Page 22 of Somebody's Watching Me
Annabeth lowered the T-shirt to cover herself. “Are you transferring here permanently?”
The hope he heard in her question would be his undoing. “I’m working on it.”
Working on it as much as he could. Without a valid reason, Ben was blocking his move out of Texas.
An alert coming from Haven’s security system popped up on the screen to his left. Rowan switched to the live stream and saw Jamison wandering around the home’s rear patio.
“How’s Jamison?” he asked. “She’s moping around the pool currently.”
The lights under the water gave Jamison an ethereal glow, highlighting the fluffy robe she wore. It was well past midnight, and tomorrow wasn’t going to be an easy day. She needed to sleep instead of sipping from the wine glass in her hand.
“Scary quiet.” Annabeth disappeared to lay on her bed, leaving him with just a view of her feet dangling off the mattress. “She’s absolutely devastated but is completely avoiding the subject, so we don’t know how to bring it up.”
Liam and Jamison had been the type of couple everyone envied. Besides being madly in love, the two were genuine friends, and to throw it away like this was insane.
“It looks like she’s going to hang out there for a while,” Rowan said, ending the feed when Jamison buried her face in her hands as she cried. It didn’t feel right to watch. “I hate this for them.”
“Do you think I should go down there?” Annabeth yawned. “Abe tried talking to her before he left to stay the night with whoever he’s sleeping with these days, but Jamison was kind of short with him, and that was so not like her. They’ve always been close.”
Simone might have raised Jamison, but she was still a Fairweather, and they weren’t the type to allow people to see them at their weakest. “Leave it be.”
They talked for a little longer, reluctant to let the conversation end. He almost asked her to meet him for breakfast when she mentioned a new deli opening at Firewater, but decided against it, not wanting to drag her from Jamison.
Once they hung up, he waited to switch out of the feed until she closed the balcony door. The scans weren’t yet complete, and logging out before they were done would raise a red flag.
He pulled on his shirt while the never-ending layers of sequencing scrolled. It shouldn’t be much longer. The code was his own. Lines of poetry he’d written himself and could recite in his sleep.
Except those four numbers.
Rowan’s head tilted as four out of place digits punched in red on the screen. His system instantly rejected the entry, eating the numbers before he could even register them.
Bringing up the scan, he expanded on the section affected. All the branches were at his fingertips, and these types of errors were of the basic variety. An incorrect passcode when entering a building or powering up an account wasn’t something he normally dealt with, and certainly not in the wee hours of the night, but his curiosity as to who it might be had him searching.
Narrowing it down to Florida, he almost didn’t bother looking any further, positive it was Samuel. The man was dedicated, and if an idea struck him in the night for a new building or a fix on a current development, he worked it straight through.
Sure enough, with a few clicks, Rowan found the invalid entry. It wasn’t coming from the Fort Lauderdale division, but from here in northern Florida. It had to be Samuel. He was likely half-asleep and mistyped.
The number sequence went off again, and again in the incorrect order.
Rowan frowned. Being wrong once was one thing, but being wrong twice for Samuel Fairweather wasn’t possible. Rotating in his seat, he ran a secondary search from another unit, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention when the entry appeared again, but this time in the correct order.
The new scan completed as the code flashed green, telling him it was coming from the front gate of Haven House.
Someone was trying to get in.
Returning to the central monitor, Rowan pulled up the feed of the gate camera in time to see a midsize sedan driving past. The car’s lights were off, but thanks to Ben Fairweather splurging on the best surveillance system out there, he could make out that there were three people in the car.
And all of them were wearing ski masks.
Hitting the silent alarm, Rowan sent a signal to the police in both Port Michaelson and Hollingsdale. The alarm would secure the entry points around Haven. Even with the passcodes these people obviously had, they wouldn’t be able to enter unless someone let them in.
Zanmi never hid their faces, proud to support Toby, meaning this was likely reporters looking to get gossip after the news conference. The car inched onto the property at an agonizingly slow speed, and he foughtthe urge to call Annabeth. But he couldn’t do that. She was safe inside the house, and he needed to focus on the person who wasn’t.
Asleep on a lounge chair, Jamison remained oblivious as what appeared to be two men and a woman made their way up the front path. Rowan tried her cell, but nothing. She must have left it inside.
Out of choices and time, Rowan typed a text to Annabeth.
Wake your mother. Don’t be scared. Alarms will go off in a sec. Cops are coming. I’m on my way.
