Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

“Are you... Who are you?” Loesser stammered.

She gave a faint smile. “It’s me, Kari.”

“But... I don’t understand.”

She gave a contemptuous glance at Dale, still lying on the pier, and said to Loesser, “When he followed me to Crowell I finally realized what had to happen: One of us had to die... and I picked me.”

“You?”

She nodded. “I killed the person he was obsessed with: Kari the supermodel.” Looking out to sea, breathing deeply, she continued. “Last year, down in the Caribbean, I met this plastic surgeon. His office was in Manhattan but he also ran a free clinic in Haiti, where he was born. He’d rebuild the faces of locals injured in accidents.” She laughed. “He was trying to pick me up, of course, joking that if I ever needed a plastic surgeon, give him a call. But he wasn’t obnoxious and I liked the volunteer work he did. We hit it off. When I decided last month I had to do something about Dale I called him. I figured if he could make really deformed people look normal, he could make a beautiful person look normal too. I met with him in New York. He didn’t want to do the operation at first but I gave him a hundred thousand for his clinic. That changed his mind.”

Loesser studied her closely. She wasn’t ugly. She simply looked average — like any of ten million women you’d meet on the street and not glance at twice.

David Dale’s terrible moaning rose up over the sound of the wind, not from physical pain but from horror — that the beauty that had obsessed him was now gone. “No, no, no...”

Kari asked Loesser, “Can you take these things off me?” Holding up the cuffs.

Harper unhooked them.

As Kari pulled her coat tighter around her a mad voice suddenly filled the air, rising above the sound of the waves. “How could you?” Dale cried, rising to his knees. “How could you do this to me?”

Kari crouched in front of him. “To you ?” she raged. “What I look like, who I am, the life I lead... those don’t have a goddamn thing to do with you and they never did!” She gripped his head in both hands and tried to turn it toward her. “Look at me.”

“No.” He struggled to keep his face averted.

“Look at me!”

Finally he did.

“Do you love me now, David?” she asked with a cold smile on her new face.

He scrabbled away in revulsion and began to run back toward the street. He stumbled then picked himself up and continued to sprint away from the pier.

Kari Swanson rose and shouted after him, “Do you love me, David? Do you love me now? Do you? Do you?”

“Hey, Cath,” the man said, surveying the grocery cart she was pushing.

“What?” she asked. The plastic surgery had officially laid “Kari” to rest and she was now accepting only variations on Catherine.

“I think we’re missing something,” Carl replied with exaggerated gravity.

“What?”

“Junk food,” he answered.

“Oh, no.” She too frowned in mock alarm as she examined the cart. Then she suggested, “Nachos’d solve the problem.”

“Ah. Good choice. Back in a minute.” Carl — a man with an easy temperament and an endless supply of bulky fisherman’s sweaters — ambled off down the snack food aisle. He was a late bloomer, a second-career lawyer who was exactly five years older and two inches taller than Cathy. He’d picked her up in the annual Crowell St. Patrick’s Day festival ten days ago and they’d spent a half dozen delightful afternoons and evenings together, doing absolutely nothing.

Was there a future between them? Cathy had no idea. They certainly enjoyed each other’s company but Carl had yet to spend the night. And he still hadn’t given her the skinny on his ex-wife.

Both of which were, of course, vital benchmarks in the life of a relationship.

But there was no hurry. Catherine Swanson wasn’t looking for a man. Her life was a comfortable mélange of teaching high school history, jogging along the rocky Massachusetts shore, working on her master’s at BU and spending time with a marvelous therapist, who was helping her forget David Dale — she hadn’t heard anything from the stalker in the past six months.

She moved forward in the checkout line, trying to remember if she had charcoal for the grill. She thought—

“Say, miss, excuse me,” mumbled a man’s low voice behind her. She recognized his intonation immediately — the edgy, intimate sound of obsession.

Gasping, Cathy spun around to see a young man in a trench coat and a stocking cap. Instantly she thought of the hundreds of strangers who had relentlessly pursued her on the street, in restaurants and in checkout lines just like this one. Her palms began to sweat. Her heart started pounding fiercely, jaw trembling. Her mouth opened but she couldn’t speak.

But then Cathy saw that the man wasn’t looking at her at all. His eyes were fixed on the magazine rack next to the cash register. He muttered, “That Entertainment Weekly there? Could you hand it to me?”

She passed him the magazine. Without thanking her, he flipped quickly to an article inside. Cathy couldn’t tell what the story was about, only that it featured three or four cheesecakey pictures of some young, brunette woman, which he stared at intently.

Cathy slowly forced herself to be calm. Then, suddenly, her shaking hands rose to her mouth and she began laughing out loud. The man looked up once from the pictures of his dream girl then returned to his magazine, not the least curious about this tall, plain woman and what she found so funny. Cathy wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes, turned back to the cart and began loading her groceries onto the belt.

The headlights lit the sensuous sweep of the road ahead of her.

Cruising through the dark pines, swaying left right, left right. A damp evening, a cold spring. Her Lexus strayed slightly over the centerline of the wet asphalt and she wondered whether she’d had two martinis with Don or three.

Only two, she decided, and sped up.

She drove this same road, from her job in New Hampshire to her home just over the Massachusetts border, every weekday night — and every night she thought the same thing on this stretch of Route 28: sensuous curves.

Like the cliché of a sign two miles back: Soft Shoulder.

A lot of nights — slightly drunk, listening to Michael Bolton on the radio — she’d laugh at those words on the yellow diamond. Tonight she was somber.

Twelve miles from home.

Carolyn eased her stockinged foot off the gas. Her white Ferragamo spike heels rested on the seat next to her (she often drove barefoot, less for control than to avoid scuffing). Then she piloted the car through the final set of, yes, sensuous curves that led to the minuscule town of Dunning.

The gas station, the general store, a propane company, an old motel, a liquor store and an antique shop in which she’d never — in the five years of commuting to and from the hospital — seen anyone buy a single thing.

She slowed to thirty at the rusted harvester, which is where the avid young cops of Dunning caught their speeders and tormented anybody driving a vehicle nicer than a Buick. She stopped here every night on the way home from work — buying gas and a large coffee — but the service station attendants never seemed to notice that she was a regular.

As she climbed out of the car she saw another customer, a man with a rough face and a five o’clock shadow, leaning against his car, talking on a cell phone. He nodded unhappily; whoever was speaking on the other end of the line was delivering bad news.

Carolyn slipped the nozzle into her gas tank and set the catch on the handle. She stood up, felt a chill. She was wearing her beige Evan Picone suit, low cut, no blouse, and a short skirt. With some satisfaction she noticed the customer’s eyes lift from the asphalt and scan her body. Even though there was something crude about him — the craggy face, the meaty hands — he was dressed well. A smooth gray suit and a dark trench coat with lots of flaps. His car was a Lincoln, golden brown. It cost, she figured, about the same as hers. She approved of men in expensive cars.