4. Chapter 4
Beckett
Eleven minutes is the number I gave her. I make it to her in ten forty. I’m not going to examine why.
She opens the door in a silk sleep shirt that barely covers her ass, bare feet, and the controlled, upright posture of someone who has decided that rattled is not going to be the word for tonight.
She is keyed up in the way people get when adrenaline has been running for a while and has nowhere to go — not visibly shaking, not falling apart, but operating at a frequency that is slightly too high for two in the morning. Her phone is in her hand.
"The phone," I say.
She doesn't hand it over.
This surprises me for exactly one second, and then it doesn't, because I have now known Isla Wrenwood for four days and I understand that asking her to hand over anything she is holding is aspirational at best. "I need to document the image," I say. "And trace the number."
"I know." She is looking at a point slightly left of my shoulder. "Give me a second."
"Isla."
"I said give me a second."
I look at her. She is not rattled — or she is rattled and has constructed something very convincing over the top of it, which amounts to the same thing from a threat assessment standpoint but is not, I am finding, the same thing from a human standpoint.
There is color in her face that is not fear.
She is holding the phone at her side, gripping it a little too tightly, like it contains something she has not decided to share yet.
And then I understand, with the cold clarity of someone who has just assembled a set of facts he would have preferred to remain unassembled, what else is in that photograph.
I hold out my hand. I keep my face completely still. "Please," I say.
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she puts the phone in my hand, lifts her chin, meets my eyes, and says: "What? Like women don't need to get off."
"No," I say. "Women do." A pause that lasts approximately one second too long. "I just —"
"Just what?"
"Can we please talk about something else?" I ask with a sigh. "Like why your bedroom blinds weren't closed."
The color in her face deepens approximately one shade. "I closed the living room ones. At six. Like you said."
"I said blinds."
"You said —" She stops. "Okay. I see now that you probably meant all of them."
"I did mean all of them."
"That's a reasonable thing to be annoyed about," she says, to the middle distance, in the tone of someone conceding a point while simultaneously refusing to make it easy. "You're right. I should have closed them."
I look at her for a moment. The silk shirt. The bare feet. The chin still up. "Thank you," I say.
She blinks. I think she was expecting something else.
I look at the photograph.
I am, for approximately four seconds, not a security professional.
I am a man standing in a dark hallway looking at something I was not supposed to see, something private and unguarded and — I shut that down.
I shut it down completely and I look at the metadata and the angle and the timestamp and I do my job.
"The number is a burner," I say. My voice is level. I am a professional. "The photograph was taken from the building across the street. Third or fourth floor, tight lens." I hand the phone back. "Someone has had eyes on your apartment for longer than tonight."
I sweep every room while she stands in the kitchen with her arms crossed, watching me work with the expression she uses when she is tracking something and not ready to say what.
The apartment is clear. I document the sightlines from the bedroom window, photograph the angle, make notes.
The building across the street is a mixed-use residential — eight floors, twelve units per floor, common roof access.
Someone has been patient enough and organized enough to identify the right window, the right floor, the right hours.
This is not a stranger acting on impulse. This is someone with a plan and enough access to execute it, and the fact that they sent the photograph instead of using what they had tells me something about what they want. They are not trying to harm her yet. They are trying to make her feel watched.
"You need to relocate," I tell her. "Seventy-two hours. While I secure the sightlines and get eyes on that building."
"No."
"Isla —"
"No." She sets her mug of tea down on the counter with a controlled precision that tells me we are about to have the version of this conversation where she is completely calm and completely immovable.
"Leaving my own apartment because someone is watching me is exactly the kind of thing that tells him it's working. I won't do it."
"This isn't about what signals you're sending. It's about exposure."
"I understand what it's about."
"Then you understand that staying here with a compromised sightline is —"
"Beckett." She looks at me. "I hear you. I'm not going."
I stand in her kitchen at two in the morning and look at a woman who is sharp and stubborn and right about half of it and completely wrong about the other half.
I calculate, with the part of my brain that is always calculating, that pushing this point further tonight is going to cost me more than it gains me.
"I need you to relocate to my place," I say. "At least for a few nights while I secure the sightlines."
"Absolutely not."
"Isla." I keep my voice level. "I can't stay here for seventy-two hours. I have a seven-year-old son. Mrs. Callahan is contracted for some overnights, but she’s not a live-in nanny. Besides, I need to be able to move without leaving you exposed, and I can't do that from your couch."
