Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
DAEMON
The Lucky Break site office wasn't really Malakai's, but Ethan let him work out of it, which was the sort of thing Ethan did. Nadia took the chair across from the monitor, while I jammed myself into the corner.
Malakai sat between us, which felt deliberate, and pulled up the footage with no preamble.
The timestamp read 15:47 on Saturday. The camera above the service entrance had a decent angle on the kitchen corridor, and the figure who appeared in it moved like someone who knew exactly where they were going.
Generic kitchen whites, cap pulled low, face angled away from the lens. Nothing accidental about any of it.
"They knew about the camera," Nadia said.
"Or assumed there'd be one and planned accordingly." Malakai rewound it and played it again. "Either way, they'd done their homework."
We watched the figure move to the panel beside the walk-in, locate the right switch without hesitating, flip it, and leave. Forty seconds from entry to exit. Slick and completely deliberate.
"Casper," I muttered.
Nadia stilled on the other side of Malakai. "Yeah, but this ghost isn't friendly." She leaned in for a closer look at the monitor. "Malakai, can you run it again?"
He did. She watched the screen, then turned to look at me. "It's the same guy."
Malakai's head came up. "You recognize him?"
She nodded at the screen. "The morning of the snap inspection, somebody came into my kitchen behind the produce delivery. Generic whites, cap, head down. Straight to the two spots that mattered and then straight back out."
Nadia was onto something. I'd seen her kitchen clip the night she found it, and the hair on my arms was already up.
"It has to be the same bastard," I said, jerking my head toward the screen. "Same build. Same economy. Same way of never giving the camera anything. Nobody moves like that twice by coincidence."
Malakai ran it a third time. Once you saw it, you couldn't unsee it. The lean frame, the gloved hands, the unhurried certainty. An untrained eye could have mistaken them for one of Nadia's crew.
The only problem with that was Nadia's crew never wore generic whites. They wore navy jumpsuits with the Coogan's Catering logo on the breast and across the back.
"So they knew the venue layout," I said. "Which kitchen you were using, where the fridge panel was. Twice now. That's not someone who wandered in off the street."
"No. Somebody is feeding them venues and floor plans." The words came out flat, which from Nadia meant the opposite of calm.
The room went quiet while that settled.
"Someone with access to your booking software," Malakai said. "Or someone who scouted it beforehand."
"Can you do anything more with this?" I asked.
"I've already got someone looking at any CTV cameras in the area to see if they picked up anything," said Malakai, closing the file. "We've got proof of deliberate tampering. All that's missing is a face."
Nadia stood. Picked up her bag. She hadn't looked at me directly once since she'd walked in, and she didn't look at me now. "Malakai, I appreciate it. Let me know when he has something. Anything."
"Will do."
She was at the door. Stopped with her hand on the frame. "Thank you for pulling this together, Malakai."
"No problem," he said.
She left without looking back. I listened to her footsteps down the corridor, the sound of the main door, and then nothing.
Malakai leaned back in his chair and looked at me.
"Don't," I said.
"I won't say anything."
"Good."
I left before he could change his mind.
The first few hours after viewing the footage, I told myself it was fine.
I was fine. This was fine. Nadia and I had been something brief and intense, and now it was over, and that was how these things went. I'd known from the start she was too smart to take a chance on someone like me.
I'd known it and hadn’t backed down. Now we were here, and the only surprise was that it had taken this long.
I told myself all of that with complete conviction and went back to work. For about forty-eight hours, it almost held.
Then it stopped holding.
By the following day, I was useless on the job site. Tyler told me twice to focus. Ethan said nothing, which was worse. He watched me the way he watched everything, and I did my best to pretend I didn't notice.
I drove to Millbrook on Thursday night because nobody in Millbrook knew my name.
That was the real reason, although I dressed it in better ones for the length of the drive. Forty minutes inland, a main street with three bars. I picked the loudest, because the loudest was where the old version of me would have gone, and the old version of me was who I'd come here to find.
He'd been easy. He'd been bulletproof. Nobody had ever looked at him the way Nadia had looked at me in that parking lot.
The uniform still fit. That was the first discovery of the evening. I ordered a beer, took up the correct amount of space at the bar, said something to the bartender that made her laugh on her way past. The machinery still worked.
