John Lutz - Pulse

“Then he and I really should talk.”

“You’ll be doing most of the talking,” Linda said. “But if that’s the way you feel about it, okay.”

Grace was slightly surprised by Linda’s acquiescence. And pleased. It might mean she was ready to face up to what, on a basic level, she knew wasn’t actually real. This might lead to what the TV psychoanalysts called a breakthrough. She looked at her watch. Ten minutes to eleven.

“I don’t have another appointment until two o’clock,” she said, standing up from her chair. She smiled reassuringly at Linda. “Let’s go.”

Linda braced herself with both hands on her chair arms, levered herself to her feet, and smiled back.

“Just sit for a minute in the anteroom while I shut things down here in the office, and I’ll be right with you.”

Linda went out and settled into a comfortable chair, and the doctor didn’t take long at all.

Linda led the way out of the office and down the hall to the elevator. Already she was acting as the hostess, and would in subtle ways be in charge of this visit.

Dr. Moore considered that a good thing.

“If you don’t mind,” Dr. Moore said, “I’d like to drop by my apartment first and get out of these high heels; I’ve got a blister and they’re killing me.”

“I hear you on that one,” Linda said.

“There are two messages for you,” Pearl said, when Quinn returned to the office from lunch. “Both from women who think someone’s following them.”

“We’ve had more than a few calls like that,” Quinn said.

“Since the media have made you the big hero and serial killer hunter.”

Quinn made a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh.

He ambled over and lowered his large self into his desk chair hard enough to make the cushion hiss. Pearl wondered if he’d been “lunching” with Jerry Lido. “Either of these calls sound like the real thing?” he asked, already sure of the answer.

Pearl shrugged. “One didn’t make much sense, or maybe I couldn’t understand the caller because of her accent. The other seemed okay at first, then she asked that no one contact her doctor to let her know she’d called.”

“She say what kind of doctor?”

“She didn’t have to.”

Quinn punched a button on his desk phone and listened to both messages. The first was in a high-pitched voice speaking in what sounded like some kind of middle European accent he couldn’t begin to understand.

The second caller was understandable, a woman speaking with what sounded like deliberate and fragile calm, explaining how the same man had been following her, how sometimes he let himself into her apartment. She then said that she didn’t want her doctor to know yet that she was going outside the rules, calling someone who might believe and help her. Her doctor, the woman said, didn’t think the man was real. Then she explained that it was true that he wasn’t real all the time, but only sometimes.

Neither woman left a name, but the voice of one was familiar.

Quinn sat for a moment mulling over the calls. He’d received dozens like them over the past several weeks. There was something about the second woman, something in her voice that signaled real if sublime fear. Perhaps she had mental problems, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be a potential victim.

And the woman with the accent? How could he judge if he couldn’t understand her?

He looked at caller ID. The first number was that of a large insurance firm with a Midtown office. He called there and talked to three people who had no idea of the identity of a woman with a heavy European accent who might be trying to contact him.

The second number displayed no name but had a Manhattan prefix. He called it and got no answer and no invitation to leave a message.

After hanging up, Quinn stared at the phone, then dug through the note papers beneath a paperweight on his desk. The second caller’s number was that of Linda Brooks, with a West Side address.

Linda Brooks, the woman who’d approached him in the office because she thought someone might be following her. The one who was under analysis.

She’d also left her doctor’s name and address.

Quinn jotted down the information on a piece of scratch paper and tucked it into his wallet with similar folded slips of paper.

He wasn’t quite sure why, considering how many women like Linda Brooks there were in the city. Seldom were their monsters real.

Real enough to them, however. He felt a pang of pity for Linda Brooks. Started to reach again for the phone.

But she hadn’t wanted him to call her analyst. About that she’d been specific.

Yet she wouldn’t answer her phone. And who was to say she needed more help than the woman with the European accent who’d called? Or any of the other troubled and frightened women, most of whom weren’t in any actual danger?

Quinn wished he could help them all, the fearful and delusional, but he couldn’t except in general ways. Like trying to stop a very real killer.

He turned his mind to his job.

I t had taken only fifteen minutes for Dr. Grace Moore and Linda to cab from Grace’s apartment to Linda’s. Grace had changed into more comfortable shoes, and left the thumb drive video of her session with Linda with her other home files.

The phone was ringing inside Linda’s apartment, but it stopped just as the two women got to the door.

“Do you have an answering machine?” Grace asked.

“Not anymore. It talked to me sometimes when it shouldn’t have.”

Linda unlocked and opened the door but stood back, allowing Dr. Moore to enter first. Grace did just that, smoothly and confidently. She took in the apartment with a glance: neat, neutral furniture that was carefully arranged, a small flat-screen TV resting on what looked like an antique table, hardwood floors that were scratched and dented but glossy with a recent coat of wax, a bookcase stuffed with books and stacks of magazines (so Linda was a reader), and a window with half-lowered white blinds. A lineup of small, potted geraniums spanned the marble sill.

“I bought those yesterday,” Linda explained, noticing the geraniums had caught Grace’s attention. “Now nobody can climb in through the windows without disturbing my flowerpots.”

Grace simply nodded, thinking the flowerpots didn’t provide much security.

Linda was only halfway into the apartment, as if she was still considering staying out in the hall. Grace gripped her gently but firmly by the arm and guided her the rest of the way in. She could feel tremors running through Linda’s body.

“Why are you so nervous? You’re home. I’m here.”

“And he’s here,” Linda said.

“The reason I’m here,” Grace said, “is to demonstrate to you that he isn’t.”

“Hah!”

“So how does he get in?”

“Obviously, he has a key.”

Grace almost smiled. “Tell me, Linda, is this person part of the secret government organization you mentioned during our last session?”

“Oh, no. He’s on his own. I’d know it if he was with the government.”

“How?”

“He’d be dressed differently, for one.”

“Like the government agents you see on TV or at the movies?”

“I don’t go to the movies very often. That stuff isn’t real.” A click and a low, soft humming made Linda’s body jerk.

“That’s only the refrigerator,” Grace told her.

“So maybe he’s getting something from it. A glass of milk.”

“Has he done that before?”

“Of course. He’s left the glass out where I could see it, with just a little milk left in it. I know why he does stuff like that, so it creeps me out. He wants me to hope he goes ahead and does whatever he’s planning, wants me to give up and put my fate in his hands. Work with him.”