In Self Defense by Susan Sloan (phonics books .TXT) 📕

and to their second child, a boy, two years after that.  In the spring of 2010, she went back to work at Thornburgh House, this time as an editor.

On the other side, Richard Durant was forty-eight years old, and one of five children, three surviving, born to Emma and William Durant of Lacey.  He was a graduate of Washington State University, had gone to work at Nicolaidis Industries in 1995, and married the boss’s daughter six years later.  In 2005, upon the retirement and subsequent death of Gus Nicolaidis, he took over the company for his wife, and had been running it quite profitably ever since.

In addition to the personal information on the Durants she had gathered, Erin had also compiled a number of facts, observations, questions, and theories relating to the man who had been harassing Clare.  The detective couldn’t help but feel that there was a real sense of urgency here, in part because this was not the first case like this that she knew about.

Six years ago, about a year before she and Dusty hooked up as partners, Erin recalled, a popular Seattle singer had started receiving the same kind of phone calls that Clare was now receiving, and that less than a month after she first reported those calls to the police, she had been found in an isolated area near Green Lake, raped, mutilated, and murdered by someone who had clearly enjoyed his work.  It was assumed, for lack of a better explanation at the time, that the killer was a deranged groupie, who was suffering from unrequited love.  But then, three years later, there had been an eerily similar case, although the second victim was a West Seattle waitress and not a celebrity.

The first murder had been well publicized when it happened, but the second had received far less coverage.  Neither Erin nor Dusty had worked either case, but they knew the details of both, and they had always assumed, just like everyone else at the time, that the second victim’s estranged husband had taken advantage of the perfect opportunity to commit a copycat crime.  However, there was never enough proof to take the husband to trial, with the result that no perpetrator had been brought to justice in either instance, and Erin now began to wonder if those two cases could be linked, after all, and if Seattle might not have a serial stalker in its midst.  She wished she could talk to the only detective who had worked both cases, just to pick his brain, but Frank Pulansky had died two years ago of leukemia.

At nine o’clock, she called her partner.  “Sorry to bother you so late,” she said, after chatting for a few moments with Jean Grissom, Dusty’s wife of twenty-nine years.  “But I’ve been doing some thinking about the Durant situation.”

“So have I,” Dusty replied.  “As a matter of fact, I was just getting ready to call you.  I got to thinking, somewhere between Jeannie’s pork chops and peach cobbler, about the Laughlin and Medina cases.  Do you remember them?”

“I most certainly do,” Erin said, glancing down at her own forgotten dinner -- a limp wedge of leftover pizza.  Linda Laughlin was the popular Seattle singer, and Grace Medina was the waitress with the estranged husband.

“Well, I started wondering if maybe we have a connection here.  Two can be a coincidence, but three -- I’m thinking maybe we have a pattern.”

“That’s exactly why I was calling you,” Erin told him, a comfortable smile spreading across her face.

Dusty Grissom was a thirty-year man, having joined the Seattle Police Department a couple of years after a stint in the military.   There wasn’t much he hadn’t seen in those thirty years, and he had a mind like a computer, filled with the particulars of every case he’d ever worked, and many he hadn’t, that he could access and process at a moment’s notice.

“I’m thinking maybe everyone was wrong about the waitress’s husband, and maybe those two cases are linked, after all,” he said now.  “And I’m wondering if this could be the start of number three.  The timing would be about right.  And I sure wish Frank Pulansky was still alive.”

“We’ve been together too long, partner,” Erin said with a chuckle in her voice.

“Why?” he asked.  “Am I reading your mind?”

“Either that, or I’m reading yours.”

“Mrs. Durant said the calls to her office started about three weeks ago, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Erin confirmed.

“Well then, if I remember correctly, and this is our guy,” Dusty observes, “he’s going to start calling her at home pretty soon.  And after that, there won’t be very much time.”

***

Clare was getting a very slow start on Wednesday morning.  She and James Lilly had lingered on at the Children’s Hospital benefit until well after one o’clock when it finally ended, and she had paid for it by oversleeping, so soundly, in fact, that she never even heard Richard when he got up.

For some reason, it took longer than usual to get the children out of bed and ready for school.  And then she misplaced a manuscript she had been evaluating, and she and Doreen had to ransack the house to find it.  Otherwise, she would not have been standing with the housekeeper in the middle of the library at nine-fifteen in the morning when the telephone rang.

“Hello, Clare,” the voice said when she picked up the receiver.

Clare froze.  “How did you get this number?” she gasped.

“Well, you don’t seem to want to talk to me when you’re at the office anymore,” the voice taunted.  “So I thought I’d try you here.  Since you were out so late last night, having such a good time with someone other than your husband, I had a feeling you might still be home.”

The receiver slipped out of her hands and clattered onto the hardwood floor of the library.

“What’s the matter?” Doreen asked, startled by the expression on her employer’s face.

“It’s nothing, nothing at all,” Clare assured her, getting hold of herself and