Echeverria looked at me again, and then decided he’d rather look at Jackie. He did, and then he frowned and turned back to face Debs. “Okay, I get it,” he said. “But, uh—what’s the deal with you? What are you doing working on it if it’s not your case?”
Deborah’s face froze into her official Talking to the Captain Face. “I am on detached duty as a technical adviser to the Big Ticket Network, which is shooting a pilot here. Starring,” she said with a nod at Jackie, “Miss Forrest.”
Echeverria looked at Jackie again.
“And so,” Debs said, and Echeverria tore his eyes off Jackie and looked back at my sister, “Miss Forrest and I are conducting a parallel mock investigation of our own in order to teach her proper police investigative technique and procedure.”
Echeverria looked at Deborah with new respect. “Fucking brilliant,” he said.
Deborah just nodded.
“So, what,” Echeverria said. “I gotta go talk to Anderson, ask him if I can see the case file?”
“I’m afraid so,” Deborah said.
“And he really is a total fucking dope?”
“Or worse,” she said. “But I never said that.”
“Well, shit,” he said.
“Pretty much,” Deborah said.
THIRTEEN
ECHEVERRIA LEFT TO FIND ANDERSON, WITH ONE MORE LONG look at Jackie, and I was not particularly unhappy to see him go. Of course, he had a right to ogle whoever he wanted, and Jackie was certainly ogle-worthy. But for some reason, I didn’t like it. Perhaps I was merely getting overzealous in my role as her bodyguard. Maybe it was something else.
In any case, I was glad to see the last of Echeverria, and it gave me a chance to think a little bit more about Patrick Bergmann. Knowing what he looked like was very nice, of course, but for my purposes it was more important to know what he thought like. Would he stalk Jackie as if she were a deer, staying in heavy cover and then leaping out when she wasn’t expecting it? Or would he be the kind of freak who showed himself to his victim a few times, just to build suspense? Would he approach in some bizarre, brilliant, unimaginable manner? Or just charge her with a lasso?
I knew what he liked to do after he caught his victims—I had seen it three times already. But I didn’t know how he liked to stalk, and it would certainly help if I could figure that out. And all that aside, I naturally enough felt a certain amount of curiosity about somebody who shared my interests.
“Could I read the letters?” I asked Deborah. She looked at me blankly. “The letters Patrick wrote to Jackie,” I said as patiently as possible.
Deborah cocked her head to one side. “Patrick,” she said. “He’s already ‘Patrick’ to you.”
“It is his name,” I said, trying very hard not to sound cranky.
“His name is sicko,” she said. “Or fucking psycho. Or the suspect or the perp.” She shook her head. “But to you he’s Patrick.”
“Oh, my God, he’s doing that thing again,” Jackie said, staring at me as if I was a piece of alien technology that had just turned itself on. “You know, where he goes inside the guy’s head.”
“If you’d rather,” I said with all the dignity I could muster under the circumstances, “I can go back to drinking awful coffee with Robert.”
Deborah made a snorting sound. “I wouldn’t wish that on anybody,” she said. She picked up the sheaf of papers from her desk. “Read the fucking letters,” she said, holding them out to me. “Go away into your fucking trance. Bring back something I can use.”
“Thank you,” I said, and although I thought I had managed a tone of quiet but injured self-possession, Jackie and Deborah snickered in unison. But I fought down my quite natural impulse to lay about me with a chair and took the letters, settling into the folding chair beside Deborah’s desk as I began to read. The letters were all printed out from a standard computer printer.
“Dear Miss Forrest,” the first one began.
I guess I should just say Jackie but I wanted to be polite the first time, so here goes. I got to say I seen a lot of beautiful girls in my time and not all of them on the internet hahaha but you are something special. First I seen you I new you are something rilly special and now I watched everything you done and I new that you and me was spose to be together like it was something just spose to happen. I no I don’t have to try and discripe it to you because you are goin to feel it to soon as you see me and so I will just say for rite now I rilly need you to send me something maybe you were wearing and you don’t have to wash it first if you no what I mean. I no you will see me real soon.
youre soul mate Patrick Bergmann
I flipped through the next few letters; they were pretty much the same, telling her with increasing frustration that she was meant to be with him; anybody could see it, and she had to see it, too, and would definitely see it as soon as she saw him. They didn’t get really interesting until the fifth letter.
“I am sick of heering from that dum bitch you got working for you,” it started, and it just got better.
You dint anser me your own self and I told you you should. You dint sent me the thing you were wearing and I told you I need that. You have to start listing to me or this goin to turn rilly bad. Why cant you see what is so cristal clear and plain as day that you and me are goin to be together? You no I rilly love you and you will rilly love me if you just see me for two seconds. And you got to no that one way or other you are going to see me!!!