Before I could comfort her, before I could decide what to do, I had to see what was on that dresser. The closer I got, the more I wanted to turn back. To take Ahanti and leave the apartment and hide somewhere and pretend like she didn’t have a stalker and I hadn’t already seen too many horrible things to ever feel safe again.
A knife rested on the dresser. Dried rust red stained the blade.
Heat burned through my stomach and up into my throat. I almost turned back to join Ahanti in the bathroom. But I couldn’t. I had to see it, and then I had to call the police.
One step closer and I could make out the paper lying beneath the knife like it was a macabre paperweight.
On the paper was a printout of a picture of Cary lying on the ground. He was dead. Below it, someone had scrawled a message.
Sorry I missed you. I took care of the problem. I’ll always take care of you. See you soon.
I sank down onto the edge of the bed. Ahanti came out of the bathroom, wiping her mouth with a washcloth. She looked stunned, almost numb.
I turned her around and led her back to the bathroom. “I’m calling the police. Get what you absolutely need. You won’t be able to stay here tonight.”
I dialed 911, and for the first time, I wished the officers who were going to respond would include Fair Haven’s Chief McTavish. He and I might be like anchovies and chocolate together, but I knew how he worked and how he’d treat a case like this. In DC, even though this was a homicide now, it likely still wouldn’t be a priority.
I gave the dispatcher the name of the detective we’d originally spoken to about Ahanti’s stalker and had Ahanti provide the name of the detective who interviewed her earlier today. Then I texted my mom and Mark, and snapped a picture of the knife and message as well. The police doubtless wouldn’t like that if they found out, but I knew my mom would approve.
Detective DeGoey—as Ahanti had informed me his name was—arrived on the scene with the responding officers. A small part of me wondered what it said about me that, in my mind, my best friend’s home had become “the scene.” Did it mean my parents were right about my inability to completely give up the law? I shoved the idea to the back of my mind. It could wait.
DeGoey and the officers went over to where the knife sat and talked quietly. He called someone on his cell phone and came back over to where I stood. I’d decided to follow my dad’s lead and not sit. That way I wouldn’t have to look up at DeGoey like a naughty child.
DeGoey came back across the apartment and stopped next to me. He gave me a look I couldn’t interpret. “For an innocent woman, she spends a lot of time with her lawyer.”
What I wanted to do was snub him, but that would be counterproductive. He wasn’t the detective trying to prove Ahanti had committed a murder anymore. He was the detective who was trying to solve Cary’s murder, a murder we now knew intersected with Ahanti’s stalker. Hopefully he’d understand that distinction soon. As much as it galled me, that meant we’d be better off with him as an ally.
I gave him a smile so sweet it practically dripped honey. “Most people don’t have a defense attorney for a friend. That’s the capacity I was here as when we discovered the knife and the note, and that’s why I was here Thursday night as well.”
His eyebrows were too thin for a man’s. They flattened a bit now and almost disappeared. “You also didn’t mention before that you weren’t some underling from Fitzhenry-Dawes. You are a Fitzhenry-Dawes.”
His barriers were going to be harder to crack than the Fair Haven officers’. Good thing I wasn’t a quitter. “Would it have mattered if I did?”
His lips curved into the world’s tiniest smile. “Not in a positive way.” He motioned back toward the two officers. “We’ll have to close this place up to fingerprint it. I hope for her sake”—he looked over my shoulder, I assumed at Ahanti—“that we find some because the timing is almost too convenient. She comes home from being questioned by the police about her ex-boyfriend’s murder, and the real murderer has left a confession in her apartment.”
I could have protested that I’d gone back here with her right afterward, but that wouldn’t help. He could easily suggest she’d left it here before, just in case. And while I doubted he’d ever say it out loud, he clearly didn’t think well of my parents’ firm. He might even think I’d helped her create this situation so there’d be reasonable doubt for a jury.
Besides, any of that obscured the real solution here. I definitely hadn’t accrued enough goodwill for him to follow it for my sake, but maybe he’d listen to reason. When we took away all the layers, he and I both wanted the same thing—to catch the person responsible. “We’ve already been to the police because she has a stalker. We believed that stalker might be the deceased, but now it seems her stalker is your murderer. We have the messages her stalker sent her. I think you’ll find the handwriting is a match. I’m hoping you’ll be willing to look into it as an option.”
He stone-faced me but said, “Show me.”
Thankfully, we’d already separated out the stalker’s messages from Ahanti’s other fan mail. I brought him over to the box and waited nearby while he glanced through it.
Finally, he straightened. “I’ll take it with me for handwriting analysis and to check for matching prints. The handwriting looks similar, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t copy it, knowing it would deflect suspicion.”
But he sounded less certain than before. He pulled a card from his pocket and handed it to me. “In case anything else comes up. And if you’re telling the truth, I’d recommend she doesn’t stay here anymore alone once we release the place. Once a stalker kills, they’re more likely to do it again.”
13
My mom, Geoff, and Mark waited for us in Mark’s hotel room when Ahanti and I arrived.
If the situation hadn’t been so grim, I might have laughed at the sight they made. My mom, lipstick as fresh as if she’d applied it a moment before, sitting with her perfect posture in the desk chair. Her lilac perfume hung lightly in the air, and she hadn’t even taken off her shoes to get more comfortable—that would have been unprofessional. Mark perched on the corner of the bed and shot glances at the door that connected our rooms like he was seriously considering making a break for it. Still the handsomest man I’d ever seen even when his peeling sunburn made him look like he had leprosy. And Geoff, wearing clothes that looked like he’d been heading to the gym when the police called, slouching one shoulder against the wall by the window. Between the slouch, his scowl, and his position, he reminded me a bit of a castle gargoyle.
Mark sprang to his feet and crushed me into a hug. “I hope you like gray hair, because at this rate, I’m going to be completely gray before I’m forty.”
I hugged him back, even though his reaction seemed a little over the top. I hadn’t been in any actual danger this time. “You’ll look distinguished with gray hair anyway.”
He slowly released me.
My mom pressed her lips together in a way that clearly said what have you gotten me in to now? “Next time, Nicole, perhaps you could be a little more detailed in your text.”
What had I written? I’d been trying to contact the police, make sure we had a record of the evidence, and keep Ahanti calm all at the same time. I pulled my phone from my purse.
The text I’d sent to my mom and Mark read Stalker broke into Ahanti’s apartment with a knife. Called the police.
I scrunched up my nose. Reading it back, I could see how that might have been misinterpreted. It did sound a bit like the stalker broke in while we were there. “Oops?”
“I assured both men that you wouldn’t have taken the time to text us if the stalker had literally been in the apartment with you at that moment,” my mom said.
I explained what had happened in more detail. “And I got a picture.”
My mom and Mark moved forward, huddling over my phone in the slightly gruesome curiosity shared by medical examiners and criminal defense attorneys who’ve seen too much to be shocked by anything.
Between them I caught a glimpse of Geoff’s face. He was watching us with a look that I might have given to a vampire going in for a human snack.
He moved past us to Ahanti. “We need to talk outside,” he said low in his throat.
From the corner of my eye, I caught movement that I assumed was Ahanti shaking her head. “Whatever you’re going to say, you might as well say in front of Nicole. I’ll tell her anyway, and she’ll tell Mark because couples shouldn’t keep secrets.”
