Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

Kari threw herself into her modeling, easily getting assignments with Ford, Elite and the other top agencies. But her successful career created a curious irony. She was desperately lonely and yet she had no privacy. Simply because she was beautiful, complete strangers considered themselves intimate friends and constantly approached her in public or sent her long letters describing their intimate secrets, begging for advice and offering her their own opinions on what she should do with her life.

She grew to hate the simple activities that she’d enjoyed as a child — Christmas shopping, playing softball, fishing, jogging. A trip to the grocery store was often a horror; men would speed into line behind her at the checkout stand and flirt mercilessly. More than once she fled, leaving behind a full cart.

But she never felt any real terror until David Dale, the man in the gray pickup truck.

Kari had first noticed him in a crowd of onlookers when she was on a job for Vogue two years ago.

People always watched photo shoots, of course. They were fascinated with physiques they would never have, with designer clothes that cost their monthly salary, with the gorgeous faces they’d seen gazing at them from newsstands around the country. But something had seemed different about this man. Something troubling.

Not just his massive size — well over six feet tall with huge legs and heavy thighs, long, dangling arms. What had bothered her was the way he’d looked at her through his chunky, out-of-fashion glasses — his expression had been one of familiarity.

As if he knew a great deal about her.

And with a chill Kari had realized that he was familiar to her too — she’d seen him at other shoots.

Hell, she’d thought, I’ve got a stalker.

At first David Dale would simply appear at shoots like the one in Pacific Grove, California, parking his pickup truck nearby and standing silently just outside the ring of activity. Then she began to see him around the modeling agencies that repped her.

He began to write her long letters about himself: his lonely, troubled childhood, his parents’ deaths, his former girlfriends (the stories sounded made-up), his current job as an environmental engineer (Kari read “janitor”), his struggle with his weight, his love of Dungeons & Dragons games, television shows he watched. He also knew a frightening amount of information about her — where she’d grown up, what she’d studied at Stanford, her likes and dislikes. He’d clearly read all of the interviews she’d ever given. He took to sending her presents, usually innocuous things like slippers, Day-Timers, picture frames, pen-and-pencil sets. Disturbingly, he’d sometimes send her lingerie: tasteful Victoria’s Secret items, in her exact size, with a gift receipt courteously enclosed. She threw everything out.

Kari generally ignored Dale but the first time he’d parked his gray pickup in front of her house in Santa Monica, California, she’d stormed up to and confronted him. Tugging at his damaged ear, breathing in an asthmatic, eerie way, he ignored her rage and simply stared at her with an adoring gaze as he studied her face, muttering, “Beautiful, beautiful.” Upset, she returned to her house. Dale, however, happily pulled out a thermos and began sipping coffee. He remained parked on the street until midnight — a practice that would soon become a daily ritual.

Dale would dog her on the street. He’d sit in restaurants where she was eating and occasionally have a bottle of cheap wine sent to her table. She kept her phone number unlisted and had her mail sent to her agent’s office but he still managed to get notes delivered to her. Kari was one of the few people in America without e-mail on her computer; she was sure that Dale would find her address and inundate her with messages.

She went to the police, of course, and they did what they could but it wasn’t much. On the cops’ first visit to Dale’s ramshackle condo in a low-rent neighborhood, they found a copy of the state’s antistalking statute sitting prominently on his coffee table. Sections were underlined; David Dale knew exactly how far he could go. Still, Kari convinced a magistrate to issue a restraining order. Since Dale had never done anything exactly illegal, though, the order was limited to preventing him from setting foot on her property itself. Which he’d never done anyway.

The incident that finally pushed her over the edge occurred last month. Dale had made a practice of following the few men whom Kari had the effrontery to date. In this case it’d been a young TV producer. One day Dale had walked into the man’s health club in Century City and had a brief conversation with him. The producer had broken their date that night, leaving the harsh message that he would’ve appreciated it if she’d told him she was engaged. He never returned Kari’s calls.

That incident had warranted another visit from the police but the cops found Dale’s condo empty and the pickup gone when they’d arrived.

But Kari knew he’d be back. And so she’d decided it was time to end the problem once and for all. She’d never intended to be a model for more than a few years and she’d figured that this was a good time to quit. Telling only her parents and a few close friends, she’d instructed a real estate company to lease her house and moved to Crowell, Massachusetts, a town she’d been to several years before on a photo shoot. She’d spent a few days here after the assignment and had fallen in love with the clean air and dramatic coastline — and with the citizens of the town too. They were friendly but refreshingly reserved toward her; a beautiful face didn’t place very high on the scale of austere New England values.

She’d left L.A. at two A.M. on a Sunday morning, taking mostly back streets, doubling back and pausing often until she was sure she’d evaded Dale. As she’d driven across the country, elated at the prospect of a new life, she’d occupied much of her time with a fantasy about Dale’s committing suicide.

But now she knew that the son of a bitch was very much alive. And somehow had found out where she’d moved.

Tonight, huddled in the living room of her new house, she heard his pickup’s engine start. It idled roughly, the exhaust bubbling from the rusty pipe — sounds she’d grown oh-too-familiar with over the past few years. Slowly the vehicle drove away.

Crying quietly now, Kari rested her head on the carpet. She closed her eyes. Nine hours later she awoke and found herself on her side, knees drawn up, clutching the thirty-eight-caliber pistol to her chest, the same way that, as a little girl, she’d wake up every morning, curled into a ball and cuddling a stuffed bear she’d named Bonnie.

Later that morning an embittered Kari Swanson was sitting in the office of Detective Brad Loesser, head of the Felonies Division of the Crowell, Massachusetts, Police Department.

A solid, balding man with sun-baked freckles across the bridge of his nose, Loesser listened to her story with sympathy. He shook his head then asked, “How’d he find out you were here?”

She shrugged. “Hired a private eye, for all I know.” David Dale was exactly as resourceful as he needed to be when it came to Kari Swanson.

“Sid!” the detective shouted to a plainclothes officer in a cubicle nearby.

The trim young man appeared. Loesser introduced Kari to Sid Harper. Loesser briefed his assistant and said, “Check this guy out and get me the records from...” He glanced at Kari. “What police department’d have his file?”

She said angrily, “That’d be departments, Detective. Plural. I’d start with Santa Monica, Los Angeles and the California State Police. Then you might want to talk to Burbank, Beverly Hills, Glendale and Orange County. I moved around a bit to get away from him.”