Page 34 of Shadowing Her Stalker

His mouth pulled into a grim line. He nodded as he raised his phone to his ear. “I have a friend with the LRPD. I’m going to see what I can find out from them.”

“Do you think it was this Griffin guy? I mean, could it have been?” She moved her chair a few inches closer to his, shaken and needing to feel his proximity.

“It could have,” he murmured. “Need to see if the timeline fits.” He held up a finger for her to hold the thought. “Yeah, this is Wyatt Dawson from the state police. Is Mark Jones in, please?” He must have been put on hold because he lowered his finger and resumed their conversation without missing a beat. “Does he return the car, gas up his truck, then go looking for you? No.” He shook his head, dismissing the chain of events. “He’d go looking for you in the rental. Wouldn’t want to risk anyone ID’ing his vehi—Hey, Mark,” he said, his tone shifting from speculative to professional in the space of a syllable. “Wyatt Dawson. How are things?”

He listened for a minute, nodding. “I hear you. Yeah, we’ll have to do that. Listen, I won’t keep you, but do you think you can find out who’s handling a break-in and property damage case for me? I think it’s connected to an active investigation.” He rattled off the address of the condo, tapping his pen against the side of his laptop. “Yeah, give them my number. Appreciate you.”

Cara couldn’t suppress her bemused smile.

When he looked over at her, the crease between his brows deepened. “What?”

She shook her head and wiped the smile from her face. “Nothing. I was—It’s funny, is all.”

“What is?”

“The weird kind of conversational shorthand guys have. If I’m interpreting your two-minute conversation correctly, you commiserated about the job, asked for what you needed, confirmed the urgency and need for response, and made some vague plan to get together—”

“Which we never will,” he interrupted.

“Exactly. All wrapped up in a neat little package.” She skimmed her palms together as if drying them off. “I wasn’t criticizing. In fact, I was admiring your skill.”

He dropped the pen to the table and leaned in to look at her. “It would have to be a wildly tight timeline for it to be Griffin,” he mumbled.

She watched as he snatched up his phone and started to fire off another text.

Narrowing her eyes, she asked, “How do you know your messages are safe?” His head popped up, and for a moment he looked affronted. “I’m only asking. I mean, are they regular texts or do you have some sort of secure channel like on TV?”

“We have an encrypted network, but it’s not foolproof. Some people love to crack codes,” he muttered, finishing his message.

She inclined her head. “People like you and Agent Parker,” she said quietly.

He studied his screen, a smile tugging at his lips as he jabbed at the trackpad. “Exactly.” Then he scowled at his laptop. “I don’t know how your folks can stand service this slow. Thank goodness they weren’t trying to use a computer while watching CineFlix—it would crash the bandwidth. It’d get hung up right in the middle of the big forensics reveal.”

His phone dinged and he glanced down at it. “Eight fifty-three a.m.,” he reported. “If he trashed the place, he wouldn’t have been too far behind us.”

“What time did we leave?”

“Somewhere around there. I got the package with your stuff and came right to you.”

“So he was doing all this in broad daylight,” she murmured.

“Sometimes it’s easier. People notice a commotion in the night. We’re actually pretty lucky someone was home to hear it. Most people would have left for work already.”

“Yeah, we’re so lucky,” she said with an edge of sarcasm.

He fixed her with a stern stare. “We are. We were already gone. Now, Emma’s emailing a copy of the receipt for the file.” He checked his computer, then grabbed his phone. “I’m going to switch to my phone’s cellular hot spot. This is driving me crazy.”

A few seconds later the email with the scanned transaction from the gas station came through. He sent off two more emails before switching off his hotspot and settling back in his chair, fingers poised over the keys. “You up for running through this all again?”

Cara nodded, sitting up straighter in her chair. She spoke low and steady, keeping her breathing even as he typed a bullet-point timeline of events starting with the day she noticed an uptick in hostile messages and brought them to the attention of her partners. When they got to the attack on her neighbor Nancy and her decision to fly home to Arkansas, he slowed her down, asking her to get more granular as he added incident after incident. Her voice cracked when she recounted her decision to jump from the car, still not quite able to believe she’d done it. She hadn’t realized how high and tight her voice had become until Wyatt stopped typing and reached over to cover her hand with his.

“Breathe,” he encouraged. “It’s okay. I’ve got the rest.”

She nodded, dragging in a deep but shaky breath. “Okay. Okay.”

“I’ve got you,” he assured her, giving her hand a quick squeeze before releasing it to resume his typing.

Cara sagged in her seat, exhaling slow and low and feeling more confident than she had in weeks. “Yeah. We’ve got this,” she whispered.

---