by Emily James
“My mom’s with Geoff.” I pulled out the chair next to her and sat. “So you don’t have to worry about him.”
She rested her forehead in her hands for a couple of beats. “That’s good. I got the idea they think we planned it together, but that he carried it out.” Her voice carried a this-can’t-be-happening tone.
I scooted the chair in closer. My mom and I would get this straightened out as soon as possible. “What have they said to you so far?”
She pulled the pad of paper closer to her and picked at the edge. “Not much. Someone stabbed Cary last night when he was closing up his studio. I tried to explain to them that we thought Cary had been stalking me. I meant it to show that he was a danger to me, not the other way around, but they took it as motive. The detective said something about Cary and me having a prior relationship that ended badly. That’s when I asked to call my lawyer.”
She’d done the right thing, but the timing would have made the detective more suspicious than he already was.
While I knew Ahanti well enough to know that she wouldn’t have turned the tables on Cary by killing him, I did have to ask a question she wasn’t going to like. “How confident are you that Geoff wasn’t involved in this?”
She picked at the paper so hard the corner ripped off. “Ninety-nine percent.”
“Why only ninety-nine?”
“You can’t be one hundred percent certain about anything in life.”
Classic Ahanti grayscale, but if we couldn’t get this situation cleared up soon, we’d have to talk about her fudging her life philosophies a little when the police talked to her again.
The detective who came through the door looked young enough that this might have been his first case after being promoted. That they sent us a relatively inexperienced detective was a good sign. Besides, unless he was a prodigy, I could handle him. Better my mom be with Geoff. If they thought he’d been the one to carry out the crime, they’d lean heavier on him.
“I assume you’ve had enough time to confer with your lawyer,” the detective said.
I didn’t miss the slight that he failed to introduce himself to me. That meant he might already know who I was. If he did, my last name alone would put him on high alert. Fitzhenry-Dawes had a reputation for defending people who were guilty.
I’d go with a hackneyed response and hope it made him underestimate me. “We’ve had plenty of time, since my client had nothing to do with this.”
His slight eyebrow raise said trite. Which I marked as a win for me.
He pulled the pad of paper back toward him from where it sat in front of Ahanti. He glanced at it, and I couldn’t be sure, but I’d have sworn he rolled his eyes. He tore the top page off to reveal the blank one underneath.
“I don’t suppose your client can provide an alibi to substantiate that claim.”
Ahanti said Cary died when he was closing up his studio. It wasn’t unusual for Skin Canvas to stay open until almost midnight. If Cary stayed open as late, I knew Ahanti was home alone, which sounded like yet another cliché. Cary also wasn’t as busy as Skin Canvas, though.
“What’s the time of death window?”
“Between 6:00 and 8:00 last night.”
I shut down both a smile and a cringe. She had an alibi, and when the detective heard it, he’d be convinced I was lying. “She was with me during that time.”
This time he openly rolled his eyes. “Convenient that she was meeting with her lawyer at the same time as her former boyfriend was murdered. Almost like she knew she’d need an alibi.” The mocking drained out of his tone and the look he gave Ahanti could have left a bruise. “But as I’m sure your attorney told you, conspiracy to commit murder is punishable with the same sentence as committing the act yourself.”
Ahanti maintained her composure. She didn’t shoot a look in my direction. She didn’t give any indication of what she was thinking.
I’d been expecting her to react. Maybe she already knew, the tiny, always-suspicious voice in my head whispered. Maybe she and Geoff did plan this together.
“It wouldn’t make sense for us to kill Cary,” Ahanti said. “We weren’t even sure he was stalking me.”
Then I saw it in the way she held extra still. I-don’t-know-what-to-do Ahanti was frantic, like a squirrel who can’t decide which direction to run from the cars bearing down on them. That’s the Ahanti I’d been expecting. This was business Ahanti, the one who might screw up a part of a tattoo but always knew she could fix it. She knew she hadn’t been a part of anything illegal, and so she trusted that this could be fixed. That’s why she was so calm despite her nerves.
I really did need a vacation when I started suspecting my best friend was capable of murder. The next thing I knew, I’d be doubting Mark, too.