The woman two stools down was funny. That was the second discovery. Sharp without being cruel, the sort of funny that came from paying attention to the world rather than performing for it.
She had dark hair and an expressive face, and she laughed at her own jokes before she finished telling them, which should have been annoying and somehow wasn't. Under any previous set of circumstances, this would have been the easiest evening of my life.
"You're not from here either," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Coogan's Break. On the coast."
"What brings you to Millbrook on a Thursday?"
"Needed a change of scenery."
She looked at me in a way that said she'd heard that before and knew what it usually meant. "Bad week?"
"Something like that. You?"
"I live here." She reported it as if it were the weather. "Eleven months."
"You don't sound convinced."
"The jury's out." She turned her glass in a small circle on the bar. "It's where I landed. Landing somewhere and living there are two different activities, but the rent doesn't care which one you're doing." She leaned over and held out a hand. "Jess."
"Daemon."
"Course it is." She grinned at whatever my face did. "Relax, it's a good name. You either grow into a name like that or you get buried under it."
We talked about nothing for a while. The bartender's haircut. The jukebox's limited range. The pool league and its politics. She was good at nothing-talk the way some people are, keeping the ball in the air without apparent effort.
"What do you do?" I asked.
"Now? Front-of-house manager at a winery. Weekends and weddings." She picked at the corner of her beer label. "Before, I ran an events company. Weddings, corporate, festival catering in the summer." A small shrug. "In Bend."
I knew Bend. I'd never set foot in the town, but I'd seen the name printed on one of Malakai's handouts, sitting third on a list of three. Something in my chest changed gears.
"You said ran. Past tense."
"It's true. I said that." She looked at me a second longer, recalibrating, the way people do when small talk stops being small. "We sold." She followed this with a derisive snort. "Coming up on two years ago."
"Who to?"
“A national outfit. Stole the business right out from under me.”
"Elevate?" I said, and when her eyebrows shot up, I added. "They're in my town right now."
“Huh. Small world.”
She said nothing for a spell. Then she signaled the bartender for two more, lifted her jacket off the stool beside her, and nodded at it.
"Sit down, Daemon from Coogan's Break," she said. "Let me tell you how the movie ends."
It started, she said, with a complaint to the Health Department.
"Six years, never so much as a warning. Then one Tuesday there's an inspector in my kitchen holding allegations so specific it was like someone had walked through with a clipboard."
She turned her glass. "Cleared in three weeks. Didn't matter. Word on the street was already moving. Then licensing got a letter. Then our two anchor clients got friendly phone calls from somebody concerned about our stability. Concerned. That was the word both times."
"Then the offer," I said.
"Then the offer." She nodded slowly. "Polite as a tide. They don't push, you know. They arrange the water level and wait."
"Anything physical? Sabotage?"
"Nothing we could prove. Although three weeks out from our biggest wedding of the season, our refrigeration contractor stopped answering his phone. To this day I can't tell you whether that was them or my own luck."
She tipped her bottle toward me. "That's the elegant part. After a while, you can't tell which problems are yours and which are manufactured. Soon enough you're flinching at all of them."
I thought about a figure in generic whites finding the right switch on an industrial fridge. I drank my beer instead of answering.
"How long did you fight?"
"I fought the whole time. But I was on my own." The label came off her bottle in one piece. She smoothed it flat on the bar, taking more care over it than it needed.
"Russ. My partner. Both kinds. He did the books, I did everything else.
Somewhere around the second complaint, he ran the numbers and decided we'd already lost. He never said it like that.
What he said was that he was protecting us.
Protecting me, protecting our staff, protecting whatever we'd get to walk away with. "
She looked at the flattened label. "By the time I found out he'd been taking their calls, the conversation was mostly over. He'd negotiated the surrender before I knew the battle had a date."
"And you signed."
"What was I going to do, buy him out with money we didn't have, mid-siege?
" She said it without heat, an old argument worn smooth from handling.
"I signed. Our relationship lasted four months past the closing.
Turns out the company was the thing we were, and once it was gone, we were two people with opposite definitions of protecting each other. "
She checked her phone and turned it face-down on the bar.