Ladies' Man (8 page)

The second page said “Life,” and it showed what looked to be rather hideously drawn creatures—angels maybe?—holding an unconscious or limp person whose head was down and toes were dragging, carrying him or her—again it was hard to tell—up to the clouds.

The second letter had the same words, but different illustrations. “Death,” or “Deth” this time—it was spelled wrong on this page—showed a contorting figure being burned alive by fire. “Life” was more of those grotesque angels. And then there were the eyes. “I am watching you.”

“The first two arrived by mail,” Ellen told him. “They were kind of odd. There was no name on the envelopes, just the address. The third one was taped to the front door. Jamie found it day before yesterday. That was, let’s see…July first.”

Sam looked up at her. “Do you have the envelopes?”

She shook her head. “If they’re not in that file, then no.”

“And you’re sure Bob’s name wasn’t on any of the envelopes? Not anywhere?”

“They only had the address. The one that was taped to the door didn’t have anything written on it at all.”

“And they were sent here, to the house, not to the studio?”

“That’s right.”

“If you get anything else like this either in the mail or hand delivered, make sure you save the envelopes,” he said.

Ellen nodded. “Isn’t this really creepy?” she asked, using the exact same word he’d been thinking. “I mean, they’re not exactly death threats, but there is some kind of threat implied, isn’t there?”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “I’d say
something’s
implied.”

The third letter was different. There were only two pages. The first was a picture of the awful angels. Underneath the crayon drawing were the words “They are watching me.” The second was the eyes again, and the words “I am watching you.”

“You said Jamie found this taped to the door?”

Ellen nodded.

“Bob mentioned Jamie too—and someone named Lydia. Do they live here too? Are they, like, hired help?”

Ellen laughed. And laughed. For some reason, she found his question very funny. “They are, in fact, nothing like hired help,” she told him. “I can ask them to come down here if you want to talk to them.”

“Yeah, I’ll want to do that, but first I have some questions about the phone calls. Can you tell me about how many you’ve received?”

“I’ve gotten at least three. Lydia got one. I no longer allow her or Jamie to answer the phone.”

Sam looked up at her over the pages of his notebook. “Allow?”

She smiled at him sweetly, almost sadly. “Lydia and Jamie are my children, Sam.”

Children? Shock spread through him in waves. She hadn’t mentioned her kids even once the entire time they were together. “You didn’t tell me you had kids.”

“Well, I do. A fifteen-year-old daughter and a thirteen-year-old son.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“There’re a lot of things I didn’t ask.”

Ellen shifted in her seat, clearly ill at ease. Why hadn’t she told him about her kids? Had she intended to deceive him from the very start? Had she planned to seduce him? Had she planned to use him for only one night of pleasure, and therefore hadn’t bothered to tell him more about herself than the information she’d had to provide to answer his questions? Hell, if she were that calculating, she damn well could’ve lied about
everything
.

“Do you want me to tell you about the phone calls?” she asked.

Sam’s voice sounded harsh even to his own ears, but he couldn’t stop himself. “No, I want to know what else you didn’t tell me. Are you really divorced, or is Richard hiding somewhere upstairs too?”

Ellen sat silently, staring at the floor, and Sam cursed softly. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She looked up at him, her brown eyes vulnerable and so very sad. “No, I probably deserved that.” She stood up. “Maybe you should go.”

Sam didn’t stand up. Instead he picked up the file of letters and sighed.

“No, I shouldn’t go. You’ve got a problem here,” he said, gesturing to the file, “that’s bigger than this problem here,” he added, gesturing between the two of them. “Please, sit down and tell me about the phone calls.”

Ellen sat down slowly, her eyes searching his face. “You think this could be serious?”

“Bob said something about a caller hanging up when he and Jamie picked up the phone. Have I got it right? You and your daughter were the only ones who’ve gotten these calls?”

Ellen nodded.

“Can you tell me everything you remember about the calls? Can you describe the voice?”

“Male,” she said, her eyes still on his face. “It was definitely a man, even though it was kind of high pitched and raspy, as if he were trying to disguise his voice.”

“What did he say?”

“It was weird. The first time I picked up the phone, he said something like, ‘Do you like to fly?’ and I said something like, ‘Who is this?’ or ‘Who’s calling?’ He asked something else really odd—‘What do you smell like?’ or, no, ‘
Who
do you smell like?’ It was weird.
Who
. And then he said—and I remember this really clearly, because he said the same thing in the other calls, and to Lydia too. He said, ‘Do you want to get probed too? Where do you want to get probed?’” Her face flushed and she glanced away from him. “And then he got pretty explicit with his list of choices. That’s when I hung up.”

