Jeffery Deaver - XO

Crystal Stanning asked, “But what’s his motive for killing Bobby Prescott-if he’s the one who did?”

Dance said, “That’s a good question, Detective. It’s the one thing that doesn’t quite fit. Erotomanic and love obsessional stalkers are the least dangerous, statistically much less so than domestic stalkers. But they can certainly kill.”

Madigan added, “I think we should remember too that Bobby could just have been at the wrong place at the wrong time. If that song was an announcement it was just about the concert hall. Maybe had nothing to do with Bobby. The perp might just’ve been waiting for anybody to show up.”

“Good point, yes,” Dance said. “But what we should do is look into Bobby’s life a little more, see what he was up to, anything illegal, for instance.”

“He wasn’t,” Kayleigh said firmly. “He had a problem a few years ago, drugs and drinking, but he was clean recently.”

Skepticism is part of being an officer but Dance wasn’t going to contest the girl. It was important to her to preserve the memory of her friend and they could learn independently if Bobby had been engaged in any risky activity. From the comments by his neighbor, Tabatha, it seemed that he wasn’t.

“But that doesn’t mean somebody still wouldn’t want him dead,” Dance said. “And we have to remember some intruder-likely the killer-took some things from his trailer the morning after he was killed.”

“I could look into his personal life, his background,” Harutyun offered in his low, easy voice, silken mustache bobbing.

Dance glanced at Madigan, who nodded his agreement. “Dennis’s our librarian. Mean that in a good way. He does his homework. He knew what Google was when I thought it was a character on the Cartoon Network.”

“Good.”

“Can’t you interrogate him?” Alicia asked Dance, who didn’t offer that the first interview had not been particularly successful.

“Possibly. But I’m not sure how helpful it would be.”

In her lectures, Dance talked about the difficulty of kinesically analyzing suspects like Edwin: People on the borderline of psychosis, like stalkers, might tell you facts that can be helpful in running a case and can lead to your uncovering their deception. But such people are often impossible to analyze kinesically. They don’t feel any stress when lying-because their goal of getting close to the object of their obsession trumps everything.

She explained this now and added that they also had no leverage to bring him in.

Alicia grimaced in frustration, then asked, “Isn’t there a stalking law here?”

“That’s right-California’s was first in the country,” Madigan said.

Dance paraphrased the statute: “You’re guilty of stalking if you willfully, maliciously and repeatedly follow or harass the victim and make a credible threat with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of the immediate family.” She added, “It doesn’t have a lot of teeth, though. Some jail time and a fine.”

“Well, it’s something; arrest him anyway,” Kayleigh said.

“It may not be that easy. Tell me about his stalking.”

“I mean, my lawyers’d know more, I left it pretty much up to them. But I know he sent me about a hundred and fifty emails and thirty or so regular letters. He’d ask me out, hint about a life together, write about what he’d done that day.”

Not nearly as bad as some, Dance noted.

“And he sent me some presents. Pictures he’d drawn, miniature instruments, old LPs. We sent everything back.”

“You said he showed up at concerts but you never saw him.”

“Right.”

Lopez asked, “Disguises, maybe?”

“Could be,” Dance said. “Stalkers have a whole arsenal they use to get close to their objects and keep them under control. They steal mail to find out who the victims know and where they might be. They threaten witnesses into lying that they’ve never been around the victims’ houses. They get to be good at hacking phones and computers and some even go to locksmith school to learn how to break and enter. These’re really desperate people. Their whole worth is tied up in their love for their object; they’re nothing without that person in their life.”

Alicia said, “We threatened him with restraining orders and everything but… he just ignored the letters and the lawyers said he was never quite across the line of legality.”

“They talked to the FBI about hacking into our computers,” Kayleigh said, “and hired a private computer security firm. But there was never any proof he did it.”

Madigan then asked the key question, “In all those letters was there any threat at all? Under the statute there has to be a credible threat.”

“Isn’t Bobby’s death enough of a threat?” Alicia asked harshly.

“We don’t have proof he did it,” Harutyun said.

“Please. Of course he did.”

Dance continued, “When we’re talking about an arrest for stalking under the statute, Detective Madigan is right; you need a threat against you or a family member. It can be implied, but if that’s the case there has to be a reasonable belief that you’re actually in danger of harm.”

“Not, you know, mental or psychic harm?” Crystal Stanning asked.

“No. Physical.”

Kayleigh was staring at a poster, a cartoon of a police officer and a contrite teenage boy.

SCHOOL PATROL DETAIL: IF IT’S ONLY POT, TALK TO THEM… A LOT.

She turned back and reluctantly said, “No, no threats. It’s just the opposite, really. He was always telling me how he wanted to protect me. How he’d be there for me-just like in that song, ‘Your Shadow.’”

It was then that Dance’s phone sang out with an incoming message. It was from TJ Scanlon. She read quickly then looked up.

“You want to hear a bio of our stalker?”

But the question, of course, needed no answer.

DENNIS HARUTYUN HELPED Dance log on to her email from a terminal in the corner of the room and she printed out TJ’s document.

Scanning, disappointed.

“There isn’t much, I’m afraid.” Edwin Stanton Sharp had been born in Yakima, a town in eastern Washington state. His father was a traveling salesman, his mother worked in retail. “To judge from her income, she must have had several jobs. This could mean that the boy spent a lot of time alone. Psychologists think stalking begins from attachment issues. He was desperate to spend time with his parents, mother particularly, but she wasn’t available.”

“Now, his grades were very good. But he was held back a year in the seventh grade, which is pretty old for that, and his marks weren’t too bad so that suggests emotional problems in school. But there’s no record of disciplinary action, other than for a few fights on the school yard. No weapons were involved. He also had no extracurricular activities, no sports, no clubs.

“When he was sixteen his parents split up and he went to live with his mother outside of Seattle. He went to the University of Washington for two years. Again, he did fairly well. But for some reason he dropped out just after the start of his third year. No record of why. Again, no interest in other activities. That too is typical-stalking takes a lot of time. He started working at jobs stalkers sometimes gravitate toward: security guard, landscaping, part-time retail sales, offering samples of food at grocery stores, door-to-door selling. They’re good professions for those with voyeuristic or stalking tendencies because you get to see a lot of people and are largely unsupervised. And invisible.”

“Good ponds for fishin’,” Madigan said.

Well put, Dance reflected.