At noon, a small white van slowed beside Daniel’s house.
The investigators watched it from inside an unmarked vehicle.
The driver passed the property, circled the next block, and returned five minutes later.
Daniel recognized the Blue Current logo partly scraped from the van’s passenger door.
The vehicle stopped beside a corner convenience store rather than pulling into his driveway.
Bell radioed the license plate and approached on foot.
The driver saw him, started the engine, and accelerated toward the avenue.
Bell did not pursue blindly through the residential streets.
He reported the direction of travel and waited for patrol units already positioned farther ahead.
Within minutes, the van was located at a shopping center.
The driver had abandoned it with the doors open.
Its cargo space contained empty chemical containers, a folded pool net, and a thick plastic bag holding several instrument-case handles.
None of the handles had been manufactured for pool equipment.
Daniel listened as Bell relayed the discovery to Ortiz.
“That doesn’t sound like somebody picking up a repair part,” Daniel said.
“No,” Ortiz agreed.
“It sounds like somebody removing the evidence that would connect several houses.”
CHAPTER THREE — A NAME ON THE CASE
Daniel learned more about Isabel from her fellow technician, Theo Martin, who arrived at the police station that afternoon.
Ortiz asked Daniel to come because he might recognize service visits recorded in Theo’s notebook.
Daniel drove there with a uniformed officer following him, then sat in a small conference room across from a tired young man in a yellow work shirt.
Theo had been with Blue Current for six months.
He kept handwritten maintenance notes because the company’s scheduling software regularly lost service histories.
“Gideon hated the notebook,” Theo said.
“He said it made us look old-fashioned.
”
“What did it actually contain?” Ortiz asked.
Theo turned pages covered with chlorine readings, pump model numbers, and small sketches of equipment pads.
“Everything that mattered for the customer,” he replied.
“The official app mostly cared about how quickly we finished.”
One entry described a visit to Daniel’s address eleven days earlier.
Theo had accompanied Isabel because Daniel’s pump timer kept resetting.
“That was the day she asked about the black instrument case,” Theo said.
Daniel frowned.
“What black case?”
Theo looked at him.
“The one she thought she’d left in your garage.”
Daniel had never seen a black instrument case in his garage.
Theo said Isabel had borrowed a heavy case from a friend to transport delicate water-testing equipment.
When she returned to the van after inspecting Daniel’s pump, the case had disappeared.
Price claimed she had forgotten it at the previous address.
Isabel disagreed.
She had placed it beside the rear tire while carrying a toolbox.
“Was the case actually hers?” Ortiz asked.
Theo swallowed.
“It belonged to her brother.”
He explained that Isabel’s younger brother, Mateo, repaired violins and violas for a youth orchestra.
The case had been on loan to Isabel because its hard shell protected a specialized instrument she intended to deliver after work.
“What instrument?” Daniel asked.
“A viola built by a local maker.”
Theo turned another page.
“It was for a student who had finally earned a place at the summer conservatory.”
The student had been waiting for that instrument for eight months.
Isabel called Price about its disappearance, and he offered to replace the case if she stopped asking questions.
“But the viola was inside,” Theo said.
“You cannot replace a handmade instrument with a generic store model and pretend nobody will notice.”
Daniel understood the tension in his voice.
He remembered spending years saving for the piano his late mother had played in their first apartment.
That piano had been a battered upright with two stubborn keys.
It was still the only object he regretted losing when his family moved.
Ortiz asked why Isabel had not reported the missing viola immediately.
Theo answered that she had reported it.
A local officer took the complaint, but no evidence initially linked the theft to Price.
The following week, Isabel recognized the same maker’s distinctive curved scroll in a photograph from a warehouse auction listing.
She sent the listing to Mateo, who identified a tiny repair mark he had made near the neck.
The seller withdrew the instrument before they could ask to inspect it.
Price then summoned Isabel to his office.
“He knew about the listing,” Theo said.
“He told her she was embarrassing a customer.”
“Who was the customer?” Ortiz asked.
“He wouldn’t say.”
Isabel began examining the company’s routing calendar.
Whenever a reported instrument theft occurred, Price had arranged a late change to the assigned technician’s schedule.