Sam was scribbling her words down in his notebook. Probed. That wasn’t a word he’d heard too often. Maybe they’d get lucky and come up with a match for some previously apprehended creep’s MO. They’d plug the words used in both the phone calls and the letters into the police computer—together and separately, because at this stage they couldn’t even assume it was the same guy—hoping to find some previously tagged sex offender with a similar method of operation. This kind of creep tended to favor certain words over others, such as “probe,” or asking
who
you smell like, rather than
what
, and those word choices sometimes helped in identifying them.

And IDing this guy would help them find him.

“The second and third times he called, I hung up as soon as he started talking about probes,” Ellen continued.

Sam looked up. “Did he ask for or mention your uncle at all?”

“No.”

He flipped back through his pages of notes. “The first letter arrived on…June twenty-eighth. The first phone call was…before that or after that?”

“After. A couple days after.”

“You’re certain of that?”

“Yes. I’m sure you know that Bob’s number is unlisted. He thought it was just a coincidence. But I remember being really spooked, thinking it was maybe the same guy who sent those awful pictures. Still, Bob thought it was just some pervert who randomly dialed a number, searching for a female voice.

Sam glanced up from his notes.

“But you don’t think that, do you?” Ellen asked, a note of worry creeping into her voice.

He shook his head. “Ellen, do you remember the date your commercial first aired?”

She frowned. “No. Wait—yes. It was…” She met his gaze only briefly. “It was the day after us. You know. You, me, the lions…”

Sam smiled crookedly. “I don’t need a lot of reminding about that.” He flipped through his notebook to a calendar page. “That was a week ago Friday. So you saw the commercial on Saturday…June twenty-fifth.” He looked up at Ellen. “Three days before you got the first threatening letter—sent to this address, without a specific name on the envelope.”

He held out the drawings of the victim in the pictures labeled “Death.” “Look at the hair color,” he continued. “That’s not Bob. Bob has dark hair. In both of these pictures, this person is blond.”

“Oh my God. Do you think…?”

“I think these letters weren’t for Bob,” Sam said grimly. “Ellen, I think they were meant for
you
.”

SEVEN

M
r. Harrison! How are you, sir? Nice to see you again.”

Sam looked up to see Ron, the limo driver, waving to him from where the stretch limousine was parked in front of Bob Osborne’s house.

“You mind if we take a second to set this guy straight?” he asked T.S. He didn’t wait for his friend to respond before approaching Ron and holding out his hand for a shake. “Hey, how’s it going, Ron?”

“Fine, thank you, sir.”

“Look,” Sam said, “I wanted to introduce someone to you.” He turned to T.S. “This is—”

“Tobias Shavar,” T.S. interrupted, reaching past him to shake Ron’s hand. “I’m Mr. Harrison’s assistant.”

“Nice meeting you, Tobias,” Ron said. “I’m a big fan of your boss.”

“Mr. Harrison
is
a brilliant writer,” T.S. agreed, with a broad grin in Sam’s direction. “He is without a doubt one of the true American geniuses.”

Sam knew T.S. well enough to know there was a reason he’d kept Ron in the dark about their real identities. He waited until they were far enough away, heading up the stairs to the front door of Bob’s town house, before he quietly asked, “You want to tell me what the hell that was about?”

“I figured out the perfect plan,” T.S. told him smugly.

“Well, you are an American genius—you said so yourself,” Sam said snidely. “Are you going to tell me, or are you going to use your brilliant mental powers to send this perfect plan to me telepathically?”

Before either of the men hit the bell, the door swung open and a bespectacled little boy gazed out at them. “Sorry,” the kid said. “We just bought Girl Scout cookies from the kid down the street.” He started to swing the door closed, then opened it again, laughing at the expression on their faces. “I’m kidding. I know you’re not Girl Scouts—I could tell because you’re not wearing green skirts. You’re T. S. Harrison and his friend, right?” He pointed first to T.S. and then to Sam. “T.S.? Or T.S.?”

They both pointed to Sam and said in unison, “T.S.”

“I’m Tobias Shavar,” T.S. said. Sam glanced over at his friend. T.S. was enjoying this false identity thing a little too much. But then again, T.S. had always been a big fan of intrigue.

“They’re waiting for you in Bob’s office,” the kid said, opening the door wider to let them in.

“You’ve got to be Ellen’s kid,” Sam said as he stepped into the entry hall.

He was surprised. “You know my mom?”

“Yeah, I do,” Sam said. “You must be Jamie.”

