For the first time since entering the house, Nolan spoke. He had been standing in the background, shaking his head unhappily. “I think you already have a pretty good idea who the rest of these men are.”
“The same as you – police officers.”
“Not quite the same.” In deference to the all-white decor, Nolan and everyone else had taken off their shoes. His socks whispered on the thick wall-to-wall carpet. “Malibu doesn’t have a police department. Walt and Lyle here are with the local sheriff’s department. Pete and Sam are with the state police. The rest of these men are LAPD.”
“And how did you get involved?” Coltrane asked. “Since when do L.A. policemen work in Malibu?”
“They don’t,” Nolan said. “Unless it’s their day off and they’re here unofficially, doing somebody a favor.”
“Me,” the first man said. Nolan had introduced him as Walt. “I’m the one he was doing a favor.”
“It’s a stalker situation.” Nolan gestured wearily, having dealt with crimes of this sort too many times before. “The woman living here has been harassed for the past three weeks by someone who seems to know everything she does. Until a while ago, he phoned her constantly. Even though she changed her number five times and none of them was ever listed, he still managed to find out what the new ones were and keep calling her. Finally, she had the phone taken out of service.”
“That explains the computerized voice I heard when I tried to call yesterday.”
“So you did try to call,” the second man, Lyle, said. “I was going to ask you why you didn’t phone instead of paying an unexpected visit on New Year’s Day.”
“You still think I’m lying?”
“Just crossing the t’s.”
“Meanwhile,” Nolan interrupted, “she started getting photographs.”
Coltrane straightened.
The men studied him – he had never been looked at so directly.
“Photographs.” Coltrane understood. “So when I showed up with a camera and started taking her picture, you assumed…”
“The photographs she receives – there are hundreds – have been taken wherever she goes,” Nolan said. “No matter what she does, somebody manages to shoot pictures of her.”
Coltrane felt a return of the bone-cold sensation of having been in the water, except that in this case he was frozen because he remembered how violated he had felt when he learned that Ilkovic had followed and photographed him.
“And that doesn’t include the bouquets of flowers that are delivered to her a half dozen times a day. Not always when she’s at home. She’s been getting them at restaurants, at her dentist’s, once even at her gynecologist’s. A note read, ‘Thinking of you,’” Nolan said. “Love letters on the windshield of her car. Special-delivery proposals of marriage.”
“So, naturally, she got worried enough to call the sheriff’s department,” Walt said. He had a brush cut, a squarish face, a sand-colored mustache, and a slight scar above his right eyebrow. “I’m the one who came out and interviewed her. We’re not a big department. We don’t have a lot of staff and resources, but that’s what we were going to need, I knew, because right away it was obvious that the complainant needed surveillance, and not just in Malibu. We might care about jurisdictions, but the guy we’re after is free to roam as he pleases. The complainant has business in Los Angeles. She goes there often. So I decided to call the LAPD Threat Management Unit and see if they had any advice.”
“Which is where I come in,” Nolan said. “Walt and I went to the Police Academy together. For a time, he was with the LAPD Robbery Division, but eventually he moved up here.”
“For the peace and quiet,” Walt said, as if peace and quiet were not what he had found.
“He asked for me,” Nolan said, “and we discussed the obvious problem, which is that, strictly speaking, this ardent admirer hadn’t broken the law.”
Coltrane cocked his head in confusion.
“The problem is that, in addition to a pattern of harassment, there has to be an element of threat,” Nolan said. “To you or me, it might be common sense that someone who pesters a woman night and day with professions of love is trying to intimidate her. But the district attorney’s office might not see it that way. They might worry that a jury will figure this guy is more a nuisance than a threat. I once had a case where a stalker sent chocolates to a woman all the time, boxes and boxes. Phoned her constantly. Wrote hundreds of letters. She felt threatened and wanted him stopped. A restraining order didn’t do any good. So I arrested him, and the case actually went to trial. But the jury couldn’t decide if he was guilty of anything. This happened around Valentine’s Day. One woman on the jury later said she thought sending all those chocolates was ‘quaint.’ Honest to God. Anyway, after the hung jury, the guy showed up at the woman’s house one night and shot her in the head. Said he got tired of waiting for her to marry him. Said if he couldn’t have her, nobody would. How’s that for true love?”
“But in this case, we got lucky,” Lyle said.
“If you want to call a threat lucky,” Walt added. “The ardent admirer sent our complainant a funeral wreath with a ribbon across it that read, ‘Till death do us part.’ That’s not the most explicit threat I ever heard of, but the ten-pound heart that came with the wreath certainly was. It turned out to be a bull’s. It had an arrow through it, and a note attached to the arrow. ‘Be mine. You’re wounding my heart. Don’t make me wound yours.’ Tender, don’t you think?”
“And enough to make a jury put him away,” Coltrane said.
“Maybe not for long. But hey, the complainant would breathe easier for a while at least. Hell, maybe this jerk would use the time to reconsider how he shows affection.”
“You don’t have any idea who he is?”
“No, and neither does the complainant. The obvious temptation is to suspect he’s someone she knows. But that’s not always the way these things work. He might be someone she met five years ago and doesn’t remember. Maybe he’s a clerk at the bank she uses. Sometimes it takes only one look for a creep like this to get fixated on someone. We do know he orders the flowers by sending a letter of instructions along with cash to various flower shops. The wreath and the bull’s heart were delivered by a parcel service. The return address on the packages was bogus. While the phone was still working, the guy frequently left his voice on the complainant’s answering machine, but she doesn’t recognize it.”
“The best tactic we could think of,” Walt said, “was to try to entrap him.”
Lyle explained further. “Before the complainant had her phone disconnected, we told her to tell this guy when he called that it was time to put up or shut up, that she’d be waiting for him here this afternoon. She made certain he understood how angry she was with him and that she wanted to see him face-to-face to guarantee he got the point that she wanted nothing at all to do with him.”
“It was an ultimatum we hoped he couldn’t refuse,” Nolan said. “Especially because, when the phone was disconnected yesterday, the creep had no way to get in touch with her to try to renegotiate the terms of the meeting.”
“Then we sent for the cavalry,” Walt said. “Lyle and I are officially on duty. These other guys are friends helping out.”
“On New Year’s Day. I’m impressed,” Coltrane said. “Friends wouldn’t normally give up New Year’s Day to-”
“The complainant’s generous,” one of the other men said.
The rest of the group looked at the man as if he had said too much.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Walt said. “When we’re off duty, she hires us to be her protection. One or the other of us goes into L.A. with her.”
“Speaking of…” One of the state troopers glanced around nervously. “Where is Tash?”
The group tensed.
“Jesus.” Walt snapped to attention. “What happened to her? The last time I saw her, she was coming out of the water and we were chasing-”