The Shadow Hunter

bedroom was next. Here was where Hickle truly lived, where he felt free to be himself. He had made the room a shrine to Kris Barwood. Her image was everywhere. The walls were papered with KPTI advertisements, photos of Kris from feature articles, and eight-by-ten glossies of Kris at various stages in her career.
    “He really is her number one fan,” Abby whispered. She snapped a series of still photos with a pocket camera.
    She was disappointed that there was no computer in the room. Hickle had told Kris Barwood that he’d searched the Internet to obtain her home address. Presumably he had used a publicly available terminal. It seemed odd. Even on his income, he could surely afford a garage-sale computer. Maybe he was a technophobe or something.
    The first thing she did was plant a second audio bug. This one she taped to the underside of his nightstand drawer. If he talked in his sleep, she would know.
    Then she began her search. In a cabinet she found rows of videotapes, each eight hours long and carefully labeled with five dates in chronological order. Weekdays only. Kris’s newscasts. The half-hour 6 P.M. show and the hour-long 10 P.M. edition added up to ninety minutes per day. Hickle recorded a week’s worth ofshows—seven and a half hours—on each tape. Thirty-six tapes in all. He’d been taping for roughly eight months, and by Abby’s calculation he now had two hundred seventy hours of Kris Barwood. And he was still taping her, still adding new shows to his collection.
    Two rows of books took up the cabinet’s lower shelf. Some bore the labels of used book shops, while others were stamped “LIBRARY.” The front row consisted of true-crime titles, many with photo sections. The photo pages were noticeably dog-eared. Hickle had spent time poring over black-and-white shots of stalkers escorted under guard after their arrest. Did he picture himself in the same circumstances, and if so, did the prospect bring him worry or satisfaction?
    The second row leaned toward more practical subject matter, dealing mostly with the intricacies of finding confidential information in government archives or on the Internet. Blurbs on the dust jackets promised,
You can track down anybody!
Other books focused on tactics and strategy in guerrilla warfare. Passages concerned with the art of the ambush were copiously underlined.
    The last few books, nestled in a corner, were of a different type. She brought them into the light and felt a chill run over the muscles of her back. They were Kris Barwood’s high school yearbooks.
    Abby looked at the most recent one, dated 1978. The senior class photos were in the front, in alphabetical order. Kris’s picture was one of the first.
    Kris at eighteen, a graduating senior. Her activities had included the school newspaper and the debate club. Her quotation was from Blaise Pascal:
The heart has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of
. Hickle surely must have agreed with that.
    She examined the other yearbooks, which collectively provided a detailed record of Kris’s teenage years. How had Hickle obtained them? Back copies might be offered for sale by the school itself, or perhaps he had gone all the way to Minneapolis and stolen them out of the school library.
    After replacing everything in the cabinet, she focused on the bedroom closet, the last place left to explore and the one most likely to yield secrets. The closet had bifold doors, the knobs encircled by a short length of padlocked chain. Hickle wasn’t taking any chances.
    The padlock had four cams, each numbered with ten digits. That meant ten thousand possible combinations, from 0000 to 9999. There had to be some way to narrow it down. What would a person use for a combination? His birthday. The information was in the TPS report, but she’d left it next door, and she wouldn’t go into the hall merely to retrieve it; the risk of being spotted by another tenant was too high.
    Instead she used her cell phone, speed-dialing Travis’s office, and pulled him out of a meeting. “Yes?” he snapped.
    “What’s Hickle’s birthday?”
    “What?”
    “I need to know.”
    “For God’s sake…All right, hold on.” She waited until he came back on the line. “October seventh, 1965.”
    “Don’t hang up. I need to try something.”
    She put down the phone and set the combination to 1007—October 7. No result. 1065? 0765? Nothing. Her gaze drifted to the walls covered with Kris Barwood’s face, and the solution was so