The company sent crews to several properties, creating a record that made everyone look equally responsible.
But one van appeared on the route twice, once under a false vehicle number.
“I found that after he fired me,” Theo said.
Ortiz raised an eyebrow.
“How did you still have access?”
“I didn’t use his software.
”
Theo lifted the notebook.
“I wrote down the actual vehicle plates whenever I checked equipment out.”
The handwritten records were not a dramatic secret code.
They were ordinary notes that established where real vehicles had been when electronic schedules said otherwise.
Daniel flipped through the pages with Ortiz’s permission.
He found an entry from last month describing a service at Carol Mercer’s home.
Her house did not have a swimming pool.
She owned a small decorative fountain that had been dry for three summers.
“Why were you servicing Carol’s house?” he asked.
Theo leaned forward.
“That’s the part Isabel couldn’t explain.”
The entry indicated that a Blue Current van had spent ninety minutes at Carol’s address on three separate nights.
All three visits were labeled as emergency pump repairs.
Carol’s fountain had no functional pump.
“Did you tell Isabel?” Ortiz asked.
“She already knew.”
Theo paused.
“She said she had once seen Gideon carry a violin case through Carol’s side door.”
The room fell quiet.
Daniel pictured Carol standing over his ruined pool, insisting that his business should have stayed out of hers.
She had not simply been helping a criminal because she disliked a neighbor.
She had allowed stolen property to pass through her home.
And somebody had decided Isabel knew too much.
CHAPTER FOUR — THE WOMAN AT THE BUS DEPOT
At three forty, Ortiz received a message from a patrol officer at the Westbrook transit terminal.
A woman matching Isabel’s description had asked a ticket agent where she could find a public telephone.
She appeared frightened and had no purse.
Ortiz and Bell left immediately.
Daniel remained at the station while Theo checked the service notebook for further references to the terminal.
There were none.
Half an hour later, Ortiz called Daniel on a secure line.
“We’ve found Isabel,” she said.
“She is shaken, but she is alive.”
Daniel felt his shoulders loosen for the first time that day.
“What happened to her?”
“She will tell us in her own time.”
“Did Carol’s trap have anything to do with it?”
“It appears so.”
Ortiz explained that Isabel had received a message shortly after seven that morning.
The message appeared to come from Daniel’s phone number and asked her to arrive early because the pump was leaking.
She recognized the unusual wording and called Daniel, but the call went unanswered.
Daniel checked his missed calls.
There was an unfamiliar number at seven twelve, not Isabel’s usual contact.
He had been driving through a tunnel and had not noticed the ring.
Isabel decided to stop at a coffee shop and ask Theo to accompany her.
Before she reached the shop, a man in a blue maintenance jacket approached at the curb.
He claimed Price wanted to discuss reinstating Theo.
Isabel recognized him from the service depot, but not as a regular technician.
He was Gideon Price’s brother-in-law, Raymond Pike.
Raymond offered a ride and showed Isabel a photograph of the missing viola.
He said the instrument would be returned if she agreed to withdraw her complaint.
She refused to get inside his vehicle.
Then he showed her a second picture of Mateo leaving his workshop.
“He wanted me to think they could reach my brother,” Isabel later told Ortiz.
Raymond did not physically force her into the vehicle.
He simply followed her down two blocks, repeatedly asking whether her family understood the trouble she was causing.
Isabel took refuge in a busy pharmacy, then boarded the first bus she saw.
She switched buses twice before reaching the terminal.
Her purse disappeared somewhere along the route.
“She thought somebody was following her,” Ortiz told Daniel.
“We have to determine whether that was true.”
Daniel went still.
“And the pool?”
“We believe it was intended to create a second point of pressure.
”
“What does that mean?”
“Raymond was supposed to bring her here to meet Price after the morning scare.”
Daniel looked down at the service calendar on his phone.
“She was meant to come to my backyard.”
“Yes.”
“And fall into that thing.”
“We don’t know whether they intended to injure her or hold her there while they made demands,” Ortiz said.
“Either outcome would have been dangerous.”
Daniel gripped the edge of the desk.
“They could have killed her.”
“We are treating that possibility seriously.”
