The boy kept his hands clenched, but looked surprised and even more confused.

“You folks are crazy.” O’Connell quickly began to move past them. “Nut jobs.”

“Leave us alone,” the boy said. Not very convincing, O’Connell thought. When he was about a half dozen paces past, he stopped and turned. As he suspected, they were still wrapped together, defensive, staring after him.

“You two are lucky.”

They eyed him with astonishment.

“Do you know how close you came to dying tonight?”

Then, not giving them a chance to reply, he spun about and moved as swiftly as he could without running, from shadow to shadow, leaving the young couple behind him. He suspected they would remember their fear from this night far longer than they would remember the happiness that they’d started it with.

“I think I need to know more about Sally and Scott, and then, about Hope, too.”

“Not Ashley?”

“Ashley seems young. Unfinished.”

She frowned. “True enough. But what makes you think that Michael O’Connell didn’t finish her?”

I didn’t know how to answer, but I felt a distinct chill in her words. “You told me that someone dies. Surely you’re not saying that it was Ashley…”

My question hung in the air between us. She finally said, “She was the one at greatest risk.”

“Yes, but-”

She interrupted, “And I suppose you think you already understand Michael O’Connell?”

“No. Not fully. Not nearly enough. But I’m searching about for my next step, and I was wondering about the three of them.”

She paused, fiddling with her glass of iced tea, again turning her head to stare out the windows. “I think about them often. Can’t help myself.”

She reached for a box of tissues. Tears were welling up in the corners of her eyes, but she wore a small smile. She took a long, slow breath of air.

“Do you ever consider why crime can be so devastating?” she asked abruptly.

I knew she would answer her own question.

“Because it is so unexpected. It falls outside ordinary routines of life. It takes us by surprise. It becomes totally personal. Utterly intimate.”

“Yes. True enough.”

She stared at me. “A history professor at a snobbish liberal college. A small-town attorney, expert in barely contested divorces and modest real-estate transactions. A guidance counselor and coach. And a head-in-the-clouds, young art student. Where were their resources supposed to come from?”

“Good question. Where?”

“That’s what you need to understand. Not just what they figured out, and what they did, but where the intelligence and the strength came from.”

“Okay,” I replied slowly, drawing out the word.

“Because eventually they pay a heavy price.”

I didn’t say anything.

She filled the silence. “In retrospect, it always seems so simple. But when it is happening, it’s never so clear-cut. And never quite as neat and tidy as we think it should be.”

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.