Page 26 of Single Mom's Bodyguards
Four bodies. One woman, three men. Familiar windows framing something intimate. Flesh and fabric and faces. Angles that tell me which of our cameras they mirrored to find the best lines of sight—and which rooms we thought the hedges covered.
I recognize my own shoulder. Sean’s hand. Huck’s back. Bailey’s mouth. I catch the edge of a strangled laugh in my throat, the kind that hurts because it isn’t a laugh at all.
“Huck,” I say, very calm. “Look at the north hedgerow mid-height, nine feet inside the line. That’s the lens vector on the library window putting those angles together. He had a tripod. Maybe two.”
“I’ll find it,” Huck says, voice flat like a field before lightning.
“Don’t bother,” I say, eyes flitting from one print to the next, cataloging, evaluating light bleed, guessing lens length, shutter speed. “He’s long gone. He watched us. The hedges swallowed him. He never wanted the perfect shot. He wanted us toknowhe got it.”
“Wes,” Sean says, and when he says my name like that it means he’s not going to ask me to breathe.
I make myself breathe anyway. I pinch the bridge of my nose, willing myself not to punch the screen. “I’m coming down. Don’t move. Don’t touch any more of them. I want to bag the envelope.”
I grab the kit and jog through the hall, past the sun stripe across the stone that leads to the kitchen, past anywhere Bailey might hear me, or worse, see me. She’ll know something is wrong if she looks at me. I wonder if she heard the bell. I wonder if her mouth is pressed into that stoic line she uses on directors when they mistake fragility for pliancy.
The heat slaps my face as I step outside.
From the driveway, the gate is a sculpture, and Sean is a line cut from it. He doesn’t look at me when I slide the nitrile over my hands and crouch to lift the envelope into an evidence bag. The photos he keeps in his left hand, fanned slightly so they don’t stick to each other.
Huck materializes from the hedge without so much as a twig complaint, as if the plants respect his mood. He sees the prints. His jaw flexes. The tendon in his neck pops like a trigger half-pulled.
“We close the blinds,” he says.
“Already the plan,” I answer. “But closing blinds won’t stop a man who came to put fear in us.”
“This is Oswalt,” Sean says, and it’s not a question.
I’m inclined to agree. “She lives too far from neighbors for this to be a nosy hobbyist. These are not tabloid shots. This is a control tactic. He paid someone to get close enough to taste our breath and then he made sure we’d find the proof.”
Huck’s hands curl into fists like he’s practicing for a skull. “He’s breathing today because you told me to hold back.”
A lesser man would flinch from Huck’s tone. Sean is not a lesser man. “And he’s going to keep breathing until we make sure he chokes on his own bullshit in a courtroom.”
“I have alternate ideas,” I say, which is the polite gloss forI want to send a message back that hurts.
Sean cuts me a look. “Later.”
“Copy,” I say. But inside my head, the message is already drafting itself in razor wire and code. “Let’s not tell her yet,” I add. “Not until we have a plan phrased in ‘we’ve got you’ instead of ‘he’s mad you had a beautiful life for four hours.’” I hold out my hands for the stack. “Let me bag those.”
Sean passes me the prints, carefully. I slide them between acid-free sheets, then plexi, like we’re archiving a crime.
“Get inside,” he says quietly. “We’ll talk in ops.”
Huck doesn’t move. He stares a beat longer at the gate like he can make a man reappear by promising him hell. Then he follows us in. Behind us, the gate stands there like a mouth that just swallowed a secret.
I lay the prints out on the ops desk one by one, in sequence. The table’s big enough for a small war plan, but it still feels too small for this.
Sean stands over my left shoulder, arms crossed. Huck plants himself on the other side, leaning forward like he’s ready to shove his fists through the table if it’ll get him answers faster.
The photos are glossy, professional-grade. Whoever took them wasn’t guessing. They knew exactly where to stand, what time to come, and what lens to bring. Like they’d been watching her for weeks.
And we missed it.
Depth of field puts them inside the property line for most of these. The rest were taken from the kind of position you only get by casing the place days in advance.
“They were careful,” I say, tapping the edge of one shot. “Never crossed more than halfway to the glass. That keeps the trespassing argument murky.”
“I don’t care if it’s murky,” Huck says. “He was on the property. That’s trespassing.”
