“Woo-hoo! You’re the best, honey!” she cried, lifting her drink for a toast. They clinked glasses and Matthew said he would deliver the goods to her after his next workday.
He knew getting them would be easy, and it was. He just waited until he was alone in the office, locked the door, and went to the PC file, where the number of letters from Steve dwarfedall others. There was one declaring that Faith was “three diamonds” but he could make her feel like “five diamonds.”
Matthew knew Faith lived at the Three Diamonds apartment building and he paused for a moment, wondering if that was what Steve was referring to. But no, there was no way this guy could know her address. Matthew dismissed it as a coincidence.
He took that letter and several others, including one that asked if Faith remembered Steve from the Belle Isle Art Fair. Then he grabbed a few promo photos and put everything in a manila envelope, hiding it under some other things in his work bag.
Tara took over from there. She didn’t even tell him about the first letter she sent out until after the fact.
“I did it, I sent letter number one to Steve yesterday,” she announced a few days later.
Soon after, she began really ramping up the chatter with the stalker, to the point where Matthew found it extremely uncomfortable, but Tara thought it was fun. She set up a private email address and took a picture of herself in a bathrobe in the mirror, pretending she was Faith.
“The idiot has no idea it’s not his lover girl,” she said, laughing. “I told him we’ll only take pictures of our bodies, not our faces, and he agreed.”
For weeks she played this guy, taking a picture of her shoulder or leg or a bare foot or her cleavage. She took one in her underwear and a bra and she might have even gone further in stripping, Matthew wasn’t sure. He did know that Steve reciprocated with photos of himself, usually in the exact same poses. Tara showed them to Matthew and they both made fun of Steve for everything from his awful looks to his puppy-dog eagerness.
At the R&B Music Festival one Saturday, Matthew wasstanding next to Faith in what talent at Channel 9 jokingly called “the bride and groom receiving line” with viewers when he saw a dorky guy in jean shorts, white socks, and a cheap polo shirt that was too tight stop in front of Faith and start to say loudly that his name was Steve and that he was her boyfriend and they traded pictures.
Matthew’s antennae went up. This had to be the guy Tara was conversing with. Although Matthew had never seen the guy’s face, because all of Steve’s photos were from the neck down, thishadto be him.
Faith was completely clueless as she tried to appease this viewer in front of her, and Matthew felt a tinge of guilt. He also wondered if she noticed, as Matthew had, that Steve then stood under a tree not far away from them and watched for the entire rest of the time they were there. Matthew tried hard not to stare at him too much. Luckily, the meteorologists all got into the weather vehicle at the end and quickly took off.
He told Tara about it that night, and she checked the private email to see if Steve had written.
“Oh yeah, he’s asking why she ignored him at the festival,” Tara said. “Don’t worry, I got this. I’ll tell him I was trying to keep it secret from you and others.”
Her fingers flew over the keys and she smiled in satisfaction as she hit send. But when Steve responded, he asked for an in-person date again. He had been doing this for a while now.
“How long can you keep this guy at bay?” Matthew asked, leaning over her shoulder at the laptop to read Steve’s email.
“A while. I have a great idea,” Tara replied. “I’m going to ask him to follow me home and to other stuff instead. Can you get me Faith’s calendar from the shared one you all have for events? I’ll ask him to show up at all of these. This is when Faith will getunnerved by this guy and it will make her want to leave Detroit. Then operation ‘Matthew to the main met chair’ will be fully complete. When she leaves the city I’ll write to Steve one more time pretending to be Faith saying ‘I’m so sorry I got transferred to another city and our love will never have a chance to grow’ and then he’ll be out of her hair for good and she’ll be out of ours. It’s just soooo perfect.”
Matthew had never felt fully on board with all of this manipulation, and he certainly didn’t like his girlfriend sending sexy pictures to another man, even if she never showed her face. But Tara was unstoppable. There was really no way of stemming the tide now, he knew that. Tara was having too much fun. The whole thing seemed to excite her.
He let out a deep sigh and told her not to go too overboard. She turned her head toward him and gave him one of the more passionate kisses he could remember in a while, and he was jelly for her, as usual.
But just a month later Faith was dead, strangled in her car. Was it possible Steve had followed her on her dinner break and done this? Or was he as heartbroken as the rest of humanity seemed to be and he was innocent, nothing more than a clueless fool?
Now Matthew sat in the office and ruminated over not only the course of events with Steve the stalker but also just the whirlwind past few days. It had been nonstop since Perry had called Saturday morning to tell Matthew the news. He had to wake Tara and tell her, and she screamed and even cried a little. They both had looked at each other with trepidation and Matthew said aloud what he was sure they were both contemplating: “You don’t think? Not the stalker? It can’t be, right?”
“I don’t know,” Tara replied, her face whiter than he had ever seen it. “Let’s not even let our minds go there.”
He had always been nervous that somehow their little game could be traced. Even if Steve was not responsible for Faith’s death in any way—and God, he hoped not—Matthew could be fired if thisevercame to light.
It could go any number of ways. The police might never bother them again and they’d be scot-free for life, or the complete opposite: they could be accomplices to a murder. Or perhaps a middle ground. He could be fired for harassing a fellow employee. With the amount of harassment training they had to do at work, he knew there was a zero tolerance level for anything like that.
Two of the three options were very, very bad things for their future, and his bowels seemed to shift. He felt like he might have diarrhea coming on.
Why oh why had he ever let it get this far? He should have stopped it long ago. This kind of game-playing wasn’t worth it, and it hadn’t had the desired effect. It didn’t make Faith just turn and run away to another city, it made her dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Laura
June 4
Laura returned from the police station pissed off and ready for battle. She had answered all of the questions from detectives honestly. Elliott answered his too, she hoped honestly, but how could she tell? If he had lied to Laura about camping with buddies, who knew what he was capable of? That was the pissed-off part of her. Well, that and being on some hit list from Faith. What had Laura ever done to deserve being on a list like that? It was so unfair. Yet Faith was dead, so it was hard to be mad at her for too long.
