Michael Prescott - Next Victim

October 16: I ADMIRE YOU FROM AFAR, SPECIAL AGENT.

December 3: DO YOU THINK ABOUT ME AT NIGHT, AGENT McCALLUM?

January 22: I KNOW YOU’RE AFRAID OF ME, TESS McCALLUM. YOU SHOULD BE.

February 8: YOU’RE GETTING IN DEEP, TESS-UP TO YOUR NECK.

By that time, she felt sure he’d become interested in her as a potential victim. It turned him on to know that a woman was after him. Her picture had been in the media, and he surely knew what she looked like. If he had begun to fantasize about her, his thoughts would have moved inevitably toward the culmination of the encounter-the duct tape, the knife.

After the second postcard, she’d been told he might try to reach her by phone. A tap-and-trace had been installed on her home and office phone lines, and psychological profilers had given her advice on how to handle the conversation.

But she’d had no opportunity to use any of the tricks she’d learned. He had never called. And after the fifth postcard, he had not written to her again. He had killed three women by that time. And on February 12, he had struck once more. He had killed Paul.

After that, Mobius had gotten at least part of what he wanted-the complete attention of the federal government. RAVENKIL had become a federal case. The murder of a federal officer was a federal crime. The law required that the homicide be committed as a direct result of the officer’s performance of official duties, a stipulation that was difficult to meet-but since Paul had provided some of his expertise as a profiler in the Mobius case, the statute’s requirements were deemed to have been satisfied. Everyone knew that Paul Voorhees had not been the intended target, of course. Everyone knew it was Tess who was supposed to be dead.

Still, this legalistic sleight of hand had been enough to put the bureau front and center in the investigation. Not Tess, however. She had been placed on bereavement leave, forced to undergo counseling, and told she was too personally involved in the case to be permitted an investigatory role. For two years she had worked other cases in Denver.

And as for Mobius, he had simply…stopped.

No more killings. For twenty-five months he had lain dormant, like a deadly cocooned insect.

In some ways, his silence was more maddening than his communications had been. Part of her needed to know that he was still thinking of her. To have invaded his thoughts was small revenge, but better than nothing. Possibly she’d cost him a few sleepless nights.

Now he had resurfaced in LA. Maybe Denver was too small for him, and he yearned for the big time. He might have come to California for the same reason so many others did: to be a star.

There was no way to know. He had revealed nothing of himself, except a compulsion to kill women and the name he had chosen for himself.

Mobius. Possibly a reference to the so-called Mobius strip-an endless loop formed by giving a strip of paper a single twist before attaching the two ends. The result was a one-sided surface without a break. It was a concept that would be familiar to someone trained in mathematics or engineering. But what did it mean? Was it his way of saying that the murders were an unending chain, that he would go on killing indefinitely? The nickname could be a boast or a taunt. Anything was possible. His psyche was a black hole from which no light could escape.

And now he was making contact again.

She took a breath, then called Andrus. She knew he always kept his cell phone on his person or near him. He had told her to call at any hour if there was a new development in the case.

The phone on his end rang four times before a sleepy voice answered. "Andrus."

"It’s Tess."

"What’s happened?" He sounded instantly alert.

"Another postcard."

"Christ. Did he send it to your motel room?"

"No, my home address. It was forwarded."

"Let me get my pen. Okay, give it to me."

She repeated the message.

"I’ll send a courier to pick it up," Andrus said. "We’ll run it through the lab tonight."

"It won’t accomplish anything. You know he wears gloves. Doesn’t even lick the stamps. Uses the self-adhesive kind."

"Maybe this time he slipped up."

"Fat chance. He’s not making any mistakes, Gerry. Just the opposite. You heard what he wrote. He knows we’re running undercover ops. He’s not falling for it."

"You got all that out of two sentences?"

"Yeah, I did. That’s what he means by being stupidly predictable. He’s saying he knows we’re trying to bait him by laying traps on Melrose. And he’s not going back there. He’ll strike somewhere else next time."

"You could be right." She heard the creak of mattress springs as Andrus shifted his position in bed. "Wait a second. You said the card went to your home address."

"Right." She had moved after Paul’s death. She had thought Mobius couldn’t find her again. "How the hell could he track me down?"

"We both know an unlisted address doesn’t mean anything these days. Anybody can obtain that info on the Web. There’s no privacy anymore. No safety-for anyone." Andrus was silent for a moment, then added, "You can’t go back there."

"Yes, I can."

"Not if he knows- "

"You don’t understand, Gerry. I can go back-because when I do, Mobius will be in prison."

Or dead, she added to herself.

Andrus sighed. "I take your point. You know, he may also be aware that you’re in LA. He might even be watching the Federal Building. He could have seen you come and go."

"We have anybody scoping out the street?"

"We will, as of tomorrow. In the meantime, you’d better change motels as a precaution."

"Let’s not get paranoid."

"If he was scoping out the Federal Building and saw you leave, he could have followed you to your motel."

"I hope so. I hope he tries something. I really do, Gerry."

"I don’t want you being a cowboy on this thing, Tess. Cowgirl. Whatever."

"Hey, I’m just your average civil servant doing her job. And if I happen to get the opportunity to blow this bastard’s head off-well, that’s one of the perks of federal employment."

"We’ll talk about it in the morning. The courier will be there in twenty minutes. Once you’ve handed over the document, try to get some rest."

She couldn’t argue with that advice. She told him good night and heard the click on the other end of the line.

Then she was alone in the room, without the illusion of companionship Andrus’s voice had provided.

Really alone.

Do you think about me at night, Agent McCallum? Mobius had written.

"Yes," she whispered. "I think of you. And you think of me, don’t you, you son of a bitch?"

Amanda Pierce had vanished, but Jack Tennant was not giving up. He intended to find the bitch.

His only lead was the words recorded in Pierce’s phone conversation-"meet you at the hotel." He had to assume the meeting would take place somewhere in LA. But LA was a big town, with lots of hotels.

"So what do we do?" Dante had asked after the debacle at the Century Plaza. "Visit every hotel in the city? There’s not enough shoe leather in the world for that detail."

"We don’t need shoe leather," Tennant had said. "We need a fax machine."

He set up shop in a squad room at the Westwood field office, nearly deserted at this hour. The squad blast-faxed Pierce’s driver’s-license photo to every hotel in town, along with a bulletin alerting the recipients that the woman was armed and dangerous.

"With luck, somebody will have noticed her," Tennant said.

"We haven’t been lucky so far," Bickerstaff observed with a sigh.

"That’s why we’re due for a break."

At three A.M. they got a call from a desk clerk at the MiraMist Hotel in Santa Monica. "Yeah, I saw her. Gets kinda boring on the night shift. I remember checking her out."