Serial

32

Jock Sanderson had done time for raping Judith Blaney. It had been hard time. A small man, with fine features and a lean, muscular frame, Jock had fallen victim to sexual abuse in prison. Half a dozen gang members had in fact made him their own, passing him around like depreciating property.

It had been a nightmare, and it had lasted until the team of Legal Aid lawyers, campaigning to overturn wrongful eye-witness rape convictions, used DNA evidence to prove that someone else had raped Judith Blaney.

Late last year, Jock Sanderson was pardoned.

The real evidence had been skimpy to begin with. Jock had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Judith Blaney had been the wrong woman. She’d wrongly identified him in a police lineup, and again in court. She more than anyone had caused him to live his nightmare. To live it over and over for more than five years.

So what was left of Jock had been freed to walk in a world that still thought him unworthy. He’d begun to drink, an old habit that soon became an addiction. Now he was a regular at AA meetings and had been dry for months.

The only job he’d been able to find was with Sweep ’Em Up Janitorial Service, sweeping and cleaning entertainment venues, from sporting events to Broadway and off-Broadway theaters, the days after evening performances. A weekly paycheck had enabled him to leave the halfway house and the constant pressure of church services and one-on-one attempts to convert him to Christianity. Jock dealt with that by doing what he figured most Christians did-pretend. Prison had taught him well how to do that.

He could sometimes even pretend and fool himself.

The way Jock figured it, he’d been done wrong. Somebody owed him. That somebody was Judith Blaney.

He hadn’t raped Judith. He’d been home in bed alone, suffering with a cold, on the evening of her rape. Of course he had no witnesses to corroborate his alibi. Usually you didn’t welcome company when you were flat on your back with a fever and congested chest.

Jock had never seen Judith before his arrest. But he dreamed about her a lot in prison. He’d seen her face almost every night in his dreams. Her nightmare lived within his nightmare.

Often, some of the things that had been done to him in prison, he did to Judith Blaney in his dreams. His muffled screams became hers. Also his humiliation. His pain. She would beg him with her eyes to stop. But he didn’t stop. Not in his dreams.

Sometimes, he thought, dreams meant something.

Jock had been following Judith for almost three months. He didn’t mind if now and then she noticed him. Let her wonder.

After the first month, she’d obtained a restraining order. He was forbidden by law to harass her, or even to approach within a hundred feet of her.

He knew what a hundred feet meant. He could measure the precise distance in his mind. So he continued to follow Judith. He would be far enough away that she couldn’t do anything about it. She would know he was there though. Not always, but she could never be sure when he was observing her. At times she’d forget and feel safe. Then she’d glance behind her and there on the crowded sidewalk, or perhaps across the street watching her pull away in the back of a taxi, there he would be, and any joy would drain from her features and an expression he interpreted as fearful would come over her. That would give him a cold satisfaction.

But most of the time she didn’t know he was tailing her. That also gave him satisfaction. He was becoming expert at watching her without her knowledge. Sometimes even moving close to her, inside the protective hundred-foot legal distance. Like a trespasser on a dare.

Like tonight. He’d been on the same crowded subway car, then only ten feet behind her on the teeming platform. He’d been nearby her on the escalator. He kept a more prudent distance behind her on the sidewalk on the way to her apartment. She would often glance behind her, especially if the night was dark and the sidewalks not crowded.

He was close enough tonight to hear the tapping of her high heels. If he stayed tight to the buildings, keeping an awareness of light and shadow, he could haunt her like a ghost whose presence she would barely sense.

Now and then he’d deliberately let her catch a glimpse of him, let her know she wasn’t alone in this fear-filled world that only the two of them inhabited and that she had helped to create.

Jock knew Judith now better than she could imagine. The way hunters knew the thing they hunted.

It was almost an hour after dusk. They were on a long block that was almost deserted. Only the two of them. Tap, tap, tap went her heels on the hard concrete. Echoing in the street and in his mind.

Can you feel my eyes on you?

Sense my thoughts?

I already served time for raping you. Maybe I have a free one coming. Maybe more than just rape. I paid. You should pay.

Her stride was brisk and rhythmic, hurried but not panicked. Not yet.

Tap, tap, tap…

Faster now. She was picking up her pace. Afraid of something. Did she know he was here? No, she couldn’t. She couldn’t be sure.

He was certain she hadn’t spotted him.

He dropped back, confused by her obvious uneasiness, and saw a figure detach itself from the shadows and fall in behind Judith. The figure was that of a man. Medium height. Medium build. That was all he could be sure of from this distance.

Jock slowed his pace and tailed the man who was following Judith. Unquestionably, the shadowy figure was acting furtively. What was going on? Was Judith getting plainclothes protection? Had she gotten the police interested in him again?

No, he was sure the police would have approached him or come to his door and warned him. Since the day Judith had pointed her finger at him in a lineup, he’d been close acquaintances with the police, with the prison system, with the thugs that kept the order. They were all alike.

Sometimes they wore uniforms, sometimes not. But he was positive the figure ahead wasn’t a policeman. The police didn’t work that way. Didn’t look that way. Didn’t feel that way.

Jock watched the man following Judith stand across the street from her as she entered her apartment building.

The man tilted back his head and stared up at the correct window and waited patiently until it became illuminated. Then he put his hands in his pockets and walked away. His gait was different now. More relaxed. The intensity had gone out of him.

Excitement rippled through Jock like a chill. Something strange was happening here. Someone else had entered their private, fearful world.

He wasn’t the only one stalking Judith.