he received on July 1 made that point clear: Oh, Loser, I saw you out on another date tonight. I see you gave up on that whore Liz. Thank God. I haven’t seen her at your place lately. Well, I’m glad. Everyone told me you can’t stand her and that you two aren’t even friends, and you two aren’t even talking to each other. Thank God you woke up and realized she was no good for you.
On Wednesday, Sally brought one of her Volkswagens to Hyatt Tire to have Dave look into a problem she was having with the radio. “I put a fuse in it, and I walked her out to her car. I said good-bye, and I gave her a little kiss.” He didn’t realize someone was watching. Within two hours, Sally was bombarded with calls, texts, and emails from someone claiming to be Cari. Dave also heard from “Cari,” boasting about how easy it had been to trace Sally through her license plate number: So now I found two of your whores. One drives a burgundy car and lives close to downtown. The other I saw at your job through binoculars from Menard’s.
Dave glanced across the busy four-lane highway at Menard’s, a huge home-improvement store that was part of a Midwest chain. He realized with a shiver that someone could park in the lot and watch him at work. “I was in the Menard’s parking lot two minutes” after the text arrived. “Of course, it was well after the fact, and I didn’t find anybody.”
On July 3, at 6:10 A.M., one of the emails Dave received referred to both Sally and Liz: So, loser, I told you I watched you, and I saw you with a fat-ass whore at your work. Got that fat-ass whore’s license plate number, can get her address, name, telephone number from it. Now I see that ugly whore Liz at your apartment. If you don’t want them finding out about each other, break up with ugly whore Liz now, or I will ruin your life like I told you I would. I can see the whore’s car.
“Loser” was apparently the stalker’s new pet name for Dave, but she stuck with her old standby for Liz, continuing to refer to her as “a fat-ass whore.” In the stalker’s mind, the two worst things a woman could be were “a whore” and “fat,” and when that fat accumulated around a woman’s lower region, the insult was as bad as it could possibly get. “A fat-ass whore” was the ultimate denigration, and the stalker seemed to delight in the slur. It was not reserved just for Liz. Any female who so much as smiled at Dave was a “fat-ass whore” and in danger of being sliced by the sharp blade of the watcher’s knife.
Neither Liz nor Cari were fat. The size and shape of a person’s body were not something that Cari ever would have criticized. She had never judged or mocked anyone for their physical appearance, and had, in fact, been accepting of all manner of idiosyncrasies of her fellow human beings. Dave, however, still knew very little about the woman he had spent two blissful weeks with. Whatever good qualities he had noticed in that short period of time were overshadowed by eight months of foul-mouthed threats.
I would do anything to make you hate her.
The stalker had written that in reference to Liz. But Dave did not hate Liz. If anything, he felt more fondly toward her, more protective of her, because of the thousands of threats and ugly words targeting her. It was Cari he had come to despise. How ironic that the stalker, so determined to make him hate Liz, had succeeded only in making him hate her. Dave was so exhausted by the crazy games that he didn’t stop to reflect on this. He never questioned his stalker’s identity. He had assumed from the beginning that Cari was behind all of the ugliness. The first disturbing texts had come from her phone, and the troublemaker had claimed to be her, brazenly and gleefully taking credit for every mean deed. Why would the stalker lie? She said she was Cari, so who else could it be?
Dave was not alone in his belief. He was one of many intelligent males, including experienced detectives, who saw exactly what the culprit had wanted them to see and nothing more. Several females, however, had suspected the truth. Some tried to speak up but were shushed