knock them both to the floor. The force of the tackle sent his cap and dark glasses flying, but his flesh was disappointingly silent and whole beneath the weight of her body. He didn’t scream, as Carl had, or yell. He landed with a thud and a sharp exhalation of air, nothing more.
She jerked him by the shoulder, rolling him over so she was staring into a pair of watery blue eyes. She was so close to the man that her chin brushed the straggly beard he was trying to cultivate.
But the hair on his head was more interesting than the hair on his face. The intruder’s scalp was covered with short sprouts of fluffy hair, interspersed with a few pale pink scabs that would soon disappear.
“Mickey Pechter,” Tess said. “My computer buddy.”
It took him a few more seconds to catch his breath. Once he did, all he said was: “I hope you know that Judge Halsey and the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s office are going to hear about what you’ve done.”
Then, with surprising force, he pushed Tess off him and stumbled toward the door.
CHAPTER 31
“What you did? He actually said that?”
“Yes,” Tess said. “And without apparent irony.”
She was at the dining room table, watching Crow as he straightened and cleaned the so-called great room, the combination living and dining room that had been created by knocking out the walls in the front of the house. He was unusually manic, as if he felt the house had been defiled by the afternoon’s events and needed some sort of symbolic cleansing.
Crow and the dogs had arrived home just as Mickey Pechter made his mad dash. Unfortunately for Mickey, Miata thought he was running toward Crow and had responded accordingly. She growled and snapped, fur bristling on her neck, penning Pechter in a corner of the house until he seemed on the verge of wetting himself.
If he had been crouched on someone else’s wood floor, Tess would have rooted for just that outcome.
But it was her floor, her house, and Mickey Pechter was a problematic presence, wet or dry. If she called the police and made a report, she could end up before Judge Halsey, her probation extended because she was clearly making no progress on the anger front. She didn’t worry about additional criminal charges—home invasions went to grand juries, which seldom indicted homeowners. But she didn’t want to come under Judge Halsey’s falsely benevolent gaze again, didn’t want to hear his droning pronouncements on the violence that flowed between men and women. She was tired of explaining herself, tired of asking for permission.
She called to the dog. “It’s okay, Miata. Down, girl.”
The Doberman retreated, but then the greyhound surged forward, anxious to get in on the action. Esskay, however, had no instinct for combat. Once she confronted Mickey Pechter, her only move was to hook her nose in his armpit, looking for a pat. She ended up knocking him back on his ass. He yelped with pain—a phony, exaggerated cry. What a whiner, Tess thought. Crow, meanwhile, had turned his attention to Carl, who insisted through gritted teeth that he would be just fine if he could elevate his knee and ice it.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” Tess asked Mickey. She was suddenly weary, adrenaline draining from her body and leaving her with nothing but a bruised flulike feeling.
“I wanted you to know what it’s like to be scared and jumpy all the time. It’s a joke, what that judge did. You assaulted me. I woke up in intensive care. Then I go back to work, and I get fired. They said it was because of the downturn, but I bet it was because they heard about what happened.”
Tess smiled. So she had exacted a punishment of sorts. Out of work, Mickey Pechter would have more time but fewer funds to stalk underage girls.
He did not miss her look of satisfaction. “If I were a woman and you were a man, it wouldn’t have ended with you in counseling. You should be in jail, you bitch. I have nightmares because of what you did.”
“I know. I heard your victim impact statement. So if you’re so scared of me, why have you been following me?”
“I saw you with this guy down on Guilford Avenue one day. It got me to thinking.”
Guilford Avenue? That was the day they visited the private mail service, where Eric Shivers had once kept a box. What was Mickey doing there? Baltimore was small enough for such a coincidence to be plausible, but Tess had assumed Mickey Pechter was the kind of suburban boy who never ventured downtown.
All she said was, “Got you thinking what?”
“That maybe you and he were fooling around and I should follow you and see if I could get the goods on you, blackmail you, fuck up your life the way you fucked up mine.”
“You thought Carl and I were having an affair? Don’t be ridiculous.”
He wasn’t listening, he was wound up in his own logic, illogical as it was.
“Then I thought it would be better just to scare you, make you feel unsafe all the time, vulnerable-like. I tried hang-up phone calls at your office—only I kept getting the machine. So then I started tracking you. I wanted you to see me following you. I wasn’t planning on doing anything more, but today, when I got here and saw the door open—”
Now even Mickey Pechter seemed to be having trouble understanding how his mind had worked, how he had reasoned himself into almost getting killed. Yet Tess knew. After all, it had happened to her. All I wanted to do was scare you, get you to stay away from teenage girls. I never set out to strip your clothes off and apply a depilatory.
