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hers. “That night, I heard someone trying to break in my back door. I called 9-1-1.”
    “And Aaron responded to the call.”
    She nodded, leaned back against the counter, and met the police chief’s gaze. “Imagine you live alone, and someone tries to break into your house. You can hear the screen being ripped off the hinges. You call the police, and soon after, hear sirens. You open the front door to your savior, only to see the person you know damn well was at the back side of the house minutes before terrifying the hell out of you.”
    “So you reported your suspicion to his supervisor,” Mark prompted, his voice flat, but there was something like sympathy in his eyes.
    “And I found out he’d been documenting my ‘stalking’ of him. He accused me of faking the attempted break-in and calling the cops that night just so he would answer my call. He said I was a cop groupie who wouldn’t leave him alone.” Libby shuddered. She’d learned a cop groupie was a whack job who hung out at cop bars and gave officers blowjobs in the parking lot.
    “What did his supervisor say?”
    “He wanted solid evidence against Aaron. At that point, it was just my word against his. And my word wasn’t worth a damn thing.” By the time Aaron’s captain was done questioning her, she was hysterical, her credibility shattered. This was where her sense of déjà vu came from. She wouldn’t make that mistake here.
    “How did the other officers in the precinct respond to your charges?”
    One look at his face and she knew. “C’mon, Mark, you know that. I bet you even spoke with some of them today.”
    His head dropped in a slight nod.
    “His partner backed him up, claimed he couldn’t have been at my back door at the time of the attempted break-in. And his buddies vouched for him at other times, or said they’d witnessed me following him.” She took a step toward him. “What about you? Do you always side with the one with the badge, even if he’s a Goddamn loon ?”
    “My job isn’t to side with or against other cops. It’s to find the truth.” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the counter. “Tell me how you finally got the Anti-Harassment Order.”
    “After Internal Affairs investigated, with inconclusive results, Aaron became even worse. In addition to being followed, I started getting crank calls at all times of the day and night. Of course, I got a trace on my line. One call came from a pay phone located in front of a convenience store. I had read the police blotter in the newspaper and knew that a convenience store had been robbed that night. I checked with the manager. He confirmed that Aaron Brady had been one of the officers to respond to his call. Aaron did that two more times—called me from a phone that was near a call he’d answered while on duty.
    “I documented everything. My neighbors helped. They were sick of being spied on by a cop. We got pictures of Aaron parked in his car in various places in my neighborhood. With a date and time stamp. I took pictures of him when he followed me, and friends got shots of him at my destination, all with date and time stamped on them. I had witnesses. Then I got lucky. The judge at the hearing was sympathetic. She said the evidence showed adequately that he’d engaged in a ‘course of conduct that alarmed, annoyed, and harassed me which served no lawful purpose and was likely to cause me substantial emotional distress.’” Knowing they described the threshold she needed to meet to get her life back, she’d memorized those words long before the final hearing. “In King County, the Anti-Harassment Order allows some leeway—meaning I didn’t have to show bruises, thank God.”
    “Then Aaron left you alone?”
    “Yeah, but there were other repercussions. Aaron’s brother said I was a psycho bitch who harassed his little brother, and when Aaron wouldn’t have anything to do with me, I tried to ruin his career. He pulled his project.