Her Bodyguard

Like Dorothy’s Tin Man, who realizes he lacks a heart, the stalker is still human enough to know he lacks something. Even if he can’t describe the problem, still he senses the void within—the black hole that in a normal person is filled by a sense of selfhood. By a soul.

And the stalker knows he needs to fill that void. Yearns most horribly to fill it. Believes with unshakable faith that to ever be happy, to ever be normal, he must fill it.

So just as the Tin Man set off to ask the Wizard of Oz for a heart, the stalker goes bumbling through life, searching and searching outside himself for a solution to the. problem that lies within.

Until one fine day the answer comes to him. He has a black, sucking hole where his identity should be? He’ll fill it with someone else’s identity! Someone else’s soul.

And since the void is so big, he’ll need a big identity to fill it. Somebody important, however the stalker defines importance.

A generation ago, importance was a politician. Today, importance is most often a celebrity. So one day, the stalker flips the pages of a magazine—and sees a photo. Or turns the TV channel just as a certain actress walks into a room—and wham!—there it is. A person staring into his eyes, seemingly speaking to him and him alone, promising him the solution to his whole rotten, lonely life. Promising recognition, belonging—identity.

All he has to do is win that person’s love, the stalker thinks. Except he doesn’t know what love is. His underlying urge is darker, deeper. He doesn’t want love; he wants possession. Wants to merge with. Become. Seize that soul and swallow it whole. To eat it.

Trace switched the lamp back on and sat again. So with zombies like that wandering the world, what does Richard Corday do for his new, beautiful young wife?

Already the creator of five hit TV shows, Corday sets out to create a showcase series for Lara. The perfect wedding gift for an actress, he must have thought. A role to die for. Like a master jeweler crafting the perfect setting for a matchless diamond, he creates an evening soap opera called Searching for Sarah.

In which, for the past thirteen years, Lara had played the part of beautiful young Dr. Laura Daley, who has a secret sorrow. At the age of seventeen, Daley sold her illegitimate baby in a black-market adoption and used the payment to finance her way through college, then med school. Lara had assumed the role when she was thirty—at that age, she could still play the part of a teenager—and she’d been playing it ever since. The role had evolved over the years, with Dr. Daley changing from career-driven girl, to brilliant med student, to sexy resident, to glamorous pediatric surgeon in a big city hospital. She needed only one thing to make her life perfect: reunion with her lost, never forgotten, deeply regretted daughter. Because, since episode three of the show, Dr. Laura Daley had realized her dreadful mistake. She’d been frantically searching for Sarah for thirteen years now.

The premise was guaranteed to speak to every wacko in the country—at least every female wacko, and doubtless some of the males. What could be more seductive to the loser nobody needs than a TV diva who needs you and you alone? For somebody lost to know that lovely Dr. Laura Daley is frantically searching for you?

Searching for Sarah was like a Help Wanted ad, broadcast one night a week for thirteen years. The one part waiting for an actor to fill it was the role of the missing, longed-for daughter.

Was it any wonder Sarah XXX wanted the position? The only wonder was that Trace didn’t have a dozen—a hundred—wannabe Sarahs to contend with. Lara had been damned lucky to escape a serious stalking as long as she had.

How serious a stalker was Sarah XXX? That was the question.

Six days after Sarah XXX mails this letter from Boston, promising—threatening—a mother-daughter reunion, somebody pushes Lara over a cliff. The simplest explanation wasn’t conclusive, but Trace firmly believed in starting with it first: one wacko, not two.

So all I have to do is find Sarah XXX.

And maybe he had. He reached for letter number five, then selected, instead, the top page from a thicker stack of papers. Gillian’s résumé.

He paused as the buzzer tucked in his pocket quivered soundlessly against his thigh. Lara. He waited, eyes unfocused, breath deepening, preparing himself for action if this was a call for help—then let out a little sigh of satisfaction when the buzzer stopped vibrating after three seconds. Good. And good night to you, too, Lara.

Buzzers were a bit of proprietary technology that Brickhouse used in any case where physical attack was a possibility. The client was instructed to wear a special locket on a chain around his or her neck at all times. Press the button concealed in the locket’s design, and a silent buzzer would alert the Brickhouse bodyguard that he was needed—and needed now.

He glanced at his watch. Midnight. Which meant it was nine in Seattle, not too late for his night-owl younger sister. He picked up his phone and dialed.

“Mmm, ‘lo?” a drowsy voice murmured in his ear.

“Asleep already?” he said easily. “Lazy bum.”

