Terrell pulled up Friday evening in a rented black Tahoe, looking exactly like what he was a man the government had spent five years making him dangerous in all the right ways.
Six-two, broad shoulders man who moved quiet for his size.
He had the kind of stillness about him that only came from years of reading rooms professionally.
U.S. Marshal five years in fugitive division and operations, which meant Terrell had spent half a decade finding people who did not want to be found.
Damon met him at the curb.
They embraced the way men do who grew up in the same house and hadn’t seen each other in too long for a brief moment then back to business.
“You look tired,” Terrell said, reading him immediately.
“I am.”
They went inside.
Terrell sat at the kitchen table with a glass of water and listened without interrupting.
That was his training showing he didn’t ask questions until Damon was completely done talking. He just absorbed.
Damon walked him through everything. The black Hyundai Sonata.
The rotating of cars.
The shadow projector. The heating device at the hotel. The phone hack through Bluetooth.
The documentation binder all twenty-nine pages of it now which Terrell picked up and moved through carefully, pausing on certain photographs longer than others.
“You remember my kids’ mother?” Damon asked.
Terrell looked up. “Kezia? Yeah I remember her.” “Don’t tell me y’all back into it.”
“No. Not her. Her neighbor.”
Terrell set the binder down. “The neighbor.”
“Some young woman. I have never spoken to her. Not one word. Never made eye contact before this started, never crossed paths, nothing.
She showed up in my life out of nowhere and she has been running a full surveillance operation on me for going on two months now.”
Damon leaned forward. “And she’s got at least one partner.
Yeah a lookout she used inside a store on Briar Road earlier this week while the car circled the parking lot outside.”
Terrell was quiet for a moment. He turned a photograph over in his hand the one of the Hyundai Sonata in Kezia’s neighbor’s driveway.
“The equipment,” he said.
“The projector, the heating element, the phone hacking through Bluetooth you know what that tells me?”
“Tell me.”
“That tells me somebody funded this.
That’s not stuff a twenty-something puts together out of a YouTube tutorial.
Somebody either provided the equipment or provided the money for it.”
He set the photo down flat.
“Which means your primary subject may not be your primary problem.”
Damon nodded slowly.
He had been sitting with that same thought for days and didn’t wanted to say it out loud yet.
“So what do we do?” Damon asked.
Terrell leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. The way he gets when a plan was already forming.
“First thing first we get her name.
Real name, not a plate number.
I’ve got resources for that, it won’t take long.”
He tapped the photograph.
“Second thing we need a counter-surveillance setup.
To me you have been the subject this whole time.
We’re going to flip that.
She watches you, we watch her, and we do it clean enough that she never knows the dynamic has changed.”
“And third?”
Terrell looked Damon in his eyes.
“Third — we find out if she’s doing this on her own or if she has someone behind her.
Because a young woman with no connection to you doesn’t build a two-person operation with professional equipment around a stranger.”
He paused.
“Somebody could’ve paid her to come at you, Damon. And I could be wrong.”
The kitchen was quiet for a moment.
Damon looked at the binder on the table.
Twenty-nine pages of his own life being observed without his consent, documented in his own hand because nobody else was going to do it for him.
“How long will this take?” Damon asked.
“The name? Forty-eight hours.” Terrell picked up his water glass. “The rest of it depends on how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
He took a slow drink and set the glass down.
“But I’ll tell you this much, cuz. Whoever set this in motion — they made a mistake letting it get to the point where you called me.”