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!!!
The next letter was even angrier, starting out with a string of misspelled curse words that really made me lament the state of public education in our once-great nation, and then settling down into a steady stream of thinly veiled and completely naked threats.
You better jus get it thru youre head that this is goin to happen and that is all there is to it and if you cant see it I am goin to MAKE you see it and make you see ME. I am not afraid to do some pretty bad things if its goin to make you open up youre eyes and look at me and no what I am sayin about you and me is the total hunred percent true.
Given what had led up to it, the final letter was fairly standard stuff, disappointingly predictable in its turn to cold rage, threats of violence, and general psychotic unhappiness. I read it twice, pausing in between to think grateful thoughts about the education I had been lucky enough to receive from Harry-and, as unlikely as it seemed, from the Miami-Dade public school system, which was really starting to look good compared to what Patrick got in Laramie, Tennessee. But of course, as I reminded myself, the schools in Tennessee were not totally to blame; several intelligent people had come from that state, and I was almost certain that another one could come along any day now.
I read through the last letter one more time.
If that is the way how you want to play it than that is the way how I am goin to do it. You want to go all cold and mean on me that’s fine because I can play that game even better and you will be so sorry you ever did that. I will fine you and I will make you see me and I will make you see what you could have had and than I will take it all away from you one little piece at a time. And I do mean ALL of it. I will show you that you are no diffrent but just a hore like all the other girls think they are so special and I will make you SEE what you could have had and that will be the last thing you ever see and I am coming for you bitch and you better believe it.
This last letter was not signed, “youre soulmate”; love is so fragile, isn’t it? And again, it really was just a little bit disappointing in the blunt and ignorant mind it revealed. I do not absolutely demand that every sick and twisted killer must show a bright gleam of intelligence and originality, but really. Something this pedestrian did seem to be letting down the side just a bit, don’t you think?
In any case, it was clear to me that this was not a subtle brain, searching for visceral poetry. This was a very direct, rather dull and ordinary sick and twisted killer. He was psychotic, yes, and capable of almost any kind of perverted violence, but he lacked all refinement, and altogether seemed to be without a single subtle or interesting thought on what was, after all, a very important subject.
Disappointing, but at least it meant he should be quite easy to find, once I put my own sharp and wonderful mind to it and began to track him to his lair and then …
… and then nothing at all, because my mind would not be tracking anything right now; my mind was firmly locked in place inside my skull, riding high atop my body as it performed its chores as Jackie’s protector. I could not step out into the bright and welcoming moonlight and slide through the shadows to find Patrick in what would certainly be a terribly obvious little hidey-hole, could not take him and tape him and end things the right way, my way … because I would be spending those precious dark hours hovering over Jackie with vigilance and cunning, and perhaps a little more dark rum.
I became aware that conversation had stopped in Deborah’s little office, and I looked up from the letters to see Jackie and my sister both staring at me. “What,” I said.