He squirmed and straightened his back against the wall, but said nothing.
She nodded to the photo. ‘I was Bird Woman when I met the man who … The one who stalked me. There was a woman I’d partied with a few times. We just ended up together, Lila was her name. We ran into each other at a really ratty bar in Santa Monica one night. She was with him. She called him Edge. That’s all, just Edge. She was fucking him, and she told me he wanted to do a threesome with me. She was really strange about it, almost like she was desperate to involve me. I told her no. There were too many elements in a threesome I couldn’t control, and after seeing the two of them together, I was pretty sure I couldn’t control him, pretty sure he was dangerous. That was the night he grabbed my phone away from me and took this picture.’ She looked down at the image. ‘It’s the only picture I have of any of them, any of the people I used to be. I wouldn’t allow photos, but this was on my own phone, so it didn’t seem to matter, and I didn’t want to upset him. He was flirting with me, and she was watching, sort of, I don’t know, she was just acting really strange. I was just trying to be polite, be nice and get the hell out of there. It wasn’t comfortable. When he asked me outright if I’d like to have sex with them, I politely declined. I thought everything was cool. I made a quick stop to the bathroom on my way out when I heard noises in the alley. And he was out there, beating the shit out of her.’
She shivered, and Garrett tightened his hold around her and chafed her arms. ‘I wasn’t thinking. I started yelling at him, I told him I’d call the police. I told him I had a gun.’ She shrugged. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t have anything, but he just shoved her against the wall and stared at me. And he said, “I hear birds don’t live long, Bird Woman.” Then he left.
‘Two weeks later Lila was dead.’
‘Jesus!’ Garrett pulled her closer. ‘He killed her?’
‘No. He didn’t kill her, at least not outright. She committed suicide. Though, looking back, I’ve no doubt he drove her to it. I didn’t even know she was dead until he emailed me the link from the paper and her obituary. I have no idea how he got my email, how he discovered who I was when no one else could. In the beginning, he seemed all broken up about Lila, and I was sympathetic, but distant. I figured he’d lose interest and if he didn’t I’d change my email address and that would be that. K. Ryde had lots of email addresses and lots of identities. I figured it couldn’t be that difficult to handle.’
‘But it was.’
She nodded. ‘It was. Then the expensive gifts and flowers started showing up at my door, my door, not K. Ryde’s office, my home which no one knew anything about. I couldn’t send them back, I had no address. I emailed and asked him to stop and he got angry. And the gifts got unpleasant. Rotting fish, a dead snake, horrible, horrible pictures. I don’t know if he took them or just downloaded them off really sick internet sites, but it got worse and so did the emails, more and more threatening. Awful stuff. I changed my email. It didn’t help. I moved. It didn’t help.’
‘Didn’t you call the police?’
‘Of course I did, but there was nothing they could do. Even when the death threats started, there was still nothing they could do, not really. He had my cell phone number and he called me dozens of times a day. I got a new phone and it started all over again. Then he found out that I worked for K. Ryde. I don’t think he ever learned that I was K. Ryde, though I can’t imagine how he didn’t know that. He knew everything else. But when he found out that I worked for the Ryde Agency, he found out about a client I was working with at the time, a very secretive client. He told me he’d turn his attention on the client. That’s the only time I ever turned a client over to the Bachman Agency. And I knew I couldn’t continue, that K. Ryde couldn’t continue without putting clients and people I cared about at risk.’
She lowered her head into her hands and tried to breathe, tried to get her heart to slow down. ‘I couldn’t take it anymore, Garrett. I left. I sold the Ryde Agency for a lot of money and I moved back to Portland.’
‘Fuck, Kendra! And I involved you in all this.’
She shook her head. ‘Garrett, it can’t be him. I hired a detective to find out who he was, to find him and get him off my back. I mean, I had to do something. The police were of no use. I gave them everything I knew, even went so far as to hang out in the places where he used to be with a wire.’
‘Jesus, Kendra! Were you crazy?’