Page 129 of What We Burn

FENRIR:

That was my read. The new clusters track her shifts. A burst just before she starts, sometimes one partway through. The night sends have nearly stopped.

I pull up the logs and overlay them against the shift schedule Holden built when we set up the watch rotation. Fenrir’s right. The texts used to come when she was housebound, alone, awake at 3 a.m. with her throat aching. Now they come when she’s pulling on an apron.

He knows when she’s working.

Me:

So he’s keyed into her routine. The second it changed, his timing changed with it.

FENRIR:

Which raises the question of how he knows it changed.

Fucking hell. I rub my eyes, already feeling the first warning prickles of a migraine. “Son of a bitch.”

Me:

He’s either watching her in real time or he’s got a feed.

FENRIR:

Possibly. Or there’s a calendar, a shared doc, anything cloud-synced. How does the diner communicate shifts?

Me:

The system is a literal dry-erase board in the break room. The boss takes a photo of it and puts it in a WhatsApp group chat. They communicate changes in that group.

FENRIR:

WhatsApp isn’t that hard to crack if you go through a device. Probably how he’s getting info.

Me:

I swept everything after the first text though. The whole house’s devices. Everything was clean.

FENRIR:

It was clean two weeks ago. Before she went back.

That lands like a kick. Because a clean sweep two weeks ago doesn’t mean clean now. New routine, new devices in play—the diner’s POS, the Wi-Fi there, her texting us from break. A dozen new surfaces, any one of them a way in.

Me:

Can you pull the diner’s network? Anything she connects to when she’s on shift?

FENRIR:

Already pulling it.

Me:

If he’s watching he’s watching through a screen, that could be his way in.

FENRIR:

That’s the assumption I’m working.