first cup of tea, Jessica paced. “How long do you think he’ll be?”
“Well, the stalker had a good head start,” the cop admitted, “so I don’t know. He could be hours.”
She glared at him. “You should have let him go right at the beginning.”
“I shouldn’t be letting him out there at all,” the cop corrected her. “He’s a civilian and not trained. I also don’t have permission from my boss.”
“Yet, if he finds the guy, you’ll get a commendation, and, if he doesn’t find the guy, you’ll get a slap on the wrist,” she said.
“Quite possibly, yes,” he said. “I’d just as soon catch this asshole.” He glared out the front window. “Remember. Two of my friends were attacked too.”
“What about their vehicle?” she asked. “My car is in the garage, and your police car is stopping me from getting it out.”
“Forensics is working on it right now,” he said. “They arrived about five minutes ago.”
She looked at him in surprise, walked to the dining room, where she could see out the window. Sure enough, people were going over the vehicle. “I’m surprised they don’t just tow it back to the station.”
“They will,” he said. “They just want to make sure nothing of interest is in there first.”
She nodded. “I can tell you that you should also be looking for this guy’s truck,” she said, frowning at the reminder. She’d worked hard to forget all that unpleasant mess. “I don’t remember much, only that the license plate ended with N.”
He looked at her in surprise. “When did you see his vehicle?”
She proceeded to fill him in on the fender bender and the threat that he made against her.
He whistled at that. “Have you had any contact with your ex?”
“Nothing except for divorce-related communications with our lawyers. Not until that fender bender message,” she said, “and, since then, my phone has had a million unidentified calls, where nothing is said, and then he hangs up. I accused the silent person on the other end of being George,” she said with a frown. “I heard a startled gasp but no acknowledgment.”
“Of course not,” he said. “It’s not likely he’s willing to give up his identity, is he?”
“No. Although I sure as hell wish he would,” she said. “I’m really pissed off about how this whole mess is affecting Danny.”
“Do you think this is all about child custody?”
“George didn’t want anything to do with my son when I was pregnant,” she said. “He wanted to break up so he wasn’t responsible for child support and wanted it known that, as far as he was concerned, I was supposed to have an abortion, and it went against his wishes to keep my son alive.”
The cop stared at her steadily. “And is that how it happened?”
“We never discussed abortion,” she said, “and it was a perfectly healthy pregnancy. I was healthy, and we’d been married for over a year by that time. There was absolutely no reason for an abortion,” she said, “and it’s not something that I would ever do.”
“So you broke up. How far along were you?”
“He walked out about a week after finding out that I was pregnant,” she said. “I didn’t tell him for several weeks because I wanted to be sure, so I was in about my fourteenth week when I told him.”
“And he was gone by the fifteenth?”
She nodded. “At the time, I thought it was probably just an excuse for him to leave because we hadn’t been terribly happy for the previous year. Somehow I thought maybe the child would make things better.”
He nodded. “I hear that a lot.”
“But I didn’t do anything, like trap him with the pregnancy,” she said. “I was on birth control, but I’ve always had problems regulating my cycle.”
He kept taking notes, nodding once in a while. “Where does your ex work?”
“He has his own medical supply business,” she said, “and he travels a lot.”
“Maybe he thought that would impact his lifestyle.”
“I think he only thought it would impact his bank account,” she said drily.
“And how much does he pay for child support now?”
“He doesn’t,” she said. “I just wanted my son, so that was our agreement upon separation. I would take my son, and he’d get to walk free.”
The policeman stopped and stared at her. “Most courts would have awarded you child support,” he said. “And it doesn’t make any sense for your ex-husband to come back now. It would be pretty easy to nail him for child support.”
“Well, that’s one theory,”