Twisted Page 9

  Barefoot, Kari walked out into the cold drizzle, seized the flowers and tossed them into the trash. Returning to the front porch, she paused under the lantern and tore open the envelope, hoping that maybe Detective Loesser had spoken with Dale and frightened him into leaving. Maybe this was a good-bye message.

  But, of course, this wasn’t the case.

  To my most Beautiful Lover—

  This was a wonderful idea you had, I mean, moving to the east Coast. There were too many people in California vieing (or whatever…ha, you know I’m a bad speller!!!) for your love and attention and it means a lot to me that you wanted them out of your life. And quitting your modeling job so I don’t have to share you with the world any more…You did that ALL for me!!!!

  I know we’ll be happy here.

  I love you always and forever.

  —David

  P.S. Guess what? I FINALLY found that old New York Scene magazine where you modeled those lether skirts. Yes, the one I’ve been looking for for years! Can you believe it!!!! I was so happy! I cut you out and taped you up (so to speak, ha!!!). I have a “Kari” room in my new condo, just like the one in my old place in Glendale (which you never came to visit—boo hoo!!!) but I decided to put these pictures in my bedroom. I got this nice light, it’s very low like candle light and I leave it on all night long. Now I even look forward to having bad dreams so I can wake up and see you.

  Walking inside, she slammed the door and clicked the three deadbolts. Sinking to her knees, she sobbed in fury until she was exhausted and her chest ached. Finally she calmed, caught her breath and wiped her face with her sleeve.

  Kari stared at the pistol for a long moment then put it back in the drawer. She walked into the den and, sitting in a straight-back chair, stared into her windswept backyard. Understanding at last that the only way this nightmare would end was with David Dale’s death or her own.

  She turned to her desk and began rummaging through a large stack of papers.

  The bar on West Forty-second Street was dim and stank of Lysol.

  Even though Kari was dressed down—in sweats, sunglasses and a baseball cap—three of the four patrons and the bartender stared at her in astonishment, one bleary-eyed man offering her a flirty smile that revealed more gum than teeth. The fourth customer snored sloppily at the end of the bar. Everyone, except the snoozer, smoked.

  She ordered a model’s cocktail—Diet Coke with lemon—and sat at a table in the rear of the shabby place.

  Ten minutes later a tall man with ebony skin, a massive chest and huge hands entered the bar. He squinted through the cigarette smoke and made his way to Kari’s table.

  He nodded at her and sat, looking around with distaste at the decrepit bar. He appeared exactly like she’d remembered him from their first meeting. That had been a year ago in the Dominican Republic when she’d been on a photo assignment for Elle and he’d been taking a day off from a project he’d been working on in nearby Haiti. When, after a few drinks, he’d told her his line of work and wondered if she might need anyone with his particular skills, she’d laughed at the absurd thought. Still, David Dale came to mind and she’d taken his phone number.

  “Why didn’t you want to meet at my place?” he now asked her.

  “Because of him,” she said, lowering her voice, as if uttering the pronoun alone could magically summon David Dale like a demon. “He follows me everywhere. I don’t think he knows I came to New York. But I can’t take any chances that he’d find out about you.”

  “Yo,” the bartender’s raspy voice called, “you want something? I mean, we don’t got table service.”

  The man turned to the bartender, who fell silent under his sharp gaze and returned to inventorying the bottles of cheap, well liquor.

  The man across from Kari cleared his throat. With a grave voice he said, “You told me what you wanted but there’s something I have to say. First—”

  Kari held up a hand to stop him. She whispered, “You’re going to tell me it’s risky, you’re going to tell me that it could ruin my life forever, you’re going to tell me to go home and let the police deal with him.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.” He looked into her flinty eyes and when she said nothing more he asked her, “You’re sure you want to handle it this way?”

  Kari pulled a thick white envelope out of her purse and slid it toward him. “There’s the hundred thousand dollars. That’s my answer.”

  The man hesitated then picked up the envelope and put it in his pocket.

