Stalker

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

“You’re in early. Is that the infamous tracker?” Kelly asked as she crossed their office to Jake’s desk Wednesday morning.

“I am, and it is,” he replied, rolling it between his fingers. “Unfortunately, as far as I can determine, the man who placed it on Alan’s car must have realized it’s been removed. He hasn’t tried to access it this morning, at least not since I’ve been here.”

“Not too surprising,” Kelly commented, holding out her hand. When he gave it to her, she looked at all its sides, shaking her head. “It’s one of a million that can be found at any online big box or spyware store.”

“I already figured that out,” Jake said dryly. “So as a clue it’s pretty useless. If I’d been smarter I’d have put on gloves before taking it off his car, but I wasn’t.”

She patted his head, eliciting a growl from him, as she replied, “We can’t all be geniuses. Are you going to get in contact with Alan to see if anything happened last night or this morning?”

“Yeah, although he promised he’d call if it did.”

Jake retrieved Alan’s paperwork to get his number and dialed, putting it on speaker phone so Kelly could listen, too. When Alan answered and identified himself, Jake asked, “Has your stalker done anything?”

“I told you I’d let you know,” Alan replied with some asperity. Then he apologized. “This has me on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop as it were. No, there’s been nothing. I did check the wheel wells, all four of them, before I left for work. There wasn’t another one of those gizmos, although I suppose there could be a lot of other places he could have put it.”

“To be honest, I doubt he’ll try that again, now that he knows you know about it,” Jake told him. “We can hope he’ll give up on you, or move on to try it with someone else.”

“You think he gets off on tailing people?”

“I think he gets off on creeping people out, and tailing them is one way to do it,” Jake replied. “As long as he sticks to that he’s relatively harmless. If he escalates, then you have a problem.”

“Cheerful thought,” Alan replied dryly. “Thanks for checking on me. I will call if anything more happens.”

“Do that,” Jake said at the same time Alan broke the connection. “Guess he had a customer,” he told Kelly.

“Probably,” she agreed. “Okay, what’s on our schedule for today?”

“As if you don’t know.” He brought it up on his computer and they divvied up who would do what and got to work.