Jordan showed up at the house Saturday morning without calling first, which was so far outside his normal pattern that Jake knew something was wrong before he'd even gotten the door all the way open.
"They pulled my badge access yesterday afternoon," Jordan said, before Jake had said a word, standing on the porch in yesterday's clothes, the particular haggard look of a man who hadn't slept so much as waited out the night. "Compliance flagged an anonymous complaint. Said I've been using company systems and third-party data relationships to run an unauthorized personal investigation. Which—" he laughed, short and humorless, "—which is technically true, which is the part that's going to make this hard to fight."
Jake stood back to let him in, a cold weight settling into his stomach that had nothing to do with surprise. "When did the complaint come in?"
"Thursday night. Late. HR wouldn't tell me the exact time, but I know how their intake system logs things, and I'd bet good money it landed within a couple hours of us standing in your kitchen reading that note." Jordan dropped onto the couch, elbows on his knees, and dragged both hands down his face. "She didn't come after me directly. She went after the thing I actually need to keep doing this job. Smart. Efficient. I respect it in the same way I'd respect a well-executed insurance fraud, which is to say I mostly just want to strangle whoever did it."
Sara appeared in the kitchen doorway, a dish towel still in one hand, her face going carefully still the way it did now whenever anything touched the edges of what they'd started calling, in the privacy of their own bedroom, the situation. "Jordan. What does that mean, practically. Are you fired?"
"Not yet. Suspended pending investigation, which in my company's language usually means fired in three to six weeks once they've built a defensible paper trail. I've got a union rep who's decent, and honestly, the case against me isn't nothing—I did lean on a guy for a plate lookup I wasn't authorized to request. That's real. I did it anyway because I thought it mattered more than the risk, and I'd do it again, but it means I can't stand up in front of a review board and claim I did nothing wrong. I can only argue about why."
Jake sat down heavily in the chair across from him, guilt moving through his chest like something physical, sharp-edged and cold. "This is because of me."
"This is because of her," Jordan said, sharp enough that Jake looked up. "Don't do that. Don't take a thing that was done to me and make it about your guilt, because that's not useful to either of us right now, and we don't have time for it. I made choices. I'd make them again. What I need you to actually sit with is what this tells us, which is that she's watching close enough, and moving fast enough, that pulling my access within hours of that note means she either already knew who I was before Thursday night, or she found out that same evening and acted on it immediately. Either way, that's not a woman working alone with a legal pad and a grudge. That's someone with real reach."
"Can you keep working the case without your access?"
"Some of it. I'm not starting from zero—I pulled everything relevant onto a personal drive before any of this happened, habit more than foresight, but I'll take the luck where I can get it. I've lost the plate-lookup relationship, probably permanently, my guy's not going to touch anything else for me now that there's an open compliance case with my name on it. I've lost official database access. What I've still got is everything I already found, and about six hours last night where I couldn't sleep either, so I kept pulling threads on my own time, off any system that could get flagged."
He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket, considerably more careful with it than the gesture suggested, and set it on the coffee table between them.
"I want to be straight with you both about what this is and isn't," he said. "It's not a location. I don't have an address for her, not yet. But I found something in the property records for that business park where the diagnostic shell's registered address sits—the actual building, not the mail drop. There's a below-grade unit in that complex, leased eleven months ago through yet another LLC, paid a full year up front in cash-equivalent instruments, which is the kind of payment structure almost nobody uses for a legitimate small business lease, because it's expensive and inefficient and mostly exists to make a paper trail harder to follow. Eleven months lines up close enough to when your annual physical would've been that I don't think it's nothing."
Jake picked up the paper, hands unsteady, and looked down at an address he didn't recognize, a unit number, a filing date circled in Jordan's careful handwriting.
"You think this is where she is," Sara said quietly, coming to sit on the arm of Jake's chair, one hand settling on his shoulder.
"I think it's the first real address connected to any of this that isn't a mailbox at a UPS store. I'm not telling you to drive over there. I want to be very clear about that, both of you, especially you." Jordan looked hard at Jake. "I know exactly what you're like when you've got a target in front of you and I know exactly how badly this could go if you show up at a building alone, working off information I pulled together in one sleepless night with no verification. I want to run the lease history properly, see if I can find anyone who's actually seen activity at that unit, maybe find a delivery record, a utility hookup, something that confirms it's occupied and not just another piece of paper. That takes time I'm not sure I have anymore, given everything else."
"So what do we do with it," Jake asked. "Right now."
"Right now, we don't sit on it alone." Jordan sat back, some of the exhaustion in his face giving way, for a moment, to the flat, careful calculation Jake had come to recognize as him actually working the problem instead of just absorbing it. "I think it's time we bring in someone who still has the kind of access I just lost. A real detective, someone in property crimes or even just a patrol sergeant who owes me a favor from an old case—not to raid the place, nothing that dramatic, not yet, but to have eyes that aren't mine confirming what we're looking at before any of us does something we can't undo. I've got a name. I was going to call him Monday. I think, given this morning, we probably shouldn't wait that long."
He looked between them, Jake and Sara both watching him with the particular stillness of people waiting to be told how frightened to be, and something in his expression softened, just slightly, the exhaustion and the analysis both giving way for a second to the plain, uncomplicated fact of fifteen years of loving someone.
"We're closer than we were three days ago," he said. "I need you both to hold onto that part too, not just the part where things are getting harder. She's had to move faster and messier than she probably wanted to, going after my job instead of staying quiet and patient. People make mistakes when they're forced to move fast. I intend to find hers."
Outside, through the front window, the street sat quiet in the gray Saturday morning light, ordinary and unremarkable, no car parked three houses down, nothing to mark it as anything other than what it appeared to be—and Jake found, watching it, that he'd stopped being able to tell the difference anymore between a street that was actually safe and one that had simply gotten better, for now, at hiding what wasn't.