A car zipped past her. She fought off the impulse to swerve crazily, as if the other car had come too close. She shook her head, trying to dislodge every fear that choked her.
She was letting thoughts just roll around wildly within her, when suddenly her cell phone rang. Again, she nearly swerved. The ringing clawed at her, and she reached out, almost losing her grip on the steering wheel. It was not the special cell with the number only Jordan and Sarah had. It was her regular phone. She seized it from the passenger seat.
A medical emergency, was her first and only thought.
“Doctor Jayson?” A crisp, authoritative voice.
“Speaking.”
‘This is Alpha Security. Are you at home?”
Karen was confused. Then she remembered the alarm system that she’d installed in her house after the Big Bad Wolf’s first letter, and the expensive monitoring plan she’d purchased. “No. I’m on the road. What seems to be the problem?”
“Your system shows an intrusion. You are not at home currently?”
“No, damn it, I told you. What sort of intrusion?”
“Protocol requires me to tell you not to return to the home before I am able to contact the local police, so that they can meet you at your house. If there is a burglary in progress, we do not want you surprising some criminal. That’s the police’s job.”
Karen tried to respond, but choked on each word.
A police car was waiting at the turn into her driveway. A young cop was standing beside the driver’s-side door, waiting for her. He was slouched against his vehicle, and didn’t give off any appearance of urgency.
“This is my home,” Karen said, rolling down the window. “What’s happening?”
“Do you have some identification, please,” the cop responded.
She produced her driver’s license. He took it from her, seemingly not noticing her quivering hand, looked at it, measured her face against the picture on the card before handing it back.
“We’ve already checked the house,” he said. “There’s another cruiser up there. Will you follow me, please?” This question was spoken like a command.
Karen did as she was told. The police car in front of her garage was occupied by two officers, one of whom was an edgy young woman who kept her hand on the butt of her holstered 9 mm pistol. The other was a substantially older man, slightly potbellied, with gray tufts of hair that protruded beneath his cap.
Karen felt her knees go weak as she exited her car. She was afraid she was going to stumble and fall on her face, or that her voice was going to crack with fear.
“Hello, Doctor,” the old cop said, cheerily. “You were lucky you didn’t come home early.”
“Lucky?” Karen asked. It was all she could do to squeeze out the single word.
“Let me show you.”
He led Karen past the front door-which was wide open-to an adjacent window. It was broken, with glass shards fanned out on the floor inside.
‘That’s where he got in,” the cop said. “Then when the phone rang-that’s what the security company does: They call your house, and if you answer they ask for a code, and if there’s no response within six rings, they call us-anyway, phone rings, burglar sees the caller ID, panics, maybe grabs something, sprints out the front door, and heads off into the woods, or off to wherever he’s parked his car. It took us a few minutes to get here, but he was long gone, and-”
“How many minutes?” Karen interrupted. Her voice seemed pale, as if her words had somehow lost their color.
“Maybe five. Ten at the very most. We were fast. One of our guys was just a couple of miles up the main road, looking for speeders. He got turned around, hit his lights and siren, and got up here quick.”
Karen nodded.
“I already called a window guy. Hope you don’t mind. We keep some names on file at headquarters of guys who will come straight out, day and night…”
“No that’s fine.”
“He’ll be here any minute. Fix up the broken glass. Get your alarm system back online. But while we’re waiting, we’d like you to just check out the house, see what was taken before the bad guy ran. The insurance people, you know. They want as much in the police report as possible when you make your claim.”
Again Karen nodded. She couldn’t think of anything to say. Her imagination was crowded with too many possibilities:
It was the Wolf.
No, it was too clumsy. He would be sophisticated. Clever.
Why would someone else break in? It can’t be a coincidence.
Did he come to kill me?
She didn’t know what to say to the policeman. Instead, she just walked slowly through her house, searching for some sign that something was missing. But other than the glass spread about beneath the broken window, she could see nothing. It was almost as if whoever it was had broken the window, jackknifed into her house, and made an immediate turn and exited. That can’t be the Wolf, she told herself. He would want something. And the Wolf would have known I wasn’t here.
With the cop hovering over her shoulder, she went into every room, checked every closet, opened every door, and switched on every light. Nothing was missing. This merely confused her more.
Midway through her survey, a middle-aged man from Smith 24-Hour Glass Repair showed up and rapidly began work on her window. The repairman had greeted the cops as if they were relatives, which Karen guessed might be the case.
“Anything?” the gray-haired cop asked.
“No. Everything still seems to be in place.”
“Keep looking,” the cop said. “Sometimes it’s not so obvious, like a wide-screen TV ripped from the wall mount. Do you keep cash or jewelry around?”
Karen searched through drawers in her bedroom bureau. Her meager collection of earrings and necklaces was where she had left it that morning.
“Nothing missing,” she said. She knew she should feel reassured, but instead she felt queasy, nauseous.
“Lucky. I guess that alarm system did its job. We’ve had a number of break-ins in this part of town. Snatch and grab mainly.”
Karen did not feel lucky. She continued to survey her house. Something still seemed wrong, and it took her a second to realize that Martin and Lewis were nowhere to be seen. “I have two cats…” she started.
The cop glanced around. “Live alone, ought to have a big, mean dog.”
“I know that. But they’re not here,” she replied. “They’re inside cats-you know, don’t really go out.”
The cop shrugged. “They probably took off fast as hell out the front door right behind the bad guy, just as scared as he was. My guess is they’re hiding in some bush someplace close by. Put out a bowl of food on the rear deck after we leave; they’ll be back soon enough. Cats, you know, they can take care of themselves pretty good. I wouldn’t worry. They’ll show up when they get hungry or it gets too cold. But I’ll put it in my report anyways.”
Karen thought she should call for Martin and Lewis. But she knew they wouldn’t come. Not because they wouldn’t obey her summons. Because she was absolutely, 100 percent completely certain they were dead.
34
The Big Bad Wolf held a nine-inch hunting knife in his hand, balancing it on his palm. It had a satisfying weight-not too heavy to be unwieldy, but not so light that it couldn’t be used to cut through skin, muscle, tendons, and even bone. He placed his thumb against the serrated blade but stopped himself from the temptation of drawing it across the razor-sharp edge. Instead, he moved his index finger to the flat side and gently stroked the length of the knife, reaching the tip and stopping. After a moment, he scraped at a little dried blood near the handle, before reaching below his desk, bringing out a spray bottle of disinfecting kitchen cleaner, liberally applying it to the entirety of the knife, and then carefully wiping every surface to destroy any lingering DNA.