“We’ll be up at the house in a few minutes, Sarah,” Mom said, and I took that as my dismissal. As I headed toward the back door, I turned for another glimpse of the gate glowing in the night. Maggie would love it. Like the corral, the lights were another bit of heaven brought closer to earth. Mom looked happy, too. Bobby had her in his arms and they were locked into a long, slow kiss. I thought about how I missed those, and how I missed Bill, but I couldn’t help but think that even with so much pain in the world, life had so much to cherish.
Inside the house, I found Maggie at the living room window, barefoot and in her nightgown, holding the blinds apart so she could see the gate. She must have expected me, because she didn’t seem startled when I walked up behind her.
“It’s wonderful, Mom. Don’t you think so?” Maggie asked, staring out at the lights in the darkness.
“It is, Magpie,” I agreed. “It truly is.”
In the kitchen, I made myself a cup of Mom’s chamomile tea, and then decided on one last phone call before I turned in for the night.
“Was your sister having an affair?” I asked Faith Roberts.
“No, at least not lately,” she said. “I thought awhile back there was someone, but I was never sure. For a time she seemed busier than usual, and I didn’t hear from her like I typically do. She never told me about any particular man, although we usually shared everything in our lives. That stopped before her death, maybe a couple of weeks. I saw more of her, and things got back to normal. But even if Billie had an affair, she didn’t kill herself over it.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Like I told you, those last weeks, I’d never seen Billie look happier,” she said.
“One last question,” I said. “Was your sister seeing a therapist?”
The phone went quiet. “Well, I guess I should have told you about that,” Faith said, finally. “But it’s not what you think. She’s not the usual kind of therapist. It wasn’t because Billie was depressed.”
“What kind was she seeing?”
Again, silence.
“Faith, I can’t help if you’re not honest with me.”
She must have considered that and decided I was right. “My
sister and I shared a belief in the supernatural. Perhaps that’s why I’m so certain she’s communicating with me,” Faith said. “The therapist she saw deals primarily in hypnosis and past lives.”
“You want to say that again?” I asked.
“Past lives, like reincarnation,” Faith said. I could tell from the tone of her voice that she realized how bizarre I thought this sounded. “I know it’s pretty unusual, but you really need to talk to Dr. Dorin. She’ll explain it. It’s not really that eccentric, I promise.”
As I wrote down the doctor’s name and phone number, I thought that this just might be the oddest case of my career. If it weren’t for that bruise Dr. Joe showed me, by now I would have agreed with H.P.D.’s conclusion and written the whole thing off. It didn’t help my mood any when Faith said she had something else she wanted to tell me.
“This is the first evening since Billie’s death that six o’clock came and went and nothing unusual happened,” she said. “I think it’s because she knows you’re going to help us.”
“I’ll do my best, Faith,” I said. “But please remember, in the end it may turn out that H.P.D. is right, and your sister’s death is a suicide.”
Thinking about how much I would have liked it if Bill had dropped in to leave messages after his death, then shrugging off even the thought that that was possible, I hung up the telephone, and went into the living room to check on Maggie. She wasn’t there, but I knew where to find her. I walked out to the shed, and there she was, in her soft flannel nightgown, slumped down in one of the old metal chairs, in a light sleep. I peeked in on Emma Lou, who slept peacefully in her temporary home. Confident that, at least for now, all was well, I nudged Maggie a bit, whispered her name, and she woke up. We were past the point where I could carry her. She opened her eyes, and I walked her down the hill. As we approached the house, she caught another glimpse of the Christmas
light dream catcher over the gate, with Mom and Bobby still standing beneath it.
“It really is beautiful, Mom. Just like the stars,” Maggie said. She smiled, and then cuddled against me for the rest of the walk into the house.
C
assidy Collins’s heart pounded so hard as she walked onto the stage, she worried it might rivet its way through her chest. She used to look forward to performances, but now they filled her with an acute dread, an overriding foreboding.
I’ve got to pull it together,
she thought.
I can’t let this perv get to me.
Oblivious to her plight, all around her the San Diego audience cheered, called out to her, a sea of strangers that intensified her fears. Were they, as they appeared, simply a throng of parents, daughters, and sons? Were they
all
there just to have a good time? Or had something else brought one spectator to the concert?
