Pulse

61

New York, the present

“I ’m used to him now, because I know he’s not real.”

“Used to him in what way?” Grace Moore asked her patient.

“It’s almost like he came with the apartment,” Linda said. “When I enter I catch a glimpse of him crossing in the hall from the bathroom to the bedroom. If I’m in the kitchen and can’t see him, I know he’s still back there. I suspect he hides under the bed.”

“Have you ever looked?”

Linda stared at her. “Are you kidding?”

“You told me you know he’s not real.”

“But he could become real, and then where would I be?”

“If he wasn’t real when he went under the bed,” Grace said, “he wouldn’t be real when he stared back at you if you bent down and looked to see if he was there.”

Linda looked incredulous. “He could reach out and get me. Have me by the throat in half a second so I couldn’t make a sound, then he’d do whatever he wanted to me. If you were me, would you take that kind of chance?”

Grace thought about it. “No,” she admitted. She crossed her legs and sat back in her chair. “Does he ever talk to you?”

“No. Not him. Just the voices in the stone.”

“If he could talk, what do you suppose he’d say?”

“You mean if he would talk.”

“I suppose I do mean that,” Grace said.

“He’d say, ‘I’m here to torture and kill you.’ ”

“Why would you think he’d say that?”

“You know why. I’m a paranoid schizophrenic. And besides that, I’m his type.”

“Oh?”

“I keep up with the news, all the stuff about the serial killer, Daniel. I look like the women he’s killed. Same size and build. You know, with big boobs. Same brown eyes and brown hair.” She decided not to tell Dr. Moore yet about meeting with someone who might believe her, might help her.

Grace smiled. “Linda, if I didn’t dye my hair blond, I’d look like that. Well, maybe not so much in the boobs department, but I have brown hair and brown eyes. Like millions of women in New York. Why do you think that killer would settle on you?”

“He’s in my apartment.”

Grace tilted her head and nodded. The logic of the irrational was difficult to refute. “Have you tried talking to him?”

“Yes. He doesn’t answer, only smiles or shrugs and goes someplace where I can’t see him.”

“You mean disappears?”

“Of course not. He simply walks into another room.”

Grace regarded Linda for a long moment. “Do you think he’ll be there when you leave here and go home?”

“He almost always is, after a session.”

Grace smiled. “You have him trained.”

“Or he has me trained. Same difference. He’s my-”

“Your what?”

“My fate.”

Grace shook her head. “Oh, Linda, that isn’t so. You have control of your own life.”

“Then what am I doing here?”

“Getting the help you need. Our sessions, your medications. Have you been taking your meds as prescribed?”

“Of course. He stands somewhere behind me and watches in the mirror as I take each pill.”

“Hmm. I have an idea, Linda. You say he’s almost always in your apartment when you come home from these sessions. How about if I go home with you and meet this man?”

“You mean after one of our sessions?”

Linda was going to be elusive now and protect her hallucination. Not uncommon. “I mean after this session.”

“I doubt if he’ll talk to you.”

“Does he know about me?” Grace wanted a chance to examine Linda’s medicine cabinet and see which pills and how many were in her prescription vials. Linda was displaying symptoms that her medications should be alleviating.

“Oh, he knows,” Linda said. “He’s followed me here. I watched him once hanging back behind me in the elevator and watching to see which door I entered.”

“You mean my door, to my office?”

“Right. He stood down the hall a way and watched.”

“Then he and I really should talk.”

“You’ll be doing most of the talking,” Linda said. “But if that’s the way you feel about it, okay.”

Grace was slightly surprised by Linda’s acquiescence. And pleased. It might mean she was ready to face up to what, on a basic level, she knew wasn’t actually real. This might lead to what the TV psychoanalysts called a breakthrough. She looked at her watch. Ten minutes to eleven.

“I don’t have another appointment until two o’clock,” she said, standing up from her chair. She smiled reassuringly at Linda. “Let’s go.”

Linda braced herself with both hands on her chair arms, levered herself to her feet, and smiled back.

“Just sit for a minute in the anteroom while I shut things down here in the office, and I’ll be right with you.”

Linda went out and settled into a comfortable chair, and the doctor didn’t take long at all.

Linda led the way out of the office and down the hall to the elevator. Already she was acting as the hostess, and would in subtle ways be in charge of this visit.

Dr. Moore considered that a good thing.

“If you don’t mind,” Dr. Moore said, “I’d like to drop by my apartment first and get out of these high heels; I’ve got a blister and they’re killing me.”

“I hear you on that one,” Linda said.

“There are two messages for you,” Pearl said, when Quinn returned to the office from lunch. “Both from women who think someone’s following them.”

“We’ve had more than a few calls like that,” Quinn said.

“Since the media have made you the big hero and serial killer hunter.”

Quinn made a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh.

He ambled over and lowered his large self into his desk chair hard enough to make the cushion hiss. Pearl wondered if he’d been “lunching” with Jerry Lido. “Either of these calls sound like the real thing?” he asked, already sure of the answer.

Pearl shrugged. “One didn’t make much sense, or maybe I couldn’t understand the caller because of her accent. The other seemed okay at first, then she asked that no one contact her doctor to let her know she’d called.”

“She say what kind of doctor?”

“She didn’t have to.”

Quinn punched a button on his desk phone and listened to both messages. The first was in a high-pitched voice speaking in what sounded like some kind of middle European accent he couldn’t begin to understand.

The second caller was understandable, a woman speaking with what sounded like deliberate and fragile calm, explaining how the same man had been following her, how sometimes he let himself into her apartment. She then said that she didn’t want her doctor to know yet that she was going outside the rules, calling someone who might believe and help her. Her doctor, the woman said, didn’t think the man was real. Then she explained that it was true that he wasn’t real all the time, but only sometimes.

Neither woman left a name, but the voice of one was familiar.

Quinn sat for a moment mulling over the calls. He’d received dozens like them over the past several weeks. There was something about the second woman, something in her voice that signaled real if sublime fear. Perhaps she had mental problems, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be a potential victim.

And the woman with the accent? How could he judge if he couldn’t understand her?

He looked at caller ID. The first number was that of a large insurance firm with a Midtown office. He called there and talked to three people who had no idea of the identity of a woman with a heavy European accent who might be trying to contact him.

The second number displayed no name but had a Manhattan prefix. He called it and got no answer and no invitation to leave a message.

After hanging up, Quinn stared at the phone, then dug through the note papers beneath a paperweight on his desk. The second caller’s number was that of Linda Brooks, with a West Side address.

Linda Brooks, the woman who’d approached him in the office because she thought someone might be following her. The one who was under analysis.

She’d also left her doctor’s name and address.

Quinn jotted down the information on a piece of scratch paper and tucked it into his wallet with similar folded slips of paper.

He wasn’t quite sure why, considering how many women like Linda Brooks there were in the city. Seldom were their monsters real.

Real enough to them, however. He felt a pang of pity for Linda Brooks. Started to reach again for the phone.

But she hadn’t wanted him to call her analyst. About that she’d been specific.

Yet she wouldn’t answer her phone. And who was to say she needed more help than the woman with the European accent who’d called? Or any of the other troubled and frightened women, most of whom weren’t in any actual danger?

Quinn wished he could help them all, the fearful and delusional, but he couldn’t except in general ways. Like trying to stop a very real killer.

He turned his mind to his job.