Let the Devil Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page A

monster emerged.” She paused and took a sip of her coffee.
    “As Robby got more involved, he started taking over. He wasn’t helping me with
my
project anymore—it became
our
project, and then he started acting like it was
his
project. After we’d meet with one of the families, he’d give them
his
card with
his
contact information, tell them they could get in touch with
him
anytime. In fact, that’s when this ridiculous Montague thing started, when he had those cards printed up: ‘Robert Montague, Documentary Productions and Creative Consultancy.’ ”
    Gurney looked skeptical. “He was trying to elbow you out, steal the project?”
    “It was sicker than that. Robby Meese looks like a god, but he came from a screwed-up home where bad things happened, and hespent most of his childhood in equally messed-up foster homes. Deep down he’s the most pathetically insecure person you’ll ever meet. Some of the families we were talking to, trying to sign up for official interviews—Robby was desperate to impress them. I think he’d have done
anything
for their approval, anything to be accepted by them. To make them
like
him. It was kind of disgusting.”
    “What did you do about it?”
    “Initially I didn’t know what to do. Then it came to a head when I discovered he’d been having discussions on his own with one of the key family members, a guy I really wanted to get to. When I confronted Robby about it, the whole thing blew up into a screaming match. That’s when I threw him out of our apartment
—my
apartment. And I got Connie’s lawyer to draft a nice threatening letter to keep him away from the project
—my
project.”
    “How did he take it?”
    “At first he got very nice, slimy-nice. I told him to fuck off. Then he started telling me that messing around with old murder cases could be risky and I should be careful—that maybe I didn’t know what I was getting into. He’d call me late at night, leave messages on my phone about how he could protect me and how a lot of the people I was dealing with—including my thesis adviser—weren’t what they seemed to be.”
    Gurney sat up a bit straighter in his chair. “What next?”
    “Next? I told him if he didn’t leave me alone, I’d get a restraining order and have him arrested as a stalker.”
    “That have any effect?”
    “Depends what you mean. The calls stopped. But then the weird stuff started happening.”
    Madeleine stopped what she was doing at the sink and came to the table. “Sounds like this is getting intense. Mind if I join you?”
    “No problem,” said Kim. Madeleine sat down, and Kim continued. “Kitchen knives started disappearing. One day I got home from a class and I couldn’t find my cat. Eventually I heard this little meow. The cat was in one of the closets with the door closed—a closet I never used. And there was one time I overslept because the time on my alarm clock had been changed.”
    “Aggravating, but fairly harmless,” said Gurney. The look on Madeleine’s face suggested strong disagreement, so he added, “I don’t mean to downplay the emotional impact that nasty pranks can have. I’m just thinking about the legally actionable degrees of harassment.”
    Kim nodded. “Right. Well, the ‘pranks’ got nastier. One night I got home late and there was a drop of blood on the bathroom floor—like the size of a dime. And one of my missing kitchen knives was lying next to it.”
    “My God,” said Madeleine.
    “A few nights later, I started hearing these eerie sounds. Something would wake me up—I wasn’t sure what—and then I’d hear a board creaking, then nothing, then something that sounded like breathing, then nothing.”
    Madeleine looked horrified.
    “This is an apartment?” asked Gurney.
    “It’s a small house, divided into one upstairs and one downstairs apartment, plus a basement. There are a lot of crummy houses like it outside the campus, broken up into cheap apartments for students. Right