John Katzenbach - The Wrong Man

Scott let his daughter fully vent before answering. This was a quality left over from her childhood, when early on he’d learned that letting Ashley bluster and complain would settle her down, and that ultimately she would listen if not to reason, then at least to something close to it. A father’s trick.

“He doesn’t have the right. He just has the ability. So, let’s try to make some moves that he won’t anticipate. And, first among these, is getting you away from him.”

Again, Scott could sense Ashley measuring things on the other end of the phone. He had little idea that much of what he’d said had already occurred to her. Still, what he was suggesting seemed to discourage her, and Ashley found her eyes welling with tears. Nothing was fair. When she did speak, it was with resignation.

“All right, Dad. Time for Ashley to vanish.”

“So, they hired a private investigator?”

“Yes. An extremely competent and well-trained fellow.”

“That makes sense. It also seems like the sort of reasonable thing that any modestly well-educated and financially sturdy couple would arrange. Like bringing in an expert. I should go speak with him. He must have prepared some sort of report for Sally. That’s what private investigators always end up doing. It must be available, somewhere.”

“Yes. You are correct about that,” she said. “There was a report. An initial one. I have the copy that was sent to Sally.”

“Well?”

“Why don’t you try to speak with Matthew Murphy first. And then, afterwards, I’ll give it to you, should you think you still need it.”

“You could save me some trouble here.”

“Perhaps,” she replied. “I’m not sure that saving you time and effort is precisely my task in this process. And, equally, I think visiting the private investigator will be…how shall I put it? An education.”

She smiled, but humorlessly, and I had the distinct impression that she was teasing me with something. I stood up to leave, shrugging my shoulders. She sighed, seeing the discouraged look I had on my face.

“Sometimes, it’s about impressions,” she said abruptly. “You learn something, you hear something, you see something, and it leaves an imprint on your imagination. Eventually, that is what happens to Scott and Sally and Hope and Ashley, as well. A series of events, or moments of time, all taken together accumulate into a fully formed vision of what their future might be. Go see the private detective,” she said with a brisk tone. “It will add immeasurably to your understanding. And then, if you think it necessary, I’ll give you his report.”

The more Scott read, the more terrified he became.

Immediately the following morning, after the less-than-satisfactory meeting with Sally and Hope, like any proper academician he had immersed himself in a study of the phenomenon represented by Michael O’Connell. Descending upon his local library, he started researching compulsive and obsessive behaviors. Books, magazines, and newspapers crowded his desk in a corner of the reading room. An oppressive, heavy quiet filled the space, and Scott suddenly felt that he could barely breathe.

He looked up in near panic, his heart moving quickly as if it were close to bursting.

What he had absorbed that morning was a litany of despair.

Death had surrounded him. Over and over, he had read about this woman here, and that woman there, young, middle-aged, even elderly, who had been the object of some man’s driven obsession. They had all suffered. Most had been killed. Even the survivors had been crippled.

It seemed to make no difference where the women were located. North or South, in the United States or abroad. Some were young, students like Ashley. Others were older. Rich, poor, educated, or impoverished, it was all irrelevant. Some had once been married to their stalkers. Some had been coworkers. Some had been classmates. Some had been lovers. All had tried all sorts of techniques, had turned to the law, turned to their families, friends, any possible source of help, to try to extricate themselves from the unwanted, relentlessly obsessive attention. He read undaunted desire.

All had found it useless to seek help.

They were shot, stabbed, beaten. Some managed to live. Many did not.

Sometimes children died alongside them. Sometimes coworkers or neighbors died, the collateral damage of rage.

Scott reeled under the onslaught of information. It made him dizzy as he began to see the trap Ashley was in. On page after page, in every book and article, the single common denominator was love.

Of course, he understood, it wasn’t real love. It was something wildly perverse, emanating from the darkest part of a man’s imagination and heart. It was something that deserved a spot in forensic psychiatric texts, not Hallmark cards. But the sort of love that he read about seemed to have found a foothold in each case, and this scared him even more.

Scott started to grab book after book filled with story after story, and tragedy after tragedy, searching for the one that would tell him what to do. His eyes raced over the words; he flipped pages in rapid succession, haphazardly tossing one book down and seizing another, driven by mounting anxiety, all the time searching for the one that would tell him the answer. As a historian, an academic, he believed that the answer was written somewhere, a paragraph on some page. He lived in a world of reason, of structured argument. Something in his world had to be able to help.

The more he insisted this to himself, the more he knew how fruitless his search was destined to be.

Scott rose, pushing back so hard from the desk that the heavy oaken library chair crashed back on the floor, sending a noise like a shot through the quiet space. He could suddenly feel the eyes of everyone in the room burning into his back, but he stumbled away from the table, as if he’d been wounded, dizzy, clutching at his chest. In that moment all he could do was panic. He gestured wildly at all the research, his throat closing, turned, abandoning all the papers. He ran, right through the card catalogs, past the reference desk and the librarians who watched him, shocked, never having seen a man thrust into so much fear by the printed word. One tried to call after him, but Scott could hear nothing as he burst out beneath an overcast sky, the air less chilled than his heart, knowing only that he had to get Ashley out of the path she was on, and do it quickly. He had no idea precisely how to achieve this, but he knew he had to act, and as fast as he could.

Sally, too, started that day filled with decisions she thought were eminently reasonable.

It seemed to her that the first order of business was to really measure what sort of individual her daughter had brought into their lives. That he was clever with a computer and had tampered with each of their lives seemed clear. She dismissed the instinct to take all the bits and pieces of information to the police, mostly because she wasn’t yet sure that they would do any more than hear her complaint, and because she might jeopardize the integrity of her lawyer-client relations by doing so. Involving the police, she thought, would be a poor idea, right then.

What troubled her was that O’Connell, assuming he had pulled these things off, which she wasn’t 100 percent sure was true, seemed to have an instinct for subtlety that was dangerous. He seemed to know how to hurt someone in ways that weren’t defined by a blow or a gunshot, but by something more elusive, and this scared her. That he knew how to make their lives miserable was a danger that truly made her pause.

Still, she reminded herself, O’Connell wasn’t really their match.