  Nearly a month after his meeting with Kari Swanson, Detective Brad Loesser sat in his office and gazed absently at the rain streaming down his windows. He heard a breathless voice from his doorway.

  “We got a problem, Detective,” Sid Harper said.

  “Which is?” Loesser spun around. Problems on a night like this…that’s just great. Whatever it was, he bet he’d have to go outside to deal with it.

  Harper said, “We got a hit on the wiretap.”

  After Kari Swanson had met with him Loesser had had several talks with David Dale, urging—virtually threatening—him to stop harassing the woman. The man had been infuriating. He’d appeared to listen reasonably to the detective but apparently hadn’t paid any attention to the lecture and, with psychotic persistence, explained how he and Kari loved each other and that it was merely a matter of time until they’d be getting married. On their last meeting Dale had looked Loesser up and down coldly and then began cross-examining him, apparently convinced that the cop himself had a crush on her.

  That incident had so unnerved the detective that he’d convinced a commonwealth magistrate to allow a wiretap on Dale’s phone.

  “What happened?” Loesser now asked his assistant.

  “She called him. Kari Swanson called Dale. About a half hour ago. She was nice as could be. Asked to see him.”

  “What?”

  “She’s gotta be setting him up,” Harper offered.

  Loesser shook his head in disgust. He’d been concerned about this very thing happening. From the moment in his office when he’d seen her eyeing the department’s shotguns he’d known that she was determined to end Dale’s stalking one way or another. Loesser had kept a close eye on the situation, calling Kari at home frequently over the past weeks. He’d been troubled by her demeanor. She’d seemed detached, almost cheerful, even when Dale had been parked in his usual spot, right in front of her house. Loesser could only conclude that she’d finally decided to stop him and was waiting for an opportune time.

  Which was, it seemed, tonight.

  “Where’s she going to meet him? At her house?”

  “No. At the old pier off Charles Street.”

  Oh, hell, Loesser thought. The pier was a perfect site for a murder—there were no houses nearby and it was virtually invisible from the main roads in town. And there were stairs nearby, leading down to a small floating dock, where Kari, or someone she’d hired, could easily take the body out to sea to dispose of it.

  But she didn’t know about the wiretap—or that they now had a clue as to what her plans were. If she killed Dale she’d get caught. She’d get life in prison for a lying-in-wait murder.

  Loesser grabbed his coat and sprinted toward the door.

  The squad car skidded to a stop at the chain-link fence on Charles Street. Loesser leapt out. He gazed toward the pier, a hundred yards away.

  Through the fog and rain the detective could vaguely make out David Dale in a raincoat, clutching a bouquet of roses, walking slowly toward Kari Swanson. The tall woman stood with her back to Dale, hands on the rotting railing, gazing out over the turbulent gray Atlantic.

  The detective shouted for Dale to stop. The sound of the wind and waves, though, was deafening—neither the stalker nor his prey could hear.

  “Boost me up,” Loesser cried to his assistant.

  “You want—?”

  The detective himself formed Harper’s fingers into a cradle, planted his right foot firmly in the man’
s hands and then vaulted over the top of the chain link. He landed off balance and tumbled painfully onto the rocky ground.

  By the time the officer climbed to his feet and oriented himself, Dale was only twenty feet from Kari.

  “Call for backup and an ambulance,” he shouted to Harper and then took off down the muddy slope to the pier, unholstering his weapon as he ran. “Don’t move! Police!”

  But he saw he was too late.

  Kari suddenly turned and stepped toward Dale. Loesser couldn’t hear a gunshot over the roaring waves or see clearly through the misty rain but there was no doubt that David Dale had been shot. His hands flew to his chest and, dropping the flowers, he stumbled backward and sprawled on the pier.

  “No!” Loesser muttered hopelessly, realizing that he himself was going to be the eyewitness who put Kari Swanson in jail. Why hadn’t she listened to him? But Loesser was a seasoned professional and he kept his emotions in check as he followed procedure to the letter. He lifted his gun toward the model and shouted, “On the ground, Kari! Now!”

