Chapter 3
The strip mall lot gave me a workable angle into Rover Court’s pedestrian gate, forty yards off but clean, and it had the advantage of being a public lot where nobody questioned a plumbing van sitting near a taco place at lunch.
I’d switched vehicles twice in three days, gray pickup to sedan, sedan to van, and shifted positions often enough that a bored patrol officer had no reason to run my plate.
Trent Holloway hadn’t left his unit yet. That was fine. I had patience to spare.
Owen called at eleven forty, which meant he’d finished whatever report he was supposed to be finishing and wanted to talk instead.
Owen was my digital guy, the only person at the firm who could pull a public record faster than I could ask for it, and about the only person I’d call a friend without qualifying the word first.
“Tell me you’ve got Holloway doing something stupid,” he said. “Harland’s already called twice this week.”
“Got the cooler lift two days ago. Clean footage, timestamped, backed up. I’m here mostly in case Harland wants more once he appeals, which he will.”
“So you’re sitting in a parking lot for insurance?”
“That’s the job.”
“Uh huh.” I could hear him typing, the small percussive sound of a man doing two things at once and giving neither his full attention. “You said something yesterday about a resident. Yellow shirt. What’s her unit number doing in a Holloway file, Caleb?”
I hadn’t meant to mention her at all. It had come out sideways, in the middle of a sentence about foot traffic patterns in the courtyard, more information than the sentence required.
Josie Barrett, tenant, upper east corner.
I’d logged her unit number too, which I had no professional reason to know and had learned anyway, the way I learned most things, by watching long enough that the facts arranged themselves without my asking.
“She crosses through the frame a lot,” I said. “I logged it so I wouldn’t waste time chasing overlap between her movement and Holloway’s.”
“You logged her unit number for overlap purposes.”
“I logged everything relevant.”
Owen didn’t say anything for a second, which from Owen counted as commentary. “You want me to run her? Since she’s relevant.”
“No.” The word came out faster and harder than the question deserved, and I heard him note it, the way he noted everything, filing it away for later use against me. “She’s not part of the file. Don’t put her in anything.”
“Then keep her out of the file yourself,” Owen said, not unkindly.
“Because right now you’re the one putting her in it.
” He let that sit a beat, then moved on, asking if I wanted him to check whether Holloway had any public wrestling dates on the calendar, just in case Harland came back wanting a second round after the appeal.
I said yes, contingency only, nothing to act on yet.
We talked logistics for another six minutes, and the whole time some part of my attention stayed pinned to the gate the way a compass needle stays pinned north regardless of what room you carry it into.
Holloway came out at twelve twenty, no brace this time, moving easy across the courtyard toward a group of men unloading gym bags from a hatchback, and I had the camera up and running before he’d crossed ten feet.
He helped carry a folded wrestling mat, awkward and heavy, gripped it with both hands and walked it toward the covered rear parking, no hesitation in his spine at all, and wedged it upright against the block wall between two trucks.
I got forty seconds of it, clean angle, his face visible the whole time.
Second piece of usable evidence, unrelated to the cooler but better, because it put his claimed restrictions directly next to what his body was actually doing, on video, with a timestamp.
I logged it, backed up the file, and let the lens drift, the way it always drifted now, toward the stairwell.
She was already there. Upper walkway, second-floor east corner, leaning both forearms on her railing like she’d been standing there a while, and she was holding up a piece of poster board with block letters written in what looked like marker, the kind of handwriting meant to be read from a distance.
PARKING LOT: 6/10. TOO FAR FOR GOOD DETAIL.
She’d made a scorecard rating my position, and she was holding it up with the flat, satisfied patience of a woman who had planned this, who had probably stood at that railing for ten minutes waiting for me to notice. I had noticed within ninety seconds. That did nothing for my pride.
Holloway’s curtains had already fallen still behind his window, no movement in the gap, nothing left worth the angle.
I put the camera down. I picked it back up.
I told myself the smart move was to leave the lot entirely, find a position she hadn’t clocked yet, prove to myself that competence still meant something in this specific arrangement, and that there was no cost to it either way since Trent wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
I moved to the curb three blocks over, an angle I hadn’t used yet, tucked behind a delivery truck that gave me maybe eighteen minutes before it would drive off and expose me.
I gave it four minutes before she appeared at her kitchen window with a fresh piece of poster board, smaller this time, held at an angle that told me she’d watched the van’s whole route from her railing before I’d even finished parking.
DELIVERY TRUCK: 4/10. THE TRUCK WILL LEAVE. THINK AHEAD.
I sat there afterward with the engine off, the street gone quiet in the flat early-afternoon heat, and admitted to myself, privately, in the only kind of honesty I ever practiced, that the Holloway file would be considerably easier to close if the woman in unit twelve simply stopped appearing.
Easier to work. Simpler to explain to Owen without the sentence curling sideways into a unit number I had no business knowing. None of that made me start the van.
Holloway’s lights went out around four, no more activity visible behind the glass, no more reason to hold the position at all by any professional measure I could name.
I stopped the clock on the file right there, logged the hour, closed it out clean.
Then I stayed anyway, watching a lit kitchen window two courtyards over where nobody was holding up a sign, just moving through her evening the way people do when they think no one is counting the minutes.
I wasn’t billing anyone for this part. I just hadn’t found a reason yet to leave.