Chapter 8
Detective Ortiz spread three printed maps across the interview-room table. Each showed the same section of the city in thin gray lines. Blue marks followed delivery routes. Red circles sat around my workplace, Malik's diner, and the alley between them.
“His supervisor provided assignment logs after the company received the records request,” she said. “GPS came separately from the fleet system.”
I kept my hands around a paper cup of water. “How many times?”
“Seven route deviations in the last month. Five brought him within a block of your workplace. Three continued toward the diner.”
My stomach tightened at the ordinary precision of it. Not shadows, not instincts. Dates and turns and minutes could be printed on paper.
“Was he making deliveries?”
“Not on those streets.”
Ortiz tapped one map. The marked route bent away from Caleb's assigned area, stopped near my workplace for eleven minutes, then returned to the proper route.
“So this proves he followed me.”
“It proves his company vehicle went where it wasn't assigned,” she said carefully. “That's important. It isn't the same as proving why.”
I looked at the red circles until they seemed brighter than the rest of the page.
At the delivery company office, the supervisor met us in a cramped room that smelled like cardboard and burned coffee. His name was Dennis Hale, and he kept smoothing one corner of Caleb's assignment sheet with his thumb.
“Drivers take breaks,” he said. “They miss turns. They stop for food.”
“Seven times?” Ortiz asked.
Dennis glanced at me, then back at her. “I'm not defending it. I'm telling you what his lawyer would say.”
He pulled up the dispatch history on his monitor. Caleb had been assigned across town on two of the afternoons when his van had stopped near my job. On another day, his last scheduled delivery had ended almost forty minutes before he drove toward the diner.
“Would he have known her closing schedule?” Ortiz asked.
Dennis shifted in his chair. “He made regular deliveries there before we changed the route rotation. Employees sign for packages. Drivers notice who works when.”
The answer landed quietly. No secret access. No elaborate plan. Just repetition and attention I hadn't known I was receiving.
Ortiz interviewed Caleb without me in the room. I watched through the narrow pane in the door from the hallway, unable to hear him. He sat forward with his elbows on his knees. His face stayed composed. Once, he gave a small, disbelieving shake of his head.
Afterward, Ortiz found me beside the vending machines.
“He says he likes the diner's food,” she said. “Claims he stopped there whenever he had time. He denies following you. He denies entering the alley.”
“Did he say why he was near my work?”
“Convenient parking. Phone calls. Lunch breaks.”
Every answer had enough air in it to survive.
Malik met us at the diner with a box of receipt rolls and digital sales reports. We checked the dates against Caleb's GPS stops at a back table while the afternoon crowd thinned around us.
“No matching card,” Malik said. “I checked cash orders too, but those don't carry names.”
“Would you recognize him?” Ortiz asked.
“Maybe if he came often. I can't swear I saw him.”
The receipts failed to support Caleb's story, but they couldn't kill it either. He could have paid cash. He could have entered without ordering. He could have liked the food and still followed me.
Malik pushed the box aside. His hand stopped a few inches from mine, close without assuming.
Ortiz closed her folder. “There's one more thing. Caleb replaced his phone three days after the confrontation.”
I heard the refrigerator motor click on behind the counter.
“He says the old one was damaged,” she continued. “The carrier confirms the replacement, not what happened to the device. We don't have grounds to search his home or seize every piece of electronics he owns.”
The glint beneath the hood returned to me—the small flash I had first taken for something sharp. A lens catching the streetlight.
“He recorded me,” I said.
“I think the old phone matters,” Ortiz replied. “But thinking it and recovering it lawfully are different problems.”
Outside, Malik stood with me on the sidewalk while Ortiz took a call near her car. Traffic moved through the intersection in short bursts.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“Apparently I keep being predictable.”
His expression tightened. “That doesn't sound safe.”
“It means documented.” I looked toward Ortiz. “Same shifts when possible. I tell people when I leave. I save messages. I don't change plans without noting why.”
Ortiz joined us. “And you do not try to draw him out. No posts meant to provoke him, no walking past the alley to see if he appears, no answering unknown messages to keep him talking.”
“I won't be bait.”
“You were never going to be,” she said. “This is your decision.”
I took out my phone and entered my next three work shifts into the shared log she had asked me to keep. My thumb hesitated over Friday's closing time, then pressed save.
May you like
The routes gave Caleb a pattern. The receipts gave him room to deny it. Somewhere, his old phone might hold the difference between suspicion and proof.
For now, all we had was the route he wasn't assigned—and the device he claimed no longer existed.
