The Pattern

The anonymous mail came every three weeks. Always in envelopes with no postmark. Always with things inside that were specific without being traceable.

The third one had a photograph of Liza's car parked outside her apartment. The fourth had a printout of her last three credit card transactions — places she had been, things she had bought, the slow accumulation of her life since she had left. The fifth had a note: You are still not alone.

She documented all of it. She photographed all of it. She filed it all and she called Diane and she told the PI what was happening and she understood that the pattern was not random — the three-week interval was deliberate, the specificity was deliberate, the whole thing was a message: I know where you are. I know what you are doing. I am always watching.

It was the same message Drake had been sending her for twenty years, in different ways, through different channels, with different degrees of plausibility. This time, she was building a record. This time, she was keeping everything.

She added the pattern to the evidence log: three-week cycle, increasing specificity, the note about being watched. She drew a line connecting it to the Route 9 storage unit and the PI's sightings and the phone call on the Thursday night, and she looked at the web she was building — the threads connecting things that seemed separate until you looked closely — and she thought: this is the map of what he did. This is the record of it.

The sixth anonymous mail came two weeks later and inside it was a photograph of Gavin.