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“Do you really think someone is so mad at my family that they’d dothat?”
“It’s amazing what people are capable of given the right motivation.” He paused and studied her. “Do you know how to shoot a gun?”
She leaned away from him at this blunt segue. “No! Why?”
“I can teach you. I have a spare pistol.”
“No, I don’t want that. I hate guns.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay, but I want you to have something to defend yourself with.” He glanced at her. “As an artist and sculptress you must have excellent hand strength, as well as good hand-eye coordination and finger dexterity.”
“So? Do you want me to gouge an attacker in the eye with a paintbrush?”
“Not a paintbrush.” From under the sun visor he slipped out a knife in a leather sheath.
She looked at the weapon. “I don’t like—”
“You don’t have tolikeit, Alex. You just have to use it, if necessary.”
He pulled off the road, unsheathed the knife, and then made a straight stabbing motion with it. “Into the belly, two inches above the navel, up to the hilt.” At the end of the thrust he twisted the knife to the left and right, and then upward. “They won’t hurt you after that.”
“I can’t possibly—”
He sheathed the knife and made her take it. “You have no idea what you’re capable of until you need to be capable of it. You have one life, Alex—don’t let anyone take it away from you without a fight.”
He drove back to Jocelyn Point.
“Can I catch a few hours’ sleep here before I head out?” he said.
“Of course. I have some things to do around the house. You can sleep in my bed. It’s a lot cleaner than Dak’s.”
* * *
Three hours later his phone alarm went off. Devine rose and found Alex in the kitchen.
He said, “I’ve been invited to dinner tonight. I don’t like leaving you, I really don’t. But my instincts are telling me it’s important. Now, keep the knife with you at all times, lock all the doors, and do not go to your studio. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Anything looks or feels weird, and I mean anything, call the cops and then call me. I’ll be here in a flash.”
On his way back to the inn, Campbell phoned him.
“Benjamin Bing was in the Army for eleven years. Enlisted. Topped out an E6.”
“He was still a staff sergeant after eleven years?”
“His career plateaued. He was not going to move higher than that. Disciplinary problems. Hotheaded. Unmanageable. Those were some terms I found in his file.”
“Why’d he leave?”
“I had to dig deep to find it. He was stalking a woman who lived near the base where he was deployed. There were some communications, written, that went way, way over the line. There was also some vandalism at the woman’s apartment, and a man that she was seeing was attacked and severely beaten. But he couldn’t identify his attacker.”
“How young was the woman?”
“A freshman in college.”
“So the Army cut him loose to go stalking and beating up other boyfriends?”
“They didn’t want the headache. You know how that works.”
“So Mister Angry and Perverted comes back here to become police chief. Great. How’d he get the Purple?”
