Shielded In The Shadows

The words were roughly scrawled on the glass, as though written by someone who’d just learned to write. Or written backward. They were uneven. Big. Red. Legible.

Retreating immediately to her car, she locked herself in and, willing her garage door to open quickly as she started her vehicle, dialed 9-1-1.

* * *

Jayden was in bed, watching TV since he wasn’t going to kid himself into thinking he was going to close his eyes and go to sleep—rather, he’d be closing his eyes and getting hard as he relived the after dinner feast he’d enjoyed—when his phone rang.

Emma.

“Hey!” He grabbed his phone up immediately, sliding the answer button across the screen with his thumb with the phone already on his way to his ear. “I’m glad you called.”

She wanted to talk as badly as he did, he assumed. Was unsatisfied with the way things stood between them. Deeply so.

“I need you to check Bill Heber’s location from tonight.” Her terse words didn’t fit into the postsex daze.

Sitting up, he muted the TV, some documentary about the way cheese was made, and flipped on the lamp on his nightstand.

“Come again...”

“The locations app, I need you to check it, please.”

She was sounding professional...but...familiar, too...like she had the right to call him at ten at night to ask a favor.

He yanked on a pair of basketball shorts to cover his nudity, stumbling a bit as he tried to step into them while holding them with one hand.

“What’s going on?” he asked, half hopping toward the bedroom door on his way to his office. He could check the app on his phone, but didn’t want to take it away from his ear. To stop talking to her.

“Someone was at my house tonight. They wrote ‘Leave it alone’ on my sliding-glass door in red.”

“When tonight?” She’d only been gone a little over an hour.

Holding the phone with his shoulder, he quickly backtracked to the chair by his bed, grabbed the jeans that were always laid out in case of emergency, pulled them up and reached for the shirt.

“While I was at your house.”

A dozen questions sprang immediately to mind. “Are you there now?” he asked, his unbuttoned shirt hanging on his shoulders as he grabbed his wallet, keys and gun, and slid into the shoes at the bottom of his bed.

“No. I’m at the police station, making a report. They’re there now, checking things out.”

“I’m on my way down,” he told her, disconnecting

before she could even attempt to tell him his presence wasn’t necessary.

Only to himself did he admit that, for once, his needing to be “there” didn’t have a whole lot to do with the case.

* * *

He checked his app and Bill’s whereabouts that evening, while waiting at a red light. Tossing his phone on the passenger seat next to him as the light turned green, and picking it up again at the next red light.

Bill’s phone had been in the same place all evening. His home. Right where he was supposed to be. He’d driven there from work, right at the time that fit the schedule that Jayden had for him. The man was free to come and go, of course, without reporting to his parole officer, but Jayden knew about any scheduled events like church or meetings, just because Bill had chosen to report them to him. And Bill knew that if he went anywhere without the phone app he’d agreed to carry, all bets were off as far as Jayden was concerned.

On his way into the station, he called Bill, just to make certain his phone was on. And with him. He asked Bill how he was doing and heard how the man had been watching a baseball game and his team had won. He chatted about a couple of game-winning plays. Things he and Jayden talked about pretty regularly as they both followed the same team.

The receptionist at the front desk of the Santa Raquel police station was expecting him and directed him to a small private meeting room just feet away from Chantel’s desk. The detective, a transplant from Las Sendas, just north of San Diego—via upstate New York—had worked with Jayden a time or two. And anyone who took her slender, blond frame to mean the woman lacked the strength of a larger officer, or who attempted to test that theory, would find himself hurting. How badly depended on how pissed she was.

That night she was pissed.

“Do you know where your offender, Bill Heber, was tonight?” she greeted him, standing from one of the four chairs at the wooden table—the only furniture in the room. Emma was all business, sitting next to where Chantel had been, leaving him one of the two chairs across from them. She looked expectant, waiting for him to hand over his client.