Stupid me. “It’s something we need to consider, but it could also have been a random mugging. It’s not a stretch that someone might have thought Cary would have cash on hand.” I squeezed her hand. “Besides, if it is connected, at least it means the police will be investigating, too. When they catch this guy, they’ll be able to send him to prison, where he can’t harm you or anyone else again.”
And I’d make sure that even if the guy had money for it, he wouldn’t be represented by Fitzhenry-Dawes.
I smoothed the list of names on my lap. “Right now, the best thing we can do is try to figure out who might have left that photo. Then we can pass that information along to the police.”
Ahanti finally squeezed my hand in return. “Since the letters have been coming a long time, we can cross off recent clients.”
She reached for the pen.
I blocked her hand. “Not necessarily. It’s not unusual for stalkers to watch for a long time before making contact.” I pulled out my phone and checked the notes I made when we were looking at the messages. I’d been able to put together a bit of a timeline. “I think we can safely assume that your stalker’s been a client for at least two years, though. That’s when he first mentions something about how gentle you are, so you must have had contact by then.”
“But it could have been earlier?”
I nodded.
She took the pen, her tongue peeking out from between her teeth. “That also means Terrance’s clients might have seen something, but can’t be my stalker.”
She added X marks by a few more names.
“Have you ever touched your mailman?” I asked.
She put an X beside him as well. Terrance’s name was written right above.
Ahanti hadn’t loved me hinting at Terrance as her stalker any more than she’d liked me suggesting Geoff had something to do with it. But Terrance knew her name meant gift. Most of the other people on this list wouldn’t, unless they’d wondered about it and searched on the Internet. That seemed like a stretch. He’d deliberately used the gift motif, which he wasn’t likely to do unless he’d heard it from Ahanti and felt the meaning of her name was important to her.
“How about Terrance?” I tried to make it sound like I was simply crossing off the least likely people first.
“It’s not Terrance,” Ahanti said and put an X beside his name.
But she hadn’t answered my question, and Terrance had tattoos up both his arms. “Are you the one who does Terrance’s tattoos?”
“We trade services,” she said. Her words sounded pinched, like she was clenching her jaw. “But Terrance has known I was dating Geoff from the start. He wouldn’t have suddenly decided to send a picture with Geoff’s face burnt out now.”
That was another part we still needed to explain if we wanted to be able to pinpoint her stalker. The stalker might have killed Cary because he perceived him as a threat to Ahanti. Or he might have seen him as a competitor for her attention. But why threaten Geoff now? Why not when they started apartment hunting? Why not months ago when they got engaged? Why not back when they started dating, for that matter?
“Can you think of anything that’s changed between you and Geoff recently that might have caused the stalker to escalate? Did you have a public fight?”
That would have been ideal since it would narrow our suspect list to people who were around for both the fight and the day the photo was delivered.
Ahanti snagged a piece of paper from the side table, flipped it over, and doodled on it without paying much attention. “Not a chance. You know Geoff. He’d rather concede than fight in public and make any sort of a scene.”
She continued to draw, and her engagement ring caught the light. They’d been engaged months ago, but…I flipped the paper on my lap over.
The sketches bore only a few similarities to her final design, kept around now for scrap. The design had taken her months and, in that time, she hadn’t worn a ring. She’d texted me a picture of it on her hand when it’d finally been finished.
I switched to my text messages and scrolled back. That was only three weeks ago.
My theory only worked, though, if she and Geoff had done something similar to Mark and me and kept their engagement mostly private until she had the ring. I’d known about it, and they’d begun making arrangements, but they might not have told everyone. Without a ring, it wouldn’t have been obvious, and I knew Ahanti hadn’t posted it on social media until she had the ring to flaunt.
“I think it might have been your ring. How many people knew about the engagement before your ring was finished?”
Her pen slipped from her fingers and rolled onto the couch. “Almost no one knew. Just you and our families.”
We had our trigger.
My phone beeped, and I glanced at the text in case it was my mom. It was.
I held my phone out to show Ahanti the sender. “They’re releasing Geoff for now. My mom wants to know if you feel up to bringing me back to the hotel. She wants to see the material from the stalker and ask you a few questions. She suspects the two cases are related.”
Ahanti nodded. “Let me grab a sweater and pull on some jeans. Hotel air conditioning is always too cold.”
I took a picture of the list of names as a back-up while I waited. It was another lawyerly trait that I couldn’t seem to shake.
I didn’t know what my future held in terms of practicing law, but based on what Mark had told me earlier today, my dad and I needed to have a talk. Whatever decision I made—
Ahanti screamed.
12
I jumped to my feet and spun around, but then my legs felt stiff, like someone had dunked my bottom half in liquid nitrogen.
Ahanti stared down at something on the top of her dresser, her hand pressed to her mouth and a sweater and pair of jeans crumpled on the floor at her feet.
She sprinted toward the bathroom.
My brain and my legs came back to life at the same time. The walk across the studio apartment felt abnormally long, like I’d stepped into some sort of carnival funhouse.
As I passed the bathroom, Ahanti sat on the floor, slumped over the toilet. I didn’t stop.
