Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  “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.”

  5

  “I shouldn’t have called Geoff,” Ahanti said as soon as we crossed the dividing line between the chilled interior of the police station and the muggy sun outside.

  I wanted to say something comforting or encouraging or brave, but everything I came up with in my head would have sounded trite to me had the roles been reversed and I was the one afraid for Mark’s life.

  Even with all the murder investigations I’d been a part of in the past ten months, none of them made me feel this way. In Peter’s case, I’d always had a niggling doubt that he might not be as innocent as he wanted me to believe. With Uncle Stan, he was already gone before I got involved with hunting down the person who hurt him.

  After those two, the victims had been strangers or people I barely knew. This time it was my best friend.

  I couldn’t help feeling like I’d given Ahanti false hope. Not only that, but she was still unprotected from someone sick enough to burn her fiancé’s face out of a photo.

  “He’ll never believe the I’m-breaking-up-with-you thing again.” Ahanti stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Will you talk to him? He might listen to you about how dangerous this could be for him.”

  If it was anyone other than Ahanti, he might take my word as a criminal defense attorney. In this situation, nothing was going to keep him away when she was in danger.

  I motioned for her to follow me so that we weren’t standing like human traffic cones in the middle of the sidewalk. “That’s not a good plan. He might be in danger, but so are you. What we need is a plan to keep you both safe.”

  “I already have a decent security system in my apartment. Maybe I should head out of town for a bit.”

  Unless she wanted to move permanently, a vacation wasn’t going to be much help. Her stalker had been infatuated with her this long, and she’d gone away on trips before. He’d be waiting when she got back. And we still wouldn’t be any closer to figuring out who he was.

  Even if she did move, she’d have no guarantees that he wouldn’t simply follow her. It all depended on how deep he felt the connection to her was.

  A man passed by us in the opposite direction close enough that he brushed against my purse and set it swinging.

  Ahanti flinched away from him and looked back over her shoulder until he was well out of range to grab one of us.

  It took all my self-control not to do the same. Paranoia and anxiety were my constant companions, but even when I’d lived in the DC area, I hadn’t felt scared to walk alone in the daylight in the nicer parts of the city. Now I wanted to check for people following us in the storefront glass, and I wished I’d asked Mark to skip his meeting and stay with us.

  And this guy wasn’t even my stalker. We couldn’t simply do nothing and hope this would go away. It wouldn’t. One of the stalkers my parents were hired to defend had tried to kill the object of his obsession. They didn’t all reach that point, but I didn’t want to take that risk. I was certain Geoff and Ahanti wouldn’t want to take that risk with her life, either.

  Even a restraining order didn’t guarantee the stalker would leave her alone, but if we had enough information on him to get one, she’d also at least know who to watch out for. Right now, every person we passed could be a threat.

  It wasn’t a good way to live. She’d be headed for an ulcer before she turned thirty-five.

  “If the police can’t help until we know who this guy is, then that’s what we need to figure out. It’s time for us to hunt him.”

  By the time we reached Ahanti’s apartment building, I already regretted my use of the word hunt. Clearly I’d been too graphic in recounting my adventures in Fair Haven. After I made my statement about hunting down her stalker, Ahanti looked like she was going to throw up on my shoes.

  “You promise I won’t have to confront him?” Ahanti asked.

  “I promise.” Mark was already going to hate this idea enough without me doing anything to make myself threatening to Ahanti’s stalker. “All we need to do is figure out who this guy is. We’ll let the police handle it from there.”

  She fished around in her purse again, still struggling to find her key.

  Even once she had a restraining order in place, she needed to take steps to protect herself. “Little tip. Try to make sure you always have your key out and ready before you reach the door.”

  I left out the it’s too easy an opportunity for your stalker to corner you otherwise.

  She shuddered. “I hate having to think about this.”

  I stuck out my hands, and she plopped her bag into my grip. It was nearly the size of a child’s backpack and at least as heavy.

  She held it open with her now-free hand and wiggled her key out from behind her sketch pad and case of graphite pencils. We’d been apart long enough that I forgot all the things she carried around with her.

  Once inside the building, she headed for the elevator.

  I touched her arm. “The stairs are probably better,” I said softly. “In an elevator, there’s no place to run.”

  Her skin took on a yellow tinge under her natural beautiful tanned skin tone.

  “Right.” She pivoted and headed for the stairwell. “Right.”

