Ahanti had a pile of large freezer bags and a permanent marker next to her. I could only imagine that she planned to package each piece of potential evidence with a date. It was that kind of organization that had made her simultaneously a successful artist and a successful business owner. Not everyone could be both.
Ahanti handed me the photo that started it all. I flipped it over. The message on the back was written in bold red marker.
“So how do we start?” Ahanti asked.
“Since this is the only thing we’re certain he sent, we can use it to match the handwriting on other letters.”
Ahanti shifted her gaze to the side and traced the label on the box closest to her. “It’s not the only one I’m sure came from him.”
It took all my courtroom training not to react. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Almost everyone withheld things, embarrassed by them or thinking they weren’t important. I’d just figured Ahanti would know better after all her years of friendship with me. “Show me the others.”
She scrounged through the box marked APRIL and handed me two cards. The contents weren’t X-rated, but they were definitely more intimate than what a normal customer would have written, mentioning the softness of her touch and the smell of her hair when she leaned over him.
The notes were handwritten, with no more grammatical errors than I would have expected from anyone. That left us without a clue to the sender’s intelligence or education level.
I snapped pictures of both the notes and the photo of Geoff, front and back. The cards were in black pen instead of the red marker on the photo, so the letters were fatter on the picture and the writing blockier and less clear. The handwriting looked like it might be the same, though it was a little hard to tell.
Ahanti was watching me as if she expected a lecture. She kind of deserved one for not telling anyone how far the letter writer had gone before now. Lecturing her wouldn’t change anything, though. “Well, at least we have a bigger sample size.”
I tugged the May box toward me while Ahanti took the June one. She didn’t remember him sending anything in either of those months other than the picture of Geoff, but we had to be thorough. It seemed strange that the stalker would skip such a long stretch of time.
I crossed my mental fingers. Combing through evidence could be a slow process. We wouldn’t have any answers in the hour-length of a TV show. Real evidence collection was like going on a scavenger hunt or following a trail of footprints and broken branches through the woods.
Ahanti was right about May. I didn’t find anything that matched or had a similar tone. Most of the cards and notes were simple thank-yous. A few looked like they’d been originally attached to a gift like a bottle of wine.
“You get a lot of appreciative clients.”
Ahanti shrugged. “I only do custom work, so we spend a lot of time together. I’ve also got a reputation for being able to fix old tattoos or botched jobs and turn them into something beautiful that looks like they intended it that way all along. I’ve even had a few chemo patients whose eyebrows never grew back in coming for cosmetic help. Those ones I do at cost.” She lovingly stroked the card in her hand. “This one was from a woman who had a nasty scar on her arm from a car accident. She’d given up wearing t-shirts or a bathing suit because she couldn’t stand the stares. We hid it under a gorgeous rose as part of the stem. That was a good day.”
Ahanti and Terrance were the only tattoo artists I knew, but it seemed like, while they were giving people tattoos, they were often also giving them so much more.
I moved back to the February box. Nothing there, either. Ahanti also came up empty with January.
I tapped a card against the box edge. The gaps really bothered me. Why only send her things in some months and not others? If Cary were her stalker, shouldn’t he have shown some consistency?
I popped the lid on November’s box. Ahanti was already halfway into December’s.
She sucked in a breath and passed the card in her hand over to me. The handwriting seemed to match. This one talked about what a gift she was to him. I took a picture.
She gave a visible shiver. “The worst part is he keeps repeating the gift idea.” She flipped the card over so I could see the front had a sparkly gift box on it. “I think he knows my name means gift.”
I’d missed that connection completely. The police likely would have, too, if they’d been presented with it. It was a very personal thing. “Do you remember if anyone asked you the meaning of your name?”
She held the card pinched between two fingers like it was filthy and dropped it into a freezer bag. “Only Terrance. Back at Cary’s, when we’d been working together a few months.” She shot me a look like she could guess what I’d say in response. “But this isn’t Terrance. Cary was there too. He would have heard it.”
It was almost 8:00 by the time we finished. Even with the gaps, there’d been a disturbing number of messages with similar handwriting and tone.
I’d texted with Mark a couple of times during the process, and he’d told me to take as long as I needed to finish. He blamed his sunburn for also destroying his appetite. He was considering raiding the hotel ice machine to create an ice pack.
Ahanti carried boxes back to their stack while I finished the one belonging to the month she’d left Cary’s studio to start Skin Canvas.
I was down to only two items left in the box. It looked like he might not have written her that month. According to Ahanti, there hadn’t been any message prior to her leaving Cary’s studio, either. That would make sense if her stalker were Cary. He wouldn’t have been stalking her prior to their romantic and business break-up.
The second last letter was from a woman. She’d signed her name.
The final card wasn’t signed. And the handwriting seemed to match. I might have found the first one he’d ever sent. It’d been eerie working back through the messages and seeing his progression in reverse. This note could give us a clue to when he moved from interest to obsession with Ahanti.
It didn’t automatically cross Cary off the list because it’d been sent during a month when she was still at his studio part of the time. He could have sent it after she left. We’d have our trigger. We’d know it was Cary.
The note was a short one—congratulating Ahanti on the change she’d made.
My lungs felt like they shrunk down to half capacity. Cary wouldn’t have congratulated her on leaving him.
When Ahanti had her back turned, I snapped a photo of the card and tucked it into the freezer bag. Hopefully she wouldn’t want to see it and dig it out.
“I found one from right after you stopped working with Cary.” I kept my voice casual. Controlling my intonation would probably never be easy, but it seemed like my mom had been right that, the more I practiced, the better I got. Whether improving my ability to deceive was a good thing or a bad one was a matter of perspective. “At least we know when it started.”
She yawned and didn’t ask what was in the note. Since I hadn’t specifically mentioned it, she probably assumed it was identical to the rest. Until I could talk this over with Mark, I needed to let her think that.
Because if Cary turned out not to be her stalker, we had a much bigger problem.
The man in all these notes knew her well. He was determined.
And he was most likely one of the two men she was closest to—Geoff or Terrance.
Over our takeout dinner, I caught Mark up on the notes I’d taken and showed him the picture of the first missive. It seemed like a good thing that Mark had stayed behind. He could barely move without wincing. His arms were as red as his neck.
