In Self Defense

by Susan R. Sloan

  “Oh well then, maybe I should be leaving,” he said, the color in his face deepening just a bit. “I really just stopped by to see how you were holding up.”

  “All things considered,” she declared, “I think I’m holding up pretty darn well -- thanks in no small part to you.”

  “Oh, I didn’t do that much,” he said with a diffident shrug.

  “Don’t be modest, James,” she told him. “I wasn’t kidding before when I made that toast. You gave me back my life.”

  He considered that. “Well, the way things were going, somebody had to, I guess,” he said. “But you did most of it. I only helped.”

  “The police wouldn’t have believed me if I’d gone to them -- you were right about that,” she said. “I had no evidence. They would have just patted me on the head and sent me on my way, and sooner or later, Richard would have succeeded.”

  “Forgive me for saying so, since he was your husband and all, but the man was a pig,” James and the champagne declared. “I watched him rutting around women for almost four years -- using the position you gave him to get away with it. Frankly, I don’t know why you wanted to hold onto him.”

  Clare sighed. “I loved him,” she said simply. “I really did. In spite of everything.”

  “Well, maybe, but he didn’t deserve you, you know that,” James said.

  “That’s very sweet, but not to worry,” she told him. “All the wonderful things I felt for him all those years vanished as soon as I realized what he meant to do to me.”

  They were sitting side by side in front of the fire, watching the flames flicker and snap. “I do feel bad about duping the police, though,” she admitted finally.

  “Really?”

  “Detective Hall came by, to apologize. I think she really meant it. I think she was really sorry.”

  “I don’t know why she should be,” James said. “There wasn’t anything the police could have done differently. Or should have done differently, now that I think of it. They had everything covered -- except, of course, what they couldn’t have anticipated.”

  “I almost told her,” Clare confessed.

  James blinked. “You did?” he said cautiously. “Now why would you have done a thing like that?”

  “As I said, I felt bad for her.”

  “But what would that have accomplished, after the fact and everything?”

  “I don’t know,” Clare conceded. “Maybe nothing. But maybe they’d have been able to put their obsession with the stalker to rest, once and for all.”

  “I guess,” he said with a dry chuckle.

  “You were very good, you know, very convincing,” she told him. “You should have been an actor. Some of those phone calls would have scared me out of my wits, if I hadn’t known. In fact, there were times when I have to admit I wasn’t even all that sure.”

  “Well, that was the whole idea, wasn’t it?” James suggested.

  “Yes,” she said, “but you didn’t have to be quite so good at it, did you? You even managed to hide your adorable Texas twang.”

  “Of course I did -- the police were listening,” he reminded her. “Besides, you were just as good as I was."

  “You have a point,” she conceded.

  He chuckled again. “Actually, it was kind of fun, you know, once I got the hang of it -- of playing the part of a stalker, I mean,” he told her. “It was pretty heady stuff. I could see where someone could get carried away with it.”

  “I don’t know how you ever came up with the idea.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t that hard, really,” James explained. “One day, while I was trying to teach you how to walk on crutches, I remembered those two cases the detectives later told you about -- the singer and the waitress -- and I knew the police had never caught anyone. It seemed like the perfect way to get them involved, so they’d protect you. Even if they did end up doing a pretty lousy job of it.”

  “Well, we can’t really blame them for what happened on Mercer Island,” Clare said in defense of Erin and Dusty. “Even we didn’t figure on that.”

  “True,” he agreed, and wagged his head. “You’ve got more lives than a cat, you know.”

  “Lucky for me,” she said.

  “Until it almost backfired. Who knew Richard was going to leave that message for Stephanie Burdick, and that you’d end up having to stand trial for his murder?”

  “When it should have been him standing trial for trying to kill me,” Clare agreed.

  “And having some crackerjack attorney get him off?” James suggested.

  “Now that would have been my death sentence,” Clare gasped. The alcohol was taking effect on her now, too. “You know, there were times during the last year when I really thought this was all just a horrible joke, and that Richard was going to rise up from under some rock, at the most inopportune moment, and expose us.”

  “Not much chance of that happening,” James said, glancing at her with an odd little expression on his face. “I’m afraid the man is as dead as dead can be.”

  “I know,” she said with a nod. “It’s just that sometimes, I don’t know, none of it seems quite real.”

  They sat there, side by side on the soft leather sofa, not saying anything for a while, she contemplating the fire, he contemplating her.

  “Do you think the real stalker is still out there?” she wondered finally. “Do you think he’s still in Seattle?”

  “Hard to tell,” he said.

