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It seemed like a reasonable request. I took the phone and answered. “Hello?”
“Hi, Sarah Tessorro, Reel Magic magazine; can I speak to Jacqueline Forrest, please?”
I covered the mouthpiece. “Sarah Tessorro, Reel Magic,” I said to Jackie, and she nodded. I handed her the phone.
“Sarah!” Jackie said enthusiastically. “How are you?” And then the two of them were off into a five-minute chat in which Jackie talked about the new show, her character, how wonderful the script was, and how great it was to work with a wonderful pro like Robert. I listened to that part with real surprise, and not merely because she overused the word “wonderful,” which was not her style at all. But I had watched Jackie with Robert for a week now, and I didn’t need to read the script to know they detested each other. Still, Jackie said it very convincingly, and my estimation of her acting talent went up several notches.
By the time the Town Car pulled up in front of the headquarters building, she’d said it with equal conviction in two more interviews. It must have been hard work, and I decided that being a star was a little more difficult than I’d thought. Clearly, it wasn’t all mojitos and sunsets; sometimes you had to repeat terrible lies in a very convincing way. Of course, that seemed like something I could be very good at—I’d had so much practice, after all—and I began to wonder again whether I was too old to switch careers.
We got out right at the front door and I took Jackie upstairs and delivered her to Deborah, who was already hard at work at her desk. She looked up at us as we came in with an expression I could not read; it was partly her Standard Cop Face, but with one eyebrow raised in cynical disbelief.
“How’d it go?” she asked us.
“No problem,” I said.
“Except when he tried to shoot my assistant,” Jackie said sweetly. But before I could add even a syllable in defense of my honor, she pulled the stack of psychotic fan letters from her bag and dumped them on Deborah’s desk. “She brought these,” she said. “The letters.”
Deborah snatched them up eagerly. “Great,” she said, and began to read them with ferocious concentration. Jackie watched her, then looked up at me. “Um,” she said.
“You’ll be fine with Debs,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”
“All right,” she said, and I turned away and headed out the door. I would much rather have stayed with Jackie and my sister, especially since I was joining Robert instead. But my duty was clear, so I left them and trudged away down the hall to my cubicle.
TWELVE
I WASN’T REALLY STALLING TO AVOID ROBERT, BUT I TOOK MY time, sauntering down the hall and savoring the memories of last night’s golden extravaganza. The food, the dark rum, the company—sheer perfection. And I had another evening just like it to look forward to at the end of today’s painful grind. It didn’t seem quite right that someone like me should have it so good, but happily, that didn’t stop me from enjoying it.
I stopped briefly for a cup of coffee and tried to savor that, too, but it proved to be beyond my abilities. The brew smelled like old pencil shavings mixed with burned toast, nothing at all like the ambrosial nectar I’d been sipping only an hour ago. Still, it would probably meet the narrowest legal definition of coffee, and life isn’t perfect—at least, not during the workday. I filled a cup and trudged off to fulfill my Duty.
Robert was waiting for me behind my desk again, but to his very great credit he had brought doughnuts—including a couple of Boston creams this time, and if you give one of these to Dexter, you will find that he is suddenly in a mood to forgive a great deal. We ate doughnuts and sipped the truly awful coffee, and I listened to Robert tell a long and no doubt fascinating story about a crazy British stuntman on a movie he had made many years ago. The point of the story seemed to escape us both, but might have had something to do with Robert facing him down over some obscure point of honor. Whatever it was, Robert enjoyed telling it, and luckily, he was so distracted by his own eloquence that I managed to sneak the second Boston cream out of the box and into my mouth before he noticed.
After the doughnuts were gone, we spent several hours playing with the microscope and learning how to prepare the slides properly. Oddly enough, in spite of the revulsion to blood he’d shown so far, he seemed fasc
inated with it in its microscopic state. “Wow,” he said. “This is actually very cool.” He looked up at me with a smile. “It’s not that bad when it’s dry and on a slide,” he said. “I mean, I could actually get to like this.”
I could have told him that I felt just the same, that I liked blood in its dried state so much that I had a rosewood box at home with fifty-seven drops of dried blood, each on its own slide, every one a small memento of a very special friend, now departed. But I have never quite believed in this newfangled notion of sharing your thoughts and feelings, especially on such a personal subject, so I just smiled and nodded and handed him a few more sample slides to play with. He went at them eagerly, and we whiled away the happy hours.
Just when I was thinking I should look in the doughnut box to see whether I had missed anything, the phone rang, and I grabbed it.
“Morgan,” I said.
“We got an ID on Jackie’s pervert,” my sister said. “Come on up.”
I looked at Robert, who was happily twiddling the fine-focus knob on my microscope. I could not very well take him along to hear about a stalker he wasn’t supposed to know about. “What about my associate?” I asked.
“Think of something,” she said, and hung up.
I put the phone down and looked at Robert. In spite of being very annoying, he was not really all that stupid, and I had to tell him something plausible. Happily for me, my stomach gurgled, providing a perfect excuse. “That coffee has gone right through me,” I said.
“Yeah, it was pretty bad,” he said without looking up.
“I may be a while,” I said, and he waved a hand at me to indicate that my intestinal issues were none of his concern and he would be fine. I slipped out and hurried away to answer my sister’s summons.
“Patrick Bergmann,” Deborah said when I stepped into her office a few minutes later. It seemed like an odd greeting, but I had to assume she meant that was our stalker’s name.
“That was fast,” I said. “How’d you do it?”
Deborah made a face and shook her head. “The letters,” she said. “He signed them. Even put his address.”
