The luncheon was for a tech consultancy in the new office park on Marchetti. Forty people, a working lunch, salmon and salad and a dessert spread. My team was capable, the food was good, the client shook my hand and said they'd book again.
I smiled and thanked them, loaded up the van, and drove back to the commercial kitchen. Then I sat in my small office and didn't move for a while.
The thing about being the responsible one was that you got very good at knowing what the feelings were without letting them run the show.
I knew what this was. The hollowness of believing something would hold and finding out it wouldn't. What I hadn't felt before was this specific version. The weight of being wrong about a person you'd been so certain of.
My phone had three texts. Holly. My mother, a photo of Emma at her follow-up appointment. Kelly, with a website update. Nothing from Daemon. I answered all three and went home.
I drove back to my parents' house and climbed the stairs to the apartment above the garage. Small space, familiar sounds. My parents’ television murmuring through the floor.
TWENTY-TWO
DAEMON
The Lucky Break site office wasn't really Malakai's, but Ethan let him work out of it, which was the sort of thing Ethan did. Nadia took the chair across from the monitor, while I jammed myself into the corner.
Malakai sat between us, which felt deliberate, and pulled up the footage with no preamble.
The timestamp read 15:47 on Saturday. The camera above the service entrance had a decent angle on the kitchen corridor, and the figure who appeared in it moved like someone who knew exactly where they were going.
Generic kitchen whites, cap pulled low, face angled away from the lens. Nothing accidental about any of it.
"They knew about the camera," Nadia said.
"Or assumed there'd be one and planned accordingly." Malakai rewound it and played it again. "Either way, they'd done their homework."
We watched the figure move to the panel beside the walk-in, locate the right switch without hesitating, flip it, and leave. Forty seconds from entry to exit. Slick and completely deliberate.
"Casper," I muttered.
Nadia stilled on the other side of Malakai. "Yeah, but this ghost isn't friendly." She leaned in for a closer look at the monitor. "Malakai, can you run it again?"
He did. She watched the screen, then turned to look at me. "It's the same guy."
Malakai's head came up. "You recognize him?"
She nodded at the screen. "The morning of the snap inspection, somebody came into my kitchen behind the produce delivery. Generic whites, cap, head down. Straight to the two spots that mattered and then straight back out."
Nadia was onto something. I'd seen her kitchen clip the night she found it, and the hair on my arms was already up.
"It has to be the same bastard," I said, jerking my head toward the screen. "Same build. Same economy. Same way of never giving the camera anything. Nobody moves like that twice by coincidence."
Malakai ran it a third time. Once you saw it, you couldn't unsee it. The lean frame, the gloved hands, the unhurried certainty. An untrained eye could have mistaken them for one of Nadia's crew.
The only problem with that was Nadia's crew never wore generic whites. They wore navy jumpsuits with the Coogan's Catering logo on the breast and across the back.
"So they knew the venue layout," I said. "Which kitchen you were using, where the fridge panel was. Twice now. That's not someone who wandered in off the street."
"No. Somebody is feeding them venues and floor plans." The words came out flat, which from Nadia meant the opposite of calm.
The room went quiet while that settled.
"Someone with access to your booking software," Malakai said. "Or someone who scouted it beforehand."
"Can you do anything more with this?" I asked.
"I've already got someone looking at any CTV cameras in the area to see if they picked up anything," said Malakai, closing the file. "We've got proof of deliberate tampering. All that's missing is a face."
