The Shadow Hunter

he would invent conversations with her, magical dialogues in whichhe was always witty and buoyant, and she sparkled with laughter at his jokes. For many months he had been married to her. She waited for him in his apartment. She shared dinner with him. She looked deep into his eyes.
    But in the past few weeks his fantasy had died, exposed as the delusion it had always been. He had maintained the dream as long as he could, until at last reality had broken it into pieces.
    She did not love him.
    She didn’t want to talk to him or read his letters or accept his gifts. He had sent her jewelry with the polite request that she wear it on the air. She never had. He had called her countless times, and on the rare occasions when he’d gotten through, she had been hostile and uncommunicative.
    It was so unfair. He deserved her love. No one could have done more for her than he had. Hadn’t he dedicated his life to her? Hadn’t he built a shrine for her in his heart? He had spent countless hours hunting down the smallest fragments of information in magazine profiles and newspaper clippings, learning her biography, memorizing every detail of her life.
    He knew that her parents had sent her to swim camp at age nine after installing a pool in the backyard of their Minneapolis home. He knew she had been the high school prom queen. She’d attended the University of Minnesota, majoring in journalism, and after graduation she’d secured her first full-time job, an entry-level position at a radio station in Duluth. The next year she’d gotten her first break, a TV reporting job in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had tracked down a Fort Wayne shop specializing in local memorabilia and had purchased, for thirty-five dollars, a glossy photo of Kris bearing the inscription
Thanks for your support. Keep watching!
    He knew that from Fort Wayne, which ranked 102 among the 210 television markets in the United States, she had gone to Columbia, South Carolina, the number eighty-seven market, and from there to Albuquerque, number fifty-two, and then onto Cincinnati, number thirty. In 1987 she had come to LA. Soon afterward KPTI had started to win accolades and viewers. He knew—
everybody
knew—that Kris was the reason. There was nobody else worth watching on Channel Eight, or on any of the other channels, for that matter. There was only Kris. As KPTI racked up Golden Mike Awards and higher ratings, her salary rose. Her first million-dollar contract—1992. Two million for three years—1997. And now her new deal, the richest yet, the richest in the history of LA news broadcasting. “The Six Million Dollar Woman,” the
Los
Angeles Times
had called her in the headline of a feature story.
    He had devoted every minute, hour, day, week, month of his life to Kris Barwood, née Kris Andersen, born Kristina Ingrid Andersen at Meeker County Memorial Hospital in Litchfield, Minnesota—yes, he even knew the hospital, which was recorded on the copy of her birth certificate he had obtained through the mail for a nominal fee.
    She liked skiing
(Redbook
, July 1999) and pasta
(Los Angeles Magazine
, March 1998) and chocolate (extemporaneous on-air remarks, 6:00 News, December 21, 1997 broadcast). She had attended the premiere of
Toy Story
and had enjoyed the movie
(Entertainment Weekly
, November 25, 1995).
    He had committed himself to her. He had given his life to Kris Barwood. For a long time he had sustained his hopes that somehow they would be together. Yes, of course she had a husband, Howard Barwood, whom she’d met at a Brentwood fund-raising event for cerebral palsy. Howard Barwood, who had made more than twenty million dollars in Westside real estate by buying old houses on choice lots, tearing them down, and putting up mansions worth three times the original price. All these details had been revealed in an interview with Mr. Barwood in the April 1996 issue of
Success
magazine.
    But Howard Barwood was not the man for her. He was merely an accident in her life. Hickle was her destiny.
    She should have been able to see this. He had explained it often enough in letters and phone messages. But she refused to be reasonable, refused to treat him with any courtesy or decency whatsoever. She had rebuffed him. She had been rude. She—
    Wait.
    Down the street came a long gray car. A Lincoln Town Car? Yes.
    Kris’s car.
    It eased forward to the studio gate and stopped, engine idling.
    Hickle lifted the gun. His finger fondled the trigger.
    Could he kill