An armed security guard stood on the other side of the door, watching them expressionlessly. Sam nodded to the man and got an almost imperceptible nod back.

“James,” the kid said in a haughty English accent. “I’m the butler-in-training. I’ve been sent to escort you upstairs. This way, gentlemen.”

The kid looked to be about ten, but his attitude and his sense of humor were that of a much older child. His eyes were blue, and his hair was light brown and gelled to stand up straight, as if his finger were permanently stuck in a light socket. Sam searched for Ellen in the boy’s face and found her in the slight pointedness of his chin, and in the way his lips seemed to quirk upward in an expression of permanent amusement.

As they took the elevator up to the second floor, Sam met T.S.’s eyes. “The plan?” he asked quietly.

T.S. gazed at the kid, who stared back at them in unabashed curiosity. “You’re writing Bob’s biography,” T.S. said to Sam. “So you have a reason to be here, right?”

Just like that, Sam understood the plan. It was crazy.

“So do it,” T.S. said. “Have free run of the place, even move in if you want to, arouse no suspicions, catch you-know-who…and maybe even achieve a few of your own personal goals at the same time.”

The elevator door opened and Jamie—
James
—stepped haughtily out. “This way, sirs.”

“We’ll catch up to you in a sec, kid.” Instead of following Jamie down the hall, Sam stopped, drawing T.S. back, and said in a lowered voice, “In theory it works.”

“Why not in reality?” T.S. asked.

Sam didn’t want to say the words aloud. This was something he hadn’t talked even to T.S. about. This was behind all of his soul-searching of late. This was the reason he was considering leaving the police force.

He was afraid he wasn’t good enough. He was afraid he couldn’t get the job done.

This whole scenario was too similar to last year’s assignment that had gone horribly wrong. Sam had been entrusted to protect a witness who was due to testify in court against a well-connected mobster. But the entire situation had gone to hell in a handbasket. While moving the witness to the courthouse from a supposedly secret location at a supposedly safe house, two detectives and the witness had been shot and nearly killed. Sure, Sam had come up clean in the ensuing investigation. According to the report by Internal Affairs, everyone had agreed that Sam had done all that he could to prevent the attack. One of the other detectives from his precinct—a man he’d had no reason to mistrust—had betrayed them. There was no way Sam could have known.

But he
should
have known. So, in a very real sense, Sam was entirely to blame.

He couldn’t stop thinking that somehow—maybe if he were a better cop—he should have known. If he had had his father’s and his grandfather’s instincts, he would have known. He should have been able to look out at the street and
know
that there was going to be an attempt to hit the witness. His father would’ve known. But that cop’s special sixth-sense gene hadn’t been carried down to Sam.

And now here he was, on the verge of facing a situation where he would be called upon to protect a woman that he cared very much about, a woman that he wanted desperately to have a relationship with.

He was already emotionally involved—that alone was a good enough reason to stay the hell away from this case. In fact, he was the last guy who should take this on. He should spill his guts to his precinct’s lieutenant and have someone else assigned to protect Ellen.

But what if Autweiler or Janowski were assigned to the case? Or, damn, how about Artie Medner? As incompetent as Sam feared he himself was, he knew those three bozos were just cruising along, waiting for retirement. Never mind the fact that Autweiler had a good fifteen years to go before he could even begin thinking about a pension.

No, as much as Sam didn’t want to be responsible for Ellen’s safety, he couldn’t think of a single man or woman to whom he’d want to hand over the job of protecting her.

God help him, though. He wasn’t going to sleep until they caught this guy.

“Man, I would’ve thought you would’ve jumped at a chance like this,” T.S. said, his eyes narrowing as he gazed at Sam.

“This is a serious situation, Toby. There’s a very real threat. It’s not some game. This is no longer about me trying to get close to Ellen.”

T.S. lowered his voice even further. “You’re scared, aren’t you?”

Sam nodded, although T.S. would never know just how very much he was afraid. “I could be wrong, but I think the guy who sent those letters and made those phone calls is dead serious. I think he wants to kill Ellen.” He took a deep breath and exhaled hard. “So let’s go in there and convince Bob and Ellen to go along with your plan, so I can start making damn sure she stays safe.”

Please God
, he added silently,
don’t let me mess this up
.

Y
ou don’t think the person who’s stalking Ellen is one of our household staff, do you?” Bob asked, concern in his voice. He was no longer shrugging off the threatening notes—not now that it looked as if Ellen were the intended target. He could be flip about his own safety, but not about hers.

“He’s not one of the guys in my security team, that’s for sure,” Hyunh said flatly. “I’ve got three men who’ve been with me for four years. I trust them.”

