Collins put her hands on her hips. She wore one of my old T-shirts as a nightgown. It came down past her hips with don’t mess with mad cowgirls stenciled across the chest. It was a gift from Bill, wrapped in a bow and handed to me the morning after our first argument.
“Hey, Lady Cop. You listening?” the kid said, clearly questioning my sanity. “I need a Starbucks.”
“I heard you,” I said. “I’m just not doing anything about it. There’s coffee on the counter. If you want some, help yourself. I’ve got horses to check on.”
“Horses? Am I on a farm?” she said, her words dripping in distaste. “Is that where you live?”
I sighed. Last night the kid clung to me like a raft in a shipwreck. Sadly, it appeared that her humility washed away in daylight. “Kind of. You’re on a horse ranch, and, yes, this is my home,” I said, perturbed. “My daughter and mother were uprooted out of here early this morning so that you could stay, to keep you safe. There are more than a dozen state troopers and rangers patrolling the property to protect you who’d rather be at home with their families or at church this beautiful Sunday morning. Some haven’t slept since they were rousted out of their beds last night to rush here to help. Perhaps you could stop grousing and appreciate the sacrifices everyone is making on your behalf, so we can make this as pleasant as possible?”
“You want grateful? That’s their job,” she challenged. Her eyes were rimmed in black eyeliner, and stage makeup from the night before was smeared across her face. I thought about the mess that must wait on my pillowcase. Maybe I should have hauled out a cot for the kid and slept in my own bed. She didn’t appear particularly appreciative. “Isn’t that what cops do? They protect people?”
“We don’t move our families out of their homes to put folks up. So this is above and beyond. And I’m not pleased with the situation,” I warned. “So if I were you, I’d try to get along. Otherwise, I might decide you’re not worth the trouble, and send you packing.”
I stared at the kid for what must have seemed an eternity. She squirmed a bit, and then said, “This is crap, Sarah. You think I want to be here?”
“No, I don’t. But last night, you sure didn’t want to go anywhere else, particularly home. One more thing, as far as you’re concerned, my name is Lieutenant Armstrong,” I said, thinking about how my mother would have reacted to the superstar kid’s behavior, if she were here to see it. I had no doubt that by now Mom would have had Cassidy Collins scrubbing out the stable. That would have been worth watching. “My family and friends call me Sarah. You’re not either one.”
“Yeah, well,” she said.
“Yeah, well,
who
?”
“Lieutenant Armstrong,” she said, clipping off each syllable. Unfazed, she sneered back at me. I figured there was no sense wasting my time with the kid. I planned to put it to good use. If no one else had bothered to, I was teaching the brat manners.
“I’ll be in the shed, checking the horses,” I said. “Then, Miss Collins, we’re going to sit down together, and you’re going to answer all my questions. Every single one. I need to know everything, absolutely everything about you and this lowlife who’s stalking you, so we can figure out who this Argus is, stop him, and get you the hell out of my life and my home.”
This time the kid smiled. “Great,” she said, contemptuously. “Believe me, this dump is no Ritz-Carlton.”
“Very true. This place is better. This is my home,” I said. “And unfortunately, it’s your only safe place. But keep in mind, no one can force me to allow you to stay here. If I get too ticked off, you’re on your way.”
Outside, the sun was high and the sky a pale blue dotted with cotton-ball clouds. I brushed both the horses down, and then decided to give them a few hours in the front pasture. It wasn’t a long walk, but the colt was slow, picking his way on the uneven earth. David showed up, and I thought I must look a sight. I’d showered and washed my hair, tied it back in a ponytail, thrown on jeans and
a T-shirt, but that was it. I had too much to do to fuss over my looks, even if he was on the premises. Besides, he’d done everything but file a restraining order to keep me away. It no longer seemed to matter.
“I’m sorry about this, Sarah,” he said. “The captain and I did try. It was all anyone could figure out to do. It just didn’t seem safe to move her.”
“So you said,” I answered. “Somehow having that kid around hasn’t helped my disposition.”
He laughed. “I can understand that,” he said. He had on an old pair of Bill’s jeans and a denim work shirt, both of which hung loose on his athletic frame. My husband had been dead for two years, but I still hadn’t given his clothes away. Another one of those things on my permanent to-do list. Maybe I just didn’t have the heart for it.
