The manager said the second tracker had been found behind the rear panel, in a place nobody would have put one during a normal installation. It was older than the first and had been there long enough that the wiring around it had been replaced once. He said they could remove both and give me the devices, but he wanted to know whether I was sure before touching anything. I asked whether the car could have come from the factory with either of them, and he said absolutely not. I sat there looking at the service paperwork and realized my daughter had never mentioned anything unusual about the car.
I called her and asked whether anyone had ever worked on the vehicle besides the dealership. She thought for a moment and said her ex-boyfriend had helped her with some repairs shortly after she bought it. I asked whether he had ever had the keys when she wasn’t around. She said yes, but only because she had trusted him completely at the time. Then she went quiet and asked why I was asking. I told her I was at the shop and that they had found something I didn’t think she would want left in her car.
She arrived twenty minutes later and went straight to the manager. He showed her where the first tracker had been installed and then explained that the second one was older. My daughter stared at both devices and said she had never known they existed. Then she remembered something from three years earlier that suddenly seemed much less innocent: her ex had once known exactly where she had been after she hadn’t told him. She had assumed he’d guessed because they still shared friends. She stood there for several seconds before asking the manager whether the older device could still have been transmitting.
He said he couldn’t tell without testing it, so we asked him to remove both. My daughter didn’t cry or get angry; she just kept staring at the car as though it belonged to someone else. On the drive home, she said she couldn’t understand why someone would go to that much trouble when he could simply have asked where she was. I told her that was the part that bothered me too. She said she wanted to check every old account, every password, and every place where he might still have access. Then, before we pulled into her driveway, she looked at me and said, “I think I know why he always seemed to know where I was.”