Bob’s security chief, Tran Minh Hyunh, was a diminutive Vietnamese woman who had worked for him for the past ten years—and possibly even longer. Despite the gray that ran through her long, dark braid, Hyunh was entirely capable of taking out a gang of the toughest street thugs without having to catch her breath. Ellen knew this because she’d seen the security chief working out with the rest of her team in Bob’s gym. She’d thrown men who were more than twice her size with seemingly little effort.

“I think the stalker could be connected to someone who knows Bob quite well,” Sam said. “This guy has access to Bob Osborne’s unlisted telephone number, remember. Of course, there are other ways he could have gotten that, but at this point I wouldn’t want to assume anything.”

“I think it would be smart not to let anyone outside of this room know that Sam isn’t really me,” T.S. pointed out.

“My security team needs to know,” Hyunh said. “But they’ll be discreet.”

Ellen looked around the room from Bob to Hyunh to T.S. and finally to Sam. “There’s no way we can keep all this from Lydia and Jamie,” she said.

“Can they keep a secret of this magnitude?” Bob wondered.

“I’m not sure I understand exactly why they’d have to,” Ellen countered.

“It would be best if we could keep my identity from the staff,” Sam explained. “The stalker could know one of them, or he could just be someone who knows where to go to overhear staff members’ private conversations. Whatever the case, the last thing we want him to do is find out that a cop has moved into the house. We want to nail this guy. We don’t want him to get spooked and back away. We don’t want him to disappear on us only to reappear later when Ellen’s not expecting it.”

Ellen felt dizzy. This was about
her
. Someone had seen her commercial and now they wanted to kill her. She laughed, her voice sounding a touch hysterical. She didn’t think her acting was
that
bad. She looked up to find Sam watching her, his crystal blue eyes totally devoid of humor.

Both he and Bob had been talking in slightly hushed, grim tones, as if she were already dead. They were making plans for Sam to move in—
move in?
Ellen nearly fell out of her chair as the meaning of their words sunk in. Move in
here?
Into the same house that she was living in?

This so-called plan was totally insane. She could barely sit in the same room with Sam Schaefer, let alone live in the same house with him for the next however many weeks it took to catch this stalker.

Ellen knew without a shadow of a doubt that she had been right in her painful decision not to see Sam again. Because seeing him again was drawing her attention to all those little things about him that she’d liked so much—and tried so hard to forget. His kindness. His quick sense of humor. The sweetness in his eyes—a sweetness that both complemented and contrasted with the heat that lingered there, just below the surface. That soft blond hair that fell forward into his eyes. The hard muscles of his shoulders and arms that flexed and shifted with his every slight movement. That smile that was as sexy as sin.

But she couldn’t forget how quiet and subdued he’d become when she’d told him she didn’t want to see him again. And she couldn’t forget the flash of hurt she’d seen in his eyes more than once since he’d been over here today.

Was it really hurt that glimmered there? Or was it merely damaged pride? He’d called her, probably expecting her to be panting to see him again. He’d probably expected her to be grateful that he’d called, and eager for another chance to fall into his arms.

Instead she’d turned him down.

But what he didn’t know was that she’d turned him down because she was afraid that if she saw him again, she would do something really stupid—like fall in love with him.

“I think I’ll just go home.” Ellen stood up. “I’ll just pack the kids up and we’ll go back to Connecticut. It’s the obvious solution.”

But both Bob and Sam were shaking their heads.

“No,” Bob said. “What’s to keep this guy from following you?”

“Believe it or not,” Sam added, “you’re safest right here. This place is a fortress. This security system is one of the best private systems I’ve ever seen. Unless you have a similar one on your house in Connecticut…?”

He knew damn well that she didn’t.

“I have an extra dead bolt on my front door,” she told him. “And a sawed-off broom handle stuck in the runner of the sliding glass door in the playroom. That’s the extent of my security system at home.”

“Leaving here isn’t an alternative,” Bob told her firmly.

“What am I supposed to do?” she said, her voice rising with frustration. “Spend the rest of the summer locked inside this house, scared to death, waiting for some Anthony Perkins wannabe to grab me while I’m in the shower?”

“It’ll be my job to make sure that you’re neither scared to death nor locked in the house,” Sam told her. “And with the new adjustments Hyunh’s made to the security system, the incident that occurred—when someone was locked in the house with you for the night—will not be repeated. Believe me, no one will be able to grab you while you’re in the shower.” He held her gaze unswervingly, a slight smile playing about the corners of his mouth. “Unless you want them to.”