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She could hear the hope in her own tone. She didn’t want this to be something, ruining their weekend together.
“You said you felt someone watching you. Now you’ve received bizarre text messages basically saying that they’re watching you. That’s a coincidence I don’t like. Blame the cop in me. I’m cynical as hell.”
It didn’t take long to come to a conclusion.
Burner phone. Whoever had sent these texts had sent them from an untraceable phone probably bought at a big-box store with prepaid minutes.
“We’ll never find out who it was,” Mia sighed. “I think we should just believe it was a wrong number.”
For her own sanity. She didn’t want to be on edge and scared anymore. That was the past.
“I doubt I could get a court order to try and ping the phone or get more information from the phone company,” Grant replied. “They’re hard to get and it’s usually only in cases of murder or something of that degree of seriousness.”
“Creepy texts aren’t going to do it. I’m not shocked. I’m just going to block the caller. End of story.”
Grant appeared unconvinced, but he’d already warned her that he wasn’t the optimist type when it came to behavior like this.
“If someone is watching you, and now they’re reaching out, then they’re escalating. That’s not good.”
“We don’t truly know if someone is watching me. I might just be paranoid. This only started when?—”
She broke off, not wanting to say the words on the tip of her tongue. It didn’t matter because Grant seemed to know what she was going to say.
“When you started seeing me,” Grant finished her statement. “Either I’ve brought up uncomfortable and unpleasant memories of the past for you, or my presence in your life has motivated someone around you to change their behavior.”
“Yes, sometimes I do think about the past when I’m with you,” Mia admitted. “But not in a bad way. Mostly in a way where I think about how far I’ve come and how I could never go back there anymore. I don’t think about the fear.”
“I guess that’s a positive thing. That leaves someone in your life is threatened by our seeing each other. Perhaps Kevin Fuller.”
“Kevin? How could he possibly know? And he’s in prison. He doesn’t have a cell phone.”
“I can assure you that prisoners often get their hands on contraband inside prisons,” Grant laughed grimly. “But I assume that Kevin has at least one friend left who might be willing to check up on you regularly and report back to him. Maybe an old friend or someone he was in prison with but has been released. They could send texts on his behalf. Kevin being responsible for all this is not out of the question.”
The thought of Kevin having someone watch her was high up on the creep meter. It had never really occurred to her that he would do something like that. She’d always assumed that being in prison would be enough of a problem for him that he wouldn’t be worried about her.
“I always assumed that being incarcerated, Kevin wouldn’t have the time or energy to wonder about what I might be doing. Plus, it’s been years.”
“Time is what prisoners have a lot of. Tons of it. It gives them time to think. And plan.”
“How can we possibly know?”
“I can call the warden of the prison where Kevin is. He can check for a phone or look into Kevin’s communications with the outside world. But we also need to look a little closer to home, too. Kevin isn’t a sure thing. It could be other people.”
“Who else would it be? I don’t have a ton of friends, and the ones I do have, I trust completely.”
Grant settled on the couch next to Mia, putting his arm around her shoulders so he could pull her close. She needed to lean on his strength at this moment. This morning she hadn’t had any problems. Now it looked like she might have a big one. She still wasn’t totally convinced that any of this was a…thing.
It might all be just a huge misunderstanding. Her paranoia. A wrong number. And suddenly, she was being stalked.
Wouldn’t I know if I was being stalked? I think I would.
“It doesn’t have to be someone that you know intimately,” Grant explained. “It could be a person in your life that only thinks they know you. Your barista, your pizza delivery guy, for example. They’re in your periphery, but they’re not in your life as a real friend. But they can build elaborate fantasies about you and them and your relationship. A friend of mine had a woman who was stalking a man in her office. She thought that he was communicating to her through songs on the radio. That’s how she explained to my detective friend that the guy would send her love messages.”
“And the guy didn’t know?”
“Not until the woman showed up at house during the day when the wife was home and tried to convince her that she should leave and divorce her husband so they could be together. She told the wife that they were in love and wanted to be married and start a family. That the wife was the obstacle, and he was too nice to ask for a divorce. Of course, the wife really didn’t know how to react. Should she believe this? Something told her it was all bullshit, so she tried to call her husband. That’s when the shit hit the fan because the woman lost it. Pulled a gun and threatened to kill the wife and herself. Luckily the call had gone through, and the husband heard the conversation. Police were called and the situation deescalated. It could have been a deadly situation.”
Okay, maybe I wouldn’t know, after all.
