Kayleigh was among those laughing but it was too loud. Poor thing’s terrified, Dance assessed. Alicia watched warily.
“First of all, my associate in Monterey’s found out that there are no warrants or court orders on Edwin—nothing federal or in California, Washington or Oregon. A few traffic violations, that’s it. Which is a little unusual for a stalker; normally there’s a history of complaints. But, on the other hand, he could simply be very careful. And we know he’s smart.
“Now, I’m going to tell you a little about stalking and where I think Edwin fits into the diagnosis. There are several types of stalkers. The first type is known as simple obsessional. These are usually domestic situations. The stalker and his object have had some prior contact, usually romantic or sexual. Relationships, marriages or even one-night stands that go bad. Think of Fatal Attraction.”
“Now that was a movie to keep husbands on the straight and narrow,” Lopez said, engendering uneasy laughter.
Dance continued, “Then there are erotomanic stalkers.”
“Like sex perverts?” Madigan wondered aloud.
“No, it’s more about love than sex. Traditionally erotomanic stalkers were women who fell in love with powerful men in higher economic or social classes. Like secretaries or shop clerks fawning over their bosses. But now, as many men fall into the category as women. The profile is that there’s been some minor, completely innocuous contact that the stalker misreads. They become convinced the subject of their obsession is in love with them but is too shy or reluctant to reciprocate.
“The third type is called love obsessional. These are the ones who go after celebrities, people they’ve worshiped from afar and come to believe they’re soul mates with. I think Edwin is a mix of erotomania and love obsessional. He honestly believes that you’re the woman for him. He wants a relationship with you and he believes that you feel the same about him.”
“That damn ‘XO,’” Kayleigh muttered. “It was just a form letter.”
Alicia said, “We send out thousands of them a week. It didn’t have anything personal about him except a name—and we’ve got an automail program that inserts that.”
“Well, you have to understand: all stalkers are more or less delusional. They range from serious neurosis to borderline personalities to truly psychotic: schizophrenic or severely bipolar. We have to assume that Edwin has a reality problem. And he doesn’t want to fix that because he gets a high out of contact with you—it’s as powerful as a drug to him.”
Crystal Stanning asked, “But what’s his motive for killing Bobby Prescott—if he’s the one who did?”
Dance said, “That’s a good question, Detective. It’s the one thing that doesn’t quite fit. Erotomanic and love obsessional stalkers are the least dangerous, statistically much less so than domestic stalkers. But they can certainly kill.”
Madigan added, “I think we should remember too that Bobby could just have been at the wrong place at the wrong time. If that song was an announcement it was just about the concert hall. Maybe had nothing to do with Bobby. The perp might just’ve been waiting for anybody to show up.”
“Good point, yes,” Dance said. “But what we should do is look into Bobby’s life a little more, see what he was up to, anything illegal, for instance.”
“He wasn’t,” Kayleigh said firmly. “He had a problem a few years ago, drugs and drinking, but he was clean recently.”
Skepticism is part of being an officer but Dance wasn’t going to contest the girl. It was important to her to preserve the memory of her friend and they could learn independently if Bobby had been engaged in any risky activity. From the comments by his neighbor, Tabatha, it seemed that he wasn’t.
“But that doesn’t mean somebody still wouldn’t want him dead,” Dance said. “And we have to remember some intruder—likely the killer—took some things from his trailer the morning after he was killed.”
“I could look into his personal life, his background,” Harutyun offered in his low, easy voice, silken mustache bobbing.
Dance glanced at Madigan, who nodded his agreement. “Dennis’s our librarian. Mean that in a good way. He does his homework. He knew what Google was when I thought it was a character on the Cartoon Network.”
“Good.”
“Can’t you interrogate him?” Alicia asked Dance, who didn’t offer that the first interview had not been particularly successful.
“Possibly. But I’m not sure how helpful it would be.”
In her lectures, Dance talked about the difficulty of kinesically analyzing suspects like Edwin: People on the borderline of psychosis, like stalkers, might tell you facts that can be helpful in running a case and can lead to your uncovering their deception. But such people are often impossible to analyze kinesically. They don’t feel any stress when lying—because their goal of getting close to the object of their obsession trumps everything.
She explained this now and added that they also had no leverage to bring him in.
Alicia grimaced in frustration, then asked, “Isn’t there a stalking law here?”
“That’s right—California’s was first in the country,” Madigan said.
Dance paraphrased the statute: “You’re guilty of stalking if you willfully, maliciously and repeatedly follow or harass the victim and make a credible threat with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of the immediate family.” She added, “It doesn’t have a lot of teeth, though. Some jail time and a fine.”
“Well, it’s something; arrest him anyway,” Kayleigh said.
“It may not be that easy. Tell me about his stalking.”
“I mean, my lawyers’d know more, I left it pretty much up to them. But I know he sent me about a hundred and fifty emails and thirty or so regular letters. He’d ask me out, hint about a life together, write about what he’d done that day.”