“What in the hell is going on here?” I muttered, mostly to myself. Foster held out his hands for both, and I handed over both the letter and picture to him.
“The paparazzi from Coober Pedy did this?” Adrianne asked. “That... doesn’t even make any sense.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“We have two choices here. The first is that the man from Coober Pedy followed us back to Sydney in order to get you to comply with this.” I pointed to the letter in Foster’s hand. “Or there is the scarier option.” I swallowed. “What if the person who’s been leaving you presents at home found us here?”
Adrianne looked as horrified as I knew she would be. “That’s... that can’t be right,” she said, and her eyes shifted to Foster. “That can’t be right, right?”
Foster was re-reading the letter and considering what I’d said. “It’s not entirely farfetched,” he said, looking at her. “Remember the phone call you got? How the person addressed you as ‘Dr. Falconi’?” He held up the letter. “Whoever this person is, they’re having a hard time differentiating between you and the character you’re playing. Like, they’ll use your name and state that you’re ruining ‘the role for which you’ve been chosen’, but at other points they talk about your betraying your love for Rutledge, which is strictly the character.”
“So whoever wrote that letter and left me all those gifts is losing touch with reality?” she asked. “That’s just... great.”
“What’s great?” We all jumped, and Adrianne shrieked. It was only Ethan, coming back from his run. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded. Adrianne rushed over and threw herself into his arms, tears flowing down her cheeks now. “Adrianne, Princess, what is the matter?”
“We’ve got a problem, Merc,” I said, and Foster handed him the letter and picture. He scanned it, and his frown deepened.
His eyes flicked to mine. “You thinking it's the same guy from California?”
I nodded. “It would make sense. If this guy has lostthismuch reality, it wouldn’t be impossible that he would follow her here.”
We should have anticipated that before we left, but there had been such a relief to just leave the problem behind in the States. Stalkers didn’t regularly cross international waters. We all figured that he would still be in California when we returned and we would deal with it when we got back. “We should have flushed him out before,” Foster said. “We could have had this handled in California and not had to deal with it now.”
Adrianne’s head snapped up. “What do you mean, ‘flush him out’?”
Ethan glared at him, and I concurred. It was too dangerous. “We would purposely seek him out,” Foster explained. “Then, we would deal with him accordingly.”
“How would you seek him out?”
“Bait,” Ethan spat the word.
Adrianne paled. “Like me? I would be bait?”
Ethan shook his head even as Foster nodded. “We would have you in a controlled situation,” Foster said. “We would make it look like you were alone in a public place, and it would hopefully lure him out so that we could confront him and get the help we needed for him.”
She looked like she was going to throw up. “How could you make it safe?” she asked.
Foster opened his mouth, but Ethan beat him to the punch. “You can’t,” he said. “Not entirely. There is always an element of risk that we’d have to accept. Things can always—and frequently do—happen that are outside of what you think is going to happen.” Ethan shook his head, mostly for Foster’s benefit. “I’m not okay with any level of risk when it comes to you,” he said, and then sent a sharp glare at Foster. “I can’t believe you’d play with her life like that.”
A complicated emotion passed over Foster’s face. “It’s not that I would be okay with putting her at risk,” he said, “but for how long are we going to let him do this? Follow us and get close enough that he could still do something violent. At least if we flush him out and confront him, it’s done whenwesay so and when we’re ready for it. No more surprises.”
I watched Adrianne’s opinion change in real-time. She went from terrified of the idea to wanting to do it in seconds. “This could be over?” she asked. “Well and truly over?”
Foster nodded. “We’d either turn him over to the authorities or make sure he gets the mental help that he needs, but either way, he wouldn’t be on the streets anymore.”
Ethan was going to strangle him. I could see that in the tension in his shoulders and arms. “I could be wrong,” I said. “It could just be an overzealous pap.”
Foster leveled a look at me. “Who sent us the damning picture instead of selling it to a magazine for the highest bidder? There’sno waythat would happen, and you know it. This is Adrianne’s stalker, and you and I both know it.”
I knew it, but I didn’t want to be right. Being right meant that Foster was right. We needed to flush the bastard out and deal with it head-on. “Can we put a pin in this?” Adrianne asked. “I’m supposed to meet with the stunt coordinator in an hour, and even though my stomach is a mess, I still want eggs from the restaurant downstairs.”
We all agreed to discuss it later, and Ethan rushed to change so that we could go get Adrianne her eggs, which she ate with a gusto that was probably at least twenty-five percent bravado. After breakfast, we took a town car to the set. The first of several fight scenes was being prepped by the stunt team. The coordinator, Maria, was overseeing it with a clipboard in her hand.
“Maria, may I speak with you?” Adrianne asked.
The woman jerked slightly, and her eyes went a little round when she noticed that Adrianne was being flanked on all sides by her security team. “Did I miss some kind of safety drill?” she asked half-jokingly. Maria didn’t mind us individually, but there was something about all of us together that made her uncomfortable. Maybe she just thought it was wasteful on a “safe” set. Maybe she thought Adrianne was silly for hiring us in the first place.