By the time we arrived, DeGoey and Ahanti almost had the air of old friends. He vacated the chair next to her bed for me. Mark indicated that he’d wait in the hall.
DeGoey clearly hadn’t been her only visitor. The bedside table had a vase of flowers, presumably from Geoff, and two cards. I peeked inside one and saw her sister Anaya’s name at the bottom. Three balloons were tied to her bedrail—one covered in tiny hearts, one covered in tiny presents, and one with a giant smiley face and the words Get Well Soon.
Ahanti must have noticed where I’d been looking. She grinned. “Busy day. Geoff, Eddie, Anaya, and Jana have already been by. I gave Jana a little lecture about not becoming a stalker, and we compromised on me designing a beautiful small piece for her ankle. If she handles the pain and loves the tattoo, I’ve promised to give her the sleeve she wants once she turns twenty-one.”
DeGoey cringed. “Your friend was telling me about some of the strange things people have tattooed on their body. And where.” He brought a hand up to his chest. “I got my little girl’s name and birth date tattooed here, but that’s as crazy as I get.”
The part of my brain that my parents had trained said he could be working to build rapport so that Ahanti would let her guard down, but I didn’t think that was the case this time. He’d seemed to be genuinely enjoying her company. Not surprising really. Ahanti was one of those people who could make anyone immediately feel like a valued close friend.
DeGoey pulled out a pen and notebook. “Thanks to the box of cards and letters you let us look through, we’ve crossed Ms. Tenali and her fiancé off our list of suspects in the murder. It seems you were right in thinking whoever is stalking her is also the man we’re looking for. In the work you’ve been doing to locate him, have you come up with any viable leads?”
Thankfully Mark and I had eliminated Geoff. This would have been the worst possible time to drop that on Ahanti.
We didn’t have much on Terrance, but it wouldn’t help Ahanti’s situation or the police’s investigation to hold that back now. “We don’t have any solid leads, though we do have a suspicion. Did you find any evidence that her home was entered by force?”
“No sign that the lock had been picked that we could tell. All the windows were locked. The alarm company reports an entry, but the proper code was entered.”
I glanced at Ahanti.
She gave the tiniest nod. “Only four people have a key to my apartment—me, Geoff, the building superintendent, and my co-worker Terrance. He takes care of my plants when I’m away.”
DeGoey scribbled in his notebook. “You’ve said that at least some of the communication by your stalker had to have been delivered by hand. It didn’t all come in the mail. Has your building’s super ever come by your place of business?”
Ahanti shook her head. “Besides, he’s in his sixties and devoted to his wife.”
She gave DeGoey his name anyway. Seems she was done taking chances with who it might be.
DeGoey took his leave at the same time as the doctor came in. My cell phone vibrated in my purse, and I pointed my finger toward the hall to let Ahanti know I’d take the call out there so as not to be disruptive.
I didn’t recognize the number. The man on the other end introduced himself as belonging to the security company my dad set me up with.
“No problem putting the additional sensors on the windows, but our sweep did turn up a device you should be aware of.”
I braced my hand against the wall behind me. Ahanti’s guess at how her stalker was learning about her private conversations had been reasonable, but I’d still been hoping she’d been wrong. “What kind of device?”
“Her smoke detector was swapped for one that contains a camera and microphone. Based on the location and angle, it looks like he would have been able to see her table.”
That was a relief at least. He hadn’t been acting as a peeping Tom and watching her in the shower. As long as she changed near her dresser, he wouldn’t have been able to see that, either. It also explained how he knew things he shouldn’t have been able to. Ahanti had always said that using her laptop on the couch made her back hurt, so she used her kitchen table when she wanted to work on her computer. The scary part of that was that it was yet another sign that the stalker knew her well. Somewhere along the line, she’d had to have told him that for him to know where to put his camera.
“Remote feed, I’m assuming?”
“Yeah. We’ll try to trace the source, but if he’s dumping it to an online storage solution, you’ll need to give all this to the police and hope they can get a warrant for the account holder. Want me to try to trace it anyway or leave that for the cops?”
A private contractor would likely get answers faster than an overworked police force. “Get me the source, then I’ll hand it over to the police.”
Since the camera alone didn’t give us anything new on the identity of her stalker, I decided to wait until they’d traced it back before updating DeGoey. On the drive to Ahanti’s apartment, though, I filled her in on what we’d done to make her home safer.
One thing that’d been bothering me since the break-in was how the perpetrator got in without her alarm system going off. One theory was the windows since they weren’t linked to the alarm. The other was that the stalker already had the code. The alarm company had now confirmed that the system triggered, but someone turned it off.
“The security firm recommend changing your alarm code every week,” I said. “Has it been changed since you installed it?”
She shook her head. “Terrance has the code,” she said softly. “But my super doesn’t. If I know he’s coming, I leave the alarm off. I should have told the detective that, but I forgot.”
“I’ll call him later and let him know.”
She accepted that without question. I also needed to still tell her about the worst of it. I waited until Mark went to get us dinner. She went through a similar range of emotions to what I had in being relieved the guy hadn’t been taping a more private area of her home but also upset that someone had managed to set up a recording device in the first place.
We’d cracked open our take-out containers when my cell rang. I didn’t even want to think about the long-distance charges for this visit. I hadn’t expected to use my phone much at all away from home.
My caller ID told me it was the police station.
Ahanti glanced over. “You might as well put it on speaker.”
Now that she knew the worst, I didn’t see a reason not to. I let DeGoey know who was on my end as soon as I answered, and I filled him in on what my security pro had found.
“I’ll have someone connect with him,” DeGoey said. “We’re going to want to take it from here. We’ve made an arrest.”
17
Ahanti dropped the Kung Pao chicken container she’d been holding. It hit the table with a whap, still upright. “Who?”
“Terrance Moore.”
Ahanti put her head down on the table.
I rested a hand on her shoulder. For her sake, and for Terrance’s, we had to be sure the police weren’t making a mistake. “Are you able to share with us what you found that led to the arrest?”