  I wanted to tell her this wouldn’t be forever, but stalking laws were much too weak. Unless her stalker found someone else to fixate on, this might have to be her new normal.

  Ahanti’s apartment was exactly how I remembered it, albeit with a bit more clutter. Her drawing table still sat next to the window that let in the best natural light, her Faber Castell polychromos colored pencils and hand guard splayed out across it like she’d been in the middle of a project when she had to leave for work.
Stacks of boxes, all labeled, lined the walls, and piles of papers grew like mold over her end tables.

  Theoretically, her apartment might have been big enough for her and Geoff to share, but it would have required a massive purge first. Or renting a storage unit. Geoff had suggested the latter to her when they first got serious, but Ahanti had insisted that she needed to be able to access her sketches and other keepsakes without traveling across town.

  She still didn’t have a TV or a radio, but her laptop sat open on her coffee table, and her state-of-the-art printer—the kind that could print images on photo paper just as well as any photo place—still didn’t have a speck of dust on it even though I could have written my name in the layer on her bookshelf.

  I deadbolted the door behind us and closed the lid of her laptop. She’d left her phone in the console of her car, so if her stalker had hacked either, we should still be safe from his prying ears.

  Ahanti flopped down on the couch. “So where do we start?”

  I joined her. Even though we weren’t investigating a murder—thankfully—investigating this shouldn’t be that much different. “Have you noticed anyone acting strangely?”

  The expression on Ahanti’s face clearly said do I look stupid? “I would have told you about that already.” She ruffled her long hair and sighed. “Sorry. I don’t even know what would make someone do this. How am I supposed to know what behavior to watch for?”

  As I well knew, anyone’s behavior could look strange or guilty if you were watching closely enough.

  Ahanti slumped back against the couch cushions. “When I was reading online at work, there were like five or six different kinds of stalkers. I don’t even know how to start narrowing it down to which kind mine might be, let alone who.”

  Her voice was taking on her taxes are due tomorrow and I haven’t even started them yet tone.

  Odd as it was, this was my element in the same way that she created art on human flesh. I could guide her through this.

  I opened the browser on my phone and held it out to her. “Show me the page you were looking at with the descriptions.”

  She tapped on my phone’s screen and handed it back to me.

  I swiveled so that she couldn’t peek at the screen. “I’m going to read these. Don’t overthink it. Just tell me if anyone immediately leaps to your mind when I describe how this might have started.”

  The website gave each type of stalker a label, but I didn’t want Ahanti getting caught up on those. I wanted her to think about the way she might have first come into contact with her stalker and who might be showing any behaviors similar to the ones listed.

  I skipped the one where the stalker was basically a predator who was profiling their victim in order to sexually assault them. While Ahanti’s stalker could technically be that, it didn’t seem to fit with what she’d told me. Plus, I didn’t need to scare her any more than she already was by even putting the thought in her mind.

  I read her the description of the next type.

  She was shaking her head almost before I finished. “That sounds more like someone who’s really awkward and doesn’t realize that you can’t keep following someone around until they agree to date you.”

  She was right. She’d have noticed someone who was that socially inept trying to make contact with her. The description also implied that they usually lost interest quickly, and Ahanti said her stalker had been making indirect contact for years, even though she hadn’t recognized it as stalking at the time.

  I moved on to the next one, a stalker who begins after the breakdown of a close relationship with their victim.

  Ahanti’s hands clenched on her knees. “That one reminds me of Cary. Cary Gilbert. The guy I apprenticed with.”

  By the time I met Ahanti, she already owned Skin Canvas. She’d mentioned that she broke with the man who apprenticed her because she found out he was stealing her designs. She’d never offered more information, and I hadn’t pressed because the situation was clearly something she’d wanted to leave behind her. I’d assumed it was because she didn’t want to slander him—even though it wouldn’t have been slander because it was the truth.

  Now, if we were going to either confirm he was her stalker or cross him off the list, we’d have to dig into their relationship.

  Considering how circumspect she’d been about it in the past, she’d probably be more comfortable telling me the story without anyone else around. I checked my phone. No text yet. Mark should be another twenty or thirty minutes at least, which gave us plenty of time.

  “What makes you think it might be Cary?”

  Ahanti shoved to her feet and went over to her drawing table. She picked up a green pencil crayon and ran it through her fingers as if the touch of it soothed her. “Cary didn’t want to take me on as an apprentice even though he’d done all my tats and he’d seen my artwork. He knew I had great design ideas. But he was already apprenticing Terrance, and he said he didn’t need another one.”

