I leaned forward, pretending I wanted a better look at the painting on the wall in front of me. In my Chinese-food note the night before, I’d asked Ahanti to meet us in the section of the National Gallery of Art where they displayed seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish works. I knew from past visits that it was never as busy as the special exhibits or any of the areas dedicated to the artwork by the Italian masters.
It was also the only place I could think of where we’d be hard to spot, have to go through a security checkpoint before we came in, and Ahanti would have a reasonable excuse for leaving her phone in her car. While phones weren’t prohibited, photography was for certain collections, and loud conversations were strongly frowned upon. Ahanti would have normally brought her phone anyway, but I’d suggested in my note that she conveniently forget it.
My cell phone beeped with a text notification. Maybe Ahanti had decided a text was worth the risk and wanted to meet somewhere else. I grabbed for my phone so fast I almost shot it out of my hands and across the room.
The message wasn’t from Ahanti. It was from Mandy. Since I’d helped her when a murder happened at her bed-and-breakfast last month, she’d insisted on being the one who watched Velma and Toby while Mark and I were out of town. My business partner, Russ, would have been the better choice since Mandy would probably spoil both dogs, but I hadn’t been able to find a way to tell Mandy that that wouldn’t have hurt her feelings.
Do I have to use the leather leashes? Mandy wrote. They’re ugly, and you have nicer purple and blue ones.
I’d left two pages of instructions about the dogs in the hope that Mandy wouldn’t explode my phone with questions while I was gone. I should have known better. How the heck she’d ever found those colored leashes was beyond me. I’d set out the leather ones, and the last time I saw the nylon ones, they’d fallen behind the food bag.
If you don’t want to burn your hands, yes, I typed back.
I’d bought the pretty nylon leashes before I signed Velma up for obedience classes. At the very first introductory session, before we even brought our dogs with us, the instructor banned the kind of leashes I had because of how painful it could be if our dog yanked it through our hand.
I pocketed my phone again and moved on to the next painting.
Mark moved along with me. “How long past the meet time do we wait?”
I checked my watch. The meet time I’d written on my note passed ten minutes ago. Given DC-area traffic, ten minutes late wasn’t terrible. And we had no way of knowing what her appointments had been like for today. For all we knew, she’d had one she couldn’t reschedule or the one ahead ran long.
Ahanti came around a corner, and my shrug stalled out halfway up. I could tell the moment she spotted us because she veered sharply in our direction.
She walked straight into a hug. “Only you would think to hide a note in a bag of takeout.”
I didn’t have to be a lawyer or a police officer to identify the relief in her voice. It matched what I felt inside. I’d been right.
Then, just as quickly, I felt like a selfish jerk. I probably shouldn’t feel relieved that something was wrong rather than that she didn’t want to be my friend anymore, but I had to hope that whatever was wrong, we could fix. If she’d truly wanted to end our friendship, there’d have been nothing I could do.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “I’m not the only one who’s worried about you. I talked to Geoff when I got into town.”
There was a tremor in her hand as she brought it up to run through her hair. A matching shiver skittered over my skin. Ahanti’s hands never shook.
“I didn’t know any other way to keep him safe. Both of you safe.” She glanced back over her shoulder, like even now she expected someone to be watching or listening. “Two weeks ago, someone left a picture of Geoff and me on my desk in the back room. They’d burned out his face and wrote I love you more across the back.”
I leaned into Mark’s solid arm for support. “You broke up with Geoff to protect him.”
She nodded. “I did some reading about stalkers online, and a lot of what I saw made it sound like if whoever did this thought I belonged to him, he might hurt Geoff to save me from him, or some warped thinking like that.”
The sad part of my parents’ business was that we dealt with the perpetrators rather than the victims. I’d been on the defense counsel side of a couple stalking cases. Ahanti’s fears were justified. Stalkers could become violent to both the object of their obsession and anyone who stood between them and what they wanted from the person they were stalking.
They didn’t normally jump straight into this level of contact, though. They tended to escalate. It should have started with something much smaller.
Ahanti hadn’t told me about anything, either recently or back when we were neighbors. At least, not that I could recall. “Is this the first thing that’s happened that made you think you have a stalker?”
She drew in a long breath, and it came out shaky. “The other stuff seemed innocent. It was mostly little gifts left at the studio. I get thank-you cards from clients sometimes, when I’ve helped them cover up a scar or hide an old tattoo of an ex’s name. I didn’t think the gifts were weird even though the cards were a bit personal.” She made an I-don’t-get-it gesture. “You’ve been there. We spend hours, sometimes days, working with clients. It’s easy to feel connected after that amount of time. People share all kinds of personal details. It’s not the first time I had a client feel like we were friends or even ask me out.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. Crap. She had told me all that. She’d even shown me a couple of the cards. We’d thought it was harmless and sweet. At one point, we’d even thought some of them might be from Geoff. I should have known better. Me, of all people. “Was the photo the only thing that seemed threatening?”
Ahanti’s gaze dropped.
My hand clenched around Mark’s arm. The gesture was so out of character for her, as if she thought she’d done something wrong.
“Some of the more recent notes mentioned things he shouldn’t have known about. One sounded almost like something I’d written in an email to you. The other was something I was sure I’d only told Geoff in a phone call.”
That explained why she’d been too afraid to use her phone or computer to tell me what was going on. Her stalker seemed to have somehow tapped into her private communications. Since the stalker was sending things to the studio, that also explained why she’d been afraid to say anything while we were there. Right now, we had no idea how he accessed her private communications. He could have bugged her studio or hacked her email. Maybe both.
Unfortunately, if he was tech-savvy enough, he might have even hacked her phone or put a keystroke tracker on her computer. As technology progressed, criminals were progressing right along with it.