He could be out there
, she thought.
He could be watching
.
The tempo built, hard and solid, the music pulsing around her, and Cassidy concentrated on the beat, trying to ease her disquiet. The stage was her territory, where she felt the most alive.
I’m not going to let some dude with an overblown ego ruin this for me,
she thought.
He won’t try anything, not here, not now, not with all these people watching. That creep wouldn’t dare.
Behind her the band kicked into a hard-rocking number, and
Cassidy relied on instinct for the dance moves that maneuvered her across the stage. In the audience, a girl in the front row reached up toward her, holding a red rose. Cassidy bent down to take it. As her hand closed around the stem, a searing pain pierced her palm. Four more dance steps and as she began the song’s second verse, she threw the rose back into the audience, where a heaving patchwork of bodies rushed forward to catch it. Still singing, she glanced at her hand and saw red, a bloody smudge. She needed to be more careful.
Leave the roses and take the daisies,
she thought.
Remember the thorns.
Per the routine, the dancers shadowed the superstar stage right, and she spun and fell back into a web of their bodies. They held her up by her extended arms, an ear-to-ear smile resolutely anchored on her face. Her hand throbbed and tears formed in her eyes, but from the audience, Cassidy appeared to be exhilarated by the excitement of being on stage.
In truth, she couldn’t get him out of her mind.
Five rows back, she thought she saw a glint in the audience, something bright. She wondered if it could be a knife, and if the hand holding it belonged to Argus. It passed quickly.
Silly,
she decided.
Probably just one of those battery-operated fans, the ones with the whirly bird tips that light.
She shook it off.
Calm down
, she thought.
I have to relax before I drive myself crazy.
As the evening wore on, she sang, danced, and fought back waves of anxiety. Until, nearly an hour into the concert, after the fourth costume change, Cassidy realized she had only fifteen minutes left on stage. The concert was nearly over. For the first time that day, she began to loosen up. One more concert and nothing had happened.
I’m freaking myself out for no reason,
she thought.
This creep just gets off scaring people.
If so, she assured herself, Argus had picked on the wrong girl. Life had fed Collins more than her share of pain, and she’d always survived. She needed to take it one
day at a time, and before long the stalker would be nothing more than a bad memory.
Suddenly, her in-ear monitor went dead, quiet.
Cassidy turned and looked at Jake, the audio guy, off in the wings, and saw him frantically search the sound mixer, flipping switches. The lights had all gone out, and nothing was working. He looked up at her and shook his head.
Not a clue
, he seemed to be saying.
Then, as unexpectedly as it clicked off, the equipment flicked back on. Dancing and singing her way across the stage, Cassidy trembled with relief.
It was nothing,
she chastised herself,
a computer glitch.
Shaking it off, she sang as the dancers formed a circle around her for the song’s finale. Cassidy moved into place, and the muscular young men dropped to their knees. Four grabbed her by her calves and thighs, lifting her up, until two moved beneath her and slipped her onto their shoulders. Cassidy thrust her arms up into a triumphant “V” and belted out the final refrain, just as again, without warning, her in-ear monitor went stone silent.
As the dancers walked the stage, displaying her in front of more than twenty thousand screaming fans, Cassidy’s monitor snapped back on. Rather than music, she heard a voice, an unfamiliar voice.
“I’m here,” he taunted, mocking her. He let lose a thick-throated laugh, and then whispered, “I’m here, and I’ve come for you.”
T
here’s no doubt about it: it’s easier to work one case at a time than balance multiple investigations. If I ever meet a cop who routinely has the luxury of focusing entirely on a single case, I’m going to leave the rangers and sign on with her department, whether it’s Detroit, Miami, or Sacramento. So far, I sure haven’t been that lucky. That is, unless I’m in crisis mode, like last year on the Lucas case. That’s different. But on your average day I work two, often three cases. Then there are the files sent in from across the state, the ones that pile up on my desk, waiting to be reviewed. Not to mention the cold cases, those I’ve never been able to solve. Some nights, one or another wakes me up in a sweat, reminding me that I haven’t given the victims justice. It’s a juggling act, trying not to let any case fall, afraid the one I drop is the one that takes me down. I love my work, but I’d only been back on the job a day, and it was already getting wild.