“Dozing,” Emily insisted. “I’m lying here on the couch with Duncan on my chest.” Duncan was one of her four tomcats, the surly orange one. “And he’s emitting sleep rays. I was fighting valiantly, but—”

“Well, throw him off and go look at your computer.” Trace had scanned Gillian’s résumé into his computer, then e-mailed it to Emily an hour ago. “Got somebody I want you to check out for me.” His younger sister was not a partner in Brickhouse, God forbid, but an associate. They farmed out much of their research to her, especially anything that could be learned over the Internet.

“Rush job or in my own sweet time?” she inquired around a yawn.

“Like prontissimo. I want it yesterday.”

“So my—lemme go, you cockleburr!” On the far side of the continent, something heavy hit the floor—twenty-two pounds of cat, Trace assumed. “So my brainstorm worked?” Emily continued. She’d suggested Trace run a want ad seeking a personal assistant for Lara, because if Sarah XXX had come to Newport in May, then maybe she’d stayed.

That wouldn’t be untypical—the stalker’s life spiraling inward in tighter and tighter circles around her target as her obsession grew. And if she’d stayed, then she’d be frantically seeking some way in past Woodwind’s unbreachable walls. “So offer her a way in,” Emily had urged. “Run a want ad with the Woodwind address and see who applies.”

“I don’t know if it worked,” he said, “but it turned up a few possibles. And this is the one I want you to start on.”

“Gillian S. Mahler,” Emily murmured, reading Gillian’s résumé on her screen.

“N. Mahler,” Trace corrected absently. “The first thing I want you to check out is—”

“S,” Emily interrupted, know-it-all kid sister to the end. “That’s an S. And I’d say your Gillian’s a leftie, correct?”

“S...” Trace stared at the spiky, backhanded letter. He’d taken it for a N in running script, not an S practically lying on its back. “By God, I believe you’re right!”

“That’s significant?”

“That, duckie, might be point, set and game. Okay, in that case here’s what I need from you, and I need it as quick as you can. What does the S stand for?”

“And if it’s Sarah?”

“Then bingo! I’ve found my pigeon.”

THREE DAYS LATER, on a morning as bright as her mood, Gillian leaned out her car window to study the device that apparently controlled Woodwind’s gates. Topping a metal post at a height convenient to the driver, it was an intercom of some sort, with a keypad and a speaker. Printed below the keypad was the instruction Press * To Call. She pressed the star sign, then waited.

“Yes?” the speaker said after a moment, in a metallic imitation of Trace Sutton’s voice.

It would be him, playing gatekeeper. “It’s G-Gillian. I’m here.” Lara had called her two days ago to say she was hired, and could she please report for work on Monday. So here she was at last, with all the possessions she’d acquired in Newport packed into boxes and suitcases that filled the trunk and back seat of her car. Because along with the job came an unexpected, quite wonderful bonus: a carriage-house apartment on the Woodwind grounds. Given Gillian’s recent problems with roommates, she might have accepted the job on those terms alone. Considering that the job and the housing gave her round-the-clock access to Lara, she couldn’t have asked for a better chance to get to know her.

There was no welcoming comment from Sutton, but slowly the gates swung inward and Gillian steered her ancient Toyota up the winding driveway. At the top of the low hill, the road divided. The right fork curved off grandly to lead front-door callers to the mansion’s covered portico. The left fork wound around back, past concealing shrubbery, to the carriage house built to one side of the mansion and a bit behind it.

On the raked gravel before the carriage house, Trace Sutton stood waiting, a sardonic half smile on his face, his hands jammed into the pockets of a pair of impeccable white tennis shorts. The very picture of a gentleman of leisure.

“That’s the door to your apartment.” He indicated a human-sized entrance to the left of the five garage bays.

She parked before it and stepped out. “Good morning.”

“Is it?” he said pleasantly.

Well, it was for me till now. Why did he dislike her so? She glanced past him toward Woodwind. “Where’s Mrs. Corday?”

“She’s not up and about yet. She had a bad night.” As he spoke, he opened the rear door of her car and lifted out a box. “So meantime I’ll show you your apartment and help you get settled.”

“Oh, that’s really not necessary!” She reached for the box, but he didn’t relinquish it. “If you’d just give me the key, I’m sure I can...”

But he’d already stepped around her and started off. “Nonsense. It’s no trouble at all.”

“But—” She didn’t want him intruding on her new space or on her new-job excitement. Fuming, she grabbed a couple of smaller boxes and followed him up the covered staircase that was built on the outer wall of the carriage house, then through a door at the top of the stairs. “Oh!” The slanted ceiling was set with skylights.