Cathy opened a folder she’d had in her hand and took out a picture of the dead woman. It had been taken from the uninjured side of her face. Her hair was shoulder-length and unrealistically blond. She had a big jaw, which made her miss being pretty.
“Oh, no,” I said, recognizing her for certain. I was unable to think of anything more eloquent. This is incredibly bad, I thought, dismally sure our lives were about to get worse.
“That’s Tracy Beal.” Robin’s voice was full of distaste, unhappiness. He looked the detective right in the eyes. “Cathy, it’s the woman who attacked Roe in her kitchen. While the movie crew was here. You didn’t recognize her?”
Cathy looked at the picture again, a little line between her eyes as she concentrated. “This woman’s hair is longer and a different color,” she said slowly. “And she’s gained a lot of weight. But I see it’s Tracy Beal, now.” Cathy was clearly unhappy she hadn’t caught this earlier, but she shook off the self-reproach. “It’s good to know her identity. We would have found out from her fingerprints later today, but the sooner the better. What’s your complete history with her, Mr. Crusoe?”
When had we gotten so formal?
“Please, sit down,” I said, not because I wanted to be polite, but because I was still weak and needed to sit, myself. I collapsed gratefully in my favorite corner of my favorite couch, next to Robin. “We went over all this when she tried to kill me,” I said. “And over it and over it. You know our history with this woman. How come she’s out, now? How could it be possible she was in our house?”
“I’ll look into that. But first I need to hear about your relationship with Ms. Beal,” Cathy said. She wasn’t going to budge.
I could tell from her face and the way she was sitting that Cathy was being such a jerk because she was ashamed. The police had screwed up, somehow. She would tell what bothered her so much … when she had to. I glanced sideways at Robin, knowing that he would rather talk about hemorrhoids than Tracy Beal.
“Tracy had already been sentenced to court-ordered therapy before she came on my radar. She’d stalked Dan Lonsdale and threatened his fiancée.”
Cathy looked blank. “Who?”
“Another mystery writer,” I explained.
“I just saw him at Bouchercon,” Robin said. “But we didn’t talk about Tracy. Nothing to say.”
“Then what did you talk about?” Apparently, Cathy couldn’t imagine a conversation that didn’t touch on the stalker they had in common.
“Dan’s publicist just got promoted, so he was worried she wouldn’t be handling his books anymore. Dan’s editor just moved to another house … another publishing house. I was commiserating.”
Cathy looked blank. Well, she’d asked. “Let’s return to how you first encountered Ms. Beal,” she suggested.
“While Tracy was in therapy for stalking Dan, she was in the mental ward of a hospital. It had a library. She picked up one of my books. She liked it. She was released from therapy two months later because she showed such amazing progress. Of course she seemed better, because she didn’t care about Dan anymore. She’d transferred her obsession to me.” Poor Robin looked tired to death of talking about Tracy Beal, and no wonder. “It wasn’t a secret I was in Los Angeles working on the script for Whimsical Death. When she was released, she made her way to LA somehow.”
Robin would never get over his mortification at being the object of Tracy’s obsession. That was one of the things I liked about him; he was really surprised when women found him attractive.
“She was your Number One Fan,” Cathy said, predictably. She had watched Misery, along with everyone else in the free world, apparently.
“If only I had a dollar for every time someone has said that.” Robin was trying to stay cool, but he hated rehashing a painful memory, and he hated it even more when people made fun of what had been a fraught situation.
“How did you meet her initially?”
“I didn’t meet her at all. She started leaving messages on my Web site under the name LastFanStanding. At first, they weren’t really loony. Comments about my books, some of them really perceptive.” Robin sounded faintly surprised. “Talking about how excited she was to see the movie. Discussing the actors cast in the production. I’ve had readers who got invested before, so I wasn’t too concerned, though my Web-management person got antsy.” Robin slung his arm around my shoulders. I leaned against him. “Then Tracy started writing letters. To me. To my Los Angeles agency. My New York agency. They weren’t signed, but the phraseology was the same as the postings on my Web site, and each message was more or less the same. She wanted to meet me in person.”
“How did you respond?”
“I didn’t. In fact, we called the police and reported it.” He shrugged. “But my signing schedule was available to anyone. I was a little worried, but I figured if she really had to meet me, it would be better in public. She didn’t show up at any of the events, or if she did she didn’t introduce herself. She kept posting, though, wanting to talk to me one-on-one. And she would not let it rest. The situation got major, both in public and in private.”
“So what happened?”
“Dawn—my Web person—banned her from the site.”
“How did Tracy react?”
“She found my mother’s address.”
I’d never heard this part of the story. Robin gave me an apologetic look; and I understood he’d simply found it too distasteful to discuss.
“Tracy wrote my mother a horrible letter, and upset Mom … very much.”
I couldn’t imagine Corinne, whose favorite topics of conversation were her two little dogs and her grandchildren, reading such a document. “Oh, Robin,” I said, taking his hand. I wished he had told me before, but I understood why he hadn’t.
“Mom took the letter to her local police—she lives in Florida—and they faxed it to LA. The police got really interested then, because there was some threatening language. And there were elements of that letter that matched one sent to Celia Shaw, the actress. The one who was murdered on the set of Whimsical Death.”
“So the police got serious about Tracy,” Cathy said.
“Right. They tracked her through the Web site, where she kept posting under different names. But Tracy kept moving, always a step ahead. She’s not stupid. But she did finally make a mistake. She blamed Dawn for the Web site ban, not me. She researched Dawn’s address, just like she’d tracked my mother. One night, she broke all the windows in Dawn’s car and slashed her tires. It was on Dawn’s security camera.”
Cathy was learning forward. “They arrested her.”