to hide out in the hope they would only search the building casually and
conclude that he had escaped. With a computer, he was a genius, but
when it came to making cool decisions under fire, Rasmussen was not half
as bright as he thought he was.
Two heavily armed cops were watching over him. But because he was
huddled and shivering and on the verge of tears they were a bit
ludicrous in their bulletproof vests, cradling automatic weapons,
squinting in the fluorescent glare, and looking grim.
Julie knew one of the officers, Sampson Garfeuss, from her own days with
the sheriffs department, where Sampson had served before joining the
City of Irvine force. Either his parents had been present or he had
striven mightily to live up to his name, for he was both tall and broad
and rocklike. He held a little box that contained four small floppy
diskettes.
He showed it to Julie and said, “Is this what he was after?”
“Could be,” she said, accepting the box.
Taking the diskettes from her, Bobby said, “I’ll have to go down one
floor to Ackroyd’s office, switch on the computer POP these in, and see
what’s on them.”
“Go ahead,” Sampson said.
“You’ll have to accompany me,” Bobby said to McGrath the officer who had
brought them up on the elevator.
“keep a watch on me, make sure I don’t tamper with the evidence, he
indicated toward Rasmussen. “We don’t want this piece of slime thinking
they were blank disks, saying I framed him copying the real stuff onto
them myself.”
As Bobby and McGrath went into one of the elevators and descended to the
second floor, Julie hunkered down in front of Rasmussen.
“You know who I am?”
Rasmussen looked at her but said nothing.
“I’m Bobby Dakota’s wife. Bobby was in that van your goons shot up. It
was my Bobby you tried to kill.”
He looked away from her, at his cuffed wrists.
She said, “Know what I’d like to do to you?” She held one of her hands
down in front of his face, and wiggled her manicured nails.
“For starters, I’d like to grab you by the throat hold your head against
the wall, and ram two of these nice sharp fingernails straight through
your eyes, all the way deep, real deep in your fevered little brain, and
twist them around, see if maybe I can unscramble whatever’s messed in
there.”
“Jesus, lady,” Sampson’s partner said. His name was Burdock. Beside
anyone but Sampson, he would have been a better man.
“Well,” she said, “he’s too screwed up to get any help from a prison
psychiatrist.”
Sampson said, “Don’t do anything foolish, Julie.”
Rasmussen glanced at her, meeting her eyes for only a second, but that
was long enough for him to understand the depth of her anger and to be
frightened by it. A flush of childish embarrassment and temper had
accompanied his pout, but now his face went pale.
To Sampson, in a voice that was too shrill and querulous to be as tough
as he intended, Rasmussen said, “Keep this crazy bitch away from me.”
“She’s not actually crazy,” Sampson said. “Not clinically speaking, at
least. Pretty hard to have anyone declared crazy these days, I’m
afraid. Lots of concern about their civil rights, you know. No, I
wouldn’t say she’s crazy.”
Without looking away from Rasmussen, Julie said, “Thank you so much,
Sam.”
“You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about the other half of his
accusation,” Sampson said good-naturedly.
“Yeah, I got your point.”
While she talked to Sampson, she kept her attention on Rasmussen.
Everyone harbored a special fear, a private bogeyman built to his own
specifications and crouched in a dark corner of his mind, and Julie knew
what Tom Rasmussen feared more than anything in the world. Not heights.
Not confining spaces. Not crowds, cats, flying, insects, dogs, or
darkness. Dakota & Dakota had developed a thick file on him in recent
weeks, and had turned up the fact that he suffered from a phobia of
blindness. In prison, every month with the regularity of a true
obsessive, he had demanded an eye exam, claiming his vision was