She
would have told him as much. Mickey Pechter, however, did not strike her as a man who would appreciate that irony.
Instead, she said, “So you came to my house with a baseball bat in hand—just to scare me.”
“I’m on a softball team. We had a game today. The bat was the only thing I had in my sister’s van. I was gonna come in, wave it around. I thought I’d pretend to be like, you know, some guy in one of those drug movies who’s looking for a stash but goes to the wrong house.”
“Sounds like a good way to get killed.”
“I didn’t know you had a gun. And I didn’t know this guy, your redheaded friend, was going to jump me from behind. He was trying to kill me, swear to God. I only swung at him to get him off me, and then he was so angry, I thought he really would kill me if he got the bat out of my hand. It was like I was outside my head. I couldn’t stop.”
Tess looked at Carl, who had struggled to a seated position with Crow’s help and had a dish towel of cracked ice pressed to his knee. His face was pale beneath his freckles. She wondered if he could go into shock from pain.
“Carl, you want to press charges against him?”
“God, no,” he said, his voice tough, if a bit faint.
“You sure?” She wouldn’t have minded Mickey Pechter facing his own felony assault charges. But this was the city, not the county. There was no Judge Halsey here, no time for such penny-ante antics. Besides, she didn’t want any official record of Pechter’s visit.
“Positive,” Carl said, between clenched teeth.
She waved her gun at Mickey, just for effect. She was suddenly aware of how bizarre she must look. Much of her hair had come loose from her braid and was flying around her head, her white shirt was crusted with dirt and dead leaves, her black linen skirt was still halfway up her hips, displaying the full glory of her now-ripped pantyhose, cut-rate DKNY purchased in bulk at Nordstrom Rack. The Preppie Avenger.
“I’m the one who almost killed someone today,” she said. The catch in her voice, almost a sob, caught her off guard. “Do you realize that? I almost shot you in my home, and no grand jury in the world would have indicted me, not under these circumstances. But it would have fucked up my life, just the same. You want to give me nightmares? You came damn close. Thing is, you would have been too dead to enjoy it.”
“I told you I didn’t know you had a gun,” Pechter stammered, afraid again.
“You never know who has a gun in this world. Or who has a concerned family friend who’s willing to wreck your life for the sheer fun of it. You can’t know anything about anyone. So you shouldn’t pick fights, because you may not win. Don’t flip people off in traffic, don’t pull macho shit in bars. We live in a world where people will kill you for one rude look. How can you not know that? Are you too busy trying to pick up underage girls to read the goddamn papers?”
“I know,” he said, “that you are one crazy fucked-up cunt.”
“Hey, watch your language.” But it was Carl who objected to Mickey’s rhetoric, not Tess. “You shouldn’t talk like that, not in front of a woman. Not in front of anybody.”
Mickey began to edge toward the door, unnerved by Carl’s intensity, although Carl couldn’t even stand, much less go after him. Tess blocked Mickey’s way.
“I’m calling my lawyer tomorrow and I’m filing for a restraining order against you,” she said. “If I ever see you again—in my rearview mirror, or standing outside my office—”
“I know,” Mickey Pechter said, sneering at her, “you’ll shoot me. Big talker.”
She put her gun on the floor and grabbed him by the collar of the windbreaker with both hands, bringing him nose to nose.
“I’ll burn something else off next time. Something that doesn’t grow back. Tell that to Judge Halsey if you like. Tell him any fucking thing you like. As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t been angry enough up to now.”
She let go of him as suddenly as she had seized him and he staggered backward, hands shooting instinctively for his groin. Then he turned and ran for his van in a wobbling stride, hands still cupped in front of him. Tess was pretty sure it was the last she would see of Mickey Pechter.
“Of course, Mickey wasn’t the only one following me. Was he, Carl?”
Carl had moved to an upholstered mission-style chair, which had cost Tess the approximate bluebook value of her thirteen-year-old Toyota. His left leg was stretched out on a matching ottoman, a second dish towel balanced on his knee, where the first had left a dark wet spot. Tess had poured him a shot of Jack Daniel’s, feeling like some saloon proprietress tending to an injured cowboy. Now she replenished his glass and poured herself a little more white wine while she was up. She asked Crow if he wanted anything, but he just shook his head and went back to his obsessive cleaning.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been watching me too. I know it wasn’t coincidence that you stopped by today. Were you parked at the bottom of the hill so you could watch the entrance to my little street? Or have you been everywhere I’ve been today? The funeral, the cemetery?”
