MIchael Prescott - The Shadow hunter

He had met her during a visit to KPTI, months ago.

He had flirted, she'd responded. He was incapable of resisting temptation. Sometimes he told himself that Kris must have been familiar with his weakness, and if she had chosen to marry him anyway, she had known what was she getting into. As a rationalization it was not much good, but it was the best he could do.

The truth was that he had loved Kris once, but the feeling had ebbed.

He supposed she'd been right when she said that for him, a woman's novelty wore off and she became another discarded toy. But there were always more toys to be bought if a man had the money… and if his previous possessions didn't weigh him down.

"She suspects, you know," Amanda said from the bathroom.

Howard, who had been hunting for his shoes amid the tangled bedspread on the floor, looked up in bewilderment.

"What did you say?"

"She thinks you may be having an affair. She told me so."

The world seemed to freeze around him, or maybe it was simply that his breath froze in his chest.

"When?"

"Yesterday. It was True Confessions time, at least for her." Amanda smirked, then turned grave.

"I shouldn't find it funny. After all, she is my friend in some sense of the word."

She stood nude in the bathroom doorway, hips cocked, arms akimbo. Her collarbone stood out against the pallor of her skin. She was not as pretty as Kris, Howard thought irrelevantly. But she was young.

"Why didn't you tell me before now?" he asked.

An insouciant shrug.

"Slipped my mind."

"Well, what did she say, exactly?"

"She thinks you're fooling around. I promised her a heart-to-heart talk, but I didn't follow through. It would be like a cat playing with a mouse. There might be a certain sadistic pleasure in it, but it's not the sort of entertainment calculated to raise your self-esteem."

"No." His voice was flat.

"I guess not."

"I'm not saying she knows anything for sure. She has a hunch, that's all-feminine intuition or whatever.

Anyway, it's good, isn't it?"

Good. What a word for her to use.

"Is it?"

"It makes it easier for you to tell her about us." A frown pinched her face.

"You are going to tell her, aren't you, Howie?"

"At the appropriate time." He knew it sounded perfunctory, and that she would be angry.

She was.

"I sincerely hope you're not getting the proverbial cold feet. I've taken a serious risk, you know. Your wife has more clout with the station than I do. She's the bionic news babe the six-million-dollar girl. What I'm trying to say is, she could get me canned, and if I don't have anything to fall back on…"

He held up a placating hand.

"You'll have plenty to fall back on. And you won't be fired. It's not going to work out that way."

"So how is it going to work out?"

"For the best." Howard sighed, suddenly tired.

"By the way, you're not the only one who's taken a risk."

"No? What have you ever done, besides show up with a bulge in your trousers?"

"I've done more than you know. More than you need to know. Now where are my goddamned shoes?

I have to get-" Home, he almost said but caught himself.

"I have to get going."

The time was almost ten o'clock, and it would take him an hour to get to Malibu from here. Kris would arrive at the beach house around midnight, and he wanted to be there well before she arrived. It had been awkward the other night, when he had come home later than usual, and she had already been there.

She had asked him questions then-questions about his imaginary drive up the coast, and about how restless and agitated he seemed. Of course she suspected him. It was obvious now, though at the time he hadn't allowed himself to see it.

Well, it didn't matter. It was too late for her, no matter what she suspected. Things were moving quickly to a conclusion, and soon everything would be resolved once and for all.

He found the shoes in one of the dark corners the lamplight couldn't reach. When he bent to slip them on, involuntarily he grunted, an old-man noise. He hated making noises like that.

Amanda was his ticket to youth. Or if not Amanda, then some new companion, younger still and lacking any tattoos.

But not Kris. Kris was the past. Kris was a dead weight dragging him down.

He had to be rid of her. He would be.

Soon.

After Hickle left, Abby opened her bedroom closet.

The VCR and audio deck had been recording continually, but the TV was off, the audio console muted.

She turned on the monitor and speakers, then sat on the floor in a sloppy lotus position, resting her back against the bed, watching the monitor. She saw Hickle pace his living room before fixing a meal in the kitchen. She wondered if eating was a response to stress or if he simply hadn't had enough dinner.

He ate standing in the kitchen, almost out of camera range. When he was done, he left the cookware in the sink and went into the bedroom.

She checked her watch. It was 9:40. Kris's newscast would start in twenty minutes. She assumed he wouldn't miss it.

But he didn't emerge from the bedroom. The surveillance microphone picked up no sounds of activity.

She waited, feeling a new, prickling intimation of trouble.

Another glance at her watch. Nearly ten o'clock. Still no sign of him.

Strange. Ominous. If any part of his daily routine was sacrosanct, it was the ritual of watching Kris at six and ten.

"What's going on, Raymond?" she whispered.

"What are you up to?"

She increased the volume. Dimly she made out a sound, something low and regular and ongoing, hard to identify. A murmur.

Was he running an electric fan? She didn't remember seeing one.

Anyway, this sound had a different quality than a motor noise. It wavered, fluctuated.

She leaned close to the speakers, maxing out the volume, but the noise floor-the ambient hiss that was part of any acoustical environment-rose to a high, steady sizzle, and the murmuring sound was barely more distinct than before.

"He fastened on Kris because she represents his feminine ideal, what he calls the look. She exists in Hickle's mind as a mature, perfected version of Jill Dahlbeck, who was also a blue-eyed blonde. But this time he's chosen a woman unlike Jill in every other respect-a celebrity, married, rich, famous, older than he is. He wants her to be unattainable. He wants to pursue her and fail, because his humiliation will give him the excuse he needs to destroy her and destroy himself ", Supine on the bed, Hickle listened. Pain cramped his belly. Slowly he rolled on his side and contracted into a fetal curl.

"What is Kris Barwood to him, really? She's his fantasy lover, his dream wife, and not to get all Freudian about it, his mother too-an older authority figure who has a home and a husband. She represents all aspects of the female presence in the world, from erotic temptress to domestic companion to nurturing parent.

And she's big enough to play all these roles-larger than life, in fact.

Her face appears on TV sets, billboards, magazine covers. She's everywhere. She is Woman. Lashing out at her, Hickle will strike at the archetype of the other sex, the sex he hates and fears. No vive la difference for him."

Abby's voice, coolly analytical, dissecting him. No, vivisecting. That was when the surgery was performed on a living body. Sometimes it was done without anesthesia-nothing to deaden the pain.

"He has zero concern for Kris as a human being, because to him she's not a human being, only a symbol.

Hickle lives in a world of symbols and images and fantasies, connected to society only through the TV set and People magazine. I guess he's not much different from a lot of us these days, and I might even feel sorry for him if he didn't pose a measurable threat…"