She felt nauseous.
Head spinning, hand quivering, she carefully replaced the scrapbook on its shelf. She returned the pencil to the exact same spot on the desk. She looked around, suddenly frightened that somehow she had touched something, shifted something, and left behind a telltale mark. She had a surge of panic, thinking that her perfume’s scent might linger in the closed air of the office. She stepped back toward the door, wildly waving her arms to try to chase any lingering smell out alongside her.
Her eyes took a last look inside, printing the space like a picture in her memory. She shut off the overhead light and slowly closed the office door. Her hands fumbled with the lock and she almost passed out when she heard a loud, blaring noise coming from somewhere close, but from some different world.
She gasped. Electric shock coursed through her body. She dropped the keys to the floor. She staggered backward like someone shot with a gun or struck hard across the face, almost falling. She had to seize the countertop to keep her balance. She could feel sweat on her forehead, and she gasped out a small, terrified gurgle. The noise sounded again.
Car horn.
As promised, the auto service had arrived.
22
Jordan maneuvered along rows of well-worn texts in the school’s library. She found many books about the rise of the Ottoman Empire or root causes of the First World War. There were entire shelves devoted to the Reformation and endless volumes assessing the Founding Fathers or the Great Depression. There was precious little about how to avoid being a murder victim.
She felt a little crazy as she wandered up and down the stacks looking for some breezy, cheery title like So, You Don’t Want to Be a Homicide Victim?: Twelve Easy Steps You Can Take at Home to Avoid Becoming Another Statistic.
Murder as a weight loss program, she imagined.
So far, her research had primarily been concerned with trying to understand famous crimes so she could glean some sort of “anti-information” from them. Her reasoning was simple: If she understood what bad guys did, then perhaps she could avoid making the same mistakes their victims had. She had read about the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti and the bank-robbing-and-murder sprees of John Dillinger. Billy the Kid and the twenty-one notches on his Colt revolver had fixed her attention, as had Charles Manson, who might not have actually killed anybody, but was regarded as an infamous murderer. She had surveyed the fiction shelves and found some Agatha Christie, which seemed quaint and dated, and some John le Carré, although she felt only slightly like a spy operating in shadowy worlds and didn’t think his books could help her. Elmore Leonard might have been more useful, and maybe George Higgins, but she saw they seemed mostly about mobsters in Florida and Boston, and that wasn’t really what interested her, because the Big Bad Wolf wasn’t some Mafia type or low-rent gang sort. There was even a shelf containing a relentless bunch of books with the word prey splashed sensationally and unapologetically across each title page, and though she felt this was what she was trying to avoid becoming, she didn’t feel these books would teach her very much.
She took her laptop to a corner of the library where there were small cubicles for students to use preparing term papers or researching English class essays. She did a Google search for stalking and came up with over forty million entries in less than a second. She scanned some of these, from what appeared to be government or police organizations. They didn’t help either.
Each began with the eminently wise admonition to “limit contact with the obsessive personality.” Great, she thought. That’s a big goddamn help. Her problem stemmed from the fact that all the connections between her and the Big Bad Wolf had been his to begin with. It simply wasn’t the same as an estranged boyfriend or a deranged classmate or coworker. On the one hand, the Wolf was completely anonymous. On the other, he was so close she could feel hot breath against her neck.
And none of the websites-like none of the books on killing-gave her the slightest idea what to do next.
So, Jordan thought, you are sort of on your own and not on your own at the same time, because there’s always Red One and Red Two.
She looked across the library. There was an assistant librarian at a desk in the corner and perhaps a half-dozen other students either wandering through the stacks or hunkered down with a pile of books. The assistant librarian was a middle-aged woman bent over a copy of Cosmopolitan and obviously killing the last few minutes before she could chase the students from their research and lock up. The students were bookish types who would have been ashamed to sneak some unattributed Wikipedia information into whatever paper they were writing, a practice universally frowned upon by the faculty but regularly employed by almost the entirety of the student body.
She knew the Wolf wasn’t there. It made no difference. He had created the impression that he was always close by, as if he was in the next cubicle, smirking behind a stack of research materials as he watched her.
She asked herself, How can I tell when I’m safe and when I’m not?
This question reverberated within her. She stood up sharply, pushed all her books aside, slipped her computer into her backpack, and walked quickly out of the library. On the steps, surrounded by early night, she realized that the Wolf could be there. Or could not.
Uncertainty dogged her every stride.
She hunched her shoulders against the chill and headed back to her dormitory. She expected to pass another night neglecting her assignments and tossing fitfully as sleep tortured her.
I can’t run away. I can’t hide. Just the opposite. I have to get close enough so I can see him clearly.
Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. The word repeated in her head like an unwanted melody, so much so that she almost missed the sound of her cell phone ringing. She reached first for the throwaway that Karen had given her. But it was her other phone buzzing.
Mom? Dad? she thought, knowing that it wouldn’t be.
Sarah was also outside in the early evening, letting cold air flow steadily over her, but not really feeling the chill. Remarkable, she thought, how a little bit of terror keeps you warm.
She had been unable to remain inside her house. The ever-present television set had failed to distract her. Memories and fears had coalesced into a stew of anxiety, and she had known she had to do something, but was unable to think of what that something might be.
Go to the movies? Ridiculous.
Go out to dinner alone? Don’t be stupid.
Head to a local bar to drink? That would be really smart.
So, for lack of any other idea, thinking that it was incredibly foolish to make herself so vulnerable but unable to withstand the buildup of tension within her, she had tossed on a pair of jogging shoes and taken a walk.
Up one block she traveled, down the next, then across a few streets, as haphazardly as possible, with no fixed direction. She had passed a few homes where once she had visited friends and neighbors, but she did not stop. From time to time she had come upon other people, usually out exercising a dog, but on almost every occasion she had hunched up her shoulders and buried her head and neck into her coat and refused to make eye contact. She did not think that some businessman home from work at the office and taking Fido or Spot out for an evening bathroom break would turn into the Big Bad Wolf, but she also knew that this possibility was as likely as any. Why wouldn’t some guy walking his mutt be a killer? In fact, the only people she discounted were those whose dogs were irrepressible and had that dog-demand and dog-need to greet any stranger on the street with a wag and a sniff. And then, after roughing up the ears and stroking the neck of the third such dog that accosted her despite the apologies and admonitions of its owner, she abruptly asked herself: Why wouldn’t a killer have a friendly dog?