Chapter 4
The van left Rover Street at four fifteen, which I only knew because I’d started keeping actual time on it, the way Dani had told me to, block letters on a legal pad instead of jokes in my head.
I watched it go from the courtyard gate, close enough to see the plumbing decal on the side panel but not close enough to look like I was doing anything but locking my bike to the rack, and when it turned left instead of right at the corner, I made a decision I’d been half making for two days already. I got in my car and followed it.
I want to be clear with myself, if nobody else, that this was not a good idea executed poorly.
It was a bad idea executed with real competence, which is a different thing and one I happen to be good at.
I stayed four cars back through a light near the hardware store, let a delivery truck cover me for two blocks when the van slowed for a school zone, and kept my speed exactly at the limit the whole way because nothing says notice me like the only car doing fifty in a thirty.
The van pulled into a lot behind a low brick office building, the kind that could have held an insurance agency or a dentist or three failed startups, nothing about the outside announcing what was inside.
I parked two lots over, at a sandwich place with enough foot traffic that my car wouldn’t read as parked-and-watching to anyone glancing out a window, and I gave it ten minutes before I walked over like a woman who had every reason to be standing in that particular hallway reading that particular directory.
I stood there longer than I needed to, staring at the little slotted plastic letters like they might rearrange themselves into something less unsettling.
A private investigator. Not a stalker with a hobby, not a bored neighbor, an actual licensed person with an actual business address, which somehow made the whole thing worse and better at the same time.
Worse, because it meant he was good at this, methodical, resourced, a professional at exactly the skill set required to make my life extremely complicated.
Better, because a licensed business has a paper trail, and paper trails were a thing I knew how to pull on.
I’d spent three years chasing down vendor histories and lease disputes and one deeply unpleasant fight with a supplier who tried to claim I owed him for equipment I’d returned, back when The Last Door was still just me and a spreadsheet and a stubborn refusal to get taken advantage of.
I knew how to find out what a person was, on paper, before I ever had to decide what he was to me.
I didn’t go in. I took a photo of the directory instead, quick and low, phone barely lifted, and left before anyone came down the hallway to ask if they could help me find something.
The rest of the afternoon I spent at my kitchen table with my laptop open and a mug of coffee going cold beside it.
Texas private investigator licenses are public record if you know where to look, and it took less than ten minutes to confirm that Caleb Rourke, age thirty-three, held an active license in good standing, no disciplinary action on file, agency registered as Rourke Investigations at the address I’d just stood outside of.
The business registration matched. A property search on the address came back to a holding company, nothing personal, nothing that told me where he actually lived, which I noted with something between frustration and grudging respect.
Court records took longer, mostly because there were more of them than I expected.
Nothing criminal, nothing that made my stomach drop the way I’d braced for.
A handful of civil filings, the ordinary kind, a subpoena response here, a name listed as a witness there, the debris a working investigator leaves behind after years of testifying in cases that were never his own drama, just his job.
I found an old news mention, three sentences in a local business roundup about a fraud case he’d helped crack years back, his name spelled correctly, no photo.
I found his professional headshot on the Rourke Investigations website instead, gray-green eyes and a scar cutting through one eyebrow that the photographer clearly hadn’t tried to retouch.
The result held me longer than the research itself had.
It would have been easier if he’d come back dirty, some pattern of complaints, a suspended license, anything that let me file him under threat and stop thinking about it.
Instead I had a man who was, by every available measure, good at his job and legally entitled to do it.
That didn’t tell me what his job was this week, or whether it had anything to do with me.
It just meant that whoever he was watching, he was watching them well.
By six, I had a name, a license number, a business address, descriptions of the van, the tan sedan, and the gray pickup I’d cataloged over the last several days, and absolutely no idea why the same man kept turning up on my street in a rotation of different vehicles.
I called Dani before I let myself think about that gap too hard.
“Say the name again,” she said, and I could hear her setting something down, giving me her full attention the way she did when she’d decided a thing had stopped being a bit.
“Caleb Rourke. Rourke Investigations, Suite 114. Licensed, no violations, real business, real address.” I read her the rest of it off my screen, the van with the plumbing decal, the tan sedan, the gray pickup, careful to note out loud that I hadn’t run anything through a site I had no legal right to use, hadn’t pulled a plate number from anywhere but my own eyes at a distance too far to actually read one.
“I followed the van there myself today. Kept back. He never made me.”
“You followed him.”
“At a distance. I stayed four cars behind the whole way and let a truck screen me twice.”
“That’s not the part I’m stuck on, but okay.
” I could hear her typing while she said it, the keys steady, and I knew without asking that she was opening the actual file she kept, the one with tabs, because Dani did not do anything by half measures once she’d decided it mattered.
“Send me the photo of the directory. Send me his headshot. Send me the vehicle descriptions in writing, not just over the phone. Send me your location right now, not where you’re going to be, where you are. ”
I sent all of it while she waited on the line, and I heard her exhale slow when the location pin landed.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s how this works, since apparently we’re doing this for real now.
Yellow means daily check-ins, you text me when you leave somewhere and when you get where you’re going, no exceptions, not even for something you think is boring.
Orange means no more private meetings with him, not one, not to hand him a casserole through a doorway.
Green means I stop checking every day, but the file stays open regardless, because a green light isn’t a promise, it’s a status. ”
“And right now we’re at yellow.”
“Right now we are extremely at yellow.” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice had lost some of its clipped efficiency.
“Josie. He’s got a real license. That means somebody’s paying him to watch somebody, and it could genuinely have nothing to do with you.
Warehouse guy across the courtyard, insurance thing, disgruntled business partner, anything.
People get investigated for boring reasons all the time. ”
“I know.”
“But you don’t actually know that’s what this is. A license tells you he’s allowed to be good at this. It doesn’t tell you what he’s using it for on your street.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know that.”
She let that sit a second, the deliberate silence she used when she wanted a thing to land instead of getting joked past. “Then you keep researching, and you keep checking in, and if this stops looking professional and starts looking personal, you tell me the same day, not after you’ve turned it into a bit. ”
“Understood.”
“Noted the noting.”
I hung up feeling steadier than I had any right to feel, which was the whole reason I called her in the first place.
I had a name. I had a license number and a business address and a face that matched a scar through one eyebrow, and none of that told me whether Caleb Rourke had any legitimate reason to know my unit number, or to sit fifteen feet from my window in three different cars.
It only told me he had the training and the paperwork to be doing surveillance somewhere, for someone, and for one evening the difference between somewhere and here felt like the only thing I actually needed to hold onto.
I drove home slower than I’d driven out, taking the long way past the hardware store out of nothing but habit, and when I turned onto Rover Street the tan sedan was already back in its usual fifteen feet of curb, sitting there like it had never left at all.
I sat in my own car a moment longer than necessary before I got out, running the afternoon back through my head, every careful gap I’d kept, every light I’d let a truck cover, and wondering, for the first time without being able to talk myself out of it, whether any of that caution had actually gone unnoticed, or whether he’d simply decided it didn’t matter yet.