The detective leaned back in his chair as if he thought Ahanti’s reaction was too calm as well. “Maybe you and your new boyfriend didn’t want to take the chance.”
The same look flared in Ahanti’s eyes as when she wanted to tattoo cheater on my ex-boyfriend’s forehead. “Geoff’s a chiropractor. If he wanted to kill Cary, he wouldn’t have stabbed him. He would have snuck up behind him and broken his neck. Geoff’s so squeamish about blood he can barely stand to be in my studio, and he’s lucky not to take off a finger with his dinner knife. He’d never stab someone.”
She certainly sounded more than ninety-nine percent certain of his innocence. Some of that was likely her protective instincts because she felt Geoff was threatened, but helped ease some of my lingering concern that Geoff might have killed Cary on his own.
The detective must have sensed the sincerity of Ahanti’s response, too, which raised my estimation of him a little. He got to his feet and went to the door.
“Don’t plan any trips out of town anytime soon. If it looks like your fiancé did it, we’re going to have more questions for you.” He held the door open like he expected us to leave. “And if you want to look less guilty, you might want to choose a different law firm.”
The detective’s foot was close enough I could have stomped it on my way by and pretended it was an accident. Ahanti was innocent, and I wasn’t my parents. Instead I gave him my sweetest smile as if he’d paid me a compliment.
Know where you’re weak, my dad used to tell me, and where they might be able to hurt you. Then turn it around and use it as a weapon against them.
I paused outside the door and looked back at the detective over my shoulder. “Our firm does handle cases for clients who aren’t innocent, but that means we’re the perfect choice for someone who is. Defending an innocent person will be easy by comparison.”
Ahanti looked like she wanted to high-five me. I decided not to tell her what I’d said wasn’t exactly true. Sometimes defending an innocent person could be as hard as defending a guilty one.
We headed straight for the parking lot, and I walked with Ahanti to her car.
She hit her clicker to unlock it, but paused with her hand on the door handle. All the confidence and bravado was gone from her face. For a breath, I was afraid she was going to ask me if I thought Geoff had something to do with it after all, and I would have had to admit that I wasn’t sure. If Geoff was the one actually stalking her, Cary would be a perfect scapegoat for his anger at being separated from Ahanti. Plus, he’d have had every reason to believe that, if Cary—her perceived stalker—died, things with Ahanti would return to the way they had been.
“I was never good at math,” Ahanti said. “It’s one of the reasons I dropped out of pre-med. But the odds seem obvious here even to me. It’s not likely Cary’s death was random, is it?”
I shook my head.
She fingered her keys and gave a sharp nod. “I was hoping I was wrong and there was some explanation where he was my stalker after all.”
Not unless he was also stalking someone else and that person, or someone connected to them, killed him. The likelihood of him being her stalker now seemed impossibly slim, especially given that the original note fr
om her stalker had already made me think Cary wasn’t the one. “Probably not.”
Ahanti swore. And not softly, either. “Could you ride back to my apartment with me? Eddie hasn’t had a chance to check my security system and locks yet.”
I understood what she didn’t say. We’d been looking at the wrong person, and she didn’t feel safe going back to an empty apartment alone in case the real stalker found a way in and was waiting for her. “I’ll came and stay with you until my mom’s done here.”
I texted my mom and Mark to let them know what I was doing.
Going back with her would also give us an opportunity to brainstorm other possibilities for her stalker. Hopefully Ahanti could come up with better suggestions that the ones that were swimming around in my mind. The only two potential suspects I had at present were Geoff and Terrance.
I climbed in and buckled up. We’d already looked at the content of the messages. There didn’t seem to be much more we could get from them about the stalker’s identity. We’d have to come at this from a different direction.
When we’d thought it was Cary, we’d planned to ask anyone who was in Skin Canvas the day the picture of Geoff was dropped off if they’d seen him. Now the list Ahanti was supposed to make would have added meaning. The people on it were either potential witnesses or our stalker.
11
The list Ahanti dropped into my lap as I sat on her couch was much longer than expected. I’d thought she’d have five, maybe six, people on the list. I hadn’t counted the names, but it looked to be at least twenty. “How many hours did you work that day?”
