Page 29 of Hunt Me, Daddy

For a moment, the whole apartment went very still. Not quiet. Still. There was a difference. Quiet was a lack of sound. Stillness was a held breath, the second before something broke.

I stared down at the crossword for a long moment.

I didn’t move.

The first thing I felt was not fear. It was outrage. Hot, clean, immediate outrage that shot through me so hard my fingers curled before I realized I’d made fists.

“You absolute motherfucker,” I whispered.

My voice sounded strange in the room.

My watcher had been inside my apartment.

My watcher had done my crossword.

He hadn’t threatened me, destroyed my laptop or anything like that.

No.

He had finished my puzzle for me. The audacity was so breathtaking I almost respected it.

Almost.

Then I remembered he had been inside my apartment, and the fury came back hot enough to burn off the last thread of admiration.

I backed away from the table and went to my desk.

He’d been here. In my space. Near my bed. Near my refrigerator, my shower, my desk, the couch where I sometimes fell asleep with my laptop still open because I was a cautionary tale with Wi-Fi.

My hands were steady when I moved my mouse and woke up my computer, which was good. I pulled the local logs first. Then cased the network. Then camera feeds. Then sensor history. No forced entry, anomalies, or even remote interference. Nothing in the hall. Nothing in the stairwell. Nothing at the window. The system showed me an untouched apartment all day, sealed and untouched.

The system was wrong.

I loathed that most of all. A system was only as useful as the assumptions behind it, and mine had just been insulted in my own home.

I ran a device scan. Nothing. Then another, with different parameters. I found nothing. By midnight, I had gone through the apartment three more times and found nothing but my own increasing desire to set the whole place on fire and start over somewhere with fewer windows and more concrete. I didn’t do that because arson was rarely an elegant solution and moving was expensive.

With a sigh, I sat on the couch with my back to the brick wall, laptop open on my knees, a knife on the cushion beside me, and the Watcher file glowing on the screen.

I created a new section.

Physical Intrusion Confirmed.

For a few seconds, I just stared at the heading.

There should have been sparks coming off the words. Some kind of alarm should have gone off. Instead, there was only the cursor blinking at me, patient and smug.

I typed up everything. I took a screenshot of the crossword, then got up and photographed it properly with scale, angle, and light variation. I sealed the pencil in a plastic bag even though he would not have left prints because ghosts didn’t leave fingerprints unless they wanted you distracted. When I sat back down, my laptop had nearly gone to sleep. I woke it up.

Under the new section, I typed:

Assessment: Watcher had physical access. High competence. Avoided/defeated all entry indicators. Either knows my setup or is able to infer physical countermeasures with high accuracy. Did not damage systems. Did not take obvious materials. Left intentional sign of his presence.

I stopped there.

He wanted me to know. He wanted me, specifically, to know that he had been here, had seen my space, had understood my puzzle, and had left me three answers.

This was invasive. Unacceptable. Criminal, frankly, though I had long ago lost the moral high ground required to throw that word around with much force.