“Here,” I said. “If you’re going to stand around gabbing, help me with the horses.”
I handed him Emma Lou’s lead, and he nudged her along. She was lagging, waiting for her foal. Warrior was so tiny, I could have picked him up and carried him, but he needed the exercise to build strength in his wobbly legs. As we neared the gate, Cassidy walked up.
“Boy, that’s the smallest horse I’ve ever seen,” she said.
“He’s just two days old and a preemie,” I said. “He’s got some growing to do.”
“Can I touch him?” she asked.
I looked at her, and figured it couldn’t hurt. “Sure,” I said, stopping our little parade to the pasture. “Gently.”
The girl moved cautiously forward. She looked wary of the horses, probably never been near one before. She’d thrown on a pair of my shorts and a clean T-shirt I’d left out for her. She had on her shoes from the concert the night before, navy blue flats with sequins. It made for a strange combination. As she sidled up to the
foal, Emma Lou threw her head back and let loose a warning grunt, worried.
“Hold her,” I told David. “Pull her in.”
He did, and Collins got close enough to reach out one tentative hand to rub along the foal’s back. “He’s soft,” she said. “Are all horses this soft?”
“Just the young ones, like all babies,” I answered, watching a smile edge across Cassidy’s face. Sometimes horses can get to folks that other folks can’t, fix them. I figured, why not try? “If you want to, you can follow us to the pasture. It’s Warrior’s first outing.”
“Is that his name? Warrior?”
“Yup,” I said, and then I decided to add, “If you want, you can help care for them while you’re here. Foals, especially preemies, need a lot of attention.”
For a moment, Cassidy appeared to consider my offer. Then she shrugged. “Nah,” she said, the word laced with a heavy dose of condescension. “I’m no farmer.”
The girl had a chip on her shoulder the size of Texas. “No problem. I’d hate to interrupt your nap time,” I said. “But if you’re not helping, go up to the house and wait. We’ll be right there to start work.”
With a smirk, Collins walked away.
“You said last night that you wondered if Argus is someone in your crew,” I said to Collins, when we sat together in the living room. The kid was spread over Mom’s favorite chair, a red corduroy recliner. The arms were worn, and Cassidy picked absentmindedly at fraying threads. “Let’s start with that assumption. Do you have anyone in mind?”
“No,” she snapped. “I just kept telling Rick that the creep knows more about me than my friends.”
“What do you mean?”
“He knows where I live in L.A., and what I do, who I’m with. His e-mails sound like he’s watching me or like he knows where I’m supposed to be,” she said. For a minute, she looked tentative. There was something else there, something the kid wasn’t eager to say.
“There’s more you’re not telling us, isn’t there?”
The kid said nothing, just stared at me, thinking.
“Cassidy, this guy is threatening to kill you,” I reminded her. “This isn’t the time to hold back any information that could help us.”
For another moment, she paused and frowned, thinking that through. Then she said, “Sometimes I wonder if he knew me before L.A.”
“Why?” David asked.
“In one e-mail, he said he liked the freckles on my nose when I was a little girl,” she said, with a puzzled look. She shook her head slightly and shrugged. “I haven’t had those freckles since fifth grade. They faded. How would he know that?”
“I don’t know. You’ve got a fair complexion. Maybe he just guessed you had freckles as a kid? I didn’t see that e-mail in the packet Mr. Barron gave me,” I said. “Why not?”
“I deleted it,” she said, with a shrug. “It was one of the first ones I got, before I was really scared of this jerk. I thought he was just another nut. I get them all the time. I didn’t think he’d threaten to . . .”
Her voice dwindled off.
“Did you show that to anyone, the e-mail I mean?”
“No, but it was the same guy. He signed it Argus.”
“Are there other e-mails you didn’t tell Barron or anyone about?”
“A few,” she admitted more than a little reluctantly.
“Did they contain anything else surprising?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess, maybe.”
“What?” David asked.
The kid wrinkled up her face in disgust. “The morning after the concert in Atlanta, that was a week or so before we played Caesars Palace, that Argus dude e-mailed and claimed I winked at him,” she said. “He said our eyes met, and he knew that we had some kind of special bond. Yuck. Really sick.”
“What did he mean by that, the bit about the special bond?” I asked.
The kid grimaced and shrugged. “Nothing, okay? Nothing I know of anyway.”