Ahanti shrugged. “We didn’t close until close to midnight. Terrance and I both stayed the whole time.”
Well, twenty was still better than the times I’d basically had an entire town full of suspects. The only name I recognized was Terrance’s. “You’re going to have to run down this list and tell me who all these people are.”
Not everyone on the list was a client. Three quarters of them were, between Ahanti and Terrance. Apparently, that Wednesday, Ahanti had booked a lot of design consults rather than actually tattooing, which meant she’d seen more people than usual. She’d also included the name of the mailman who dropped off their mail—“Because I can’t be sure he didn’t leave the picture in an unmarked envelope along with the actual mail”—a supplier who was trying to get her to switch to a new brand of ink—“But I don’t think it was him because that’s the first time he’d been in”—and the girl who kept coming back even though Ahanti refused to tattoo her. I was personally pretty sure that refusing to give someone a tattoo wasn’t grounds for stalking. Besides, Ahanti said she’d only been hanging around the last few weeks.
I drew a line through the supplier’s name. Since Ahanti hadn’t ever seen him before, he wasn’t our guy, and he also wouldn’t be much help in figuring out who might have gone into the back room.
Through the back of the paper, under the names written on it, I could see the preliminary sketches Ahanti must have done back during the design process for her engagement ring. Geoff knew she’d never be happy with something someone else created, so they’d waited for her to create her own and have it custom made. It seemed almost sacrilege to even consider that same man would be her stalker. His name wasn’t on the list.
But my parents had trained me that we couldn’t allow how we felt about a witness to change our questions or make us let them off easy. Doing so could destroy our client’s case. In this situation, it could cost Ahanti her life. “Did Geoff come by that day?”
I kept my gaze focused on the list and tried to keep my tone light. Ahanti and I had never had a fight over a guy, though she hadn’t liked Peter when I’d been dating him. I didn’t want to start a fight now. Her instinct was to defend Geoff.
“Why?” she asked, equally as casually.
So casually, in fact, that I couldn’t tell if she suspected anything. Even if she did, the fact that she didn’t want to let on to me said she didn’t take my possible suspicion of Geoff seriously. I’d already asked her if he might have killed Cary. She must realize that, as a lawyer, I had to ask some questions whether I wanted to or not.
Still, I wasn’t ready to even hint that Geoff might be somehow involved with this whole situation. “Everyone who was there is a witness.”
Ahanti dropped onto the couch next to me. “He brought me supper that night. He knew I’d be working late.”
That might actually clear him, depending on when Ahanti discovered the photo. “And when did you check the mail and other stuff on your desk.”
Her eyebrows lowered slightly. “Why does that matter?”
Be careful, Nikki. “If you’d already found the picture by then, we don’t need to bother Geoff by asking him a lot of questions. He probably has enough on his mind after the police interrogation.”
My mom hadn’t texted or called yet, which meant the police hadn’t released Geoff. They were certainly spending more time on him than on Ahanti.
“I didn’t notice it until right before I closed the studio.” Her fingers drew lines on her thighs as if itching to pick up a pencil and draw to relieve some stress. “Do you think Cary’s murder is linked to my stalker somehow?”
Mark’s favorite phrase of possible but not probable came to mind. Though how much more likely was it that Cary would be killed at the same time as Ahanti was being stalked? It wasn’t like they were part of a gang where multiple people who knew each other could be hurt in unrelated events. It might actually be probable as well as possible.
My heart beat a few slow, sickening thuds. If the two cases were related, then either Geoff had killed Cary to protect Ahanti or her stalker had somehow felt eliminating Cary was in his best interest. The two might even intersect if Geoff was her stalker.
If he wasn’t, then the real stalker was now systematically targeting people close to Ahanti. First they’d threatened Geoff, her fiancé. Now they’d killed Cary, her former boss and boyfriend.
Her separation from Geoff might have actually saved his life, but everyone else she was close to was in danger—including me. Mark was going to love that.
Ahanti’s hands clenched over her knees. “That was too long a pause. You do think the two things are connected.”
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.
