They finished the session with bag work and cooldown stretches, the easy silence of two guys who’d beaten the hell out of each other and were better for it. Ryder headed out after to handle advance work on the next Endicott event, a gallery opening Thursday that needed full sight lines and entry-point mapping before the team could plan coverage.
Isaac headed back to the temporary office space. He had stuff to do.
He opened the email from Peter first. The intruder Isaac had put against the column last night at the event, had been identified from the police report. Thomas Maddock, twenty-eight, former employee of a manufacturing firm that Endicott’s biotech had acquired and gutted during the IPO process.
Legitimate grievance. No criminal record. No connection to the email threats.
Isaac read through Peter’s analysis twice. Maddock’s profile didn’t match the email sender. Too young, too reactive, too disorganized. The emails were patient, methodical, escalating with precision. Maddock had lunged at the first opportunity and gotten himself arrested. Two completely different threat signatures.
The real sender was still out there. Still watching. Still building toward something.
Isaac typed up his notes and flagged next steps for Peter: dig deeper into whether Maddock had any connection to the email sender, or whether he’d been hired or manipulated into creating a distraction. Cross-reference Maddock’s known associates with the metadata from the emails. Leave no thread unpulled.
He sent the email and turned to the rest of his case notes. He was halfway through updating the threat assessment when the burner phone buzzed on the desk beside him.
So what made you want to do what you do? And don’t say the tuxedo.
He stared at the screen. She was pushing past the banter. Asking something real.
He thought about what to say. Thought about what to leave out.
I was living a life that didn’t fit. Someone else’s version of what I was supposed to be. The military was the first thing that felt like mine. Zodiac was the second.
What was the life that didn’t fit?
His thumbs hovered over the screen. The honest answer was a world he’d left behind on purpose. The family money. The rooms full of people whose names opened doors and whose expectations closed them. He’d walked away from all of it, and he liked who he was on the other side. He wasn’t ready to let her see the version of him that came before.
Let’s just say I was expected to be a certain kind of person, and I wasn’t that person. So I left and built something that was actually mine.
That I understand.
Yeah?
More than you know.
He told her about Zodiac itself. Not the tactics or the training, but the part that mattered to him, the part where someone was afraid and his job was to stand between them and the thing they were afraid of. She asked good questions. Sharp ones that told him she was listening to what he said and what he didn’t say.
Then he turned it around.
Your turn. How does a person end up doing what you do?
The reply took longer this time. Nearly five minutes. He thought she wasn’t going to answer at all.
Carefully.
He almost laughed.
That’s not an answer.
It’s accurate, though.
I’m serious. I want to understand.
A long pause. He watched the screen and waited.
I have my reasons. Good ones. That’s all I can give you right now.
You want to know if I’m going to push.
