Page 16 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Kit would notice.

Maybe not right away. Maybe not the first day. But eventually, because she had the kind of mind that collected wrongness the way other people collected receipts at the bottom of their purse. A man behind her twice would become a note. A repeated car would become a question. A reflection in a dark storefront would become a file.

Worse, my men would look at her.

That was not relevant.

I told myself it was not relevant.

I still did not send them.

A short while later, I was across from her building with a coffee I had no intention of drinking and a newspaper I did not need. It was a ridiculous prop. No one read newspapers anymore except old men, politicians hoping to be photographed, and assassins in bad television. But Boston was full of old men and worse politicians, so I blended in well enough beneath the awning of a closed tailor shop while rainwater dripped from the edge of the canvas in constant, uneven beats.

Her building looked worse in person than it did on camera.

It was converted brick. It had a narrow entry. Bad exterior lighting. A rusted fire escape that had no business still being attached to the wall. The front camera angle was insulting. The rear entrance was worse. The blind spot beside the service alley was wide enough to park a small car in, or a patient man with a gun, which irritated me more than it should have.

I made a note.

Then I deleted the note because I had already made it three days ago.

Fifteen minutes after I arrived, she came out.

For one full second, the world narrowed in a way I did not appreciate.

The data had not lied, exactly. It simply had not prepared me for the first time I laid eyes on her.

Kit Calloway was smaller than her presence in the systems suggested, but only physically. She wore a black coat belted atthe waist, boots that were sensible without being ugly, and a gray scarf wrapped once around her throat. Her hair was down for the first twelve steps, dark and loose from sleep or neglect, then she twisted it up with a practiced movement and pinned it with something she pulled from her bag.

A pen, I thought.

She paused outside the door, but not for long. Most people would have missed it. She looked left first, then right, then across the street—not directly at me, but near enough that I felt the delicate pressure of her attention move over the space I occupied.

Good.

At least she wasn’t careless.

Then she started walking. I followed from a distance. She kept a steady pace, neither rushed nor wandering. At the first corner, she glanced into the dark glass of a bakery window. At the second, she stopped to adjust her bag, which gave her a clean reason to scan the street behind her. At the third, she crossed against the light only after a delivery truck blocked the opposite lane and I almost smiled.

The man walking past me gave me a strange look. I ignored him.

She was not trained formally. That much was obvious. Formal training left patterns, too much symmetry, too much discipline imposed from the outside. Kit’s habits were self-made, patched together from instinct, experience, and a personality that clearly treated trust as a software vulnerability. She did not move like a field operative. She moved like someone who had taught herself everything.

There was a difference.

She walked to a café six blocks from her apartment. It was tucked into the corner of a narrow street where expensive office workers collided with students, construction crews, and arrogant business men. The sign above the door was black with gold lettering. Inside, the windows glowed warm against the gray morning, the glass fogged slightly from steam and bodies and overpriced espresso.

She went in without hesitation. I remained outside.

Across the street, a recessed doorway gave me a partial line of sight through the front window without putting me directly opposite her. I took it. The glass reflected traffic, passing umbrellas, the peek of sky between buildings, but I could still see her once she reached the counter.

She ordered quickly. She did not look at the menu. She did not smile at the barista but nodded when he said something that made him smile at himself more than at her. She paid with a card from a slim wallet, accepted a paper cup full of coffee, then moved to the window seat near the far end.

The window gave her visibility over the street, the door, and half the café. It put her back close enough to the wall that no one could easily come up behind her. It also made her visible from three angles outside and gave anyone watching from the opposite side of the street a clear view of her face when she looked down.

I disliked the seat immediately.

She opened her laptop. Then she set her coffee on the left, moved her laptop center, then placed her phone face-down to the right. Then she took the pen from her hair, and the dark twist loosenedjust enough to make several strands fall along her cheek as she bent over whatever she was reading.