She opens her mouth. Closes it. I watch her work through it — the refusal she had ready, the logic she was about to deploy — and I watch her reach the part where she can't actually counter it. It is, I will admit, a different kind of satisfaction than winning an argument on the merits.
"This isn't capitulation," I say, before she can reframe it that way. "You're not running. You're relocating to a controlled environment on your own terms, for a finite period, because it's the operationally sound decision."
She looks at me for a long moment. "How many nights?"
"Three. Maybe four."
Another pause. "Fine."
She goes to pack. I stand in her kitchen and make a note to call Mrs. Callahan on the way over, and I don’t think about the fact that I’m bringing Isla Wrenwood into the same building where my son sleeps, because that is a thought that leads somewhere I’m not going tonight.
She takes exactly as long as she wants to pack, which is longer than necessary and I suspect is deliberate.
I stand by the door without checking my watch.
She emerges with one bag, which surprises me, and pauses in the doorway of her apartment to look back into it — just for a moment, a glance that isn’t quite sentimental but is not nothing either — before she pulls the door shut and locks it.
We ride down in the elevator without talking. I sweep the lobby before I let her walk through it. My car is parked half a block up where I left it when I got here in ten forty, and she gets in without comment and looks out the window while I pull out into the empty street.
"Your place," she says, to the window. Not a question.
"My place," I confirm.
She says nothing else for the rest of the ride, and I don't push it, and when I park in the secured garage for my building in Brooklyn she looks around for a moment with an expression I can't read before she gets out.
Upstairs, I show her the guest room, give her the alarm code, tell her where the extra blankets are. She takes it all in with the same quiet attention she brings to everything, and I leave her to it and go to my drafting table and pull up the threat file.
Fourth floor, most likely. I make a note to pull the building's tenant list. I make a note to pull security footage if I can get a warrant, and to find another way if I can't. I work until the light through the windows goes from black to gray, and at six-fifteen I hear Elias's alarm go off down the hall, and I close the file and go make breakfast, and I do not think about the woman in my guest room until she appears in the kitchen doorway in already dressed for the day with her hair down and says, without preamble: "You have approximately thirty seconds to tell me how to work your coffee maker before I become a problem. "
I hand her a mug I've already poured. She blinks. Takes it.
"Black," she says.
"You strike me as black."
Something moves at the corner of her mouth.
Not quite a smile. Adjacent to one. She leans against the counter and drinks her coffee and when Elias appears a minute later, dragging his backpack and still half asleep, she looks at him with an expression I’m not going to examine right now. Possibly not ever.
At six-thirty I leave Isla at the loft with the alarm set and drive back to her building to sweep it in daylight and talk to the building manager about the security log.
I am in her apartment running the window angles a second time when Conrad Wrenwood lets himself in with a key I did not know existed.
I am on my feet with my hand on my holster before he clears the doorframe.
He stops. We look at each other. I take my hand off my holster and he steps inside like a man who is accustomed to being the most prepared person in any room and has just encountered evidence that this is not always the case.
"Mr. Beckett," he says. He has clearly been briefed on me.
"Mr. Wrenwood."
He looks around the apartment — clocking Isla's absence, clocking me in her apartment alone, clocking what that means about where she is — and something moves behind his expression that he covers quickly. "Where is she?"
"Somewhere safe."
"I'd like an address."
"I'm sure you would." I hold his gaze. "She's safe. That's what you're paying for."
He looks at me for a long moment with the flat, measuring patience of a man who is accustomed to winning these exchanges and is deciding whether this one is worth his time.
Then he moves on, which tells me something about how he operates — he doesn't push when he can't win, he simply files it and comes back later.
He tells me the photograph is being handled, that his security team is looking into the building across the street, that Isla should keep her focus on the charity appearance Thursday. He says all of this with the efficiency of a man delivering a briefing, and I listen, and I ask one question.
"Which team?"
"The Harrow Group," he says. "They handle sensitive matters for the family."
I nod like I'm writing it down. I am writing it down, but not in the way he means.
Conrad leaves eight minutes after he arrived.
I stand at the window and watch his car pull away.
Then I pull up the Harrow Group on my phone.
It takes me four minutes to confirm what I already suspected from the name: they are not a security firm.
They are a consulting group. They do not handle threats.
They manage information.
I add it to the list. This time it does not go at the top. It goes somewhere else entirely — in a column I am just beginning to build, one that has Conrad Wrenwood's name at the head of it, and a question underneath that I am not yet ready to write down.