  She was startled by the cop’s sudden appearance but she immediately did as she was told and lay face forward on the wet wood of the pier.

  “Hands behind your back,” Loesser ordered, running to her. He quickly cuffed her and then turned to David Dale, who was struggling to his knees amid the crushed roses, writhing and howling in agony. At least he wasn’t dead yet. Loesser rolled Dale onto his back and ripped open his shirt, looking for the entry wound. “Stay calm. Don’t move!”

  But he couldn’t find a bullethole.

  “Where’re you hit?” the detective shouted. “Talk to me. Talk to me!”

  But the big man continued to sob and shake hysterically and didn’t respond.

  Sid Harper ran up, panting. He dropped to his knees beside Dale. “Ambulance’ll be here in five minutes. Where’s he hit?”

  The detective said, “I don’t know. I can’t find the wound.”

  The young cop too examined the stalker. “There’s no blood.”

  Still, Dale kept moaning as if he were in unbearable pain. “Oh, God, no…No…”

  Finally Loesser heard Kari Swanson call out, “He’s fine. I didn’t hurt him.”

  “Get her up,” the detective said to Harper as he continued to examine Dale. “I don’t understand it. He—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Sid Harper’s stunned voice whispered.

  Loesser glanced at his assistant, who was staring at Kari with his mouth open.

  The detective himself turned to look at her. He blinked in astonishment.

  “I really didn’t shoot him,” Kari insisted.

  Except…Was this Kari Swanson? The woman was the same height and had the same figure and hair. And the voice was the same. But in place of the extraordinary beauty that had burned itself into Loesser’s memory on their first meeting, this woman’s face was very different: she had a bumpy, unfortunate nose, thin, uneven lips, a fleshy chin, wrinkles in her forehead and around her eyes.

  “Are you…Who are you?” Loesser stammered.

  She gave a faint smile. “It’s me, Kari.”

  “But…I don’t understand.”

  She gave a contemptuous glance at Dale, still lying on the pier, and said to Loesser, “When he followed me to Crowell I finally realized what had to happen: One of us had to die…and I picked me.”

  “You?”

  She nodded. “I killed the person he was obsessed with: Kari the supermodel.” Looking out to sea, breathing deeply, she continued. “Last year, down in the Caribbean, I met this plastic surgeon. His office was in Manhattan but he also ran a free clinic in Haiti, where he was born. He’d rebuild the faces of locals injured in accidents.” She laughed. “He was trying to pick me up, of course, joking that if I ever needed a plastic surgeon, give him a call. But he wasn’t obnoxious and I liked the volunteer work he did. We hit it off. When I decided last month I had to do something about Dale I called him. I figured if he could make really deformed people look normal, he could make a beautiful person look normal too. I met with him in New York. He didn’t want to do the operation at first but I gave him a hundred thousand for his clinic. That changed his mind.”

  Loesser studied her closely. She wasn’t ugly. She simply looked average—like any of ten million women you’d meet on the street and not glance at twice.

  David Dale’s terrible moaning rose up over the sound of the wind, not from physical pain but from horror—that the beauty that had obsessed him was now gone. “No, no, no…”

  Kari asked Loesser, “Can you take these things off me?” Holding up the cuffs.

  Harper unhooked them.

  As Kari pulled her coat tighter around her a mad voice suddenly filled the air, rising above the sound of the waves. “How could you?” Dale cried, rising to his knees. “How could you do this to me?”

  Kari crouched in front of him. “To you?” she raged. “What I look like, who I am, the life I lead…those don’t have a goddamn thing to do with you and they never did!” She gripped his head in both hands and tried to turn it toward her. “Look at me.”

  “No.” He struggled to keep his face averted.

  “Look at me!”

  Finally he did.

  “Do you love me now, David?” she asked with a cold smile on her new face.

  He scrabbled away in revulsion and began to run back toward the street. He stumbled then picked himself up and continued to sprint away from the pier.

