Love At First Lurk

Chapter 1

The van smelled like coffee gone cold and the vinyl seat cover I should have replaced a year ago.

I had it parked on Rover Street, one of three positions I’d rotated through over the last several days, chosen today because the angle gave the camera mounted behind the tinted rear glass a clean line into the Rover Court courtyard without pointing at anything a passerby would find interesting.

A plumbing company decal on the side panel completed the cover.

Harland Mutual had sent over the Holloway file eleven days earlier.

Trent Holloway, thirty-nine, warehouse shift supervisor, claimed a severe lumbar injury and had been drawing disability on the strength of it.

The claim had already paid out once. The insurer wanted documentation before it paid out again.

That was the whole job. Watch a man, prove or disprove what his body could do, write it down, invoice for my time.

I had done a hundred versions of this case with a hundred different names attached, and the rhythm never changed. It required patience, and I had plenty.

I checked the camera settings again out of habit rather than need.

Shutter speed fine for the light, memory card with room to spare, audio recorder off because I had no legal reason to record sound and no interest in giving a defense attorney something to complain about later.

Everything by the book. I kept a mental ledger of every minute I billed to Harland Mutual, and I kept it honest, because a sloppy investigator loses his license and a dishonest one deserves to.

At some point past four a woman crossed the courtyard carrying a wooden crate stacked with what looked like theater props, an old-fashioned lantern, a coil of rope, something that might have been a fake skeleton hand.

She moved fast for someone carrying that much weight, weaving around a planter and a stroller left by the mailboxes without slowing down, and for half a second she looked directly at the tinted rear window of my van the way most people never do.

Most people don’t think about the vans on their street.

She looked at mine like she was cataloging it.

I logged it the way I logged everything, without deciding it meant anything. Movement, direction, approximate age, unit unclear. Then I went back to Trent Holloway’s door, because that was the job, and the job was what I got paid for.

Holloway came out ten minutes later wearing a back brace over a T-shirt two sizes too tight for a man supposedly too injured to bend at the waist. He walked to his truck with the stiff, performative gait of someone who had rehearsed limping in a mirror, and I got clean footage of the walk itself before the good part happened.

His neighbor came out and waved him over, pointing at a cooler sitting on the curb, then at his own truck bed, the kind of gesture that needs no soundtrack to explain itself.

Holloway hesitated, glanced around the courtyard in a way that made me note it without drawing conclusions from it, and I made myself smaller against the seat without moving.

Then he bent from the knees, keeping his back suspiciously straight for a man in a brace, and lifted a fully loaded cooler that had to weigh sixty pounds like it was a gym bag.

He carried it fifteen feet and set it in his neighbor’s truck bed without so much as a wince.

I had the whole sequence in eleven seconds of usable video.

That was the case. That was, realistically, the whole file closed, pending the second round of documentation the insurer would probably still ask for after Holloway’s inevitable appeal.

I noted the timestamp, backed up the clip twice out of professional caution, ran a quick check that the footage was in focus and properly framed, and felt the small clean satisfaction of a job done competently.

And then, because there was nothing left that required my attention, I let the lens drift back toward the stairwell where the woman with the props had disappeared.

She came back into frame on the upper walkway a few minutes later, without the crate now, keys in hand, jogging the last few steps to a door on the second-floor east corner as if she’d realized partway up the stairs that she was later than she thought.

She wore a bright yellow shirt, a color that did nothing to help her blend into beige stucco, and even through the lens I could see her mouth moving, talking to herself or singing, animated for no audience at all.

That was the thing that held my attention longer than it should have.

She wasn’t performing for an audience. She simply wasn’t bothering to hide anything.

I told myself I was confirming she wasn’t connected to Holloway, that overlapping foot traffic in a shared courtyard sometimes complicated a file. That justification lasted about ninety seconds before I admitted it was a lie I was telling myself for free.

I watched her check her mailbox and make a face at whatever was inside, junk mail probably, and toss it back in with a flick of her wrist that told me she’d done that exact gesture a thousand times.

I watched her stop to say something to an older woman coming out of a ground-floor unit, the exchange easy and familiar, the kind of rapport that takes months to build with a neighbor.

I noted, without writing it anywhere, that her door was the second from the east stairwell, upper level, and that she moved through her own hallway like she had nowhere else in the world she’d rather be standing.

None of that belonged in a Harland Mutual report.

I knew the line the moment I crossed it, and I stopped the timer I used to track billable surveillance down to the minute.

Whatever I was doing now, it wasn’t Trent Holloway’s fraud case.

Stopping the clock didn’t make it clean.

It only kept my private trespass off a client’s invoice.

She disappeared inside for a while. I used the time to finish my actual notes on Holloway, log the video files properly, label them for a claims adjuster or a courtroom, and eat a protein bar.

When she reappeared it was at her kitchen window, the one facing the street, and she stood there for a moment with a glass of water in her hand, looking out at absolutely nothing in particular as people do when their minds are somewhere else entirely.

Then her eyes moved. Not the vague drift of someone taking in a street. A direct line, window to windshield, holding there half a second longer than idle curiosity would explain.

I sat perfectly still, the way I’d trained myself to sit still through worse scrutiny than this, and told myself she couldn’t possibly have picked a plumbing van out of a row of parked cars on a residential street where she had no reason to expect anyone was looking back.

I told myself that, and I did not entirely believe it.