“Good question,” Becca said. “We haven’t had time to think about anything since it happened. Me, I don’t think he wanted to kill either of us, just scare us real bad, just announce that he was here and ready to play again.”
Becca sucked in her breath. “Oh dear, we need to get the front door repaired before our neighbor, Tyler McBride, or the sheriff come to visit. I don’t want to try to explain bullet holes in the door.”
“Let’s check for a trail first,” Sherlock said. “Then, Becca, you can tell us what the stalker said to you this time while we all repair the door.”
“You’re good,” Savich said some thirty minutes later to Adam. “You said there was no trail and there isn’t.”
Adam grunted. “Let’s go out a bit farther. Maybe we’ll see some tire tracks.”
“No way,” Sherlock said. “The stalker is a pro, which means that he isn’t really a stalker. That’s just a cover. A misdirection.”
Savich nodded. “I agree. He isn’t a stalker.”
Becca said, “What do you mean, exactly?”
Adam said, as he slowly lifted leaves some ten feet away, “It doesn’t make sense, Becca. Usually stalkers are sick guys who, for whatever strange reason, latch on to someone. It’s an obsession. They’re not pros. This guy’s a pro. This was well thought out.”
And Savich thought: If Krimakov is alive, then it’s a terror campaign, and Becca’s just the means to the end. Thomas Matlock is right to be afraid. And the ending Krimakov planned wasn’t good for either father or daughter.
Becca was shaking her head. “But he sounds nuts whenever he’s called me. He called a couple of hours ago. He said much of the same things. He sounded all sorts of excited, very pleased with himself, like he couldn’t wait. I know he’s toying with me, getting a real kick out of my fear, my anger, my helplessness.” She stopped a moment, looked at Adam, and added, “The thing is, I can’t help but feel that inside, he’s just dead.”
Sherlock said, “Maybe he’s dead on the inside, but it’s the outside we’ve got to worry about. One thing we know for sure is that he’s clever; he knows what he needs to do and he does it. He found you, didn’t he? Now, could we go back to the house and Becca can tell us everything? You said he called you again. Tell us exactly what he said. Then we can put all our brainpower together and solve this mess.”
“Another thing,” Savich said as he brushed his black slacks off, “I don’t want us out in the open like this. It isn’t smart.”
And Sherlock, her brilliant red hair shining brightly in the fading afternoon light, led them back to Jacob Marley’s house.
They found caulk, an electric sander that worked, and some wood stain in the basement, on some shelves near the hole in the brick wall.
They took the front door off its hinges and brought it inside. While Savich sanded it down and Adam caulked in the bullet holes, Becca and Sherlock kept watch, their guns in their hands, watchful. Very soon, Sherlock had Becca talking and talking. “. . . and when he called me just a while ago, he said the same sorts of things, like I would contact the governor as soon as he was well enough again and have him come to me.”
“You know,” Adam said, “he doesn’t believe you’ve slept with the governor. It’s just part of a script. He needed something so that he could claim you needed punishment.”
“You’re right,” Sherlock said, giving Adam his first look of approval, for which he didn’t know whether to be pleased or snarl. “Yes, you’re perfectly right. Go ahead, Becca, what else did he say?”
“When I asked him about Dick McCallum, he wouldn’t admit that he killed him, but I know that he did. He said I’d gotten all pissy, that I’d gotten too confident, that he was coming for me soon. I tell you, when I hung up, I was ready to throw in the towel. He calls himself my boyfriend. It’s beyond creepy.”
“Yeah,” Adam said, raising his head to look at her, “she was ready to throw in the towel for about three minutes.” Then he said toward Savich, “Then she put her Coonan in her pocket and went out into the woods. Why’d you go out there, Becca? It wasn’t real smart, you know.”
She looked inward for a moment, all of them saw it—and the sanding and caulking stopped. Not one of them was surprised when she shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I just wanted to go there, alone, and sit under the sunlight against that tree. Jacob Marley’s house was getting to me. There are ghosts here, the air is filled with remnants of the people who lived here, residue, maybe, not all of it good.”