She hesitated, then nodded. “There are some fans who step over the line, get a little too close, try to move into your space, and once there was a guy who just wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” Her clear eyes clouded with the memory. “He called and showed up at my house, followed me when I was jogging, showed up on the set, even when I was out to dinner. And yeah, he sent me a letter. It was…unnerving, to say the least. I was married at the time. My husband and I got a restraining order against him.”
“What happened then?” he asked.
“I never heard from him again. I guess he got the message.”
Her explanation didn’t seem right. “Wait a second. The restraining order was the end of it?” Carter wasn’t buying it. Not for a second. “He was obsessed with you to the point that you went to the police and then he just went away?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “I don’t know what happened to him, but he left me alone.”
Carter didn’t like it. He clicked his pen several times. “The guy’s name?”
“Vincent Paladin.”
Carter scratched it out on his legal pad.
“Address?”
“I told you, I don’t know what happened to him. He was kind of a vagabond type, I think. About twenty-seven at the time. Never lived in any one place more than a month or two. At the time he had an apartment in Compton, which is in L.A. County—south-southwest of USC. Claimed he was a student there, but the police found out that was a lie. Actually, he worked at a copy store—Quickie Print, I think the name of it was.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Five…almost six years,” she said.
“And you’ve never heard from him since?”
“Not a word.”
Odd. Was it possible Paladin had relocated up here?
“Was the letter similar to this one?”
“Not at all. It was a long, rambling thing, handwritten on a yellow legal pad. There were seven pages, I think.”
“Do you have a copy?”
“No.” She offered him a small, self-deprecating smile. “It’s not something I like to dwell on.”
“But the police in L.A. have it on file, right?”
“I would assume. Detective Brown, Sarah Brown, was in charge of the investigation.”
Carter wrote down the detective’s name and made a note to call LAPD. “Anything else you can tell me about Paladin?”
“Not much.” She shook her head, the long braid swishing between her shoulder blades. “He was an introvert with this odd obsession about me.”
“Did he ever harm you?”
“No, and I really don’t think that was his intent. He was never violent, never got into the house, though he did hang around outside the gates. It creeped me out to see him there, but he never stayed long.”
“What about this picture?” he asked, picking up the bagged note again and studying the photo beneath the words, a beautiful photo in which Jenna Hughes was sexy, sultry, and sophisticated.
“A publicity shot for Resurrection, a movie I made nearly ten years ago.”
“Any significance to it? Any reason this picture would be chosen over all the other publicity shots of you?”
“Not that I know of. It was just part of the promo for the film. Available anywhere. Video stores. The Internet. Collectibles. Movie paraphernalia, I suppose. Right before the movie came out, there were thousands of pictures available, but, as I said, that was a long time ago.”
Carter asked more questions about Paladin, didn’t find out much, and made a note to find out what the creep was up to, where he’d most recently dropped anchor. Could he have followed Jenna north? Been stealing some of her things? She mentioned the phone call and the fact that she thought she’d heard music from one of her movies playing in the background, and he felt a tightening in his gut.