“I …”
“What, Sally? Would you be concerned if Edwin showed some interest in your family?”
Ah, the power of the hypothetical.
Some interest in …
“What did he say?” she blurted. “Please tell me!”
“What’s the matter, Sally?” Dance tried to appear perplexed.
“I …” The tears began. “What did he say?” Behind her, one FBI agent shifted, perhaps sensing the edge of hysteria, as was Dance. “Edwin? What did he say about my family?”
Dance said evenly, “Why are you troubled? Tell me.” Her brow furrowed.
“He’s going to hurt them! He won’t understand that I did what he wanted. If he mentioned them to you it means he’s going to hurt them to get back at me. Please, you have to do something!”
“Wait.” Dance looked troubled. “I hope you’re not telling me that you’re the one who wanted to break up.”
“I—”
“Oh, no. That changes everything…. I mean, what I told Edwin …” She stopped speaking and peered at Sally uneasily.
“Please! No! What did you tell him? Where is he? Is Edwin going to Tacoma, Spokane?”
“We don’t know where he is, Sally, I told you that…. Let me think. Okay, this is a problem.”
“Don’t let him hurt my mama!” She was sobbing now. “Please! And my brother’s got two babies!”
The scenario was playing out just as Kathryn Dance had planned. The agent had needed to plant the seeds of fear within the woman to get her to open up and had formed her questions to give the impression that Edwin was practically en route to kill her family … and possibly then her.
Breathless with tears: “I did what he wanted. Why is he going to hurt us?”
Dance said sympathetically, “We can help you, Sally. But we can’t do anything for you or your mother or brother if you’re not honest.”
In fact, she’d already talked to the local authorities and made sure that both Sally’s mother’s and brother’s houses were being guarded, though the family members didn’t know it at this point.
Sally struggled for breath. “Please. I’m sorry. I lied. He told me I had to. He told me if anybody asked, I was supposed to tell them that he was the greatest guy and never stalked me or anybody and he broke up with me, not the other way around. I’m sorry but I was scared. Send the police to my mother’s. And my brother. He’s got the babies! Please! I’ll give you the addresses.”
“First, tell me the truth, Sally. Then we’ll see about the police. What’s the real story between Edwin and you?”
“Okay,” the woman said, wiping her face with tissues one of the agents behind her provided. “Last year Edwin was a security guard in the mall where I was working and he saw me and it was like, bang, he got totally obsessed with me.”
Because she looked like Kayleigh Towne.
“He started this campaign to win me over. And one thing led to another and we started going out. Only he got weird. I wasn’t allowed to do this, couldn’t do that…. Sometimes he just wanted to sit and look at me. He’d just stare or lie in bed and stroke my hair. It was so fucking creepy! He’d tell me how beautiful I was, over and over. The fact is he thought I looked like this singer—the one he liked. I think I mentioned her before. Kayleigh Towne.”
Sally scoffed, “We had to play her music all the time. He talked about her every day. Mostly it was ‘poor Kayleigh this, poor Kayleigh that.’ Nobody understood her, her father sold the family house she loved, her mother died, the fans don’t treat her right, the label doesn’t record her right. He went on and on. I couldn’t take it. I just left one night. It was sort of okay for a month. He stalked me, yeah, but it wasn’t terrible. But then his mother died and he freaked out. I mean totally.”
The stressor event that had pushed him over the edge.
“He came over, crying and acting all weird, like his life was over with. I felt bad for him—and I was scared—so we got back together. But he just got stranger and stranger. He wouldn’t go out at all, he made me drop all my friends, he got jealous of men at work. He thought I was sleeping with every one of them there. As if … All he wanted was for me to be at home with him. Look at me and watch TV and have sex. He’d play her music when we did that. It was horrible! Finally …” Sally debated and pulled her sleeve up and displayed a scar on her wrist. “It was the only way I could get free. But he found me and got me to the emergency room. I think that convinced him to back off.”
“When was this?”
“December, last year.”
The second stressor event, the one that had initiated his stalking Kayleigh.
Dance made a decision. “He’s kidnapped her, Sally.”
“Who, Kayleigh Towne?” she whispered. And yet she didn’t seem too shocked.
“We’ll protect you and your family, Sally. I promise. And we’ll get him and put him in jail for the rest of his life—he’s also killed some people.”
“Oh, no. My God, no.”
“But we can only do that if you help us. Do you have any idea where he might go?”
Another debate raged within her.
She knows something. Come on, Dance thought. Come on….
“I …”
“We’ll get the police to your family, Sally. But you have to meet us halfway.”
“Well, he said he had this, like, religious experience, seeing Kayleigh sing for the first time. An outdoor concert, a couple years ago. He said if he could live anywhere, that’s where it would be. In a cabin in the woods near there.”
“Where?” Dance asked.
“Some town in California, on the ocean. Monterey. I don’t know exactly where it is.”
Dance finally looked away from the screen and caught Madigan’s eye. She looked back at the tearstained face of her subject. “That’s all right, Sally. I do.”
Chapter 73
AS THEY DROVE along, Edwin Sharp was singing, loud and more or less in key.
She gets gallons to the mile, not the other way round,