The only sound in the room was Crow’s dust mop going back and forth across the floor. Swish swish swish. Swish swish swish. Tess’s mother had given Crow this new kind of mop, a Swiffer, for Hanukkah, and he loved it, the way men often love things for their sheer novelty. He had the wet cloths for the kitchen and bathroom floors, the dry ones for the wide-planked pine floors that ran through the rest of the house. Their floors always gleamed.
“I wouldn’t say watching,” Carl said. “Checking in, from time to time. I’ve been worried about you.”
Tess knew there was good reason to be worried about her. But Carl didn’t, or shouldn’t. He didn’t know what Luisa O’Neal had told her.
“I saw the thing about Julie Carter in the paper,” he said, as if anticipating the question. “I remembered her from your original list. Let me guess. She was small, with light eyes and dark hair.”
“Yes.”
“Lucy. Tiffani. Mary Ann. He’s definitely got a type. Although I think Lucy was the prettiest. Even dead—” He did not finish the thought.
“Major Shields said you’re obsessed with Lucy.”
“It’s as good a word as any, I guess.” He sighed. “I liked to think of myself as Dana Andrews in Laura, only she never comes through the door in a raincoat, still alive. But when I dream about Lucy, she’s whole. In my dreams, her head is with her body. She’s not the way I found her.”
“You dream about her?”
He nodded, his face doleful. “Every few nights.”
“Is that why you cracked up on the job, got disability?”
“I got disability for my knee.”
“That’s not what Major Shields told me.”
“Then he’s a liar.”
“So you didn’t have a nervous breakdown at work?”
“Oh, I cracked up.” Carl’s tone was mild, as if he were telling a funny story on himself. “But when I cracked up, I screwed up my knee, and that’s why I had to take disability. You see, I really did slip on the ice in the parking lot, in January the year after Lucy was killed. I was out a month. By the time I came back to work, the state police had pretty much taken over the investigation. They didn’t need me. As Sergeant Craig was quick to point out.”
“But you didn’t stop, did you?”
“I just couldn’t stop talking to people, thinking about it. They warned me, told me to back off, and maybe if I had kept going the way I was going, they would have disciplined me.”
“So what happened?”
“One day—I’m still in a brace, on pain medication, walking like Walter Brennan—I drove to the bridge where I found her. I started walking. I crossed the Susquehanna: about a mile, I guess, no more. I turned back and did it again. Then again. About the fifth or sixth time, I’m in so much pain I keep thinking I’m going to pass out. Apparently I was talking to myself too, muttering like some old man on the street, although I don’t remember that part. I wa
s trying to figure out how the head came to be there, how he had slowed to leave it there, without anyone seeing him. Even in the middle of the night, another car could have come along. He was risking so much—” His voice trailed off.
“What happened?”
“One of my old co-workers called our supervisor. I was admitted to the hospital in Havre de Grace that night. They released me forty-eight hours later, although they recommended I try some post-traumatic stress counseling. It’s not like I was nuts. But my knee was so screwed up I had to get replacement surgery, young as I am. I was out the rest of the year.”
“Carl, if that’s not obsessive, I don’t know what is.”
“Well, why shouldn’t I be obsessed? I found a severed head on a bridge. I think I’ve come by my obsession pretty honestly.”
“Yet when Mary Ann Melcher called the tip line and tried to tell you her ex-boyfriend matched the description of Alan Palmer, only he was dead—”
Carl shook his head. “I knew more by then. I knew the guy we were looking for wouldn’t kill himself. He might be dead, but not on purpose. I was just stalling for time, trying to figure it out.”
“But it did make sense. There were no killings after Mary Ann, no evidence of any activity on his part.” Until Julie Carter was shot and killed.
“Everything always makes sense with this guy. What’s the one thing we know about him? He plans things out in advance, in minute detail. I think he decided to stop, for some reason, and he wanted to cut off his own trail if the cops ever came looking for him. I don’t think he’s dead or reformed.” He gave her a level look. “And neither do you.”
“So why does he make sure I get this list? Why draw attention to himself?”
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