“I think she’d be good for me.”
Said with ominous finality. You could give a client advice, but you couldn’t make her take it, Trace reminded himself. The cardinal rule of his profession and the most frustrating. He could push no further. He could give Lara an ultimatum: insist on Gillian, and you’ll have to get yourself a new bodyguard. But he wasn’t ready to do that. For one thing, hiring Gillian Mahler might be no more than Lara’s harmless whim.
Or it might, just might, prove suicidal.
Either way, he’d stayed too long on this assignment to quit now. He meant to see it through till Lara was freed from danger. Unlike most security firms, the Brickhouse credo was that they solved the client’s problem; they didn’t just make their money off it.
And if Gillian was the problem?
Well, he’d meant to investigate her anyway. He just hadn’t expected his prime suspect to be dropped in his lap. Trace smiled at the image—couldn’t help himself—then glanced at Lara.
“All right. You’re the boss, boss.”
The smile she gave him was a fair trade—more than fair—for all the headaches this whim was bound to cost him in the end. They didn’t speak again until he turned into the parking lot across from the Newport Hospital.
“You asked me to tell you if I ever remembered anything else about that morning,” Lara murmured. “And something did come back to me a little while ago while I was brushing my hair. The runner I saw that morning out on Cliff Walk?”
The unidentified runner, sex unknown, wearing a hooded orange sweatshirt, who’d passed Lara only minutes before her attack. Trace’s best bet for her assailant. It would have been easy to spin around and follow Lara back through the fog, catch her just as she passed the fatal gap... “Yes,” he said without inflection. Come on, Lara. Give me the goods and I’ll nail the creep.
“I told you I thought it was a college sweatshirt, with University of something with an M—Michigan, Minnesota, Montana?—printed on the chest.”
“You did.”
“It was University of Miami.”
“You’re sure of that?” he said quietly. Her recall of the last few minutes before the accident was piecemeal and fuzzy, a result of either head trauma or sheer terror.
“Absolutely.”
He parked the car and turned to look at her. “So what brought it back to mind?” Sometimes the association that sparked the memory was more telling than the clue itself.
“D-don’t know. It just came to me.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Dearest Lara-Mommy,
Something told me that today I’d be SURE to get a letter from you!! I went to my mailbox four times—one. two, three, FOUR—but it never came. At least, the man behind the counter said it didn’t come. I’m starting to wonder about that guy. Could he be stealing my mail?!! He stares at me every time I come in now. But maybe that’s just because he thinks I look EXACTLY like the famous TV star Lara Leigh? People are always, I mean ALWAYS, staring at me on the street and thinking that. I stopped and gave one woman who was staring my autograph the other day. She thought that was so NICE of me to give it to her without her even asking.
But then, I’m not conceited like some people we know. And all I want to know is, WHY do I have to keep asking you for a letter? Asking and asking and asking and ASKING for one...CRUMMY...LETTER—what kind of mother makes her daughter beg for just the scraps—any old scrap—of her love? Just a crumb of attention? I guess the same kind of mom who sells her baby to finance her way through med school, huh?
Well, I’m getting very, very tired of asking. Tired of walking to my mailbox, then home again, then back again, then—I know every line in the sidewalk on the way to my mailbox. I play Step on a Crack and You’ll Break Your Mother’s BACK. Do you remember that game? It’s a children’s game. If you’d been there for me, Lara-Mommy, instead of devoting all your selfish life to your lousy CAREER, we could have played it together. And maybe then, if you’d been there to guide me I’d have amounted to something. Is that it? Is that why you won’t answer my letters anymore? Because you’re ashamed of me?
I promise you won’t be when we meet. Soon. It’s time for a mother and daughter reunion, don’t you think?
But till then,
WRITE ME, YOU BITCH! (HA-HA—Just kidding!!!) your loving Sarah XXX
WITH A SHUDDER of disgust, Trace dropped the letter on his desk. He stood, switched off the lamp, then moved to the window and leaned out, greedily breathing in the sweet night air, as if the letter’s cloying brew of need and hatred had contaminated his lungs as well as his mind.
His office looked out on the front grounds of Woodwind. Even with his thoughts elsewhere, his eyes roved automatically over the darkened lawn below, seeking movement, any shape that departed from the normal outlines of the lush landscaping. Nearly midnight and not even a skunk waddled across the lawn in search of grubs.
He glanced back to his desk. He’d been combing through Sarah XXX’s letters for the past hour, searching for any clue he might have overlooked. That letter was number four of the collection—rather, a copy of number four, since the original was filed with the Newport police. The stalking case against Sarah XXX had to be meticulously documented so that if—when, he corrected himself—Trace finally tracked her down, they could prosecute.
Like all the other notes, number four was a textbook example of the kind of mash note celebrity stalkers sent the objects of their twisted affections. Whatever the words, the underlying theme was the same: terrible, unappeasable neediness. The echoing emptiness of a person who has no identity in the normal sense of the word. Because for whatever pathetic reason—neglect, abuse, psychological dysfunction?—the typical stalker possesses no self.
Like Dorothy’s Tin Man, who realizes he lacks a heart, the stalker is still human enough to know he lacks something. Even if he can’t describe the problem, still he senses the void within—the black hole that in a normal person is filled by a sense of selfhood. By a soul.
And the stalker knows he needs to fill that void. Yearns most horribly to fill it. Believes with unshakable faith that to ever be happy, to ever be normal, he must fill it.
So just as the Tin Man set off to ask the Wizard of Oz for a heart, the stalker goes bumbling through life, searching and searching outside himself for a solution to the. problem that lies within.
Until one fine day the answer comes to him. He has a black, sucking hole where his identity should be? He’ll fill it with someone else’s identity! Someone else’s soul.
And since the void is so big, he’ll need a big identity to fill it. Somebody important, however the stalker defines importance.
A generation ago, importance was a politician. Today, importance is most often a celebrity. So one day, the stalker flips the pages of a magazine—and sees a photo. Or turns the TV channel just as a certain actress walks into a room—and wham!—there it is. A person staring into his eyes, seemingly speaking to him and him alone, promising him the solution to his whole rotten, lonely life. Promising recognition,