I took her hand to make sure I had her attention. “You know this isn’t your fault, right?”
She raised her shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. “I must have encouraged him somehow, or this wouldn’t be happening.”
It was a common misconception about stalking cases that didn’t involve a celebrity. Many people assumed that the victim led the perpetrator on in some way and was partly culpable for what was happening to them. Nothing could be further from the truth. And it didn’t help that, at times, some movies and books portrayed stalking behavior as romantic. When Twilight was a craze, I was never able to get past how creepy Edward’s behavior seemed. Even then, I’d seen too much of the dark side to ever be that innocent again. Since my parents never sheltered me, I don’t think I was ever really innocent, even as a child.
The fact that Ahanti would even think she was partly to blame reminded me of the case I’d been part of only a couple of weeks ago. Blaming the victim had eventually led to the victims becoming murderers themselves. “You’re no more to blame than a woman who’s been raped.”
She adjusted the strap of the bag she had slung across her chest. It reminded me of a soldier strapping on his weapon for battle. And it looked a lot more like the Ahanti I knew.
“So is there something I can do about it?” she asked.
Mark held his phone out to her. “First, I think you should call your fiancé.” He glanced at me. “He deserves to know what’s going on.”
He didn’t have to say it’s what I would want. I heard it, and Ahanti must have, too, because she accepted the phone from him.
“And then,” Mark said, “we’re going to the police.”
An hour and a half later, Ahanti and I sat in the nearest Metropolitan Police station. Because the stalker sent his “love notes” to Skin Canvas and that was in their jurisdiction, it seemed like as good a place as any to start.
By the time Ahanti had finished talking to Geoff and we’d taken her to buy a pay-as-you-go phone that the stalker wouldn’t know about, Mark was barely going to have time to make his appointment at the lab. I told him we’d be fine to wait by ourselves to talk to an officer.
After all, even I couldn’t get into too much trouble inside a police station. Not life-threatening trouble, anyway.
Ahanti and I waited in silence, the only break coming from another text. Mandy sent me a picture of a thick, raw-looking red line across a palm and the words you were right. She couldn’t say I hadn’t warned her.
Another five minutes passed, and Ahanti crossed and uncrossed her legs. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea. I’m going to be away from work for most of the day. If he’s watching my business, he’ll know something’s up.”
Once we reported this, that was our next hurdle. Some stalking victims refused to change anything about their life, seeing that as a victory for their harasser. Others wanted to take every precaution to protect themselves in case the stalker lashed out, including moving.
“For all he knows, you had a doctor’s appointment and forgot your phone. Or you felt sick and went home. Have you gotten anything at your apartment?”
Ahanti worried her bottom lip. “I don’t think so. It’s all come to Skin Canvas so far.”
“Then it’s likely he doesn’t know where you live.”
That was a bit of a stretch. He likely knew her building. He’d probably followed her on her walk home, but her building had a locking external door. You needed a key to get in or a resident had to buzz you in. Mark and I had gotten in the other day because one of my former neighbors recognized me and knew Ahanti and I were close. That meant it wasn’t impossible for someone to gain access who shouldn’t, but it would be hard, and Ahanti would have noticed if someone followed her right in and up to her floor.
We fell into silence. For the first time, I didn’t know what to say to Ahanti. All the things I’d planned to say, all the things I’d been looking forward to talking to her about, now seemed inappropriate for the situation.
Ahanti shot me a sideways glance, and the corners of her eyes crinkled like she had a smile inside that she wasn’t sure whether to let out or not either. “Mark’s nothing like Peter.”
I laugh-snorted. If she could compliment Mark and take a jab at my ex-boyfriend at the same time, maybe I shouldn’t have worried about what to say after all. It seemed like Ahanti wanted a bit of normal in the midst of it all. “That’s an understatement.”
“How’d it go with your dad?”
I held back a second snort. It was getting to be a bad habit I needed to quit. This time, though, I didn’t feel like adding a laugh to it. “He seemed to like Mark.”
“That bad?”
It hadn’t really been. After our near argument prior to dessert, he’d been civil the rest of the evening. More than civil. If he’d been anyone else, I would have said he was amiable, so much so that Mark even commented on it afterward.
He was also up to something.
Mark hinted that I might be imagining things, but he had the good sense not to say it explicitly.
A detective with a nasal voice called Ahanti’s name, and she clutched my arm like she thought I might stay behind. I hadn’t even considered it.
My mom couldn’t have known when she recommended Mark to the head of the forensic research program that she’d be putting me back in DC at the time Ahanti would need me. My pastor would call it God’s timing.
The detective led us back to a desk with enough files and scattered papers piled on it that my fingers twitched to organize it for him. His coffee cup had what looked like a permanent ring around it on the desk.
Ahanti sat on the metal chair next to his desk. She stayed on the edge rather than settling in, her back so straight that her spine could have doubled as a measuring tape.
The detective snagged another empty chair from nearby for me.
Ahanti told him her story. When she reached the part about Geoff’s burned-out face in the picture, she started to shake to the point where her teeth chattered. I finished the story for her, repeating back for the detective what she’d told Mark and me.
The detective pulled a tissue from the box on his desk and wiped it across his forehead even though the air conditioning kept the humidity outside at bay. He tossed the tissue into the trash near my feet. “If we knew who your stalker was, we could put a restraining order in place. The problem we’re facing right now is that he’s keeping himself hidden.”
Ahanti was still looking at him like she expected there was a solution coming.
The tone of the detective’s voice carried an apology. There wasn’t a solution coming.
The detective drew out another tissue and dabbed his face again. “In cases like these, we can’t allocate resources to investigate the stalker’s identity. If he makes contact in any way where you see his face, even calls you on the phone so we could get a name from the number, you come back in and let us know. Until then, there’s nothing we can do.”