Before she reached the parking lot, she had been thinking that the run was just what she needed to clear her head and eliminate the last vestiges of anxiety. But that was before she saw Jay standing at the rear of her SUV, hands in his pockets, resting a shoulder against her rear window. She slowed to a walk. He straightened the moment he spied her and brushed road dust that had been a film on the window off his shoulder.
“What the fuck, Jay?” Ramsey didn’t pause to hear a reply to what was essentially rhetorical. She rounded the SUV, pulled on the handle to unlock the door, and got in. Jay went around to the other side and tried the passenger door. It didn’t open. She looked at Jay through the window, shaking her head as she locked her door.
Carefully, Ramsey lowered the passenger window a couple of inches, just enough to allow him to hear her clearly. “Step away from the car. I promise you it will hurt if I run over your feet.”
Jay looked around. No one was approaching the lot from the trail and the parked cars were all unoccupied. “Let me in, Liz. This is stupid. I only want to talk. You said you’d call.”
“And I will.”
“When?”
“When I know something. Now, step away.” She moved the gear shift to reverse but kept her foot on the brake.
“You had your phone call, didn’t you?”
“No. I spoke to Mr. Finch’s assistant. We had to reschedule. Some kind of family emergency. Don’t worry. If his wife’s stable tomorrow, he and I will talk then. I have the day off so there’s plenty of opportunity to have our meeting.”
Jay frowned deeply. “Tomorrow? How much time do you think I have?”
“I don’t know. More to the point, I don’t care. Last warning, Jay. Step back.” Ramsey raised the window. She stiffened and looked away when Jay hammered on it with his fist. Easing her foot off the brake, the SUV rolled backward. It was all the warning she was willing to give him. She gave the car gas and swung into the lot. Jay cleared the tires but followed, pounding on the hood until she shoved the stick into drive and shot forward toward the exit.
It was only as she reached the main road that she wished she’d left more slowly. There might have been an opportunity to see which of the cars in the lot belonged to Jay. That was something worth knowing. It also begged the question of how he kept finding her with apparently little difficulty. He knew the make and model of her vehicle, but that wasn’t enough to explain his success.
Ramsey decided against going home. She turned toward the police station instead.
Sullivan wasn’t at his desk, but the chief was in his office. After exchanging some small talk with the officers at their desks, she got through the gauntlet and reached Chief Bailey. He waved her in as she was lifting her hand to knock.
“This is unexpected,” he said, coming to his feet, welcoming her as he always did with a genuine smile. “Please. Have a seat.”
She did but perched on the edge, betraying her anxiety. “I don’t want to take up a lot of your time, but I was wondering if you’d follow me out to my car and look it over. I think my ex put some kind of tracking device on it. Is that even possible? I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
The chief did not return to his chair. He angled one hip against his desk, folded his arms across his chest, and regarded Ramsey with something more than fatherly concern.
Seeing his expression, one of Ramsey’s hands flew to her mouth. She spoke through her fingers. “Sullivan told you about Jay, didn’t he? He said he was going to. Do you even know what I’m talking about?”
“Calm yourself. Yes, I know. I’m allowed to be worried, aren’t I?”
“I don’t suppose I can stop you.”
“That’s right. You can’t. Now about this tracker. You want to know if it’s possible. It is. A tracking device uses GPS and Google Maps, and it’s relatively inexpensive depending on the contract and the monitoring system. We have it on our fleet. An individual tracker runs under a hundred dollars. A lot of them are less than fifty. So, yes, possible and likely. Sullivan said your ex found your car in his neighborhood, although he didn’t quite find you.”
Ramsey bit her lower lip, nodded. “I was running on the trail. When I got back to the lot, Jay was waiting beside my car.”
“Found you at the trail? Then I’d say you’re right. He installed a device.”
“Is it one of those magnet type things that stick to a wheel well?” When the chief gave her an indulgent smile, she understood she was even more naïve than she thought. “I guess not,” she said.
“Um, no. It’s a little more complicated than that, the ones available commercially anyway. Jay would have had to do a little bit of prep first, but then he would have needed about fifteen minutes access to your car. Longer, if he had to fumble around some.”
“Jay doesn’t fumble around at anything. He probably watched how-to videos on YouTube.”
“Well, there are a lot of them. Let’s call it fifteen minutes. How would he have done that? You park on the street? Your driveway?”
“I put the car in the garage. I have a keypad for the door, but Jay wouldn’t know the code. I keep the side door locked.”
“All right. Not there. Sullivan says your husband hacked into systems to get information about you. It stands to reason that he knew what you drove before he got here.”
“Of course. I’ve had the SUV for three years now. I hadn’t thought of that, but how does that—” She stopped, considered where Bailey was going with this, and said, “The parking lot at the Ridge.”