That’s what I was thinking sitting in the Rice University Police office waiting for Sergeant Jim Herald. Emma Lou and I had both
slept peacefully the prior night, not a blip on the baby-now-turned-horse monitor. Doc figured this was day number 299 of her pregnancy. Anything over three hundred and the foal had a chance. Aware that I had a full day ahead, I got up early, checked on the pinto, and then called Sergeant Herald to tell him I’d be dropping by. If Faith was right and her dead sister was keeping tabs on me, for the time being Billie Cox was just going to have to trust that I’d get back to her. Right now, Cassidy Collins and her stalker had my undivided attention.
I’d asked Herald to get an update on our prime suspect, Justin Peterson, from his professor, and to find out where the piano protégé was on the night Argus was in the audience in Las Vegas. Afterward, I planned a knock and talk. I’d knock on Peterson’s door and talk my way in. The truth is that I didn’t have nearly enough probable cause to get a search warrant, but I wanted a look inside his apartment. You can tell a lot about folks from the way they live.
At least that was the plan.
Fifteen minutes later than we’d agreed, Sergeant Herald, a tall, angular man with hollow cheeks and a precisely cut brown flattop, walked in the door and guided me to his cubicle. We’d barely begun talking when my cell phone rang. I noticed the 213 area code, Los Angeles, and realized it was near dawn on the West Coast. This wasn’t going to be good news.
“Argus was at Cassidy’s concert last night,” Barron said. “You have to do something, Lieutenant Armstrong.”
“Let me talk to her,” a young female voice shouted in the background. “They’re not taking this seriously. I want this perv stopped, now!”
“I’m working on it, Cassie,” Barron said. “I’ll get it done!”
“Get real, Rick. You’ve been handling this, okay, and what have you done to stop this creep?” the voice demanded. “Give me that stupid phone. From now on, I talk to the cops.”
Barron must have handed over the telephone, for the next thing the girl said was directly to me, “I want you to take care of this Peterson jerk for real. Get him the hell out of my face. You got that, cop?”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Cassidy Collins, Lady Cop,” she said. “And like I said, it’s like . . . this is it, you know? No more excuses. You need to arrest this jerk now.”
“My name is Lieutenant Sarah Armstrong, and I’m a Texas Ranger,” I said. “If you’ll just explain to me what happened last night, perhaps I can help you.”
“Rick told you. That Peterson guy showed up again, this time while I was onstage in front of twenty-thousand kids. All of a sudden the dude talks into my ear monitor. He was laughing and stuff, threatening me,” she said. “You need to stop him, now. No excuses. I want this guy gone.”
This case wasn’t going to be easy, and it sure wasn’t turning out to be fun. “Did Mr. Barron call San Diego P.D.?” I asked. “Did you file a report?”
“We’ve filed enough paper to supply the johns in Caesars Palace. Ask me if it helped. It didn’t,” she said. “I’ve had it with this dude. I can’t go to bed without figuring he’s outside my window. I just bought the hottest red Porsche, but I can’t drive it without a bodyguard because this Argus dude could follow me. You getting this, cop? You understand?”
“Yes. I understand. And one more time, my name is Lieutenant Armstrong,” I said. It shouldn’t have mattered, but this was one irritating sixteen-year-old.
“Whatever. I don’t care what your name is, Lady Cop. All I care about is that you catch this dude. Give him one of those lethal injections you Texans are so good at, and get the hell rid of him.”
There were things this kid was going to have to understand.
“Despite stalking not being a death sentence offense, I recognize your need to find and stop this man,” I said. “So tell me everything that happened last night, and maybe instead of attempting to bully me, you can help me figure out how to stop him.”
The kid balked some, but got over my “dissing” her. By the time I hung up, I was not only convinced that when I returned to the ranch that night I would burn every one of Maggie’s Cassidy Collins CDs, but also that the ill-mannered pop star had more than enough justification to be frightened. It had to be unsettling to be up on a stage in front of thousands of strangers and hear someone whisper threats in your ear. His final words were enough to haunt anyone: “You will die.”