  I stayed quiet. Any questions I needed to ask, I could ask later. Right now, she just needed to get the story out.

  “He’d asked me out a couple of times, and so I said, jokingly, that for every hour he taught me, I’d go out with him the same amount. After a month, I stopped keeping count of the hours, and it was really good for a while. We even talked about moving in together.”

  I hadn’t known their relationship was personal as well as professional.

  Ahanti set the pencil crayon back on her drawing desk in the exact spot she’d picked it up from. The rest of her apartment might be a mess, but her “studio corner” was precise, just like her studio.

  “Things went bad when clients started to come in requesting me instead of him. Even some of his longtime customers. Some of the things he said…” She pressed her fists into the desktop. “Like that I’d prostituted myself to get the job and that the only reason they were picking me over him was that I was probably screwing them, too.”

  She turned her back to the window and the sun backlit her dark hair, making her look a lot like she must have back then, young and vulnerable.

  “I stayed with him anyway because I loved him, and I thought if I left, somehow it would prove him right. Then one of my regulars told me that he was copying my designs and passing them off as his own. That’s when I packed up. Once I opened Skin Canvas, most of my clients followed, and even Terrance asked to come on board.”

  I read the description on the website again. Based on Ahanti’s story, Cary could fit the profile. But only if he’d kept in touch. The trigger event for stalkers was always a fresh meeting or a fresh rejection, not something that happened to them years ago that they didn’t react to at the time.

  “He doesn’t sound like the kind of guy to let your defection go easily.”

  Ahanti crossed her arms under her chest, a subconscious self-protective gesture. “He begged me to come back and swore he hadn’t been filching my work. He even offered to make me a partner in the business. By then I’d realized I was happier without him.”

  That was still years ago. “Did he let it drop after that?”

  “Mostly. Every once in a while, usually when business is slow for him, he’ll come by Skin Canvas and suggest we amalgamate, but he hasn’t suggested we personally get back together for years.” She flashed me her old brash smile. “Not since Terrance and Eddie threw him out last time he started hitting on me. And I mean threw literally.”

  That could explain why he’d resorted to sending gifts and love notes instead. He sounded egocentric enough that he probably assumed Ahanti would know they were from him even though he’d left them unsigned.

  There was one upside to all of this. “If he’s your stalker, I don’t think he’ll actually follow through on his threat against Geoff.”

  She stepped away from her desk, closer to the couch. “Why’s that?”

  “Once you had him thrown out of your studio, he didn’t threaten the guys who helped you, and he got less direct with his comm
unication. He de-escalated.”

  My phone pinged. I’m done playing with the lab’s toys for the day. Ready for some supper?

  Supper? I checked my watch. We’d lost the whole day. I texted him back. “Mark’s on his way. Will you be okay here tonight? You could always stay with me at the hotel. We have separate rooms.”

  She moved to a panel by the door and brushed it with her fingers. “I’ll keep my door locked and alarm system on. I’ll call you tomorrow to set up a time to look at all the stuff. Hopefully there’s something that will help prove it’s Cary that I missed noticing.” She unlocked the deadbolt but kept her hand on the door. “If Cary’s the one who’s been sending me all the messages, how did he hack my phone and emails? When we worked together, he could barely touch the computer without it freezing. Terrance did all the techie stuff.”

  “He might have learned since then.” It niggled at my mind like the beginning of a headache, though. He might have gotten more proficient over the years, but he hadn’t likely reached hacker-level skills. “I’ll ask my parents to have one of their private investigators look into Cary. Maybe he hired someone. They might even be able to catch him in the act.”

  I reached for the door handle, but Ahanti kept her hand firmly blocking access. “I can’t afford a PI. I’ve put everything I had in savings into the wedding.”

  “Don’t worry about it. My parents and I still owe you for saving my life last year.” I hugged her. “Besides, that’s what friends are for.”

  She let me out, and I listened for the deadbolt sliding into place behind me. Even once it clicked into place, I couldn’t shake the weighted feeling along my shoulders and down through my chest, almost like my purse was made of iron.

  Even though we had a good idea of who her stalker might be, and even though I knew from when I’d watered her plants when she went on vacation in the past that she did have a good security system, I felt like I was leaving her in the Roman colosseum and praying the lions’ cages held.