  Kari Swanson rose and shouted after him, “Do you love me, David? Do you love me now? Do you? Do you?”

  “Hey, Cath,” the man said, surveying the grocery cart she was pushing.

  “What?” she asked. The plastic surgery had officially laid “Kari” to rest and she was now accepting only variations on Catherine.

  “I think we’re missing something,” Carl replied with exaggerated gravity.

  “What?”

  “Junk food,” he answered.

  “Oh, no.” She too frowned in mock alarm as she examined the cart. Then she suggested, “Nachos’d solve the problem.”

  “Ah. Good choice. Back in a minute.” Carl—a man with an easy temperament and an endless supply of bulky fisherman’s sweaters—ambled off down the snack food aisle. He was a late bloomer, a second-career lawyer who was exactly five years older and two inches taller than Cathy. He’d picked her up in the annual Crowell St. Patrick’s Day festival ten days ago and they’d spent a half dozen delightful afternoons and evenings together, doing absolutely nothing.

  Was there a future between them? Cathy had no idea. They certainly enjoyed each other’s company but Carl had yet to spend the night. And he still hadn’t given her the skinny on his ex-wife.

  Both of which were, of course, vital benchmarks in the life of a relationship.

  But there was no hurry. Catherine Swanson wasn’t looking for a man. Her life was a comfortable mélange of teaching high school history, jogging along the rocky Massachusetts shore, working on her master’s at BU and spending time with a marvelous therapist, who was helping her forget David Dale—she hadn’t heard anything from the stalker in the past six months.

  She moved forward in the checkout line, trying to remember if she had charcoal for the grill. She thought—

  “Say, miss, excuse me,” mumbled a man’s low voice behind her. She recognized his intonation immediately—the edgy, intimate sound of obsession.

  Gasping, Cathy spun around to see a young man in a trench coat and a stocking cap. Instantly she thought of the hundreds of strangers who had relentlessly pursued her on the street, in restaurants and in checkout lines just like this one. Her palms began to sweat. Her heart started pounding fiercely, jaw trembling. Her mouth opened but she couldn’t speak.

  But then Cathy saw that the man wasn’t looking at her at all. His eyes were fixed on the magazine rack next to the cash register. He muttered, “That Entertainment Weekly there? Could you hand it to me?”

  She passed him the magazine. Without
thanking her, he flipped quickly to an article inside. Cathy couldn’t tell what the story was about, only that it featured three or four cheesecakey pictures of some young, brunette woman, which he stared at intently.

  Cathy slowly forced herself to be calm. Then, suddenly, her shaking hands rose to her mouth and she began laughing out loud. The man looked up once from the pictures of his dream girl then returned to his magazine, not the least curious about this tall, plain woman and what she found so funny. Cathy wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes, turned back to the cart and began loading her groceries onto the belt.

  The Fall Guy

  T he headlights lit the sensuous sweep of the road ahead of her.

  Cruising through the dark pines, swaying left right, left right. A damp evening, a cold spring. Her Lexus strayed slightly over the centerline of the wet asphalt and she wondered whether she’d had two martinis with Don or three.

  Only two, she decided, and sped up.

  She drove this same road, from her job in New Hampshire to her home just over the Massachusetts border, every weekday night—and every night she thought the same thing on this stretch of Route 28: sensuous curves.

  Like the cliché of a sign two miles back: Soft Shoulder.

  A lot of nights—slightly drunk, listening to Michael Bolton on the radio—she’d laugh at those words on the yellow diamond. Tonight she was somber.

  Twelve miles from home.

  Carolyn eased her stockinged foot off the gas. Her white Ferragamo spike heels rested on the seat next to her (she often drove barefoot, less for control than to avoid scuffing). Then she piloted the car through the final set of, yes, sensuous curves that led to the minuscule town of Dunning.

  The gas station, the general store, a propane company, an old motel, a liquor store and an antique shop in which she’d never—in the five years of commuting to and from the hospital—seen anyone buy a single thing.