  “What if he is, and he’s been following this story all along -- do you think he might be offended because he was being blamed for something he didn’t do?”

  James thought about that for a moment, and then shook his head. “If he’s still here, and he’s been following the story, then he shouldn’t be offended, he should be flattered,” he said. “After all, we were emulating an expert.”

  Unexpectedly, her eyes filled up. “I didn’t want to kill Richard, you know,” she whispered, her words beginning to thicken. “Really, I didn’t. I just didn’t want to die.”

  James frowned. “But I don’t understand -- you knew there was no stalker coming for you that night,” he reminded her. “You knew it was only me playing the part. So somewhere, down deep, you must have wanted Richard dead.”

  Clare shook her head. “All I really wanted was for him to love me,” she said, choking up. “For twenty years, that’s all I ever really wanted . . . only he never did. It was Nicolaidis Industries he loved . . . and then Stephanie Burdick.”

  “I remember my mother used to say something like that,” James murmured. “She used to say all she ever wanted was a man to love her. I loved her. And all I ever wanted was for her to look at me, and love me as much as I loved her. But I was just a kid. I guess I couldn’t give her what she needed.” He reached over and gently touched Clare’s hair with the tips of his fingers. “You remind me of her, you know,” he said. “She had blonde hair and brown eyes, just like you.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “That’s nice,” Clare said, but it was clear that her mind was somewhere else, lost in thoughts of what could have been or should have been but never was, and she was not really paying attention.

  Suddenly, James jumped up and held out his hand to her. “Come on, this isn’t a time to be gloomy, this is a time to celebrate,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go for a drive somewhere. You’ve been cooped up in this place for way too long. Let’s go find ourselves some nice fresh air to breathe.”

  Clare hesitated. “I really don’t want to have to see people,” she told him. “I’m not in what you’d call a very social mood.”

  “That’s okay, I understand,” he said with a shrug. “It’s all right. I know a place we can go. It’s one of my favorite spots. I go there all the time, and I promise you -- there won’t be another soul around.”

  ***

  “How was your turkey day?” Dusty inquired of his partner on Friday morning.

  “It was okay,”
Erin said. “The family didn’t beat up on me too much.” Actually, it was only one of her brothers who had given her a hard time, and even that was done with affection.

  “So then, are you ready to come back on the job?”

  Erin sighed, wondering if doing her job would ever be the same again. “Sure,” she said, “why not?”

  “In that case, I’ve got some news that should make you feel a whole lot better.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Apparently, the chief has been indulging in one of his semi-annual ‘it’s time to get organized’ spells, and you know what happens when that happens.”

  “He starts making waves.”

  “Precisely.”

  “So?”

  “So, the latest wave made its way all the way down to archives,” he told her, “which means that they’ve been doing a heap of cleaning up the past few weeks.”

  “What is it -- a slow time at the police department?” Erin wanted to know.

  “More like too many instances of evidence going missing, I suspect,” Dusty said.

  “And?”

  “And you’ll just never guess what they found.”

  Erin scowled at him. “If I’ll never guess, then you’d just better tell me,” she said, wondering why he was playing this silly game with her.

  “Remember the audio tapes that were made of our stalker calling Laughlin?” he asked.

  “How could I forget?” Erin said. “Those were the ones we couldn’t find when we wanted to compare them to the Durant tapes.”

  “Right,” Dusty confirmed.

  “So?”

  “So, they found them -- neatly tucked into the wrong evidence box, of course.”

  “Well, what do you know?” Erin muttered, shaking her head. “Better late than never, I guess.”

  “Even better than that,” Dusty declared with a big grin. “They sent them over to the lab and the lab boys ran them, and the report just hit my desk. We didn’t wind up with egg all over our faces, after all. They’re a spot-on match. The guy is so cocky, he didn’t even bother to use a different voice changer. We were right. We had our stalker. We had him right down to the short hairs.”

  “Great,” Erin said. “So we were right before we were wrong. Now all we have to do is wait four years until he surfaces again, and then let someone else bungle it.”

  “Well now,” he said with an even bigger grin, “before you go feeling all sorry for yourself, there’s something else we can add to the profile that should help if there’s a next time, and that might explain why there’s such a long gap between victims.”

  “Yes -- what?”

  “A bunch of notes left by Frank Pulansky got mixed in with the tapes,” Dusty told her. “According to him, there was something that Laughlin and Medina had in common that was never made public. And it fits Clare Durant, too.”

  “And just what would that be?” Erin asked.

  “They’re all brown-eyed blondes.”