Chapter 30
Thirty
FYFE
M y stomach knotted as I stared at the screen in front of me. Walker leaned back in his desk chair, waiting grimly for my response.
“Do you think he came here to target her?” I straightened.
The information was everything Walker’s contacts had dug up on Dr. Cameron Phillips. It seemed he had a history of harassing female colleagues. He’d worked in several general practices around the country in his short career. A little digging uncovered formal complaints in the last two practices (from a female doctor at the previous and a receptionist at the one before that).
It seemed Dr. Dick tended to fixate on a woman. These women had stated in their reports that they had only been dating a few weeks when Dr. Dick became possessive, aggressive, and threatening. When they tried to end things, he turned up at their homes, he called them at all hours of the night, he cornered them at work, and he’d followed them when they were out in public. There were police records for both women, but there was little the police could do unless he physically assaulted them.
The cherry on top was that he’d been engaged to a woman while cheating on her and stalking other women. It appeared the engagement ended when the police got involved.
Dr. Dick hadn’t done anything violent yet. He seemed to move on to the next woman before it got that far. However, men like that … it was usually only a matter of time before they crossed that line.
Eilidh’s arse was out there as someone with a public presence. She knew that this kind of behavior from strangers was common toward famous people. But she’d come home to distance herself from her public persona. To start over.
And the first fucking guy she encountered was a stalker.
“You couldn’t write this shit.” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “We need to get him out of Ardnoch now. Leave no options open to him to be anywhere near Eilidh.”
“Blacklist him.” Walker nodded. “Lachlan’s on it. Gordon owns the house the arsehole is renting.” Gordon was an elderly, semiretired businessman who still owned some property in the village. “They’ve found a loophole in the rental agreement so Gordon’s serving an eviction notice today. Unfortunately, it gives the prick a week to find accommodation elsewhere.”
“But he won’t find it here?”
“Lachlan’s put the word out. No one will rent him a property. Arran knows not to let him stay at the Gloaming. From here to Wick, he’ll be persona non grata. If he repeats his usual pattern, he’ll give up and move on.”
The knot in my stomach didn’t loosen. It wouldn’t until I had confirmation Dr. Dick was far, far away from Eils.
There was a knock on Walker’s door and Evan Willis stepped inside. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for days—pale, unshaven, dark circles under his eyes.
“Problem?” Walker asked.
“I heard Fyfe was here.” Evan nodded at me. “Need a word.”
“You look like shit. Are you okay?”
He scrubbed a hand over his cheeks. “I’ve been shouldering your classes and this research. Not had much sleep.”
Guilt shifted through me. “I’ll be back to running my classes as soon as I can get childcare.”
“Don’t worry about it, mate. You’ve got bigger worries than that.”
Alert, I stiffened. “Whatever you’ve found, you can say in front of Walker. Eilidh told him about the cameras.”
Evan strode into the room. “Well, you owe me big-time for the deep dive I had to take to find this bastard. There are some sick perverts out there.”
“I’ll pay you a massive bonus if you just get to the point.”
He nodded. “In the files, there are emails from the same person. Loads of emails. Coming in to Eilidh’s agency addressed to her twice a week at least.”
It was sickening to even imagine someone being that obsessed with Eilidh.
“Usual creepy stalkery emails about how they were meant to be. He talked a lot about watching her. Anyone would assume he was talking about her TV show, movies, right?”
“But he wasn’t talking about that.”
Evan shook his head. “While a lot of the stuff is … sexual … sorry?—”
I waved off his apology, even though the very thought of someone getting off on watching Eilidh made me want to start snapping necks.
“—they were also more intimate comments. Like how he loved the way emotions played over her face when she was reading a book.”
“How would he know that from watching her on television?” Walker asked coldly.
“Exactly. So I scoured through all the emails. Now, without seeing Eilidh’s flat, I don’t know for sure if details match, but he talks about watching her lying naked in her bedsheets with the birds printed all over them. How he liked that she kissed her family’s photograph before bed every night. There are loads of wee details that her team missed.”
My chin jerked back. When I’d been in Eilidh’s apartment, I’d seen into her bedroom. She had a bedspread with hummingbirds printed on it. She had a few framed family photographs on a sideboard outside her bedroom too. “It was him. She has bedsheets like that. He planted the cameras. Who is it?”
“Well, Eilidh’s security did look into it and tried to trace him through his email, but he’d set up a dummy IP address. I sent it to Lore to see if she could trace him.”
Lore was on my payroll and one of the best hackers in the country.
“But while she was working on that, I thought I’d try to find him using his sign-off. Most of these letters and emails Eilidh received have no sign-off. Completely anonymous. But this fucker couldn’t help himself. He signed off the email Domini . And that word and a sequence of letters and numbers were used in the dummy email address.”
“And?”
“Domini means master in Latin. And after a search on the dark web, I found the same word and sequence of letters and numbers as a username in several chatrooms. A few were BDSM chatrooms. The other … well, it’s a chatroom where people share their fantasies about what they’d like to do to the people they stalk. We’re not just talking rape fantasies, but violence, murder …”
“What the fuck?” I felt ill.
Evan nodded grimly. “I will never be able to bleach some of that shit out of my head. Ever.”
I winced on his behalf.
“And Lore will want a big fat bonus because I had to send her into the chat to trace the fucker from there.”
“Who is it?” Walker asked impatiently.
Evan shook his head, expression apologetic. “His name is Peter Pryor.”
“That doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Eilidh’s landlord in London. The pervert planted the cameras himself.”
My mind raced in horror at the thought of that bastard watching Eilidh. For ages. For maybe as long as she’d lived in the apartment. I wanted him in front of me so I could eviscerate him.
“A quick look into records shows that it wasn’t the landlord who ordered the annual smoke alarm check. The smoke alarms were fritzing and the new tenant, for whatever reason, had an outside company come in to check the alarms. They found the cameras. Peter was just covering his arse calling Eilidh to let her know.”
“And you know this for a fact?”
Evan sighed. “Lore hacked his computer. Lots of disturbing stuff on there. We didn’t make a move, but if you’re happy to, we’ll hand over what we found to the police.”
“Do you know … are the recordings of Eilidh on there?”
My friend’s features tightened with anger. “Aye, they’re on there. Lore says organized by … activity.”
My hands curled into fists as Walker bit out an angry curse.
Before I could respond or think past the black wrath in my mind, my phone let out a very specific alarm.
No.
A chill slithered down my spine.
“Fuck!” I yanked my phone out of my pocket, the security app open and flashing the alert. Blood rushed in my ears. “Someone just broke into my house.”