Riptide

“Of course I won’t see any shrink, that’s—”

“You either see the psychiatrist or we arrest you.”

A nightmare, she thought. Here I am at the police station, telling them everything I know, and they think I’m crazy. She said slowly, staring right at Detective Gordon, “For what?”

“You’re a public nuisance. You’re filing false complaints, telling lies that waste manpower. I don’t like you, Ms. Matlock. I’d like to throw you in jail for all the grief you’ve dished out, but I won’t if you go see our shrink. Maybe he can straighten you out. God knows someone needs to.”

Becca rose slowly to her feet. She looked at each of them in turn. “I have told you the truth. There is a madman out there and I don’t know who he is. I’ve told you everything I can think of. He has threatened the governor. He murdered that poor old woman in front of the museum. I’m not making anything up. I’m not nuts and I’m not on drugs.”

It did no good. They didn’t believe her.

The three men lined up along the wall of the interrogation room didn’t say a word. One of them simply nodded to Detective Gordon as Becca walked out of the room.

Thirty minutes later, Becca Matlock was seated in a very comfortable chair in a small office that had only two narrow windows that looked across at two other narrow windows. Across the desk sat Dr. Burnett, a man somewhere in his forties, nearly bald, wearing designer glasses. He looked intense and tired.

“What I don’t understand,” Becca said, sitting forward, “is why the police won’t believe me.”

“We’ll get to that. Now, you didn’t want to speak with me?”

“I’m sure you’re a very nice man, but no, I don’t need to speak to you, at least not professionally.”

“The police officers aren’t certain about that, Ms. Matlock. Now, why don’t you tell me, in your own words, a bit about yourself and exactly when this stalker first came to your attention.”

Yet again, she thought. Her voice was flat because she’d said the same words so many times. Hard to feel anything saying them now. “I’m a senior speechwriter for Governor Bledsoe. I live in a very nice condominium on Oak Street in Albany. Two and a half weeks ago, I got the first phone call. No heavy breathing, no profanity, nothing like that. He just said he’d seen me running in the park, and he wanted to get to know me. He wouldn’t tell me who he was. He said I would come to know him very well. He said he wanted to be my boyfriend. I told him to leave me alone and hung up.”

“Did you tell any friends or the governor about the call?”

“Not until after he called me another two times. That’s when he told me to stop sleeping with the governor. He said he was my boyfriend, and I wasn’t going to sleep with any other man. In a very calm voice, he said that if I didn’t stop sleeping with the governor, he’d just have to kill him. Naturally, when I told the governor about this, everyone licensed to carry a gun within a ten-mile radius was on it.”

He didn’t even crack a smile, just kept staring at her.

Becca found she really didn’t care. She said, “They tapped my phone immediately, but somehow he knew they had. They couldn’t find him. They said he was using some sort of electronic scrambler that kept giving out fake locations.”

“And are you sleeping with Governor Bledsoe, Ms. Matlock?”

She’d heard that question a good dozen times, too, over and over, especially from Detective Gordon. She even managed a smile. “Actually, no. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, but he is old enough to be my father.”

“We had a president old enough to be your father and a woman even younger than you are and neither of them had a problem with that concept.”

She wondered if Governor Bledsoe could ever survive a Monica and almost smiled. She just shrugged.

“So, Ms. Matlock, are you sleeping with the governor?”

She’d discovered that at the mention of sex, everyone —media folk, cops, friends—homed right in on it. It still offended her, but she had answered the question so often the edge was off now. She shrugged again, seeing that it bothered him, and said, “No, I haven’t slept with Governor Bledsoe. I have never wanted to sleep with Governor Bledsoe. I write speeches for him, really fine speeches. I don’t sleep with him. I even occasionally write speeches for Mrs. Bledsoe. I don’t sleep with her, either.

“Now, I have no clue why the man believes that I am having sex with the governor. I have no clue why he would care if I were. Why did he pull the governor, of all people, out of the hat? Because I spend time with him? Because he’s powerful? I just don’t know. The Albany police haven’t found out anything about this man yet. However, they didn’t think I was a liar, not like the police here in New York. I even met with a police psychologist, who gave me advice on how to handle him when he called.”