Page 63 of Silent Watch
Outside the window, Main Street was waking up.A woman walked past with a golden retriever.A delivery truck backed into the alley beside Finders.Someone opened the door of the Craft Mall and propped it with a doorstop.
Normal life.Ordinary morning.And somewhere behind it, someone was watching to see if she'd run.
She wasn't running.
She finished her notes, closed the laptop, and checked the time.Thirty-two minutes.She'd walk to the safe house the long way, through the park, checking her six the way Caleb had taught her, without ever calling it that.
She left two dollars on the table and walked out into the heat.
Chapter 17
Caleb had been working for the past hour or so on the timeline.He stared at the last entry for a long time, trying to puzzle it out in his head and critiquing his own work.
His phone buzzed.
Brake lines cut.Professional job.I'm at Mae's.Sid has the car.
His hands went still on the keyboard.He read it twice.The words were steady, factual, the sort of reporting she'd do even in the middle of a crisis because that's who she was.But underneath the clean sentences, he could feel the thing she wasn't saying.
Are you hurt?
No.Found it before I drove anywhere.
Before she drove anywhere.If she hadn't checked—if she'd pulled onto Sunset Beach Road and hit the brakes at the curve?—
He shut that thought down.
Stay there.I'm coming.
No.Stay at the house, I’ll be there in one hour.I have the security footage.
She had the security footage.Already.She'd been awake for less than two hours, found her brake lines cut, and her first move was to pull security footage before the trail went cold.
Harper.
One hour.I'll be careful.
He set the phone down and pressed both palms flat on the table.The wood grain was rough under his fingers.He breathed.
He shifted his focus from the report to a new project.He'd been working for the hour he waited, reading through pattern analysis.Tracing the brake tampering methodology to similar incidents in other cities—Jacksonville in 2019, Tallahassee two years later, Panama City the year after that.Same clean cuts.Same tool.Same message delivered to people who got too close to the financial architecture that Montgomery had spent two decades building.
The syndicate had done this before.To journalists, to attorneys, to a county clerk in the Panhandle who'd started asking questions about property transfers that didn't match the tax records.The clerk had moved to Georgia.One of the journalists had quit the profession entirely.The attorney had died in a single-car accident on I-75 six months later.
Then he pulled up the surveillance feed.The dark sedan at the end of Inlet Drive was gone.In its place, a white work van that he didn't recognize.Different vehicle.Same position.Same angle of coverage.They thought they knew where he was staying – they didn’t.
But they'd rotated again.
Harper walkedthrough the door fifty-three minutes later with her laptop bag over one shoulder and her jaw set.
Caleb was standing at the kitchen counter, arms crossed.He'd spent the last forty minutes putting together every piece of evidence he had about the brake-tampering pattern, and every piece of it pointed to the same conclusion.
She set the laptop on the table and pulled out the USB drive."Four minutes.One person, dark sedan, baseball cap.They knew where the camera was.In and out before nine p.m."
"I know."
She looked up."You know?"
"I know the pattern."He turned his laptop around so she could see the screen."Jacksonville, 2019.A reporter named Dana Fielding, who was investigating Montgomery's media acquisitions in northeast Florida.Brake lines cut.Same tool, same methodology.She stopped reporting."
