He looked between us. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Ahanti opened her eyes. Barely. They were still more like slits. “Thank you, but no. I have Nicole.”
He held up the alarm panel. “I’ll put this back then.”
I waited for him to finish and leave. As soon as the door clicked shut, I went and threw the deadbolt into place. This time I added the chain as well, since Terrance had the keys. We didn’t need any more surprise visitors.
Ahanti had both hands resting on her chest when I got back. “Could this be about something else?”
Her voice had a breathless quality to it, like she’d been running. I’d been hoping she’d been putting on a show for the guys, but it didn’t seem like it. “What do you mean?”
“Like maybe the person who sent the obsessive messages and the person who threatened Geoff aren’t the same person. Maybe that’s why we can’t make it all fit.”
I hadn’t caught anything that would suggest we were dealing with separate people, but she must have figured out something I hadn’t. It wouldn’t be the first time I was looking in one direction and the real culprit was hiding in another. “You’ll have to explain that to me a little more.”
She lowered her hands to her sides and shifted to face me. She kept her cheek leaned against the back of the couch. “Terrance…he and Geoff never…sometimes I’d loan Terrance money and he wouldn’t always pay it back.” Once she got going, she spit the words out fast. “Geoff didn’t like it. It was the only thing we really argued about. Terrance probably guessed that I’d eventually give in to what Geoff wanted and stop loaning him cash.”
Ahanti stopped talking so suddenly that I jerked forward, afraid she’d passed out, but her eyes were still open. She didn’t seem to want to state the final conclusion. I’d caught up anyway.
Maybe the recent events were about breaking up her marriage rather than stalking her. I didn’t want to ask how much she’d been loaning him. It had to be quite a bit or Geoff wouldn’t have objected so strongly. He wasn’t a stingy man. I knew he gave generously to the American Cancer Society and No Kid Hungry.
So the fact that Terrance had been borrowing a lot of money from Ahanti and that he had access to her apartment raised a whole new battery of questions. “Do you have any idea why he might have killed Cary?
She went pastier than someone with her skin tone should have been able to.
“Assuming he did,” I hastily amended.
“He might have owed Cary money, too. It’s not like either of them would have told me if he did.”
We could sort out the motive for Cary later if we found a clear connection between Terrance and the burned photo of Geoff. What we needed now was evidence one way or the other. Otherwise, how was Ahanti ever supposed to comfortably return to working alongside him?
We could start with whether we could see a difference in what we knew the real stalker sent and what might have been done by Terrance. I pulled out my phone and brought up my photos. One thing I could say for my dad—he’d trained me well. I was happy to pass along the stalker’s communications to the police because I’d already made my own records.
I pulled up the photo of the message about Geoff. Unlike all the others, the sender had written this message in red marker rather than the generic blue ink of the earlier missives.
Ahanti leaned in. “Why change to red marker? That could mean it was written by someone else.”
“It could also mean the stalker didn’t have a pen handy or that he intentionally chose the marker because it seemed more threatening.”
I flipped back to the other photos. The writing looked sort of the same but it was hard to tell. The writer clearly wasn’t used to trying to write clearly with a fat marker. We’d need the eyes of a handwriting expert to be sure. Back home, I could have turned to Erik or some other member of the Fair Haven police department to call on an expert. Here, Detective DeGoey wasn’t going to share his results with me.
But my parents had resources I didn’t.
I texted my mom, asking if she could recommend someone, even though she wouldn’t write back while at coffee with Mark. One of my mom’s mantras was never divide your attention because it will always halve your results. That, and she found it rude when people paid more attention to their cell phones than the person they were with.
I zoomed in on the handwriting on the note about Cary. It was written on one of Ahanti’s old pieces of scrap paper using a green pencil crayon she’d left laying out. The stalker truly must have expected to find her in her apartment and to be able to deliver his token of affection to her.
That meant he was escalating to the point where he was ready to make open contact with her. It was a dangerous moment in this kind of situation. I’d already told Ahanti that if she did come face to face with her stalker, she needed to play along with his delusion until she could get safely away. Hopefully Ahanti was able to do that.
I swiped back to one of the notes Ahanti received at the studio. They looked to be by the same hand as whoever left the knife.
“The new note about Cary looks like a match for your original stalker.”
Ahanti touched my phone’s screen, moving back and forth between the two. “That’s a little hope at least. Isn’t it? I mean, I’ve known Terrance for like a decade. I can see him pulling some crap, trying to break Geoff and me up, but he’s no killer.”
Having a copy of her key didn’t mean he put the note in her apartment. Correlation, as my dad loved to say, isn’t the same as causation. Just because people who smoked also tended to have high levels of alcohol consumption didn’t mean that smoking caused those people to drink more alcoholic beverages.
“Has he tried anything else to break you two up?”
She stroked her fingers through her hair, like the feel of it soothed her. “Yeah. It didn’t seem like a big deal before, but he liked to make nasty comments about Geoff not even letting me give him a tattoo and how it wasn’t supportive. Stuff like that.”
Frustration built inside me until I wanted to throw my phone across the room. If Terrance had sent the single message because he didn’t want his money fountain to dry up, then he might have unintentionally escalated her real stalker. Her stalker only killed Cary because he seemed like a growing threat to Ahanti and her happiness.
The real problem was, the evidence we had could be interpreted two ways, and we couldn’t know which was correct without knowing if the handwriting on the threat against Geoff matched all the rest. I’d compared handwriting samples before and been able to tell when they matched, but the different writing tools, different colors, and closeness of the styles meant I couldn’t be sure this time.
My mom still hadn’t texted me back, but the coffee shop she’d suggested to Mark was about a fifteen-minute walk from here. “Why don’t we meet up with my mom and Mark? I’m hoping she’ll know someone we can take these handwriting samples to for some answers. Are you feeling up to a walk?”
Ahanti nodded. “Whatever it takes. I can’t handle much more of this.”
Just in case, we double-checked that all her windows were locked and that the door was secure behind us.
Ahanti also pushed the apartment building exterior door shut behind us. There’d always been a notice reminding residents to do so, warning them not to allow anyone they didn’t know into the building. I know I hadn’t been as careful about it as I should when I lived there. I couldn’t have been the only one.
“I know it’s Sunday,” a girl’s voice said behind us, “but I just wanted to talk to you for a minute and see if you’d change your mind.”
Ahanti and I turned like we were synchronized swimmers. The young woman Ahanti had turned away from Skin Canvas the other day waited on the sidewalk.
Ahanti pressed both palms into the line where her forehead met her hair. “I’m not going to change my mind until you turn twenty-five, Jana. If you want a sleeve tattoo that badly that you don’t want to wait, I’m sure you could find another artist with different rules.”
