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. Madock.
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 speech writer 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