Michael Prescott - Blind Pursuit

Ringing on the other end of the line.

“Hackett.” The desk sergeant.

“Ed, this is Walker. That woman who phoned me-is she still there?”

“Just left.”

“Send someone after her. Bring her back.”

“Right.”

Walker waited on hold, the fried eggs on the stove beginning to burn.

He was worried. Annie already had done something crazy when she broke into Harold Gund’s apartment. Now, distraught as she was, she might do something still crazier.

Smoke from the frying pan wafted toward the ceiling. It would set off the smoke detector in the hallway before long. He reached across the kitchen, turned off the burner, then picked up the pan and placed it in the sink.

No eggs tonight. Just as well. His doctor had warned him to watch his cholesterol.

Hackett came back on the line. “Sorry, Michael. She’s gone. Whipped out of the visitors’ lot like a smoking fast ball.”

“Okay, Ed. Thanks.”

He thumbed the reset button again. Then stood motionless, staring out the window at the night sky, thinking hard.

A ranch in the desert, Annie had said. Southeast of town.

If Gund had bought the place, a record of the purchase would be kept at the county tax assessor’s office.

The office was closed for the night. But Walker had a friend who worked there. A friend who owed him for some hard-to-get playoff tickets to a Phoenix Suns game a few years ago, tickets obtained from a former Tucson cop, now part of America West Arena’s security detail.

It would take his friend less than a half hour to drive to the office and find the file, if it existed.

Probably unnecessary. Probably Erin Reilly had left of her own volition, as her letter had stated. Probably Annie was imagining the worst, and this Harold Gund was just a lonely man infatuated with his attractive boss. Probably.

“Oh, hell,” Walker whispered.

He dialed his friend’s home number and called in the favor.

Gund, driving fast on Interstate 10, heading southeast.

He would keep going until he crossed the state border into New Mexico. In Las Cruces he could ditch the van and steal a car. Afterward, he would get off the main highway and take the back roads. In Dallas or Houston, he would buy new ID.

Did he have money? None. He’d packed nothing, taken nothing. Panic must have chased all practicalities from his brain.

It didn’t matter. Along the way he would steal whatever he needed.

His grip on the steering wheel tightened. He pushed the speedometer needle to eighty as the concrete miles blurred past.

The engine throbbed, and his head throbbed with it. But at least the tingling of his fingers had faded, as had the unnatural heat at the back of his neck and the distant, unreal chiming in his ears. Those symptoms had vanished sometime during his search of his apartment. He had no idea why.

He wondered how much time he’d wasted in that search, exploring every possible place of concealment, the pistol shaking in his hand. Hatred and humiliation had made him sloppy, the search feverish and inefficient. Frequently he found himself checking the same closet or cubbyhole for the third or fourth time.

Finally he understood that she was gone, had been gone for many minutes, and worse-that she must have driven directly to the police.

She would talk to the detective who’d looked into Erin’s disappearance. The man would believe her this time. He would want to ask Gund some questions. Might already be on his way over.

Fear seized him. He ran from his apartment, not looking back, then got on the interstate and floored the gas pedal, barreling past semi trucks and sticker-festooned campers traveling at sixty-five.

Now he was beyond city limits, coming up on the Valencia Road exit, passing it, with Wilmot Road two miles ahead.

Soon he would leave the Tucson area behind. Christ, he never should have come here in the first place. Never.

“Never,” he murmured under his breath. Distantly he noted how peculiar the word sounded, slurred and indistinct, as if he had been drinking, or as if he were mumbling in his sleep.

The thought skipped lightly along the margin of his awareness, leaving him before he could quite grasp it. Unimportant anyway. What was important was to keep driving, get the hell out of here, never come back.

Shouldn’t have left Wisconsin. Things had been all right there. He had been safe there. Safe and empty inside.

For twenty years he’d worked as a janitor at the university, the lonely monotony of his life interrupted only by the periodic need to kill and the anguish afterward.

Perhaps he could have continued that way for another twenty years

… if he hadn’t seen the article.

It was a scholarly monograph on fire setters, appearing in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Some professor had left the slim, glossy publication on a coffee table in the psychology department’s faculty lounge. Gund found it while cleaning up on a winter night in 1992, a few months after the third woman, Deborah Collins, had burned.

The title, printed on the cover, hooked his attention at once. “Fire as Rage: Pyromania and the Antisocial Personality.”

Below it, the byline: Erin Reilly, Ph. D.

Erin Reilly.

A biographical note appended to Erin’s article said she’d recently established a private practice in Tucson.

After that, he checked each new issue of every psychology publication as it had come in. Over the past four years he found several other articles by Erin. All concerned the same issue-fire as a weapon, fire as an instrument of rage.

He wasn’t sure exactly when it occurred to him that she could treat his problem. At first he dismissed the idea; in order to undergo therapy, he first would have to confess, and there had never been any chance he would do that.

Then, last year, the possibility of kidnapping her entered his mind for the first time. The plan exercised a peculiar hold on his imagination. He couldn’t shake free of it. He found himself rehearsing it mentally, examining his strategy for imperfections, revising it again and again.

Last October he quit his job at the university. He sold his ancient station wagon and replaced it with a used Chevy Astro. Packed his few belongings into a U-Haul trailer, hitched it to the van, and drove to Arizona.

Money was not a problem for him. In his twenty years of custodial work, he had saved nearly all of what he’d earned, spending next to nothing for the studio apartment he rented. The surplus accumulated week after week, month after month, in a simple savings account. The total was $126,295.32 at the time of his departure.

He had not been putting away a nest egg for his retirement; he merely had never found any use for money. His plan gave him a conscious purpose for the first time in his life.

Erin advertised her practice in the Tucson Yellow Pages. The day after his arrival, Gund watched the office complex where she worked until she emerged at noon.

He recognized her immediately-her red hair was still the same-but the sight of her slender, long-legged figure startled him. At some level he hadn’t quite accepted the fact that she was an adult now.

She got into her Ford Taurus and drove to a restaurant downtown. At the restaurant she met Annie.

The two of them, together. Dining on a sunny veranda. Through binoculars he studied them.

Beautiful. Both so very beautiful.

After lunch, the women separated with a hug. Gund tailed Annie to her flower shop, where he caught sight of a sign in the window: HELP WANTED.

It had been crazy to apply for the job. If she’d recognized him as Oliver… or if she simply had checked out his phony story about a mix-up at the University of Arizona that had cost him a promised custodial position…