“He could have meant anything,” David said. “These types of stalkers often fantasize that they have a relationship with their victims.”
“Yeah. That’s true,” I said. “Okay, talk about Atlanta. Do you remember anyone you saw that night? Is it possible that he was telling the truth, that you saw his face in the crowd?”
“That was a big show, full-stage show, with the fly harness and the cocoon. Sometimes, up on the hoist, over the audience, I kind of see people, but I can’t see faces,” she said. “It’s more shapes. Girls and moms, a few dads. I don’t focus on anyone, and no one ever stands out.”
“Did you respond to those e-mails?” David asked.
“No,” she answered. “Like I said, I did what Rick says to do with garbage. I trashed them. But that Argus jerk, his e-mails had those things, where you click and it tells the sender that I opened it. So he knew I got them.”
“What else did this Argus know about your past?” I asked.
“That my family was dirt poor,” she said. “And that’s something I don’t tell anyone.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Collins looked wary, guarded about saying any more.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“What I tell you two goes nowhere?” she said. “You don’t flap about it? Like to reporters?”
“No,” I said. “We won’t tell anyone.”
“Sure?” she prodded.
“Sure,” David said. “Absolutely.”
“Well, okay. I don’t ever tell anyone about my past. I don’t want the press to dig around, find out where I grew up,” she said. “The truth is that Mom and I lived in a trailer park. My mom was a drunk. I don’t know my dad, not even his name. The thing is, I have no privacy. Anything anybody finds out about me gets splashed all over those grocery store rags.”
“Okay, Cassidy, let’s go with that,” David said, ever so patiently. “Let’s assume this guy
is
someone out of your past. Tell me about people you knew growing up, anyone who’d know about your life before Los Angeles.”
Her eyes dropped, and she layered her hands on her lap, looking young and frightened. The kid was tough but hurting. She’d been through a lot in her short lifetime, but now someone wanted her dead. That was beyond all her experience.
Of course, that didn’t give her the right to be rude
, I told myself,
but
. . .
“I changed my name when I hit L.A. I’d thought of Cassidy Collins when I was a little kid, liked it, so I gave that to everyone, even the social worker who stuck me in those foster homes. I made up a name for my mom, too. Said she was dead. That’s the only true thing I told anyone,” she said. “I never talk about being trailer park trash. I don’t talk about my mom drinking herself to death, either. Once I got to L.A., I wanted to be a different person.”
“We understand, Cassidy. But think back, before Los Angeles,” David instructed. “Whom do you remember?”
Again she hesitated. Quiet. “Not anyone much. Mom and me kept away from other people. Mom didn’t like strangers. She always said we had to be careful. I don’t know why, but sometimes she seemed scared,” the kid said. “I went to school, but I looked really different. My hair was darker, and I wore big glasses. When I started singing and made money, I bought contacts. And before anyone in L.A. knew much about me, while I was still a kid, I dyed my hair blond. Like I said, I don’t look like I used to.”
“But this person, whoever it is, he recognizes you?” I said.
“I guess so,” she agreed, with a shrug. “I don’t know, but sometimes I think maybe he does.”
“Why didn’t Rick Barron tell us this?” David asked. “It’s at least a lead.”
Again, the girl’s voice got small, defensive. “Rick doesn’t know. I didn’t tell him,” she admitted. “People who work for celebrities sell stories to the tabloids for millions. I didn’t want even Rick to have anything personal on me, anything about my past. It’s a lot of bad memories.”
“Germaine Dunn knows you’ve had a tough time,” I said. “She told me about your mother dying while you were still young.”
“Germaine’s my only friend,” Collins said. “But even she doesn’t know my old name or where I came from. She didn’t know what I looked like before I was Cassidy Collins.”
“Well, you’re going to have to trust us,” I said. “You’ve got no choice.”
She nodded, as if perhaps she understood. “What else do you want to know?”
“First off, your real name and your mother’s name,” David said. “Then we need the name of the school you went to, the town, the trailer park, and the names of anyone you remember from the years before you arrived in Los Angeles.”
Cassidy nodded.
“I’ll get a pad of paper, and I want you to sit here and write down everything we’ve asked for and more,” I said. “Anything that could, in any way, help us find and stop this Argus. This is your shot, Cassidy. You help us get this guy now, or you pray that he doesn’t find you before we find him.”